Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

Hugo continued to join Rafael Simón’s student insurrections, but after graduation in 1971 their paths diverged. The ambitious boy with the foghorn voice went on to study law and history at university before launching a political career in a new political party, the Movement for Socialism (MAS). Chávez joined the army. Not because he wanted to be a soldier, but because it had an excellent sports academy and would get him to the capital, where some of the best baseball teams were based. “I’m going to get to know Caracas and then I’ll quit the military academy and stay there” was the plan, he revealed years later. Once in the academy, however, the seventeen-year-old discovered he adored the camaraderie, the ceremonies, the uniforms. “By the time I dressed in blue for the first time, I already felt like a soldier,” he recalled. “A uniform, a gun, an area, close-order formation, marches, morning runs, studies in military science . . . I was like a fish in water. It was as if I had discovered the essence or at least part of the essence of life, my true vocation.” In a letter to Mama Rosa he enthused about marches and pitching tents in the rain. “Grandma, if you had only seen me firing away like a maniac in our maneuvers. First we worked on instinctive shooting—immediate action, daytime attack, infiltration etc. . . . We walked through little villages where the girls stared at us in awe and the little kids cried, they were so scared.”

  On a day of leave in late 1971 he put on his ceremonial blue tunic and white gloves and set out through Caracas, to him still a bustling, alien metropolis, to the cemetery where Isaías Chávez was buried. There he asked the dead pitcher forgiveness for abandoning the vow to follow in his footsteps. “I started talking to the gravestone, with the spirit that penetrated everything there . . . It was as if I was saying to him, ‘Isaías, I’m not going down that path anymore. I’m a soldier now.’ And as I left the cemetery, I was free.”

  The cadet fell in love not just with the army but with the books it opened. He studied Mao, Clausewitz, Napoleon, Hannibal, Sun Tzu, masters of strategy and conquest, as well as texts on Bolívar, Zamora, and Venezuela’s first caudillo presidents. The academy in Caracas had a tradition of absorbing lads from the slums and impoverished villages and turning them conservative as they rose through the ranks. But times were changing. Visiting cadets from Panama told how back home General Omar Torrijos, who had seized power in a coup, was heading a left-wing, nationalist government and reclaiming the canal from the Yankees. In a visit to Lima in 1974, Chávez and other cadets encountered Peru’s revolutionary military government shortly before it fell in a right-wing coup. The group met the president, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, Chávez later recounted. “One night he received us at the palace . . . the revolutionary manifesto, the man’s speeches, the Inca Plan—I read all those things for years.” It opened his eyes to the possibility of fusing the military with nationalism and left-wing politics. Meanwhile, the United States, mired in Vietnam, shored up Augusto Pinochet in Chile and any other brute who could squelch socialists in Latin America. Venezuela’s oil-flush democracy needed little U.S. help in snuffing out its own guerrillas—Venezuela’s army was well equipped—but tolerated legal, left-wing political parties such as MAS and Radical Cause that slowly gathered strength. Through his brother Adán, who studied physics in Mérida, Chávez met left-wing activists.

  While the military trained the young officer in armor and communications—commanders recognized his gift of gab—an idea began forming in his mind. Bolívar’s unfinished economic and social liberation; his outlaw great-grandfather; Venezuela’s poverty and inequality; progressive activism; military honor and power: it all added up, in the young lieutenant’s mind, to one conclusion. His destiny was not just to rise up the military ranks but to pursue a calling. A mission. Revolt. In a diary entry dated October 25, 1977, he appealed to Bolívar. “Come. Return. Here. It is possible.” A few lines later: “This war is going to take years . . . I have to do it. Even if it costs me my life. It doesn’t matter. This is what I was born to do.”

  —

  Rafael Simón Jiménez filled the whole entrance. Big face, big hands, and a big body, a ton of a man. He wore a billowing yellow linen guayabera, the four-pocketed, loose-fitting Caribbean shirt. He smiled, revealing dainty white teeth. They seemed too small for the booming voice that gusted through them. He padded into a bright office with Arctic air-conditioning. It overlooked Plaza Altamira, a handsome square with an obelisk and a fountain in eastern Caracas, one of the poshest parts of the city. He eased into a chair that disappeared under his frame. It was April 2011, and Jiménez was fifty-eight years old, but it was easy to see how he had dominated classmates at O’Leary High School four decades earlier. It was not just his size but his volume and exclamatory certainty. Even seated in this small office, he spoke as if addressing thousands in the plaza below. But Jiménez no longer had crowds hooked on his every word. A political career that had begun so precociously and went on to scale great heights had slipped and tumbled down the slopes. A rise and fall rooted in Jiménez’s relationship with the onetime apprentice he had called Huguito.

  He eased back in his chair and talked for a while about Chávez’s childhood. “You know he almost didn’t make it into the academy because he flunked chemistry? Ha! How differently things may have turned out!” Jiménez pondered this alternate history for a moment. “A real friendly kid. Happy-go-lucky, outgoing. Into sports and theater. I much preferred him to Adán! What a sourpuss, completely charmless. Their grandmother’s house was built by the government, you know. Given to them for a nominal sum, a humble but decent lower-middle-class house. But you never hear that! Nooo, Chávez will make you believe they were desperately poor. All part of the legend. The myth. But that’s the way with us llaneros. Half-truths, storytelling, folktales, we’re masters at it, can spin a yarn out of anything.”

  That put a question mark over the credibility of Jiménez’s own recollections, of course, but he foghorned on. While he had studied law and history and climbed the ranks of MAS, Chávez went to the academy and gradually became politicized. “One day in 1975, I was walking down the street in Barinas, and he pulled up in his dad’s Dodge. He was home on leave and in uniform. We chatted awhile, then he told me that by 2000 he’d be a general and fix the country, that he had a plan. I thought he was joking.” One night three years later, Jiménez recalled, he was with party comrades pasting MAS posters onto walls when Chávez, again home on leave, stopped by. “Very affectionate, effusive as ever, then he starts helping us put up the posters—and him in uniform! He could’ve been drummed out of the army, he was reckless like that, but got away with it.” By the late 1980s the army top brass knew Chávez was plotting something but didn’t charge him, said Jiménez. “There were two rival generals vying to be defense minister, and each thought he could use a conspiracy to his advantage.” Jiménez guffawed. “That’s Venezuela right there.”

  After the 1992 coup and Chávez’s release from jail, MAS, by now a moderate, left-wing party led by Jiménez, was part of the broad coalition that supported his 1998 presidential bid. “What a candidate! Chávez is very bright. He doesn’t go deep into subjects or grasp the intricacies but can read the dust jacket of a book and then talk as if he’s read the whole thing.” From Jiménez, an academic and political fixer, that was both compliment and put-down. “Chávez was well-intentioned. He wanted social reform and to change a rotten system. He genuinely wanted to spread wealth and ease hardship.” Jiménez became vice-minister of justice and interior, then vice president of the National Assembly. Working with the president was fraught. “He is very complex, very unpredictable. He can be tender and generous one moment, abrasive and aggressive the next. You never know what you’re going to get. I’ve always said you shouldn’t get too close, otherwise you get snagged in his personality, or too far, because then you lose him.”

  Jiménez said he was alarmed by Chávez’s power grabs and rhetoric in 2001 and 2002 and lobbied him, in vain, to cool it. “He would listen and nod quietly, seem to agree, then out he’d go the next day shouti
ng so that everybody got riled up again.” Jiménez stayed loyal during the coup and was relieved when Chávez returned to Miraflores apparently chastened rather than vengeful. In his first public responses to what had happened, Chávez was gracious and conciliatory, holding a crucifix, asking forgiveness for his role in precipitating the mayhem, and promising dialogue and unity. Jiménez, from his perch in the National Assembly, began talks with the opposition.

  There are two versions of what happened next. Jiménez, sensing Chávez’s weakness, cut clandestine deals with opponents to make himself president of the National Assembly. Chávez got wind of it and banished the traitor from his ranks at a heated meeting in Miraflores in May 2002. Or, in Jiménez’s version, he tried to bridge the country’s political differences and was punished by Chávez, who swiftly dropped talk of conciliation and resumed assailing foes. The old friends parted ways. Jiménez lost his National Assembly post and joined the opposition. Their relationship had come full circle. The former schoolboy brawler preached moderation. His former sidekick was now the rebel throwing stones, demanding the world be changed.

  —

  Chávez’s yen for confrontation started soon after he took the throne, and it still flowed a decade later. Some wondered if it stemmed from childhood, from a psychological wound that never healed. Young Hugo was turned away from his first day at primary school for wearing rope sandals rather than shoes, making his grandmother cry in shame, but poverty did not seem to have scarred him. His relationship with his mother, Elena, a stern, matriarchal figure, was distant and lacked the warmth and adoration he had for Mama Rosa. Elena had openly disapproved of both his wives, and there were rumors they had once stopped talking for two years. But if Chávez felt abandoned or resentful, he never said so. In public and private he seemed to maintain a cordial, affectionate relationship with his parents.

  Another explanation was that he was an emotional man who lashed back at vitriolic enemies who believed themselves superior. Before he took office, some branded him a communist ogre, a charlatan, and a would-be despot. By 2001 this invective was amplified, day after day, by privately owned newspapers and television stations, and Chávez countered with his own verbal barrage. However, after 2006 opponents started toning down their aggressive rhetoric, while the president not only continued but escalated his, raining abuse year after year upon increasingly mute targets.

  Some of those closest to him suspected a manic-depressive disorder. Before his death in 2010, Alberto Müller Rojas, a socialist army general, adviser, and vice president of Chávez’s party, told an interviewer: “People have to feign, at the very least, absolute submission to him, which reveals a total lack of self-confidence . . . He goes from one position to another very easily. He is an individual who has a tendency toward cyclothymia—mood swings that range from moments of extreme euphoria to moments of despondence.” Salvador Navarrete, a doctor and family friend who treated Chávez during his first years in office, publicly opined, years later, that the president was bipolar.

  There was an alternative—or additional—explanation for Chávez’s aggression that had nothing to do with his mental state. Throwing stones worked. The insults against opponents appeared spontaneous outbursts but were in fact calculated, measured provocations. Time and again opponents took the bait. They lunged, veins throbbing, faces contorted with loathing and rage, to choke their tormentor. It was a trap that exposed their arrogance, economic power, and sense of entitlement. Forced to choose between the comandante and tomato-faced aristocrats, most Venezuelans—meaning the poor—chose the comandante. The genius of the strategy was its durability. The perpetually indignant elites inhabited a self-contained echo chamber of boardrooms, golf clubs, dinner parties, and private media. They thought they were Venezuela. They could not see how their hysterics repelled and radicalized less-privileged compatriots. Thus they kept lunging and, in election after election, would keep losing.

  —

  January 17, 2003. Convoys of national guard vehicles surrounded two bottling plants in the city of Valencia, in the state of Carabobo. Soldiers in camouflage fatigues and red berets spilled out of the vehicles and pushed through picket lines of striking workers to enter the plants. At their head was a tall, powerfully built general named Luis Acosta Carles. Beret tilted rakishly over one eye, square jaw, he resembled an action hero. The general, who had diplomas in public security and human resources, was ambitious. His older brother, Felipe, had been an army officer and one of the comandante’s first co-conspirators but died during the 1989 riots. Out in this regional city, Acosta Carles had had fewer chances to impress the throne, but now, as camera crews jogged to keep up with him, he sensed opportunity.

  This was the latest front in a two-month-old economic war. Having failed to dislodge Chávez in the April 2002 coup, his opponents, unrepentant and angrier than ever, had launched a different assault in December: a national strike—in some ways a lockout, since it was directed by owners and managers as well as union leaders. Led by the executives of PDVSA, who feared the “monkey in the palace” would finally wrest control of the oil company, they sought to cripple the economy and make life miserable for ordinary Venezuelans. They shut the oil industry, banks, shops, schools, restaurants, factories. What they could not shut they disrupted, triggering shortages, queues, and hardship. The idea was to inflict nationwide pain and channel it into fury against the throne. It did not matter to them that the strike would destroy livelihoods and cost the country billions. Private media cast the strike as a patriotic action in hysterical, biased reports. Television bosses even dropped advertising, forfeiting revenue so they could clear schedules for nonstop assaults on the demon president.

  Breweries and drink makers did their bit by halting supplies of bottled water, beer, and soft drinks. Now, six weeks into the strike, Acosta Carles was helping Chávez wrest back the initiative by raiding bottling plants. The general dwarfed his men and the camera crews as he strode into the first warehouse of Panamco, Venezuela’s Coca-Cola bottler, owned by Gustavo Cisneros, the billionaire who had backed the coup. It was filled floor to ceiling with bottles of Malta Regional, a yeasty drink that had disappeared from store shelves weeks earlier. The general, sleeves rolled up over his elbows, plunged a brawny arm into a tower of bottles and took one out. He turned to the cameras and held it up. “Malta Regional,” he barked. A clutch of microphones was thrust under his chin. The reporters were from opposition television stations—Cisneros owned one of them—and badgered Acosta Carles over his legal authority to raid the plants.

  He ignored them, twisted open the bottle, tiny in his hand, and glugged it down. A young female reporter persisted, asking if he had permission from Indecu, a state regulatory agency.

  “General, today the forty-eight-hour deadline that Indecu gave the company to prepare its response . . .”

  She did not get to finish because the general drained the bottle, looked down at the microphones, opened his mouth into a black cavity, and emitted a thunderous belch. “Buuuuuuuurgh.”

  He finished and looked at the reporter. “Pardon. Pardon, señorita.” Then he belched again. “Buuuuuuuurgh.” A hint of a smile seeped across his face.

  The reporter responded, indignant: “Isn’t that rude?”

  The general shrugged. “Well, you know, it was instinct. It just came out. There was a lot of gas because it was warm.” He showed the bottle to the cameras. “Have you seen that commercial with the soccer player?” he asked, turning back to the reporter. “The one where he takes a drink”—the general mimed taking another gulp—“and then goes ‘Buuuuuuuurgh.’” Another belch.

  The reporter protested: “This is a serious issue, and I’m asking you a serious question, General . . .”

  He shrugged her off and turned to the other cameras. “All this,” he said, indicating the stocks, “is going to be distributed; it’s for the people, for the Venezuelan people. Hoarding is against the constitution.” He spun on his heel and marched deeper into the warehouse, firin
g instructions at his men.

  The general’s expulsion of carbon dioxide from his digestive tract had immediate, enduring political impact, expressing in a way that even Chávez himself had not managed the revolution’s contempt for its foes and its determination to prevail. The oligarchs could shut their factories, abuse their power, shriek and shout on their television channels, and still lose. Buuuuuuuurgh!

  Venezuelans watched the clip, played repeatedly on opposition channels, mesmerized. It made their choice stark. With the belch or against the belch. Millions called it disgusting. But millions more hailed it as comeuppance for economic saboteurs. One pro-Chávez writer called it an expression of the oppressed’s collective unconscious. “It is part of our Hispanic Arab heritage, of the reconquest.”

  Within weeks the strike unraveled. Ambitious businessmen who were not part of the traditional elite helped the government to source and distribute oil, gasoline, food, and other necessities. The comandante fired nineteen thousand workers from PDVSA and took complete control of the oil company. He invited Acosta Carles onto his television show to laud his role in the victory and proclaim him a hero. The general’s gassy vignette became known as “el eructo que salvó la revolución,” the belch that saved the revolution.

  —

  The crises of 2002 sent the comandante ever more often to the sala situacional, the situation room, beneath his office. Guards at the door, infrared swipe cards, no windows, a rectangular room filled with computers and trusted military and civilian aides. Instead of the usual palace bustle, a low hum, a place to concentrate, focus, and distill information. For a president accustomed to military command centers, it was a comforting, familiar environment. Control and communication hinged on information.

  Restricted access meant even most ministers had no idea what it looked like, fueling speculation about its size and influence. The comandante fed the aura, but the reality of this mysterious chamber in the first few years was rather mundane. About fifteen people reading newspapers and magazines online and in print, clipping, pasting, noting, archiving. Others seated before televisions and radios monitoring the airwaves’ ebb and flow. Gossip columns, public announcements, and intelligence reports were filtered to create files on governors, mayors, journalists, business leaders, trade union activists. Regional issues—cross-border smuggling in Táchira, artisanal gold mining in Amazonas, drought in Apure—were tracked and analyzed for political implications.