Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  “I loved it, there was a real buzz working down there. We had a great team, everybody with their own job and rhythm. Every day we updated profiles on the main players. Whenever Chávez visited, we were able to immediately brief him on who was doing what.” The man speaking—let us call him Andrés—had been one of the sala’s senior analysts and asked that his surname not be used. He was trim, with cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a dark mustache, and a military-style jacket. Everything about him seemed clipped and measured.

  In a low, even voice he told his story. Andrés had been a few years behind Chávez in the academy and went on to become an instructor in political science and geopolitics. Left-wing and despairing of Venezuela’s “exhaustion,” he had participated in the 1992 coup—relaying information from Fuerte Tiuna—and afterward visited Chávez in jail, giving him books by the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. “Chávez had never heard of him, imagine! A supposed man of the Left.”

  After Chávez’s election in 1998, Andrés helped set up the situation room. It swiftly matched the mood and pace of the chief upstairs, he recalled. Working all hours, responding to requests for this and that, trying to keep one step ahead, jubilant, anxious, frenetic, in a symbiotic relationship with the comandante. And then, after the April 2002 coup, it all changed. “It became something else.” Andrés paused. “I can sum it up in one word,” he said, leaning forward. “Fidel.”

  Fidel Castro had long dreamed of co-opting Venezuela and its oil wealth into Cuba’s revolution. He had supplied weapons and training to Venezuela’s doomed guerrillas in the 1960s, then in a pragmatic switch made peace with successive presidents right up to and beyond Chávez’s 1992 coup. Castro initially condemned the uprising, but two years later, when Chávez was pardoned and freed, he invited him to Havana. Fidel was in the midst of a crisis. The Soviet Union had disintegrated and with it the subsidies that had kept Cuba’s economy afloat. Imminent collapse was feared. Against this background the maximum leader invited a semi-notorious Venezuelan ex–coup leader with no money, no political experience, no organized support, and, it seemed, not much of a future. “The old fox sniffed him right out,” said Andrés, admiring the prescience. “He recognized Chávez’s potential straightaway. And his weaknesses.”

  The seduction was captured in a series of photographs. The first in black and white: Fidel, in uniform and cap, welcoming his guest off the plane in 1994, gripping him by both shoulders, smiling. Chávez gazing up at his bearded host with awe. Castro personally attended to Chávez for the entire visit. The pair bonded over Baskin-Robbins and marathon talks where they compared life arcs: both rural boys, talented pitchers who traded professional baseball dreams for politics and insurrection. An official photographer shadowed them, and Fidel gave his guest a photo album as a memento.

  In January 1999 they met again in Havana. More photographs. Chávez, now president-elect, in a brown suit and gold tie, walking down a shiny corridor with Fidel, in olive green, deep in conversation. In the following months and years the photographs multiplied. A baseball game in Havana, Chávez in white pitching for Venezuela, Fidel in a blue jacket coaching Cuba, fifty thousand spectators cheering. Chávez declared Cuba and Venezuela were “swimming together toward the same sea of happiness.” Here they are in a canoe in Venezuela’s Canaima National Park, wearing green jungle hats, waving to the camera as a waterfall thunders behind them. Now standing in a jeep—a blurred image—inspecting hurricane damage in Cuba. Then in Sabaneta in the house where Chávez was born. A future shrine, predicted Fidel. Chávez was in ecstasy. “Fidel had to stoop . . . it’s a low door, and he’s a giant. I saw it with my own eyes . . . as if it was a dream, something out of a García Márquez novel. My God!” A still image from Chávez’s television show: Fidel, famously the one Cuban who doesn’t sing, wearing headphones and holding a page of lyrics, crooning with Chávez. Chávez at the Caracas airport, looking wistful, blowing a kiss at the plane taking Fidel back to Havana.

  Andrés watched all this from his bunker in Miraflores—the sala monitored Chávez himself to record reactions to what he said and did—and he worried. Like many Venezuelan leftists, he considered Fidel an anachronism, a cautionary tale of revolutionary idealism warping into totalitarian control and central-planning fiasco. But the comandante seemed to be falling deeper under the older man’s spell. The 2002 coup, said Andrés, provided the final push into Fidel’s arms. “It was right after that it happened. The Cubans took us over.” He descended into the sala one morning to find strangers with rapid-fire Cuban accents. His new bosses. Cuba’s intelligence service, G2, had thwarted countless plots against Fidel for decades. It was among the best in the business. The comandante’s sala, in contrast, had failed to anticipate the coup. The Cubans considered Andrés and his colleagues inept or disloyal. He reciprocated. “The mess they made! Coffee cups everywhere, always munching something, crumbs on the keyboards. That I could put up with. But then I saw their strategy: seal Chávez off from the public, manipulate him, nourish his insecurity, find evidence of assassination plots, of betrayals. Make him paranoid.”

  Andrés did not last long under the new bosses. He moved to the vice president’s office as an analyst, then served in the Commerce Ministry, tax agency, and PDVSA. “I lost my faith in this project a long time ago. A lot of us have.” He sighed. “It’s a bit late now, but I regret supporting the [1992] coup. Believing the army will save us—it’s a disease.” He retained a sinecure in the oil company. “It’s easy to stay inside the system if you keep your mouth shut.”

  —

  Teresita Rondon giggled too much, little, mirthful gurgles when hearing or recounting something she considered funny, which was often. The smile revealed braces on her upper and lower teeth. Rondon was self-conscious about the dentistry but couldn’t help smiling. She was cheerful and attractive, with long, braided hair that swung when she walked, and had landed a well-paying government job straight out of university. She lived with her parents in Mérida, four hundred miles west of Caracas, a mecca for students, hikers, and tourists ringed by icy mountain peaks. It shivered during winter nights.

  She was eight years old when Chávez launched his coup, fifteen when he was elected, and now, seven years into his rule, twenty-two. Politics was not her thing. Rondon liked movies, boys, and the idea of travel. She had scored high grades in her information technology course and secured a post in the mayor’s office. “The first in my class to get a job,” she said proudly. “That’s not easy in this town, believe me, there’s a lot of competition.” When she was asked about her duties, the effervescent chatter turned taciturn. “Oh, you know, human resources, personnel, that sort of stuff.” Then she would change the subject. Even on those afternoons when she came directly from the office looking distracted, vexed, she would divert conversation to another topic. Until one day, staring into her coffee, in a quiet voice, she said: “La lista.” The list. “That’s what I do,” she said, looking up. “The list.”

  In mid-2003, opponents mounted another heave against the president: a petition to trigger a recall referendum, a mechanism enshrined in the new constitution to make authority accountable. Despite opposition leaders’ complicity in the preceding year’s coup and oil strike, a referendum stood a chance of success. The economy was flat, and Chávez’s ratings had fallen. Even his base in the slums was restless. Organizers collected three million signatures. Chávez’s allies in the National Electoral Council, supposedly an independent body, said the petition was flawed and demanded it be done again. It bought Chávez valuable months to plan a defense. As fresh signatures were gathered, he made what sounded like a threat. “Whoever signs against Chávez will be registered for history because they are going to have to give their name, surname, identity number, and fingerprint.”

  After it was all over, Chávez admitted the throne had been in peril. “An international researcher spent two months here and came to the palace to deliver a devastating message: Mr. President, if the referendum were held today, you would
lose. That for me was a bombshell because you know that many people will not tell you such things and will instead soften them. That was when we began to work with the missions and ask for help from Fidel. He told me: ‘Look, I have this idea, attack from below with all possible force.’”

  The idea was to create social programs for the poor to plug gaps in state services. They were called misiones—missions—and set up with speed and urgency. The timing was perfect because oil prices spiked, largely due to Iraq’s conflagration, and petrodollars rained on Miraflores. Chávez had never really cared about money—in the army he barely noticed his salary coming and going—and Fidel had micromanaged his island’s economy into penury. But they handled Venezuela’s bounty with finesse. While Chávez sent ninety-five thousand barrels of oil daily to Cuba, shoring up its economy, Fidel sent twenty thousand Cuban doctors, nurses, and other specialists into Venezuela’s barrios. They sought out the poor, sick, and forgotten, treated bulging veins, infections, broken bones, arthritis, bleeding gums, stiff backs. They logged medical histories, trained community volunteers, gave courses in nutrition. It was all free—and they stayed. The Cubans lived on the upper floor of new small hexagonal clinics. This was Misión Barrio Adentro.

  Teachers followed to teach the illiterate to read and write, liberating thousands from embarrassment and ignorance. This was Misión Robinson. Other teachers taught night courses to high-school dropouts. This was Misión Ribas. Its graduates were offered stipends and places at new universities. This was Misión Sucre. Credits and training were offered to small agricultural and industrial cooperatives. This was Misión Vuelvan Caras. On it went: soup kitchens, subsidized food stores, land titles, flights to Cuba for eye surgery. By the time the referendum was held in August 2004, Chávez’s ratings had recovered, and he won a landslide. “Venezuela has changed forever,” he exulted to a crowd from the palace balcony. “There is no turning back.”

  The opposition cried fraud, then collapsed. It felt cheated, crushed, and exhausted. Years of marching, chanting, plotting, organizing—for nothing. Chávez was more secure than ever with two-thirds of the country behind him. Opponents retreated into a cave, despairing and drained, to hibernate. The comandante could now finally ease the lever on the chair with the gold-plated sphynx and put his feet up. But then he would not have been the comandante. His power was now secure, but he was condemned to protect it, ceaselessly, endlessly. The Salón Boyacá briefers warned him the enemy—the fascist, treacherous enemy—would recover and regroup. Strike now, sir! Rout the remnants! And he did. He had warned people not to sign the petition, and now they would pay.

  A digital record of the three million names was passed to Luis Tascón, a young National Assembly member and specialist in information technology. He posted it on his Web site, ostensibly to prevent the opposition from inventing signatories. Thus was born la lista Tascón. The Tascón list. Also known as Chávez’s revenge. It formalized the country’s division. Heretics this side of the ledger, believers on the other. Government and state offices used it to purge signatories from the state payroll, to deny jobs, contracts, loans, documents, to harass and punish, to make sectarianism official. People lost careers and livelihoods and went bankrupt. Fear gripped those who had signed, then it spread to their relatives. On his television show the president invited Tascón onto the stage and with mock anxiety asked: “I don’t appear on your list, do I?” By April 2005 the stories of blighted lives were creating an international embarrassment, so Chávez publicly declared a halt. “The Tascón list must be archived and buried,” he said. “I say that because I keep receiving some letters . . . that make me think that in some places they still have the Tascón list to determine if somebody is going to get a job or not. Surely it had an important role at one time, but not now.”

  A year later Teresita Rondon confirmed the list was alive and well in Mérida. Her job was to apply it, to methodically cross-reference every municipal employee, contractor, job applicant. Teachers, street sweepers, police, doctors, secretaries, ambulance drivers, receptionists, anyone and everyone needed to be checked to determine if they were to be fired, barred, or hired. Rondon’s youth, energy, and IT skills made her ideal. “The list is thorough, but to run the program is slow and cumbersome, it’s got glitches, it takes times to process a name.” The list, she said, had been transformed and expanded into a new software program called Maisanta, after the comandante’s great-grandfather. It included all registered voters and allowed officials to check their addresses, voting stations, voting participation, political preferences, and memberships in missions and other government schemes. It enabled searching and cross-referencing and rated people as “patriots,” “opposition,” or “abstainers.” The Maisanta list was national. Chávez’s order to bury it had been for the cameras. Rondon was one cog in a huge, clanking machine.

  It bred a minor industry of corruption because data could be manipulated, she said. “I’ve heard of people who signed paying to become patriots.” Those who couldn’t afford the bribe stayed on the blacklist. “It’s not my fault. I didn’t know this was the job. I can’t look friends in the eye. Some of them are on the list. What am I going to tell them?” Her eyes reddened, and it seemed she would cry, but she didn’t.

  PALACE

  Carefully observing the relationship between the animals you see how they avoid and fear each other. The golden age has ended. In this paradise of American jungles, as everywhere else, a long, sad experience has taught all living beings that gentleness is rarely linked to might.

  —ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT

  5

  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  It was five in the morning, Caracas asleep in sepulchral darkness, and I was already late. The taxi swerved down Francisco de Miranda Avenue, for once deserted, its headlights picking out billboards for Pepsi, Polar beer, banks, and the comandante’s latest election campaign: “¡Ahora sí!” Now yes! The apartment blocks of Candelaria, so tatty in daytime, hulked like giant crossword puzzles, a few illuminated squares—people still partying, early risers?—amid the blackness. I opened the window to let in some breeze. It was humid. It was going to be a hot day. The taxi skirted downtown—Miraflores hid behind other buildings—and climbed the elevated four-lane highway, a dilapidated legacy of the 1950s building boom that had given Caracas, for a while, South America’s most modern infrastructure. The headlights picked out fresh murals and graffiti of the comandante and the referendum slogan. “¡Ahora sí! ¡Sí, sí, sí!” We entered the first, brightly lit tunnel, the main route through the Ávila, which soared two thousand meters above us, then started the curving descent toward the sea. In the glimmer of dawn I could glimpse new, half-built shacks creeping up the Ávila’s slopes. We hugged the coastline, mountain on one side, Caribbean on the other, and arrived at Simón Bolívar International Airport, a strip adjacent to the sea, just before six. National guardsmen in green uniforms and officials in red T-shirts, waistcoats, and baseball caps bustled around the domestic terminal. A harried, smiling official from the Information Ministry greeted me. “Mr. Rory, there you are, this way, hurry!” We ended up waiting an hour, then boarded a government jet. It was August 2007, and I was to be a guest on Hello, President, episode 291.

  Chávez was at a peak of power and popularity. The opposition, exhausted from defeat in the 2002 coup and strike and the 2004 recall referendum, had boycotted the 2005 National Assembly elections. It was supposed to delegitimize the election and send a distress signal to the international community. Over here! Look! Dictatorship! The world shrugged. Venezuela’s opposition was discredited, hysterical, and still overreacting to Chávez’s bait. The world instead gazed at Iraq, horrified at a sectarian civil war and a blundering U.S. occupation. Thus the boycott merely served the assembly on a plate to Chávez, giving him near-total legislative control for the next five years.

  With oil prices soaring ever higher, money washed through barrios, banks, and boardrooms. There was more of everything: chicken, beer, whiskey
, motorbikes, Hummers. The only question over the December 2006 presidential election had been the margin of Chávez’s victory. He did not even debate the opposition challenger, Manuel Rosales, saying that “an eagle does not hunt flies.” He did, however, promise to fuck Rosales if he crouched. Chávez won a second six-year term with 63 percent of the vote, the widest margin and highest voter turnout in Venezuela’s history. He took every state, saturating the political map red. The only surprise was that the opposition, amid defeat, clawed back credibility. It had rallied around a single candidate, albeit an uncharismatic, husky-voiced governor from the western state of Zulia. Rather than shriek fraud, as in previous votes, it accepted Chávez’s victory. Rosales even congratulated the president. “Today we recognize that they beat us.” It was a sign the opposition was beginning to reconnect with reality. Its radical wing—those who screamed that Chávez was a vote-rigging communist dictator—began to lose ground to pragmatic moderates who said Chávez could be challenged, and ultimately beaten, at the ballot box.

  Few noticed this shift, however, amid jubilant scenes at the palace, where Chávez, still only fifty-two, addressed an adoring crowd from the balcony. “Long live the revolution! Venezuela is demonstrating that a new and better world is possible, and we are building it.” Weeks later, while the country headed to the beach with beer and whiskey for its Christmas break, he made three dramatic announcements. He would nationalize “strategic” industries; shut RCTV, the country’s most popular television channel; and seek to change the constitution to abolish term limits. His voice boomed with confidence. “Nothing can stop the revolution!”