by Rory Carroll
Eight months later, as I prepared to board the plane for his television show, Chávez had kept the first two promises and was in the midst of a referendum campaign to keep the third.
The plane soared into an azure sky and banked east, toward a rising sun. Curious to experience the show firsthand, I had lobbied hard for this invitation. Today’s episode was to be broadcast from Valle Seco, a beach near the town of Guanta in the state of Anzoátegui. At a regional airport we changed for a military helicopter. The minister for indigenous affairs, Nicia Maldonado, was strapped in beside me. A captive interviewee—a surprise bonus. Ministers dodged foreign journalists. To avoid appearing uncooperative, they did not say no to interviews and instead strung us along with perpetual maybes. It made sense. There was little to gain and much to lose from exposure. Chávez was the government’s sole voice. Even to parrot him was risky: without warning he could change his mind on an issue or resent sharing the limelight. Maldonado, just seven months into the job, was already under fire from indigenous groups who complained that the 1999 constitution, in theory so progressive and favorable to them, was being flouted. Ranchers, oil companies, and coal miners were occupying their lands in the west, and a proposed government gas pipeline would cleave their land in the east. After exchanging pleasantries with Maldonado over the rotor’s blades—we agreed it was going to be hot—I asked about the pipeline controversy. She looked blank, and I repeated the question. She smiled and pointed to her ears.
“Can’t hear. Helicopter. Too loud.”
“The pipeline,” I bellowed. “Going ahead?”
She shrugged. “Disculpa. Can’t hear.”
After a few more attempts I gave up, and we both gazed at the coast passing below. After landing at a small, dusty military base, the minister skipped into a car and disappeared. We drove in convoy—the Hello, President entourage included dozens of technicians as well as officials—on a winding road past run-down fishing villages with bare-chested men on doorsteps sipping their first beers of the day, until we came to Valle Seco, a hamlet with a golden beach and handsome wooden jetty perched over limpid water. An advance team had set up a large white tent, portable toilets, rows of white plastic chairs, and a desk planted in the sand. It had a pile of books, maps, and notepads. Cameramen were busy with cables and lenses. I noticed audience veterans—ministers, governors, and mayors—gulping coffee, tucking into empanadas, and queuing for the toilets, fueling and preparing for the marathon. Local women and children who were not allowed into the official cordon waded out into the ocean, waist-high, to watch from there. They joked and laughed, looking forward to the show.
Ten minutes before 11:00 a.m., the comandante appeared. Wearing black trousers and a red shirt, he walked to the end of the jetty and looked out at the ocean for several minutes, a picture of reflection, then took up position at the desk, flashing a wide grin. “How are you all? Here we are, look, how marvelous! By the sea, so inviting it makes you want to plunge in. Here we are. Greetings to all the people of Anzoátegui and all the people of Sucre state. We are on the border between Anzoátegui and Sucre. A pretty and clear day, a clear day. Here is the Caribbean, the Caribbean Sea. What a beautiful land! It’s been quite a while since I’ve been here. Greetings to the fishermen, to the children, to the boatmen for the tourists. Ah, over there is Mochima, Mochima National Park, what beautiful water, what a gorgeous bay . . . Look there, the little ones in the water, a kiss to you boys and girls, may God bless you, a hug to the boys and girls of Valle Seco. How lovely is Venezuela! How lovely is my country. Hello, President number 291. And today we are going to speak of something marvelous. But you already know that.”
The program’s focus was to be the constitutional referendum due in December 2007, four months hence. When the constitution was adopted in 1999, the comandante said it would last a thousand years, but now he said it needed urgent changes. It would “restructure the geometry of power” by empowering grassroots assemblies, known as communal councils, curbing the authority of mayors and state governors, and, most important, abolishing term limits for the president, allowing Chávez to run for a third term in 2012. Since winning his second term the previous December, the comandante had accelerated the revolution, obtaining an enabling law from the National Assembly so he could rule by decree, amending history textbooks to recast his 1992 coup as a heroic uprising, and, most controversially, closing RCTV. It was the country’s oldest, most-watched channel, a producer of quiz shows and soap operas whose popularity cut across class and political lines. It was also one of the four private channels that had backed the 2002 coup against Chávez. Two of the channels, Televen and Venevisión, had made peace with the president by dropping their attacks, shunting neutered news broadcasts to graveyard slots, and abandoning political commentary. Their licenses were renewed. RCTV’s rabid anti-Chávez owners continued their attacks, and so in May 2007 the government refused to renew its terrestrial license, banishing it to a remote satellite slot where it ailed and died. The decision was unpopular even with government supporters, who lost their favorite programs. It triggered student protests that rolled across campuses and cities and breathed life back into the moribund opposition. With record oil prices pumping the economy, however, Chávez was still expected to easily win the referendum. Today’s broadcast was to mobilize his supporters to vote yes.
Eyeing the crowd, sipping a little tumbler of coffee, the comandante pitched the communal councils as the referendum’s centerpiece. “What is the essence of the proposal I have made to the Venezuelan people? Popular power . . . from the bases, from Valle Seco, from Guanta, from these communities, from this sea, from these waters, from these mountains; that is how we start building the new democracy, the Bolivarian democracy . . . something that has never been done here in Latin America.” He then greeted by name—I lost count after thirty-five—audience members, almost all ministers, governors, mayors, assembly members, military officers, and local officials. He punctuated the list with personal asides. He peered at the last seated rows.
“Are you hearing me at the back?”
“No,” replied a chorus.
The president laughed. “How can they answer if they don’t hear? Are you eating empanadas down there?”
Laughter. “No.”
The president went along with the joke. “It seems there is a sound fault, from here I can sense it. I’ve been doing this nine years and can sense when there are faults.” He reminisced about being a cadet seeing the sea for the first time, then chatted to small children ushered to his desk. Dark-skinned like most people from this community, they hovered shyly.
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Nairobith.”
“Nairobith. And you’re from Valle Seco? Look at those mosquito bites”—with concern he examined red marks on her arm—“you need to put some cream on that, Nairobith, that’s serious.” He blew her a kiss, and she scampered off with friends, carrying her flip-flops.
“May God bless you . . . Hey, my shoes? Where are you taking them?” The children hesitated, and the audience laughed.
“Ah no, I’ve a very big size, look”—he bared a foot—“I take 44; they called me Goofy when I was your age.”
The warm-up continued. He encouraged a boy to take up baseball, blew kisses at the women standing in the ocean, reminisced about his boyhood.
After an hour, shuffling through notes, he came to me. “Here we also have a British journalist, Rory Carroll . . . from the newspaper the Guardian. Rory, do you speak Spanish?”
Yes, I replied, though I was still taking lessons.
“What brings you here, to Valle Seco, you who are from Great Britain?”
“I’m Irish, in fact, but . . .”
“Ah! You’re Irish. So what brings you to these Caribbean shores? How long have you been living here among us?”
“Almost one year.”
“Almost one year.”
“Yes.”
“And where did you study journalism?”
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“In Dublin. I’ve been with the Guardian ten years.”
“The Guardian, from London, right?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your purpose? What question do you have for me? Do you have a question? Usually, journalists come with lots of questions.”
The audience tittered, the camera zoomed in, and I drew breath. I’d expected to get a private chat with Chávez later that evening, after the show, not a public exchange now. In halting Spanish, I asked the first question that popped into my head. Why should the president have the exclusive right to indefinite reelection while denying that to governors and mayors on the grounds they could become regional caudillos? Was there not a risk the president himself could become a caudillo?
The question landed with a thud on his desk. His nose wrinkled. He paused and squinted. “Well. That is the question that Rory Carroll brings us.” The jovial atmosphere evaporated. From the corner of my eye I detected some red-shirted neighbors inching their seats away from me. Then it began. He flung the question back out to sea, beyond the horizon, and turned it into a harangue against the evils of biased media, European hypocrisy, monarchy, the British queen, the Royal Navy, slavery, genocide, and colonialism.
“There is much cynicism in Europe, Rory, eh? There in Europe, where you’re from, I think that Europe competes with the United States. It’s older and more cynical, it’s had more years to practice cynicism, and I think the United States has learned a lot from European cynicism . . . which celebrates the discovery of America, for example, while denying the African holocaust.” What this had to do with the question I did not know, but he continued. He extolled the African blood that ran in Venezuelan veins and lambasted Europe’s history of war and conquest. He ordered the camera to focus on his brown skin to illustrate the point.
“In the name of the Latin American people I demand that the British government return the Malvinas Islands to the Argentine people.” Then, after another riff on colonialism: “It is better to die fighting than to be a slave!”
He directed the camera back at me, and I adopted what I hoped was a poker face. The cell phone in my shirt pocket was continuously vibrating with messages from colleagues watching on television. Chávez continued, glowering. “Never has a European journalist asked our opinion about the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Cultured Europe and us the barbarians. What cynicism!” How dare Britain, whose unelected queen reigned over Caribbean territories, criticize Venezuelan democracy, he said. “There they say Chávez wants to perpetuate himself in power, just because I’m proposing that the people decide about the possibility of continuous reelection for the head of state.”
On and on. Europe the monarchist. Europe the queen of cynicism that had oppressed Latin America for centuries. Europe with no term limits for prime ministers. The audience punctuated each accusation with applause. An aide slipped him a piece of paper with the names of European states that had no term limits for leaders. He read each one like pulling a trigger. Italy! Portugal! Slovakia! Estonia! Cyprus!
He resumed assailing British monarchy, then demanded my opinion. The microphone was passed to me in silence. By now my neighbors had edged quite a bit away, leaving me a little oasis of space.
“I repeat, I am not only Irish but also a republican, so this system [of monarchy] I don’t defend . . . but that doesn’t matter, because the question was about your country, and you, and my question was: If the mayors and governors don’t have the right [to reelection], why should you?” It was an attempt to stress the fact I was from a country that had suffered more under British colonialism than most, that in any case my opinion on such things wasn’t relevant, and that the president’s tirade had dodged the original question.
The microphone disappeared, and Chávez resumed the onslaught, turning my phrase “doesn’t matter” into a rhetorical stick, implying I’d said he didn’t matter, that Venezuelans didn’t matter. “It matters to us, compañero, it all matters to us, the destiny of the people of Europe, of the people of Africa . . . because we all share this planet, Rory.”
Eventually, ire spent, he moved on to other topics, leaving me to stew in my puddle of old-world vice and cynicism. The hours passed quickly after that. The comandante drew diagrams and maps setting out the new “geometry of power”; quoted Mao, Gandhi, Christ, Marx, Engels; read out extracts from Gramsci (first flicking an insect that had landed on the book); patted a dog that trotted up to his desk; railed against capitalism, Venezuela’s private media, and Catholic cardinals. When a makeup woman dabbed sweat from his face, the cameras would point at the audience. Chávez never stopped talking, not even while she rubbed tissue over his lips. Proclaiming a golden age of sport, he donated tickets for a trip to Cuba to a baseball team and a bus to a group of female athletes.
Somewhere amid all this he unexpectedly returned to my question. Catching my eye, the voice softer, he answered with an analogy. “I have to finish this picture. That another person could finish it is true, but nothing more than a line. If I give the brush to someone else, they would start to change the colors because they would have another vision, start to alter the contours.” Other officials were not responsible for the big picture and so did not need indefinite reelection, he said, looking at the seated governors and mayors. “Nothing personal.” They smiled wanly and applauded. Seven hours later it was dusk, and the show ended in applause and cheers. Officials kept a distance from me, the toxic interloper, until Chávez shook my hand. A firm grip, a smile, and a pat on the shoulder. The eyes were glazed—a normal human would have collapsed hours earlier—and he moved quickly to his trailer. Ministers shook my hand after that. The flight back to Caracas was the worst of my life. A lightning storm filled the night sky and sent the jet into sickening plunges and rolls. We landed in pitch-black driving rain. I thought of Gabriel García Márquez, landing on this same spot after his flight from Havana, eight years earlier, and his wondering if the comandante would turn out to be a savior or an illusionist.
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The Amazon rain forest seethes with a ceaseless, merciless struggle for life and death. Venezuela’s rain forest was hundreds of miles south, but its relentless, silent combat was replicated in the glass and concrete ministry buildings that ringed Miraflores. At first sight the honking cacophony of El Silencio, the government district, bore no comparison to the Amazon. It took just fifteen minutes to walk the six-block radius that contained most ministries and state institution headquarters. Turning right onto Urdaneta Avenue as you exited the palace brought you to the Finance Ministry, a brown opaque cube that towered over the neighboring Central Bank and National Budget Office. One block down was the colonial facade of La Casa Amarilla (the Yellow House), the Foreign Ministry. From there it was four minutes to MinCI, the tattered tower housing the Ministry of Communication and Information. Salsa music blared from clothes shops lining the route. A few blocks north clustered Plaza Bolívar, city hall, a pro-Chávez militia headquarters, and the Education Ministry. South was the National Electoral Council. In between were the Energy, Planning, Transport, Justice, and other ministries. On every corner the comandante gazed from murals and billboards. Slogans from election campaigns—“¡Vota no!” (the 2004 recall referendum), “¡Ahora sí!” (the 2007 constitutional referendum), and “Viva Chávez” (any year)—jostled with graffiti. Every few steps along the sidewalk you encountered stalls selling clothes, pirated DVDs, batteries, mangoes, bananas, hot dogs, mobile phone chargers, government-issued pale blue booklets of new laws. Crossing streets meant navigating motorbikes that raced past trucks, buses, SUVs, and old Chevys. By day El Silencio teemed with sound and movement. By dusk it emptied. Muggers owned the night.
Within and between ministry offices there unfolded pitiless competition for the palace’s nourishing rays, a remorseless process of adaptation and accelerated evolution that condemned ministers, vice-ministers, and ambitious aides to never-ending combat. The winners who broke to the surface basked in the comandante’s approval and patrona
ge, but they continued fending off rivals who swarmed in the shadows below, forever pushing upward, grabbing, straining, stretching. The losers were those who lost their strength, failed to adapt, and atrophied in the gloom.
Upon taking office, the comandante had inherited twenty-one ministries and in the name of efficiency and lean government reduced that to fourteen and said the target was nine. This hacking did not last long. His impatience to change and create things, his riot of ideas and initiatives and schemes, nurtured bureaucratic abundance. Ministries sprouted new branches and new departments that divided, subdivided, fused, split. The Ministry of Transport and Communications became two separate ministries. Then Transport merged into Housing to make the Infrastructure Ministry. Transport separated again and merged back into Communications until each split again into individual ministries. Transport further split into the Ministry of Ground Transportation and the Ministry of Air and Water Transportation. Chávez’s solution to a problem—a series of air crashes or complaints over a ferry service—was to create a ministry. The cabinet reproduced and multiplied to fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty ministries, until even the comandante lost count. Thirty-one, thirty-three? The United States had fifteen. A bigger oval table was brought into the cabinet room, but still ministers could not all fit around it. The government Web site could not keep up with the changes. A new ministry would be announced—for instance, the Ministry of State for the Revolutionary Transformation of Greater Caracas. It would issue a press release, as if waving a tendril, then disappear back beneath the canopy, invisible, not answering the phone, its existence uncertain until an announcement a few months later that it was officially split or merged into something else.