Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  Ministers rose and fell even faster than ministries. The comandante went through more than 180 ministers in over a decade. Ministers and courtiers battled for favor and advancement. Some lasted just a few weeks, snapped twigs quickly forgotten. But the nimblest and most versatile survived year after year. With faces turned permanently toward the palace, they sank roots and colonized El Silencio, made it their habitat, establishing contours to the revolution. Over a decade of evolutionary ferment those who learned to survive and thrive formed three distinct species.

  The disciples invested everything in submission. All categories had to show loyalty—it was the first condition of ascent—but the disciples went further by making instant, complete obedience their specialty. They brought no ideas or special talents, controlled no constituencies. They offered themselves as reliable fillers of any role, any post, no questions asked.

  Nicolás Maduro thrived this way. A tall man with a thick, dark mustache and black hair, he had no qualifications or education beyond high school but had an easygoing demeanor and instinct for advancement. He started his career driving a bus in Caracas and soon after obtained a doctor’s certificate saying he had a disability, allowing him to pursue an alternative career in the union while keeping a company salary. Chávez was suspicious of union agitators—they tended to be headstrong—but Maduro, elected to the National Assembly, was pliant. Whatever hour Chávez phoned, whatever law he wanted amended or revoked, Maduro assented. He became head of the assembly in 2005 and then, despite not speaking any foreign languages, foreign minister in 2006, a post he held for six years. He crisscrossed the world following Chávez’s orders and reading Chávez’s script, never deviating, never ad-libbing, never proposing his own initiatives. Break ties with Bogotá, fix ties with Bogotá, assail Washington, schmooze Beijing, nurture Tehran, insult Madrid, whatever the order, he complied. When the comandante patronized Maduro in public—“Look at Nicolás there, handsome in his suit, not driving a bus anymore”—he just smiled. Foreign ambassadors said the foreign minister grew into his job but that he never took a big decision. Only Chávez was allowed to shine, so Maduro did not shine. And thus he prospered. He acquired an extensive wardrobe, put on weight, grew thick around the trunk. The disciples came from varied backgrounds but shared an instinct for adopting the attitudes and rhetoric of power. Those from privileged backgrounds changed their accents, dropping lisps and other posh giveaways for local colloquialism. They acquired red T-shirts and baseball caps for party events and attending the president’s television show. When Chávez made an announcement, the disciples were the first to seek microphones to praise it. Shallow political and ideological roots let them sway and bend to the wind from Miraflores.

  The utopians relied on tapping the comandante’s imagination, on making blueprints of his dreams of revolution. Their leader was Jorge Giordani. An unusual-looking man, he was thin as a whip with large blue eyes, thick spectacles, and a wide, pale face fringed by a straggly white beard and bald head. An anorexic Santa Claus, went the joke, but for his austerity he was nicknamed the Monk. He wore dark, shapeless suits and scuffed shoes and carried a battered briefcase that seemed to have been slept on by a cat. Giordani cared little for appearances in this world because he was busy perfecting the one in his head. He illustrated it at press briefings by drawing charts and diagrams so elaborate they resembled space shuttle designs. If someone suggested his designs weren’t working in this world, he would redden, massage his fingers, and suggest that perhaps the questioner had not understood the model. Giordani was one of the very few ministers who spoke English but did so only in private. His wife, who ran a school, was a close adviser. It was while studying electrical engineering in Italy in the 1960s that Giordani had had his epiphany: just like circuit boards, humanity could be rewired, its currents conducted to make a new society. He infused this idea with Marxism during postgraduate studies in urban planning at England’s University of Sussex. He thrilled to theories about making order out of chaos. After Chávez’s 1992 coup, Giordani, by now a professor at the Central University of Venezuela, tutored him in jail on how to turn the Bolivarian movement into a government. Armed with charts and maps and formulas, he spent a decade as planning minister. A professor can spend a lifetime polishing ideas without anyone caring. Chávez exhilarated such men—there were no women in this category—with the promise of putting theory into practice. In return they promised him a new world.

  The fixers formed the third category. They were the most dynamic and grew tall by resolving, or appearing to resolve, problems. When the comandante encountered economic turbulence or dissent in his ranks, a squall that needed calming, he would turn to fixers, many of whom came from the military. The most ambitious was Diosdado Cabello. His name literally meant God-Given Hair. Born into humble means in Monagas state, a scorched terrain of plateaus and savanna in the east, he had cropped, military hair when he studied at the academy under Chávez, who by then was an instructor. Diosdado, as everyone called him, even enemies, joined the 1992 coup, served time in jail, and started to lose his hair upon entering government. He skipped from post to post. A leader of the MVR party, the state telecommunications regulator, infrastructure minister, the president’s chief of staff, vice president, governor of Miranda state. Diosdado’s gift proved to be not his hair but an ability to influence multiple institutions and organizations, nurturing allies, placing lieutenants in key posts, co-opting successors, spinning a web of patronage that included factions of the military, half a dozen ministries, and pro-government radical civilian militias. He was nicknamed the octopus: tentacles everywhere. The comandante allowed Diosdado and other fixers—all calculating, pragmatic bruisers—to amass wealth and patronage because he could deploy them, when needed, to assert presidential authority. A visit from a fixer was enough to make a rebellious governor, banker, or party faction kneel and pledge loyalty to the comandante. Diosdado was said to have acquired so much wealth and so many secrets at the Infrastructure Ministry that when he was shuffled to another post in 2004, a legend grew that he had burned the headquarters to hide the evidence. It was in one of the city’s twin fifty-six-story Parque Central Towers, once South America’s tallest skyscrapers and monuments to the 1970s oil boom. The inferno’s cause was never fully established, and there was no real evidence that Diosdado had done it. But many considered the blackened ruin, which loomed over Caracas abandoned and unrepaired for years, as Diosdado’s work. When he vacated the Miranda governorship four years later, for reasons unknown he took all the computers, files, security cameras, even the furniture and fittings.

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  A centimeter of Miraflores is worth more than an estate in the Great Savanna.” It was an expression coined long before Chávez, but the oil boom that gushed ever-increasing torrents of petrodollars from 2004 gave a giddy air to ministers and courtiers at the palace. It inflamed ambition and insecurity. It dangled the promise of influence, status, and wealth with the dread of banishment. Attract the president’s eye and elevation would be swift. Yesterday a nobody, today you beheld a fiefdom of influence and patronage. Bodyguards in armored SUVs picked you up from home. Civil servants flapped around your desk. Mayors and businessmen queued outside your office, clutching petitions. The palace requested your attendance at this and that. A heady existence. But the air was thin, the ledge slippery.

  In public, ministers all sounded the same. “The Bolivarian process is an organic process of deepening revolution through popular empowerment. We have a strategic plan, systematized and endogenous.” That was Lídice Altuve, the information vice-minister, but it could have been any of them, all speaking quasi-military corporate jargon. They would appear onstage, flanking the comandante, clapping and smiling in unison. They loathed and mistrusted each other. Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist who explored Venezuela in the early nineteenth century, noted how wildlife along the Orinoco would twitch and quiver. “Carefully observing the relationship between the animals you see how they avoid and fea
r 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.”

  Giordani, the ascetic, soft-spoken Monk, had shown his mettle in agreeing to tutor Chávez in jail in 1992. University colleagues had blanched at the invitation to give courses to coup plotters at their grim, mosquito-filled jail in Yare, but Giordani did not hesitate and forged a bond with the future president. He was rewarded with a ministerial post in 1999, but instead of applying his blueprints for a new society, he found himself just another voice at a long cabinet table filled with ambitious colleagues pitching their own, different ideas.

  One by one, the Monk eliminated his rivals. He did not trust his inherited Planning Ministry officials, who predated Chávez, and installed a parallel team of academic protégés from the university. These former Ph.D. students had studied under him, shared his ideas, and were utterly loyal. The flux of instructions from Chávez spawned instant committees, tight deadlines, and shifting targets. Some ministers lost their bearings amid the churn, but Giordani, methodical and strategic, identified key posts in newly created departments and committees and filled them with acolytes, a skill acquired at university. They steered meetings certain ways, delayed or accelerated discussions according to necessity, promoted allies, blocked outsiders, brought information and drafting documents back to base at the Planning Ministry. He set up a special academy at Los Teques, on the outskirts of Caracas, to train his protégés for government. Thus Giordani was able to ambush colleagues at crucial moments. Gustavo Márquez, head of industry and commerce, slaved over a new law only to find it, in the space of minutes at what he thought was a routine meeting, rejected and replaced by a Giordani draft. Márquez then found his department abolished and himself packed off to run Venezuela’s pavilion at an expo in Hannover.

  Guaicaipuro Lameda proved a more formidable adversary. As national budget controller, he openly challenged the Monk’s estimates and mocked him when he turned up at meetings with rolled-up blueprints under his arm. “Is that your bazooka to kill us all, Jorge?” Once, when sharing a limousine in Moscow, Lameda teased his Marxist colleague by pointing out numerous neon signs for McDonald’s, a sign of capitalism’s triumph. “Look at all those yellow Ms, Jorge. Do you think they stand for ‘Moscow’?” The Monk had his revenge. After being promoted to head the state oil company, Lameda found himself blindsided by an eleventh-hour Giordani draft of a new hydrocarbon law. Lameda noted a decade later, “But you know what? The irony is things are even worse when Giordani is not there. Everything sags, disperses. While Giordani runs things, there is at least coherence and organization.”

  The Monk’s key advantage, besides his team of acolytes, was access to Chávez. He sought contact with the comandante at every opportunity. While other ministers used the grand salons of Miraflores for meetings, Giordani lurked in the annex outside the president’s office, waiting for a chance to murmur into the chief’s ear. Those without access were vulnerable to rumor and smear. In a twinkle they could find their department abolished or folded into a rival’s domain. When the comandante started skipping cabinet meetings in 2004, jostling for the ear intensified. Ministers could spend weeks or months vainly seeking an audience. Desperate to know what the comandante was thinking, ministers strained to pick up gossip, glean rumor, catch fragments. They would hiss to one another: Amigo, what have you heard? The privileged, such as the Monk, were invited to visit the comandante’s office or to stroll with him around the adjacent patio of loquat trees, where a bronze jug cascaded water into a pond.

  Twice Giordani fell. Chávez’s mercurial personality and work rhythm drained him, and he could not abide the 3:00 a.m. calls. He defiantly turned off his palace-issued mobile phone before going to bed. Chávez became so angry he ordered Diosdado, then his chief of staff, to drag the Monk from his home and escort him through darkened, deserted streets for a tense predawn meeting at Miraflores. Chávez clashed with and fired all his ministers at one time or another but forgave and reinstated his favorites. The utopian professor appealed to the comandante’s yearning to reengineer society. And he imbued the cabinet with a cerebral gravitas it otherwise lacked. Half the ministers had no college degree.

  Nine finance ministers fell in succession until finally, in 2010, Giordani achieved his goal: the Planning and Finance ministries were merged under his leadership, making him the revolution’s undisputed economic czar. To what extent he engineered colleagues’ downfalls remained unclear. It was palace custom not to give reasons for axing. Chávez, or his private secretary, would phone the marked one to say thank you but your services are no longer required. Good-bye. The victim was left guessing. Did someone whisper to the comandante? Who? Richard Canan, a young, rising commerce minister, was fired after telling an internal party meeting the government was not building enough houses. Ramón Carrizales was fired as vice president after privately complaining about Cuban influence. Whatever the cause, once the ax fell, expulsion was immediate. The shock was disorienting. Ministers who used to bark commands and barge through doors seemed to physically shrink after being ousted. They would speak softly and shuffle into a room, meek and hesitant. They haunted former colleagues at their homes, seeking advice and solace, petitioning for a way back to the palace. “Amigo, can you have a word with the chief?” One minister, one of Chávez’s favorites, laughed when he recounted this pitiful lobbying. “They know it as well as I do. In Miraflores there are no amigos.”

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  Chávez’s gaze seemed to follow ministers every waking minute. From their mantelpieces and living room walls (it was wise to have portraits at home), from murals and billboards on their way to work, from the elevator (where posters said, “¡Adelante Comandante!,” Forward, Comandante!), from their offices (multiple posters of Chávez in different poses), from their desks (he adorned little calendars), from the T-shirts of waiters who brought coffee (“¡Viva Chávez!”), from the covers of newspapers, magazines, and government reports. The instantly recognizable tenor voice exulted, scolded, accused, joked, and reminisced from radio and television several times a day. This was why caricaturists in opposition newspapers focused on his eyes and mouth—exaggerating the squint, puffing the lips, protruding the tongue. But for ministers the most relevant parts of Chávez’s physiognomy, the ones that kept them awake at night, made their hearts pound, and halted them mid-sentence, as if struck dumb, were his ears. Physically, they were unremarkable. Not petite or oversized, not flappy or pointy: regular ears. What did the comandante hear?

  That enemies could whisper intrigues against you was bad enough. But the principal source of paranoia was fear over what you said yourself. That somewhere at some time to someone you would say something you should not. It could be anything. A grumble about the government. A reference to a bank account. A joke about the president. And that could be enough. The scythe could swing. Aides, secretaries, drivers, all were potential informants for Cuba’s G2 intelligence service and Venezuela’s DISIP, later to become SEBIN (Bolivarian Intelligence Service). Home phones, office phones, and above all mobile phones were assumed to be tapped, and choice conversations played to the comandante. This, many believed, accounted for the otherwise inexplicable fall of so many ministers. It was the reason high-ranking officials treated their phones as radioactive.

  The eavesdropping was real. And, to an astonishing degree, open. Selected clips played five nights a week, Monday to Friday, on the Razorblade talk show. Mario Silva heaped abuse on government opponents. “Hey, Otero [a newspaper owner], I know you’re watching, so I’ll say this slowly. You’re. A. Son. Of. A. Bitch.” When he leaned forward, gazing intently at the camera, a smile curling his mouth, you knew he was about to hurl “scum,” “faggot,” “limp dick,” “fascist,” or another of his favorite epithets. Offscreen, with friends, Silva could be warm and cerebral (he was well read and played chess), but on-screen he spat abuse.

  The president o
ften appeared on the show, or phoned in from the palace, for jokey banter. He urged everyone to tune in. “Did you see The Razorblade last night?” he would ask supporters at a rally. “Magnificent. And I understand Mario has something special lined up tonight. Don’t miss it!” The something special was invariably intercepted phone calls. Silva was coy about the source, but everyone assumed it was state intelligence services. “A banquet tonight, folks!” he would say, tapping his nose. “Three clips. Three different recordings. Go grab your popcorn, the first will be rolling in a few minutes.”

  The program did not air the revolution’s dirty linen—only the opposition’s—but still chilled ministers and courtiers. They assumed the palace was listening to their phone conversations as well. And that informants made clandestine recordings. A tape of a Chavista mayor enjoying what appeared to be an orgy at his official residence in east Caracas became infamous, though never made it onto The Razorblade. It was widely believed the intelligence services targeted victims’ wives on the assumption they gossiped more freely. A muckraking newspaper, Las Verdades de Miguel (Miguel’s Truths), which sold out in El Silencio every Friday, fueled the paranoia with character assassinations. “Watch out, Comandante! A spy in the heart of government,” read one typical headline, citing a minister’s supposed intrigue. The paper also specialized in gnomic warnings. “Worse than treason is loneliness. Once again the swords sharpen.” The impression grew that the palace had ubiquitous ears and that every morning the situation room supplied eye-opening transcripts and clips to the comandante.

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  The irony of advancement in El Silencio’s ministries and state agencies was that success, landing a coveted position, brought misery. Meals at the palace offered a cruel juxtaposition. Oil paintings in the Parnassian style lined the walls with scenes of bacchanal and indulgence. Nymphs and deities gorged in sensual ecstasy on tropical fruits, juicy meats, and foaming champagne. Veuve Clicquot so liked this spirit of gaiety it had paid for the works’ restoration under a previous administration. But the tables where visiting ministers ate had no munificence, no joy. “I have watched them eat. They are so rigid. They don’t smile or show any sense of enjoyment; they can’t loosen up,” said Helena Ibarra, a chef who accompanied the comandante’s entourage on early foreign trips and later served ministers in her Caracas restaurant. It was not the fault of Miraflores’s kitchen. At the comandante’s behest it served traditional fare, corn bread arepas, beans, minced beef, hard, salty cheese, as if outside the palace stretched the plains of his youth. The ingredients were fresh, the dishes tasty, but ministers did not savor them. They were too nervous.