Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  The tension originated in the comandante. On television he seemed to relish food, munching a tortilla in a market, crunching an apple on a farm—always little bites, so he could keep talking—and would reminisce about the fried plantains of Barinas, or the fried sweets his grandmother used to make. The cameras did not show that he had a personal taster, lest someone try to poison him, or that he ate to allay stress, binging at all hours. Shrill accusation he shrugged off, but mockery, betrayal, and fear of assassination stoked a ravenous appetite. The comandante especially adored hallacas, a type of tamale, and the caramelized sugar of dulce de leche. In office his weight ballooned. It did not help ministers’ nerves that alcohol and tobacco were banned in the palace and on the presidential jet. Chávez had forsworn such vices and expected officials to do the same in his presence, though everyone knew he sneaked the odd smoke.

  How nice it would have been for ministers released from palace duty to climb into the ministerial SUV and tell the driver: Casa Urrutia in Las Mercedes! To sit at the best table, sip an aperitif, choose between the bisque and the seafood platter, and lean back, an illustrious personage of respect and power. A minister who dared enter a plush restaurant in Las Mercedes, Altamira, La Castellana, or any other part of well-heeled eastern Caracas, the opposition’s heartland, was greeted with the clink-clink-clink of diners tapping glasses with spoons in protest. Insults compounded the humiliation. Thief! Liar! Son of a whore! Some ministers would slip into Ibarra’s Palms restaurant because it had a refuge, a secluded upper section, but most gave up dining out. It was the same at malls, cinemas, and supermarkets in wealthy neighborhoods: scorn, abuse, hisses. When not at their desks or public events, ministers retreated to their homes. They would shut the gates, bolt the locks, and close the curtains, sealing off, as best they could, the contempt outside. Even then there was no respite. The comandante might appear on television at any moment and drop a bombshell. Sleep would be invaded by the palace-issued cell phone.

  When things got to be too much, some courtiers sought counsel from a small, wiry fortune-teller known as Rey David. King David. His full name was David Goncalves, and he had learned his trade, he said, from a Portuguese gypsy. He had his own radio show and became famous during the Ávila mudslide disaster by giving thousands of free consultations to people seeking missing relatives. By the time Chávez won the 2006 election, senior government officials were among those summoning “El Rey” for private home visits. Many Venezuelans are superstitious and blend Catholicism with a semi-clandestine jumble of astrology, mysticism, and Santeria, a type of voodoo imported by slaves from western Africa. Rich and poor alike believe it. Judges, bankers, and politicians privately attribute misfortunes—illness, car accidents, career setbacks—to malign spells. They wear amulets and pay Santeria priests to reverse the spells and, in some cases, curse their enemies. Others ask the likes of Rey David to read tarot cards. So many anxious officials unloaded their troubles onto him he acquired inside knowledge of El Silencio’s power struggles to the point he really could, in some ways, predict the future.

  Goncalves just as often got things wrong. His main value was in conveying his clients’ mood. “Those who have a lot of power have a lot of enemies. There is a lot of anxiety and fear. They don’t trust their own bodyguards. They all want to know how to keep their money and power. That’s their struggle. They feel persecuted and worry about blackmail. A lot of it comes down to this,” he said, rubbing his fingers under the table. Prominent clients did not want to be seen visiting Goncalves, lest it suggest intrigue, so they invited him for discreet home visits. One client was so wound up that the consultation lasted ten hours, he said.

  —

  A minister needed to master three skills. The first was the balance between stillness and motion. Most of the time a minister was stone. He or she was not supposed to suggest an initiative, solve a problem, announce good news, theorize about the revolution, or express an original opinion. These were tasks for the comandante. His fickleness encouraged ministers to defer implementation until they were certain of his wishes. In any case they spent so much time on stages applauding—it was unwise to skip protocol events—there was little opportunity for initiative. Thus the oil minister Rafael Ramírez would lurk, barely visible, while the comandante signed a lucrative deal with Chevron. Or the information minister Andrés Izarra would stand, mute, while the comandante gave a press conference.

  But upon command the stone would transform into a whirling dervish. We are nationalizing the steel company, draft a declaration! We are flying to Tehran, pack your bags! Form a new police force, quick! The comandante’s impulsiveness demanded instant, urgent responses. He would become consumed by a theme. Rice! Increase rice production! The order would ricochet through El Silencio. The agriculture, planning, transport, commerce, finance, and infrastructure ministers would work around the clock devising a scheme of credits, loans, cooperatives, mills, and trucks to have it ready, at least on paper, for the comandante to unveil on his Sunday show. Thus was born the Mixed Company for Socialist Rice. Then, the next week, chicken! Cheaper chicken! The same ministers would forget about rice while they rushed to squeeze farmers, truckers, and supermarkets so the comandante could say, on his next show, that chicken was cheaper.

  The second skill was flattery. Those who mastered the game were handsomely rewarded. Tarek Saab, a human rights lawyer and poet, wrote an ode about the comandante’s rebel great-grandfather, Maisanta, which he dedicated to the comandante and his mother. He was named poet of the revolution and catapulted into the governorship of Anzoátegui state. Jacqueline Farías, a hydro-engineer, proclaimed the comandante a gift of history. “It is a privilege to have Hugo Chávez as the leader of this process. He has an ability to communicate and touch your heart and soul. We haven’t had this since Simón Bolívar.” Asked if he had any defects, she pondered a moment. “He never rests.” She became a cabinet star, then administrator of the capital district. Others seized their moment when Chávez, viewing an art fair, assessed an elderly woman’s landscape, picked up a brush, and added a tree “for balance.” His entourage laughed and clapped.

  Addressing Chávez contained its own code. Simplest was “Presidente,” a term from the early days, when holding the office seemed marvel enough. “Comandante,” a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel that emphasized submission, gradually rivaled “Presidente” for frequency. Someone—many claimed authorship—fused the terms to make “Comandante Presidente,” linking military and constitutional authority. To emphasize a personal bond, some inserted a possessive adjective so he became “Mi Comandante Presidente.” The risk, moving up the scale, was that too-obvious sycophancy would sabotage rhetoric about equality. Ministers who bowed and perspired while they said “Mi Comandante Presidente” crossed that line. Those who said it with a relaxed smile were fine. It was a question of tone. Using the comandante’s full name, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, earned extra points. Clothing was another medium to express obedience. The comandante liked red, so ministers wore red baseball caps, red T-shirts, red guayaberas, red skirts. State garment factories produced mountains of the stuff. Then one day the comandante appeared on the palace balcony sporting a yellow shirt and said, without elaboration, there was too much red. Consternation around the palace. What to do? Some ministers hesitantly abandoned the color, worrying it was a trick. Others flashed just a bit of red, trying to gauge the correct level. When, a few weeks later, the comandante resumed wearing red, again without elaboration, the crisis passed, and ministers reverted to red.

  The third ability was to mold their faces into masks: to arrange features into appropriate expressions when on camera or in the comandante’s sight line. This was tricky when the comandante did something foolish or bizarre because the required response could contradict instinct. Thus a grimace would have to become a smile, or vice versa. Missing a cue could prove fatal. During a show the comandante’s laser-beam gaze swung from face to face, spotlighting expressions, seeking telltale tics. I
mmediately after a broadcast, Chávez reviewed the footage, casting a professional eye over the staging, lighting, camera angles—and audience reaction. The advent of YouTube in 2005 intensified the scrutiny because a misjudged grin or scowl could be picked up by foes and splashed over the Internet.

  The comandante’s occasional lapses into ridiculousness were inevitable. He spoke up to nine hours at a time live on television, without a script, and punctuated the marathons with unexpected gestures and topics. This way he kept the political initiative and dominated media coverage. Being capricious and clownish also sustained interest in the show and underlined his authority. No other government figure, after all, dared show humor in public. But on occasion this dissolved into absurdity. Who tells a king he is being a fool?

  In November 2005, Chávez announced a change to the national coat of arms so the white horse would gallop to the left—in keeping with his politics—rather than to the right. “It’s a reactionary symbol,” he told his audience, gathered by the banks of the Orinoco in Puerto Ordaz, a steamy city on the edge of the Great Savanna. The horse was not Venezuelan but “imperial” because its rightward gallop and backward gaze were designed during the 1908–35 dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, who had “sold out to U.S. imperialism.” The camera panned over the seated officials who swiftly applauded. The idea, the comandante added, came from his eight-year-old daughter, who had asked why the horse galloped one way and looked the other. “Rosinés said, ‘Daddy, why does that horse look backward?’” Chávez beamed in pride. If the audience felt Venezuela had just officially become a banana republic, it did not show it. The applause swelled. Weeks later the compliant National Assembly approved a bill changing the coat of arms.

  Ministers faced another test of the mask in September 2007 when the comandante announced clocks would go back half an hour. The aim was to let children and workers wake up in daylight, he said. “I don’t care if they call me crazy, the new time will go ahead, let them call me whatever they want. I’m not to blame. I received a recommendation and said I liked the idea.” Chávez wanted it implemented within a week—causing needless chaos—and bungled the explanation, saying clocks should go forward rather than back. If ministers realized the mistake, they said nothing, only smiled and clapped. On another occasion, when Chávez misspelled a verb on a blackboard while preaching literacy to children, the education minister, Aristóbolo Istúriz, squirmed and coughed, looking tormented, before finally murmuring a correction. Chávez took it well and rewrote the word. Another time ministers sat with rictus smiles while the president jovially revealed a battle with his sphincter during a previous televised event. “Nobody knew it, but I had colic . . . Yes, I had diarrhea! I’m a human being just like the rest of you; at times people forget that. My God, ooof! I was sweating so bad.” The camera panned over faces apparently delighted with the anecdote.

  On rare occasions the correct response was not obvious, sowing panic. In a speech to mark World Water Day in 2011, the comandante said capitalism may have killed life on Mars. “I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet.” Some in the audience tittered, assuming it was a joke, then froze when they saw neighbors turned to stone. To these audience veterans it was unclear if it was a joke, so they adopted poker faces, pending clarification. It never came; the comandante moved on to other topics.

  Nuris Orihuela, the former head of the comandante’s space program, had been a serious, competent minister. A university physics professor with left-wing credentials, she had entered government soon after Chávez came to power and served as head of the state seismology institute. Promoted to vice-minister of science and technology, she had presided over the successful launch of a Chinese-made telecommunications satellite called Simón Bolívar. In person, Orihuela was the antithesis of a Venezuelan woman: boyish, short hair, no makeup, jeans, brogues. A confident woman, not afraid to be different, who exuded professionalism. In her passion for technology and social progress, she was clearly, in the best sense, utopian. Even academics outside the government who loathed Chávez respected Orihuela. She left government in 2009—she had an unexplained dispute with Chávez over Iran—and two years later occupied a small, windowless university office at the end of a dingy corridor. She was qualified to interpret the president’s Mars comment, one of his most bizarre, and had nothing to lose in doing so. She seemed beyond the cloying sycophancy of El Silencio.

  “You must understand that the president is very, very intelligent,” she said. “He understands the transcendence of technology and space. He absorbs information very quickly.” She paused, selecting her words carefully. “But it needs to be given to him in a responsible way. A considered way. The problem is some people give him information that is incomplete and not in context. That is unfortunate because a huge intelligence such as his may make rapid connections that are not”—she paused again, weighing the words—“that are not necessarily correct.” Shortly before the president made his comments, there had been a report about water on Mars, she said. “So you see, conclusions were made . . . The president is a good man, he speaks from the heart and looks you in the eye. He tells the truth. So really, there is no reason to worry.”

  6

  THE ART OF WAR

  On December 2, 2007, something unexpected happened. Chávez lost the referendum. By a slim margin voters rejected the proposed sixty-nine articles amending the constitution. The invincible soldier who had won vote after vote year after year was defeated. The country was stunned. A victory party in front of the palace was canceled, and tearful supporters went home. As workers dismantled the stage, a giant Chávez doll was deflated with a long, sharp hiss and left facedown on the concrete. Just a year earlier Chávez had been reelected in a landslide, but instead of accelerating, the revolution was now braking. Partly it was that the opposition, infuriated by the RCTV closure and mobilized by students, turned out its core vote. But mainly it was that half his own supporters—the so-called soft Chavistas—abstained. The economy was booming, but they were annoyed that government policies were distorting the supply chain, causing shortages of milk, coffee, sugar, and toilet paper. The other reason was that Chávez’s mayors and governors campaigned halfheartedly. The referendum would not abolish their own term limits, so they had nothing to gain from a yes vote. The comandante accepted defeat—disproving suspicions he would cancel the result—but bared his fury. At a press conference he said the opposition had won a “victoria de mierda,” a shitty victory. Previously, he had avoided swearing in public but now wallowed in it, repeated it, drawing out the word. “Mieeeerdah.” He lambasted supporters who had abstained. “You have no excuse, you have no consciousness, you have no resolve for the fatherland.”

  He blamed his defeat above all on a single man, a Judas whom he had once called brother. He would have his revenge.

  —

  When Raúl Baduel was a teenager growing up in Maracay, a garrison town sixty miles west of Caracas, he would spend entire afternoons clutching the airfield fence and gazing up, mesmerized, at paratroopers. The idea of standing at the door of a McDonnell Douglas and launching into the void thrilled and terrified him. “I knew then that was what I wanted to be more than anything in the world. A paratrooper,” he recalled decades later. After finishing high school, he enlisted in the academy in 1972 and there befriended Chávez. On the surface there was little reason for the two cadets to become close. Chávez was a year ahead, which made him senior, and a typical llanero extrovert full of jokes, proverbs, and chat. Baduel was taciturn and serious with a soft, husky voice. They both liked books, but whereas Chávez devoured Venezuelan history, Baduel was drawn to Eastern philosophy and mysticism. Yet they became, in their own words, brothers. They both adored the army, and Chávez, in his freewheeling way, treated the younger cadet as an equal. He even called him by his chosen nickname, Papa—taken from a character in a U.S. television
series about U.S. fighter pilots in World War II—which implied deference.

  As the two men moved up the ranks, differences in their personalities became marked. Baduel, formal and polite, blended Catholicism with Buddhism and acquired a lifelong love of incense and Gregorian chant. He preached the samurai code. He also married Cruz María, with whom he would go on to have twelve children. Chávez blended Catholicism with his own syncretism—he told comrades he was the reincarnation of Ezequiel Zamora, the nineteenth-century llanero general—and became more gregarious and theatrical. He had three children with his wife, Nancy, who lived in Barinas, and started a decade-long affair with a historian, Herma Marksman, in Caracas. Both men, however, shared increasing disgust with Venezuela’s oil-boom bloating and institutional decay.

  On December 17, 1982, the anniversary of Bolívar’s death in 1830, Chávez was the chosen orator for a barracks ceremony. He told the assembled soldiers to picture the Liberator in the sky, watchful, frowning, because what he had left undone remained undone. Afterward, Chávez, Baduel, and two other captains, Jesús Urdaneta and Felipe Acosta Carles, jogged six miles to the Samán de Güere, an acacia tree under whose shade Bolívar used to rest. It was a humid, sticky day, and the friends arrived drenched in sweat, Chávez last. There they plucked leaves, a military ritual, and Chávez improvised another speech, this time paraphrasing Bolívar’s famous 1805 oath: “I swear to the God of my fathers, I swear on my homeland, I swear on my honor, that I will not let my soul feel repose, nor my arm rest until my eyes have seen broken the chains that oppress us and our people by the order of the powerful.” The others echoed his words, and a conspiracy was born. A decade later, when Chávez led the failed 1992 coup, Baduel remained undetected as a conspirator and stayed in the army. His involvement became public knowledge only when Chávez, on the eve of his inauguration, revealed him as the “fourth man” to García Márquez on the flight from Havana. Baduel was seated just behind the writer and the president-elect. “Márquez wanted to interview me there and then,” Baduel recalled later. “But Chávez told him that wasn’t the time. Márquez never did get to interview me.”