by Rory Carroll
He had originally scorned the microblogging site as a means for spoiled brats to criticize him and “sow terror,” but its exploding popularity—Venezuela had one of Latin America’s highest per capita rates of usage—convinced him to join in. “I’m going to have my online trench from the palace to wage the battle,” he declared. A camel seemed to have a better chance of passing through the eye of a needle than the world’s most prolix leader squeezing messages into 140 characters. But he did it, the inaugural tweet arriving in April 2010. “Hey, how’s it going? I appeared as I said I would: at midnight. I’m off to Brazil. And very happy to work for Venezuela. We will be victorious!!”
Within weeks @chavezcandanga had 450,000 followers. “This telephone is close to melting. Now I am aware of many things going on here,” marveled Chávez, brandishing his BlackBerry. Every hour he received an avalanche of petitions, complaints, praise, abuse, and prayers. It became part of presidential choreography. “Look at this message,” he said during another event, reading from his phone: “‘We are graduates of UNEFA Zulia [a university], 90 percent of us are unemployed. Please help, Comandante.’” He gazed at the message, looking concerned. “We are going to deal with this. We can’t ignore it. That would be very irresponsible. We have to listen, talk, and find solutions. It is sad if people have no one to believe in, no one to write to, nowhere to go to criticize, to complain, to ask for help.” Some people tweeted him hundreds of times, exclamation marks multiplying with their desperation. It was announced a two-hundred-strong team would help manage his Twitter account. At public events, ministers and officials stood by him, pen and notepads in hand, to transcribe details of tweets he selected. “Look at this message: ‘My boss is suffering a terrible lung disease,’” he read, sounding upset. “Do you realize? These things stay with you. Sometimes I can’t sleep because I think ‘Oh my God!’ and I start to reply and I call the ministers: ‘Help me here. Locate this person.’”
It was all part of a strategy that the Information Ministry had outlined in 2007. “We have to elaborate a new plan, and the one that we propose is the communicational and informational hegemony of the state.” The nation, in other words, was to have but one storyteller.
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Newspapers and radio and television stations sailed on ostensible freedom of speech while navigating shoals with sharp rocks. One wrong move and a gash could tear the hull. The most spectacular sinking was RCTV, the country’s oldest, most-watched channel and, in the early years, Chávez’s most strident media foe. After losing its terrestrial broadcast license in 2007, it struggled on as a cable channel until January 2010, when the government again pulled the plug. Chávez made a tactical decision to keep one opposition TV voice on air. Look at Globovisión, he said. How can anyone say there is not media plurality? It attacks me every day. It was true. The cable news channel fired daily broadsides against the government, images of crime and decay and dysfunction spliced with apocalyptic music depicting Venezuela as Stalingrad.
Globovisión reached only a minority of viewers, however, so its political impact was limited. The government harassed it in multiple ways. Prosecutors launched half a dozen legal actions against the network for allegedly not paying taxes, “apologizing for crime” (it reported a jail riot), “altering the public order” (it reported an earthquake), and “promoting political intolerance” (a chat show guest said Chávez could end up hung upside down like Mussolini). Million-dollar fines drained the channel’s resources. Its majority owner, Guillermo Zuloaga, fled into exile after being charged with usury and conspiracy. Chávez then accused Zuloaga of plotting his assassination. “As I understand it, from very trustworthy information, they say they have $100 million to give to the person who kills me. He is one of the fund-raisers, and he’s the owner of a television station that is transmitting right now.” The government shut thirty-four radio stations, citing irregularities, and threatened to close dozens more without specifying which ones, leaving all stations nervous. Criticism all but evaporated from the dial. Opposition newspapers were starved of government advertising and regularly sanctioned for supposed violations.
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It was no coincidence that Chávez, who remembered everything, dominated a nation that remembered nothing. Venezuela had chronic amnesia. Indigenous tribes did not write or build cities, leaving no trace of their existence. Termites devoured parchments, erasing colonial archives. (A prescient courtier ensured Miraflores’s original furniture was made of termite-immune woods such as canalete and bitter cedar.) Earthquakes leveled eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture, and the twentieth century entombed the remnants beneath tower blocks and slums. Schoolchildren learned to genuflect before the blessed Simón Bolívar but little about the complex forces that made their nation. Immigrants—millions of Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese came before and after World War II—looked only to the future. Venezuela’s history was vague, a blank slate. Chávez had plenty of chalk to fill it. Growing up in Sabaneta and Barinas, he had absorbed myths and folk songs such as “Florentino and the Devil,” about a llanero who fights with Lucifer, and a corrido about the cavalry by Venezuela’s great poet, Andrés Eloy Blanco, dedicated to Chávez’s great-grandfather Maisanta. It lasted about fifty stanzas, and Chávez memorized every word. His skill at reciting made him popular at children’s parties, a theatrical gift nurtured in the army, where he staged plays, emceed ceremonies, gave speeches, and lectured at the academy. In power he sharpened his oratory into a precise instrument. It was not the forensic mastery of Cicero, or the stirring beauty of Churchill, but the informal language of the street elevated to something sublime.
It was always difficult to convey his storytelling to foreigners. He used idioms and expressions so particular to Venezuela that Mexicans and Chileans struggled to understand them. And often the stories had no news value in the narrow sense—nothing dramatic, nothing important revealed—so they were omitted from news reports. But these yarns wrapped around his followers like a cashmere scarf, bonding them closer to Chávez. He understood the power of repetition. Repeating not just words and phrases but entire stories, tweaking a detail here, elaborating a character there. A favorite topic was the 2002 coup, revisited again and again, hammered and shaped into a miracle of resurrection.
“How can I forget the feelings of those hours?” he would begin, reminding listeners how he was trapped in his office, with treasonous generals threatening to bombard the palace. “Suddenly the door opens, and my mother was there. She was there listening behind the door. I imagine she had her ear glued to the wall, her ears became a wall, that woman became a wall, and suddenly she enters . . . It was a moment of death, not a physical death, but a death of the soul, a death of spirit. I was thinking, is this the end? I remember then that my mother enters the presidential office with the same force of the Arauca River when it enters the Orinoco. And that woman gave a speech, that peasant, because my mother is a peasant, a teacher of the fields, forged in poverty, in battle, and I remember my mother looking at me and telling me: ‘You will never leave, because your people love you.’”
In cold print and translated into English, it sounded corny, but carried on the cadence of a tenor voice with impeccable timing, it was moving. In such ways the comandante filled the void left by the cowed, retreating private media, weaving the issues of the day—drought, power cuts, inflation—into a seamless narrative that looped around events in his own life and Venezuela’s history, an endless, twisting flow of words. The effect was mesmerizing.
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Even Chávez’s memory, on occasion, faltered, requiring help from someone who knew the revolution’s lore as well as or even better than he did. A memory bank that archived the songs, poems, and myths of the llanos, the writings of Simón Bolívar, the tangled history of the republic’s caudillos and presidents.
Rafael Castellanos. Oracle of the revolution. It took him a while to answer the door. The hallway was compressed into a narrow passage by erupting, waist-high piles of
books. They occupied each side of the hall five or six books deep and stretched down the hall in great, jagged blocks that rose to chest level. Some spilled across the passageway, bridgeheads to the other side, and others were beginning to cross on top of them. You didn’t walk down the hall so much as angle your body and seek bits of floor on which to do a slow-motion hopscotch.
He had a white mustache, a bald head, and brown gimlet eyes behind rimless glasses that gave an owlish look. He appeared to be in his seventies but navigated the obstacle course with spryness. The entire house was a warren of books squeezed onto kitchen shelves, books stacked into living room towers, books arranged into bedroom pyramids, books colonizing the bathroom, books heaped on tables, beneath tables, on stairs, behind doors, in front of windows. About eight thousand, reckoned Castellanos.
Caracas’s bookworms knew and adored “Don Rafael” as the owner of La Gran Pulpería del Libro Venezolano, the Great Venezuelan Bookstore, a cavernous establishment in Sabana Grande that squeezed more than two million books, pamphlets, and documents into ancient shelves with creaking wooden ladders. It was Caracas’s answer to the Library of Alexandria and just as much of a fire hazard. It was less known that Don Rafael was the doyen of a group of historians and scholars who discreetly served as the comandante’s intellectual backup. A collective, parallel brain that read, processed, and organized the material that nourished his speeches. It was March 2011.
The terrace overlooked a walled garden with an overgrown lawn. Two dogs from a neighbor’s garden peered through a fence. Half a dozen parrots in a cage emitted periodic, piercing squawks that Don Rafael appeared not to notice. Nor did his marmalade tabby, Príncipe, who dozed on a chair. With no space left in the house, Don Rafael, now retired from the bookshop, worked from a large table with a telephone, a small pile of books, pens, notepads, and little wooden boxes with postcard-sized sheets of paper. He worked from 8:00 a.m. till midnight, taking off two hours every afternoon for a brisk stroll—“doctor’s orders.”
A historian, writer, and literary critic, he was hired in the 1970s to run Miraflores’s archives and became enchanted by the palace ambience. “It was named Miraflores because it used to look out onto a flower market. When you’re inside the walls, you get an instinct for the meaning of executive power. It’s difficult to explain. It seeps from the masonry. You feel it in the air; there’s a weight, like an intuition, a spirit, almost supernatural. They say there are ghosts.” The hooves of a general’s horse. A woman in white. A typewriter’s clacking. The moans of a man knifed in the belly—supposedly Juancho Gómez, brother of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, stabbed to death in his bed in 1923. “Some said he was killed by the president’s mistress, others that it was a homosexual thing.” Don Rafael worked on and off in the archives until the mid-1990s and got to know and respect several presidents but quietly pined for one to fuse his passion for history, especially Bolívar, and left-wing principles. Then, in 1998, one came.
“It was a sublime moment, like a fairy tale,” he recalled, eyes shining. “Before the palace was hermetic. It had no contact with the masses. During the dictatorship, people were afraid of Miraflores; they whispered the name. After the dictators there was less fear, but people were still intimidated; they barely knew where it was. It was only a name. To have an audience with a palace functionary, even a lowly one, was a privilege. But Chávez changed all that. He connected the multitudes to the building.” By then, Don Rafael had retired from the palace, but he cheered the comandante. He sent him a biography he had written about Bolívar’s deputy, Antonio José de Sucre. “A year later I received a beautiful letter thanking me and giving an analysis of the book.” The bookseller found a new role as Chávez’s personal reader. “The president, you see, is a great analyst but no longer has time to read. So a group of us do it for him.”
The system was directed by a small, elfish general called Jacinto Pérez Arcay. An academy instructor, he had transferred fervent Catholicism into a worship of Bolívar that included blood sacrifice, resisting imperialism, unifying Latin America, and bringing “balance to the universe.” His lectures dazzled Chávez when he was a cadet in the 1970s. Upon entering Miraflores decades later, Chávez brought the general out of retirement and installed him in an office with a dozen researchers to fashion a new official history and update the cult of Bolívar. Part of his duties was to brief the comandante about historic events and anniversaries that could be woven into official discourse.
When a detail or nuance proved too arcane for palace researchers, or Google, the general would phone Don Rafael and set him to work mining his home or bookshop for certain texts that he would condense into the postcard-sized sheets. “Sometimes the general will phone me when Chávez is on TV and say, Quick, you know that book, what page is such and such a topic on? I’ll tell him, and a few minutes later Chávez refers to it. It’s total disorder here, but I know where everything is.” Don Rafael was not just a living encyclopedia but a social glue who hosted generals, ministers, and scholars on the terrace. “Oh, the conversations we have here, marvelous! If my neighbors knew who was meeting here, dear lord!” He winked. “Around here they’re all escuálidos.” Squalid ones. Using the comandante’s favorite insult.
After twelve years of revolution the bookseller remained a true believer. “Utopia is realizable,” he said. “I am sensing a great intellectual awakening. The multitudes are listening to the president. Our youth are thinking, talking, questioning. The Bolivarian process has no comparison with any other revolution. It’s a new ideology.” Don Rafael felt privileged to be helping to make history in his autumn years, but really he was helping to rewrite it, feeding chalk to the comandante as he filled the blank slate.
Chávez cast Bolívar as a prototype socialist with a sacred mission to transform Venezuela, a mission he himself would complete. Bolívar and Karl Marx, he said, were complementary architects for Venezuela. (Other times he added Jesus, making a triptych.) It was twaddle. Marx had scorned the Liberator, rightly or wrongly, as a vainglorious reactionary dictator—“a most cowardly, mean, and wretched scoundrel.” The real Bolívar was complex and contradictory. “A liberator who scorned liberalism, a soldier who disparaged militarism, a republican who admired monarchy . . . [T]he life and work of Bolívar remain full of questions and controversies,” wrote his biographer John Lynch.
Chávez and his scholars were even bolder in rearranging the twentieth century. Traditionally, Venezuelans were taught that the uprising against Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958 ended the reign of dictators (so rushed was his flight to exile he left $2 million in a suitcase on the runway) and ushered in multiparty democracy. Chávez needed to reverse this sequence of virtue; otherwise how could he be the nation’s savior? Thus he half rehabilitated a U.S.-backed brute who murdered and jailed thousands, repeatedly praising his public works, his discipline, his patriotism. “I think General Pérez Jiménez was the best president Venezuela had in a long time,” he declared. “He was much better than Rómulo Betancourt [an elected president], much better than all of those others. They hated him because he was a soldier.” The democracy that followed the dictator was cast as the true villain: an electoral charade to dupe the people while oligarchs looted the country.
Chávez’s family history was reordered to fit the new official truth. His father had been a proud member of COPEI, one of the “putrid” ruling parties, and despite his modest teacher’s salary all six of his children went on to college education and decent careers. The state provided subsidized housing (Chávez lived in one with his grandmother) and free, rickety education and health care, making Venezuela South America’s richest country until populism and corruption rotted the system in the 1980s. All this became heresy. The comandante, the nation was told a thousand times, was born in extreme poverty, a mud hut, and grew up in a venal, vicious system. “It punished the poor. Spat on the poor.” Thus his 1992 coup against Carlos Andrés Pérez was not a military conspiracy but the cry of an oppressed people. School
textbooks were amended so the coup became “a rebellion that changed the destiny of the republic.”
The nation’s amnesia made it easy to mold history, but there was no doubting that Don Rafael sincerely believed the new, official version was the correct one. In the twilight of his life he was convinced he was seeing, and helping to create, something wonderful. “Our constitution is a document for the world. What the president is doing is transcendental. He is changing our habits. Before this was a country that didn’t read. Now if the president recommends Les misérables, it sells out. The president is electric, a natural pedagogue. In addition to history, he uses music, the international language, to awaken a nationalist spirit. People sit through three, four hours of his speeches just waiting for him to sing something he remembers from childhood.” He paused. “Utopia is realizable.”
Hard-core Chavistas did love to hear the president sing, but by 2009 ratings for Hello, President had tumbled to single digits. Don Rafael seemed unaware or simply chose not to see. He received his news from state TV, two pro-government newspapers, and like-minded friends. He waved away talk of economic decay and violent crime as opposition propaganda. “Go to New York and see how bad things are there.”