Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

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  By 2010 it was easy to forget that the revolution’s “democratization of mass media” had initially been refreshing. For decades privately owned TV stations had shown a Venezuela of luxury, pale skin, and cosmetically enhanced beauty, a vapid, complacent construct. How jolting, then, to see a brown face reading the news or a documentary about salsa groups in the slums. The government modernized the creaky state television channel, VTV, and created new ones, Ávila TV, ANTV, Tves, Vive, Telesur. It revamped the state news agency and launched two daily newspapers and hundreds of “community” television and radio stations.

  The jewel in the crown was to be Telesur, a pan-regional network conceived as a voice for all Latin America and an alternative to CNN en Español. Its architect was Aram Aharonian, a journalist and intellectual who had fled right-wing repression in his native Uruguay. “The idea was to see ourselves as we truly were,” he said. Stocky, with gray hair pulled into a ponytail, he had the air of a razor-sharp hippie professor. “We didn’t see ourselves through our own eyes. We were presented through a colonial mentality as blond and tall and European, and some of us are, but we’re also short, dark, Zambo, Indian. We needed to shake off our inferiority complex and tell our own stories.” For a while after its launch in 2005 it did. It had a headquarters in Caracas and bureaus across the continent and seemed poised to become Latin America’s version of Al Jazeera, which had shaken up the Arab world with homegrown, fearless reporting.

  Then, from around 2007, Telesur mutated into a mouthpiece for Chávez. It was part of the strategy of “communicational and informational hegemony” enunciated by Andrés Izarra, the information minister. “He installed himself in Telesur and took the reins,” said Aharonian. “For him it wasn’t about promoting a Latin American identity and doing something different with television, but serving Chávez’s domestic agenda and being a political instrument. That meant propaganda as rolling news. The same garbage as the enemy but from the other side. Bye-bye, credibility, they killed it. Izarra didn’t debate. He kicked me out in December 2008.” The Uruguayan, once a comandante favorite, continued to hover on the revolution’s fringes, disillusioned but hopeful the revolution would correct course. But Izarra turned the state’s ever-expanding media outlets into a disciplined menagerie of attack dogs who tore into opponents, or parrots on news bulletins and talk shows who squawked the comandante’s favorite phrases.

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  Amid the comandante’s supporting chorus, one voice stood out. It was distinct not for what it said, since all said the same, but for the accent. An American accent, with the tensed vowels of New York. It couldn’t roll the r in revolución like natives, but commitment to the cause was total. Her name was Eva Golinger. Chávez christened her “la novia de Venezuela,” Venezuela’s sweetheart. Those who hated her, and there were many, amended that to bride of the revolution, to evoke Frankenstein. She was intriguing not just as a westerner in the palace but as someone who applauded Chávez’s early stories, the ones about inclusion and social justice in the first years of his presidency, and who continued clapping even as his stories turned dark and bizarre. She became, in her own words, an “insider outsider.”

  She was petite, in her mid-thirties, with brown hair past her shoulders, and wore a wary smile. Her apartment was small, bright, well-ordered, and warmed by two cats imported from Brooklyn. There were framed photographs of gritty urban landscapes; a bookcase with tomes on the CIA and U.S. foreign policy; a wine rack; a running machine used while watching the right-wing U.S. channel Fox—“to keep tabs on the empire”—and an impressive stack of movies. The television glowed, silent. “I always keep it on. You never know when Chávez is going to appear.”

  She sat at a small table overlooking a busy street and over careful sips of water told her story. She was born on a U.S. Air Force base and imbibed progressive causes from a young age. Her father was a psychiatrist who had served as an officer in Vietnam, and her mother brought her on women’s rights marches. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and in the early 1990s moved to Mérida to explore family roots. Venezuela was in ferment. Chávez was in jail, an enigma, and Mérida’s students regularly marched against government austerity (among them Luis Tascón, though she did not meet him then). Golinger taught English, sang in a jazz band, and learned Spanish. “It was an adventure, and I fell in love with the country.” She returned to New York in 1998, the year Chávez was elected, with the band’s guitarist as her husband. She obtained a law degree specializing in human rights. “Music and justice, my two passions.” The 2002 coup horrified her. Suspicious of Washington’s role, she used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain U.S. State Department documents that showed the Bush administration knew in advance about the coup. She passed them on to pro-Chávez groups and continued digging, the research gradually taking over her apartment and life.

  In early 2004, as Chávez geared up for the recall referendum, Golinger found evidence the United States was funding anti-Chávez groups. She packed the documents into a bulging suitcase and flew to Venezuela to inform the comandante. At first palace aides rebuffed her, thinking she was mad or a spy, but Golinger prevailed and was ushered onto Chávez’s plane on his way to a Hello, President broadcast. “They served us breakfast, but we were so busy talking I don’t think we touched anything except the coffee. There was an instant connection. The first time you meet him is pretty overwhelming. There is a magnetism, a powerful presence. Yet also a gentleness and vulnerability.” The comandante invited her onto the show to share the revelations, making her a star of the revolution.

  Golinger moved to Caracas and began writing books about U.S. perfidy against the comandante. “The president can be naive,” she noted. “He is surrounded by people who want to abuse his power. He has been betrayed again and again. His enemies have created myths and smears. That is where I come in. I hunt down the lies and set the record straight.” He was under attack, she continued, because the United States wanted the oil and to silence an ideological challenger. Thus it fomented a media campaign to demonize him. “This is a new type of war, and I’m proud to be a soldier on the right side.” She was a regular guest on The Razorblade, where she accused opposition figures of being U.S. collaborators. She named names, waved documents.

  Outside the revolution she was despised. Insults were hissed on the street. Within the revolution some, such as Lina Ron, the militia leader, called her a CIA plant. Miguel’s Truths, the muckraking weekly newspaper, hinted she was a Mata Hari. “Watch out, President!” Golinger said with a sigh. “What can you do? Some in our ranks don’t like me. In fact some hate me. But I just get on with my job, which is defending the revolution and the president.” If that imparted some glory, she implied, so be it. “There is going to be a movie about me,” she said, smiling. “The screenplay is already done. It’s going to be a thriller.”

  Two years later Golinger was editor of the international edition of Correo del Orinoco, a state newspaper (one of Don Rafael’s chief news sources) and de facto international mouthpiece. Her crowning moment was addressing Chávez, ministers, governors, generals, and ambassadors at a special event under the National Assembly’s golden dome. “Here is the light that has opened the path to a better world,” she told them, wearing a red dress and neck ribbon. “Here is the nucleus of the battle for global social justice . . . The future of humanity is here; that is what I profoundly believe.” Then she cut to the chase. Her latest research, she said, showed that the opposition media—she singled out Globovisión and fourteen radio stations—were in cahoots with the U.S. empire. The audience gasped in indignation. Golinger continued. It was part of a Pentagon plot to smear the comandante in a possible prelude to invasion. Chávez nodded gravely. Generals scribbled down the traitors’ names. Golinger urged the assembly to pass a law blocking foreign funding of NGOs and political parties. “Fatherland, socialism, or death!” she cried. “Long live Venezuela! Long live Comandante Presidente Chávez!” A standing ovation filled the hall.


  At Chávez’s urging, the assembly rushed through what was dubbed the Golinger law. It was a pretext to bankrupt human rights watchdogs, prison welfare groups, and other thorns in the government’s side. Most were shoestring operations that monitored issues like oil pollution, police shootings, jail conditions, education indicators. They relied on grants from foreign institutions, such as Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Stiftung foundation, to buy computers and pay rent. The law dried up their funding and devastated civil society. Golinger, speaking a few months after it passed, called it a triumph. “Finally! I’m delighted. This should have been done a long time ago. The infiltration is continuous, and this gives us a tool to stop it.”

  “The changes under way are incredible,” she said. “Venezuela is truly a beacon for the world.” She was not blind to problems, she said. “The administrative incompetence can be maddening. And the corruption is enormous, I see it.” So why not, from her editor’s perch, investigate and denounce it? Her eyes widened. “No, no, I can’t do that. Powerful people are involved. It would be dangerous. I look away and focus on all the positive things happening.” For a supposed champion of truth, it was a damning admission.

  A few months later at the palace, where Chávez was giving a rare briefing to foreign correspondents, he wore a tracksuit and held a baseball. “Who here plays baseball?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question to soften us up, but Golinger shot her hand up. “Me, me! I play.” He smiled back. “Ah, Eva.” She nearly burst with joy.

  KINGDOM

  It is a general rule that, in an ill-constructed machine, the engine must be enormously powerful to produce the slightest result. Experience has taught me that much must be demanded of men in order that they may accomplish little.

  —SIMÓN BOLÍVAR

  9

  DECAY

  It was always a relief to get out of Caracas and see the rest of the country. When the plane sped down the runway and began to lift, there would be a feeling of lightness more psychological than aerodynamic. The capital was stultifying. Partly it was the endless traffic jams, the jostling, crowded pavements, the fear of crime, and partly it was Chávez. The near-daily public appearances produced a collective draining, a breathlessness. He sucked up all the oxygen. El Silencio, the ring of ministries and offices around the palace, lived off his fumes, and the rest of the city lived off El Silencio, seeking jobs, subsidies, contracts, promises. The air in the city felt thin. A trip to the provinces was a way to decompress, like loosening a tie and feeling a deep, cool breeze.

  First, however, you had to get to the airport. On a good day it took forty-five minutes to escape downtown and take the tunnels beneath the Ávila leading down to the Caribbean. On a bad day—an accident or a protest blocking a motorway, a rockfall, a police stop—it could take more than three hours. Arriving, you remained tense. Armed gangs were known to ambush people in the parking lot stealing vehicles and luggage. Once inside the terminal, you kept your head down and avoided the gazes of national guardsmen, youths in khaki uniforms, who pulled passengers aside for interrogations about drugs that sometimes led to requests for bribes, usually delivered with mock empathy. “Ay, señor, what a shame, we have to give this suitcase a special search, which means you’ll miss your flight . . .” Meanwhile, baggage handlers, trolley pushers, and taxi drivers roved the terminal, hissing black-market rates for dollars, euros, and pounds. “Money, money, money change.” Even in the bathrooms there was a scam: empty soap dispensers obliged you to tip cleaners who hovered by washbasins offering green liquid from grubby plastic bottles cut in half. At the check-in desk you prayed for confirmation the plane had arrived.

  Once you were buckled into your seat, the engine whirring to life, the jet accelerating down the runway, nose tilting up, the city below shrinking, vanishing, then you could relax. In the provinces Chávez still seeped from television and radio, he still squinted from murals and T-shirts, but he was distant, separated by mountains, valleys, plains, and forests. Venezuela was bigger than Texas. The farther you went from the palace, the less suspicious people tended to be. Chavistas still wore red and recited the same slogans but were more open, more relaxed. It became easier to gaze beyond state television’s refracted images and see the revolution not as spectacle, not as a one-man show, but as a complex process that affected human lives. Simultaneously, it became harder to remain detached, to merely observe. The temptation grew to take sides.

  “Welcome, Mr. Rory! Welcome to La Vecindad! Here, climb in. And hold on.” Oscar Olachea revved the motorbike, and I gripped the rails of a two-wheeled cart attached to the back like a chariot. I was visiting a Chavista agricultural cooperative in the plains of Barinas for a story on land reform. We bounced along a dirt path, and over the engine’s whine Oscar, a cheerful bustle of energy in torn denim and muddy rubber boots, explained how he and fourteen other laborers were turning this marshy corner of the llanos—a patchwork of corn and yucca fields with ninety-one cows, sixty chickens, and six pigs—into a thriving farm. “We’re building something. This is going to be our home.”

  I spent three days there. Conditions were primitive. Most of the men wore rags and went barefoot despite mosquitoes and snakes. They slept in hammocks in a roughly hewn wooden bungalow. There was no toilet, shower, or electricity, so they answered nature’s call in the fields, washed from a barrel of soapy water, and cooked over an open fire. Rice and beans for lunch, rice and beans for supper. There was no tractor or mechanized agricultural equipment, so clearing brush, chopping wood, harvesting crops, and milking cows were done by hand. It could have been the nineteenth century.

  All important decisions required consensus. “Everybody here is equal, and thanks to that we feel richer as human beings. We have no bosses,” said Olachea. “We share and care for each other. What is that if not socialism?” The government had donated the land and lent start-up money and equipment and seeds. They worked without complaint, kept costs low, awarding themselves a pauper’s daily wage of just $3.20, in the belief they were building a future. Nailed to a wall was the co-op’s sole adornment: a poster of Chávez in his presidential sash. At night, a half-moon overhead, they sat around a fire in the yard discussing farm business. Then Adelso Lauro, a part-time soldier, would sing serenades about love, courtship, and beautiful women. A colleague drummed an upturned bucket; another plucked a cuatro, a type of guitar. “This is part of something bigger,” said Oscar, poking the fire with a stick. “We’re building up the country. We’re fixing it.”

  At such moments the shrill politicking of Caracas seemed a world away, and the revolution was about not Chávez, or the intrigues of El Silencio, but ordinary people making the best of limited options. If wanting them to succeed was taking sides, so be it. The question was, would they—the millions of peasants, factory workers, professionals, and students swept up in Chávez’s experiment—succeed? Would the system help or hinder them?

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  Bounded to the north by the Orinoco, to the east by Guyana, and to the south by Brazil, Bolívar state occupies a quarter of Venezuela. The largest of Venezuela’s twenty-three states and potentially its richest, it is mostly uninhabited wilderness except at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroní rivers. Here sprawls Ciudad Guayana, the country’s industrial heartland, a hub of coal mines, iron smelters, steel mills, aluminum plants, motorways, and tankers that shipped enormous cargoes via the Orinoco to the Atlantic. This was the same realm that had driven conquistadores mad with rage and sunstroke while seeking El Dorado, but in the 1960s Venezuela’s fledgling democracy began to harness its greatest natural riches: iron, bauxite, coal, and surging rivers topographically ideal for hydroelectricity. Planners from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed Ciudad Guayana as an Eden of modernist architecture and industry with power as limitless as the rivers’ churn. By the mid-1990s a million migrants had settled in its elongated, purpose-built city. Everything revolved around Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG), a state-owned conglom
erate that ran the factories and mines. It suffered from corruption, mismanagement, and sporadic labor disputes but made a profit and was hailed as proof the nation could shake off its oil-induced sloth and actually make products for export.

  Upon taking office, Chávez visited the zone and declared it the cradle of Venezuela’s greatness to come. Ciudad Guayana would expand, multiply production, and become a global industrial giant, he said. It would wean Venezuela’s economy off its addiction to oil. “Here is our future.” After the government radicalized in 2005, when he declared himself socialist and started expanding the state’s role in the economy, Chávez said the factories and mines would also help wean Venezuela off capitalism by transferring control to the workers. “We are in a fertile moment to plant everything anew, old dreams, old ideas, old concepts, and convert them into new ideas, new dreams, new paths. We are in a marvelous moment of the rebirth of hope.”

  “Welcome to Ciudad Guayana! Welcome to Bolívar! It’s so wonderful you could come all this way to see us.” Francisco Rangel Gómez beamed. He was a former army general and cabinet minister sent by Chávez to rule this distant fiefdom. Rangel Gómez did not dress the part of a revolutionary. Tall and powerfully built, he had the designer spectacles, striped blue shirt, and air of a successful CEO. Nor did he exude the clenched suspicion of the palace. He greeted us, a group of foreign correspondents, as honored guests.

  Rangel Gómez was the baron of Bolívar state. In terms of palace fauna, he was not a utopian or a disciple but a fixer, an ambitious pragmatist whose value was not ideological fervor—he didn’t have any—but in making this a fiefdom in the service of the comandante. Chávez appointed him head of CVG in 2000, and Rangel Gómez went on to become state governor. To visitors he wished to impress, he showed a corporate-style public relations video with upbeat music that spliced impressive statistics on water connections, school building, and poverty reduction with scenes of tourists on riverboats, smiling schoolchildren, police in shiny patrol cars, and men in hard hats operating computerized machinery. Answering questions, the governor said the news was all good. Production up, investment up, employment up, crime down, pollution being tackled. The answers were detailed and delivered with confidence. It was like listening to Bill Gates.