Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  Infrastructure crumbled. The Caracas metro, the shiny pride of South America in the 1980s, became a stifling, pushing, crowded wait for broken trains. Passengers were banned from photographing the mayhem—it would “cause public alarm”—and striking workers were threatened with jail. To avert rebellion, the authorities slashed prices and filled tunnels with soothing instrumental music and birdsong. Roads and motorways crumbled so often newspapers published maps of the latest holes, “super-holes,” and “mega-holes.” A traveler on the eve of a long drive was subject to embraces and candlelit prayers as if about to trek across medieval Europe. The government termed sporadic road repairs “asphalt fiestas” and invited the public to marvel at imported Chinese steamrollers as if they were exotic animals in the Colosseum. “Just four days left to see this state-of-the-art machinery imported by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,” said a front-page story in Diario Vea, a government newspaper. To astonishment and delight the state did build an excellent cable car to a Caracas slum and completed a handful of other projects. But they were exceptions. Rotating ministers and managers, favoring subsidies over investment, eliding auditing and accountability: it was like paving projects with chewing gum.

  Some never got started. With much fanfare Chávez announced Venezuela would build thermonuclear plants with Russian help. “The world needs to know this, and nothing is going to stop us. We’re free, we’re sovereign, we’re independent,” he said in 2010. For strictly peaceful energy generation, he added, and underlined the point by inviting survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Venezuela. Foreign media took it seriously, producing froth in Washington. Chávez with nukes! In reality, Venezuela’s scientific establishment was hollowed, the once prestigious Institute for Scientific Research a husk. Physicists were emigrating, and the country’s only reactor, a small research facility, had closed from neglect. After a tsunami wrecked Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in March 2011, Chávez closed the curtain on his atomic theater, solemnly halting development for safety reasons and urging other countries to follow his lead in protecting humanity. “It is something extremely risky and dangerous for the whole world.”

  Similar inefficiencies marched like a colony of termites into public services, infesting and gnawing the revolution’s social “missions.” Until then, many of the economic fiascoes had felt like abstractions to those cushioned by state subsidies. But cracks appeared in the network of clinics, schools, and training schemes that had saved the comandante in the 2004 referendum and inspired praise and envy abroad. The most important mission, Barrio Adentro, had sixty-seven hundred clinics and twenty thousand Cubans and offered basic medical treatment to fifteen million people. It meant that the likes of Marisol Torres, a grandmother high in the Petare slum of eastern Caracas, could hobble a few blocks for treatment rather than take a hair-raising motorbike taxi ride to a hospital in the valley. “It’s free, and the doctors take good care of me. What’s not to like?” she said, beaming. That was in 2007. Within a few years several thousand clinics were abandoned, and the remainder creaked. Many of the Cuban doctors were sent to Bolivia to replicate the system for Chávez’s ally President Evo Morales. Others defected to Colombia and the United States, claiming they had worked as virtual slaves. Chávez declared an “emergency” and tried to relaunch the program with little success. It was overstretched and undermonitored. Rather than consolidate the small clinics, the government, with an eye to the next election, launched an additional program called Barrio Adentro II, with bigger clinics, then Barrio Adentro III and Barrio Adentro IV.

  The scheme limped on, but more and more patients were referred to the parallel, traditional public health system. And here was a disaster because hospitals, a legacy of previous governments, had been starved of funds in order to cosset the clinics, which were flagships of revolution. So Marisol Torres found herself riding a motorbike past boarded-up clinics to the dilapidated hulk that was Domingo Luciani, Petare’s biggest hospital. Outside, traders sold bandages, sanitary towels, toilet rolls, and sheets. Inside was perpetual gloom—the lights were broken—cracked tiles, overflowing bins, out-of-order elevators, defunct machines, expired medicine, and despairing staff who claimed to be among the world’s worst paid. Many supplemented their wages by selling snacks, DVDs, toothpaste, chewing gum, penicillin, and syringes to patients and relatives.

  Senior government officials shunned the public system and discreetly sought treatment at private hospitals—elitist heresy.

  There was, at times, comedy in the ineptness. How could you not laugh when piles of rubble were painted yellow to spruce up Caracas before a summit? Or when camera angles framed Chávez so the bridge behind him looked finished? Or when the ubiquitous, perennial “Out of Order” signs on escalators and elevators were replaced with “Maintenance Under Way,” then “Socialist Modernization”?

  Like wounded beasts, revolutions in decline often lapse into violence, so it was merciful that Venezuela’s settled for absurdity. But at what point did a nation’s slide into black comedy stop being funny? Every blunder, every wasted dollar, extracted a human price. That the consequences were dispersed and quietly absorbed into millions of lives did not make the waste less tragic.

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  It was probably the most exciting moment in Jonathan Rosenhead’s long, distinguished career. The professor emeritus of operational research at the London School of Economics was invited to Hugo Chávez’s suite at the Savoy hotel, a temple of opulence in central London, to explain his management theories to the president. It was May 2006. Earlier that day Chávez had given a four-hour talk at Camden town hall to British supporters, broadcast back to Venezuela as a sort of Hello, President, and now he was at his hotel gesturing to Rosenhead and a colleague to take a seat. “He was very sensitive,” the professor recalled. “He knew exactly what we were feeling. He wasn’t the bombastic type at all.” For the next hour the two academics, controlling their nerves at meeting this famous, mercurial leader, outlined the principles of operational research, a branch of management science that uses mathematical modeling and statistical analysis to guide decisions. Chávez was attentive and asked intelligent questions. “I was very impressed by how he grasped the concepts,” said Rosenhead.

  Operational research had proved useful in World War II by helping British mathematicians calculate the optimal way to sink submarines, drop bombs, and lay mines. After the war it had been broadened and applied to commerce, industry, and government but by the 1960s was out of fashion. Business executives and civil servants said it didn’t work. Rosenhead, however, stuck with the discipline, developing theories, publishing papers, and lecturing at the University of Sussex. Among his students was a young Venezuelan called Jorge Giordani. “I didn’t think much of him at the time; he was just another Latin.” Over the next three decades Rosenhead became an expert in his arcane field, making recommendations about channeling a messy world into optimal decisions. “Rather than trying to consolidate stable equilibrium, the organisation should aim to position itself in a region of bounded instability, to seek the edge of chaos,” he wrote. “The organisation should welcome disorder as a partner, use instability positively. In this way new possible futures for the organisation will emerge, arising out of the (controlled) ferment of ideas which it should try to provoke.”

  Rosenhead was respected in academic circles but largely ignored by the outside world. Then, in 1999, he received a call from his former student. Giordani had not forgotten his old professor’s lectures and now as planning minister in Chávez’s new government invited him to help palace utopians transform Venezuela. It was the beginning of a close collaboration that led to Rosenhead’s 2006 meeting with Chávez at the Savoy. He visited Caracas every year to work as a consultant from Giordani’s ministry.

  Rosenhead came in May 2011 to advise on the electricity crisis. He stayed at the five-star Gran Meliá. The streetlights in front of the hotel were not working, casting the last stretch of walk in darkness. The government used the hotel, alon
g with the Alba, formerly the Hilton until it was nationalized, to host important visitors. Cuban, Russian, and Iranian voices wafted around the gilded lobby. Rosenhead, tall and lean with a bald pate and thin gray beard, physically resembled Giordani. Over a rum he explained his role in the revolution.

  “I came here in 1999 to advise on something very abstract, I don’t remember what, but they ended up throwing me at the Vargas disaster [the Ávila mudslides]. I was flown over the site and came up with proposals to rebuild the state.” Political wrangling stymied his recommendations. “None of it was acted upon, it was all ignored.” Nevertheless, he came every succeeding year to work with Giordani, sometimes lodging at the Monk’s house and enjoying long, animated discussions over supper. “He’s very cultured and sophisticated with a great sense of humor.”

  Prompted by Giordani, Chávez endorsed Rosenhead’s ideas. One of his books, Rational Analysis for a Problematic World Revisited, a forgotten text in Britain, was translated into Spanish by a state publishing house. “It sold out,” said Rosenhead, smiling. Enthused by Rosenhead’s theories on joint problem sharing, Chávez took ministers on a nationwide tour to meet mayors and governors.

  Rosenhead did not speak Spanish and worked through bilingual officials from the Planning Ministry. Over the years he wrote dozens of reports on multiple topics—energy, industry, transport, finance, housing. Once, he said, he was given two days to write six reports on six different subjects. He dutifully churned them all out and submitted them. And then . . . nothing. He asked his minders about the fate of the reports. They shrugged. He asked about the president’s plan to integrate decision making across state agencies. Blank looks. He asked about his transport recommendations. Silence. He asked for responses to his studies on infrastructure and finance. There weren’t any. When Rosenhead challenged Giordani over the information vacuum, his friend smiled enigmatically and said such was a consultant’s fate. “No feedback, none at all,” said Rosenhead. “Quite extraordinary. This is the only place where this happens.” The professor said he had heard rumors the country’s infrastructure was in trouble. “I get the impression Chávez has applied the concepts of operational research in ways I would not.” He paused and sipped his rum. “Maybe if it was a more organized country, operational research would work here.”

  10

  THE GREAT ILLUMINATING JOURNEY

  The neighborhood of El Cementerio sits on a hill and comprises two streets of bleached single-story houses whose facades are peeling and peppered with little holes, as if woodworms had acquired a taste for concrete. One of the streets is lined with carcasses of old cars mounted on bricks, childish messages daubed in the dust of their windscreens. Its worn appearance is deceptive, for the neighborhood is young. Just thirty years earlier it was woodland. After migrants from the countryside settled here, it became known to the people of La Victoria, the town at the bottom of the hill, as part of “up there,” the hillside barrios paved and slabbed by arrivals with little money. There is nothing to distinguish it from other barrios save a graveyard whose name no one seems to know, so the neighborhood is simply called El Cementerio. The Cemetery.

  On a July night in 2010, while the comandante was breaking off relations with Colombia over another diplomatic spat, Richard Nuñez assembled his lieutenants to make sense of a different crisis. Earlier that afternoon a young neighbor on a bus returning from school had flicked a piece of popcorn at an older boy from another barrio. The boy slapped the child and according to some versions confiscated the popcorn. The child went home to El Cementerio crying, prompting his mother and aunts to stomp down the hill to García de Sena Street and confront the older boy, jabbing and shouting. His relatives jabbed and shouted back, making an angry scrum. Later that evening, as a setting sun glinted off its tin roofs, shots were fired into El Cementerio. Nobody was hit, but the barrio had the feeling it portended further hostilities. Nuñez tried not to eye the gun poking from folded jeans on the top of the cupboard. “Tranquilo. Nobody do anything.”

  Richard was seven when Chávez came to power and now, just over a decade later, still looked a boy. Big brown eyes in a round brown face, slender build, none of the tattoos, jewelry, or taut facial muscles of hunter and hunted so common to gang members. But he was leader of El Cementerio’s gang, a rabble of about two dozen youths who guarded its realm like a mini-republic. It was already at war with the Fifth of July gang, from another barrio, over a motorbike stolen two years earlier. The woodworm holes—made by bullets—marked ongoing hostilities. The shots at sunset seemed to come from the popcorn protagonist’s barrio, suggesting its gang, Los Pelucos, was opening a new front. Or were the shots just a letting off of steam? El Cementerio’s warriors were divided. Some wanted to hunker down as if under siege and hope the crisis would blow over; others wanted to attack Los Pelucos. Richard’s quiet voice prevailed. “We won’t hide, and we won’t go ambushing. We’ll be on our guard, go about our business, and see what happens.” He would lead by example by riding his motorbike into town the next day.

  Growing up, Richard did well at school and was good at fixing machines. His ambition was to be a mechanic, maybe run his own workshop. How he instead found himself a reluctant street general making decisions about life and death is the story of El Cementerio, of its gang’s rise and fall and resurrection amid senseless slaughter, and Hugo Chávez’s quixotic, doomed effort to create a society “of morals and enlightenment.” Let us rewind to set the scene. In the 1950s, La Victoria, a short drive west of Caracas, was a village of two thousand people ringed by sugarcane plantations. When Chávez came to power half a century later, it was home to fifty thousand people, most descendants of rural migrants, marooned without jobs and proper housing in a culture of machismo, switchblades, and alcohol.

  In El Cementerio everybody knew each other and many were related. Most men were gone—absconded, dead, jailed—leaving matriarchs to raise broods alone. Wars broke out between gangs for trivial reasons, but the undercurrent was competition to sell cannabis to outsiders. Wedged in by bigger rivals, El Cementerio responded with tough leaders, none more so than Darwin Ospino, a.k.a. Pata Piche, or Rotten Foot. The nickname was ironic. Fastidious about deodorant and aftershave, Ospino was the neighborhood’s closest thing to a metrosexual. His fame, however, rested on killing. His first time was at a party. A rival gang turned up, jeering and hustling, and Ospino dropped one of them with a 765 pistol. The police didn’t arrest him, didn’t even look for him, not even after Ospino found a taste and talent for killing, taking out rivals on the street, dragging them from homes, from bars. He shot a woman’s husband, then widowed her again after she remarried.

  All this happened while Chávez was focused on a new constitution and wresting control of the state oil company. The criminal justice system—police, laboratories, courts, jails, parole officers—was not a priority. The president set a new tone by saying it was justified to steal if you were hungry. At the same time he rotated interior ministers so fast ministry officials were left confused and unsupervised. By the time Ospino quit the El Cementerio gang in 2003, exhausted from stress, he had killed twenty-six people. Victims’ relatives were too afraid to identify him and the police too distracted to chase. Ospino got a job as bodyguard for Jesse Chacón, a close Chávez ally who served, for a while, as interior minister. Few would dare attack a minister with such a fearsome character by his side, went the logic, and with no charges against Ospino there was no legal impediment to hiring him. (Laid off in 2009 when a banking scandal toppled Chacón, Ospino told me he cherished his years working for the government. “It was awesome. I learned a lot.”)

  In 2004, El Cementerio chose a new leader, José Daniel Nuñez, Richard’s older brother. There were more guns, blood, and money on the streets, and the neighborhood felt under threat. Violence rose because the stakes rose. In addition to cannabis, gangs were now dealing the far more lucrative cocaine. Chávez had expelled U.S. counternarcotics officials, accusing them of espionage, and in exchange for loy
alty turned a blind eye to army generals’ deals with cocaine-trafficking Colombian guerrillas. Venezuela was a transit route for the United States and Europe, but increasing quantities spilled into the domestic market, giving gangs means to buy weapons, corrupt police, and get high.

  José Daniel, who physically resembles Richard, was by common consent exceptionally bright and, depending on how you look at it, incredibly lucky or unlucky. Shot fourteen times during an ambush, he survived and hobbled out of the hospital, one-eyed, and hunted down his assailants. “One at a time,” said Richard, awed. Caught and jailed, in prison he was stabbed thirteen times and again survived, fueling rumors he made a pact with the devil for immortality. Belief in Santeria, a voodoo-tinged African-Caribbean import, was widespread, especially among gangsters who prayed to santos malandros, holy thugs, for success and survival. Who else, after all, could they turn to? Many of El Cementerio’s mothers dealt drugs, as did the head of the neighborhood association, who had a sideline renting pistols. The state was largely absent save for police, and they were brutal and corrupt, selling bullets, extorting store owners, moonlighting as kidnappers, auctioning prisoners for execution. Police killed between five hundred and a thousand people per year, mostly young men in slums, and were very seldom charged. Officers accidentally shot dead the Nuñez boys’ grandmother while chasing a suspect through their home.

  Which returns us to July 2010 and the popcorn-triggered tension. With Ospino retired and José Daniel in jail, how to respond to the Pelucos’ nocturnal shooting into the neighborhood was Richard’s call. His decision to act normally—he did not want to cower or declare war—was brave but misjudged. When he rode his motorbike into town the next day, they were waiting for him. The street was packed with traffic, and he had just passed the police station when bullets struck, hitting him in the belly and arm and hurling him to the ground. He had not been shot before. The pain was instant, excruciating. He crawled for cover, bullets hissing, embedding in asphalt. Traffic continued to rumble past, oblivious. It did not seem real. A lull, seconds feeling like minutes, then more shots. Someone shouting. “Go, go, go!” A motorbike engine roared and faded. The attackers did not have the nerve to finish the job. There would be other opportunities. The popcorn war was just beginning.