Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

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  As the Great National Moral and Illuminating Journey went off the rails, supporters defended the comandante by saying he meant well, that his heart was in the right place. The disasters were certainly not intentional. Chávez did not want violent crime, or mayhem in prisons, and tried in a distracted, ham-fisted way to control it. He gained no political benefit from the suffering. That much of it stemmed from his hypercentralized, improvised style of rule did not negate the mantra, repeated as a defensive shield, that he meant well. But even if that was true, so what? Good intentions in the palace did not allay fear or salve grief. To blithely say it was the thought that counted, that the revolution was genuinely seeking a better way, as some apologists did, was to abnegate responsibility. Venezuela was a country of twenty-eight million people, not a laboratory of mice.

  It was clear, in any case, that the comandante was capable of malice. These were the occasions he shed the rhetorical cloak of ethics and radiance and gave honest expression to ugly intent. His purpose would bare itself with a defiant flourish heedless of damage to his reputation. It happened when he was angry or felt threatened, and the purpose was always the same: project power. There was an exhilaration to such moments, a liberation from casting off euphemism and allowing words—words so often mummified in official jargon and chicanery—to convey rather than conceal what he wanted to say: I am in charge, do as I say, or else. The only thing that varied, on such occasions, was the nature of the threat. Or else what? To wayward allies that could mean public humiliation or losing a seat at the banquet. To opponents it could mean property expropriated, commercial licenses withdrawn, or intercepted phone conversations broadcast on state television. Or jail. Compared with the comandante’s tyrant friends (Assad, Saddam, Gadhafi, Mugabe, Lukashenko), this was mild stuff.

  Justice, a favorite word, a climactic rallying cry delivered with a punch in the air, proved his undoing. Venezuelan justice, that is to say its legal system, sold its soul long before Chávez. Judges, prosecutors, and lawyers—with some noble exceptions—shared a carousel of bribes, jobs, and influence with politicians and businessmen. When Chávez came to power, he vowed to clean up the system. Whatever his original intentions, after the shock of the 2002 coup and general strike the priority was not judicial honesty but loyalty to the government. He purged thousands of judges and replaced them with obedient successors. New Supreme Court judges set the tone by being filmed in their robes chanting pro-Chávez slogans. After 2004 most judges did his bidding: twisting the constitution this way and that, harassing private businesses, jailing political opponents (three dozen at most, usually for short periods). The judicial takeover was not subtle, but the comandante took care to greet partisan judgments as if delivered from an impartial Olympus. The revolution, he would say piously, was founded on the rule of law.

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  December 10, 2009. María Lourdes Afiuni, head of the Thirty-first Control Court of Caracas, studied the defendant. He was paler and older than the glossy, posed photographs published in newspapers, less sheen and swagger, but then two years and ten months in the basement cell of the Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services did things to a man. Before his arrest he was Eligio Cedeño, superstar. The boy wonder from the slums who saw all the angles on financial trades and owned his own bank, and an estimated $200 million fortune, by the time he was forty. Then, in 2007, the comet crashed. He was charged with evading currency controls and became Eligio Cedeño, cautionary tale. Exactly what he did to infuriate the comandante remained unclear—some said he had funded opposition politicians, others that there was a scandal involving a Chávez relative—but either way his case was toxic, and it was assumed Cedeño would spend decades inside. Prosecutors dragged their feet so that after almost three years he was still awaiting trial. Under Venezuelan law any prisoner held that long without trial was entitled to be released. Now Cedeño was sitting in Afiuni’s courtroom for another hearing, gazing back at her, bearing a whole world of trouble.

  Like the comandante, the judge was a single parent who adored her job, drank too much coffee, ate whatever was put in front of her, and smoked on the sly. She never learned to cook, didn’t care for it, preferring to wallow in law books and, when not working, spend time with her teenage daughter. The father was long gone. Afiuni was overweight and skimped on makeup but partly yielded to Venezuela’s feminine ideal with blond highlights. A low-profile, mid-ranking jurist, she steered clear of politics and rattled through her caseloads of muggers, kidnappers, and wife beaters with brisk, tough rulings. And then along came Eligio Cedeño, the hot potato that three other judges had already passed on. The point of the hearing was to pave the way for a trial, but prosecutors, as was their custom, failed to show. They assumed Afiuni would set a date for a new hearing and send the banker back to his cell. Instead, nerves jangling, she released him on bail. “What do I do with him?” asked a puzzled bailiff. “He’s not going back,” she replied. The tycoon was free. He walked out of the court, past prosecutors in the hallway gabbing on mobile phones, hopped on a motorbike taxi, and vanished into midday traffic.

  Back at the courthouse, pandemonium. Prosecutors, waking up to what happened, shrieked at police to snap handcuffs on Afiuni, assuming she had been bribed. Other officers started combing the city for Cedeño. He went into hiding and surfaced two weeks later in the United States seeking political asylum. There were two possibilities. The banker had bought the judge in a prearranged plot. Or she had taken the penal code seriously and concluded it was unjust to keep holding him without trial. Whatever the truth, it swiftly vanished under the lava of rage that erupted from the palace. Rather than summon the attorney general and Supreme Court for private instruction, Chávez went on television to let everyone know what should happen. Seated in the palace in front of a Bolívar portrait and wearing a military-style blue jacket over a red T-shirt, sartorial code emphasizing comandante over president, he made it clear Venezuela was looking at its sole source of authority.

  “María Lourdes Afiuni made a deal,” he said, his finger stabbing at the camera. “This bandit of a judge, a bandit, didn’t say anything to any prosecutor. She sent for the prisoner, put him in the courtroom, and then took him out through the back door. He escaped . . . This is worse than a murder! That judge has to pay for what she has done.” In earlier times she would have been put before a firing squad, he said. “We have to give this judge and the people who did this the maximum sentence, thirty years in prison in the name of the dignity of this country!” He told the Supreme Court to immediately prosecute Afiuni and directed the National Assembly to pass a law deterring judges from such outrages in the future. In Kafka’s dystopias, faceless bureaucracies were the instruments of persecution. For appearance’ sake, Chávez usually hid behind judicial lackeys when he wanted someone arrested, ruined, or exiled, but not this time.

  And so María Lourdes Afiuni went to jail. Technically, of course, it was a center for the holistic attention to people deprived of their liberties, but everyone called it Los Teques women’s jail. Perched on a wooded hilltop west of Caracas, it sat across the valley from the military prison which since April that year had hosted Raúl Baduel, another prisoner who had underestimated presidential vengeance. The women’s facility was bursting—its population had tripled in four years—and Afiuni had convicted dozens of her fellow prisoners, some of whom vowed to drink her blood.

  January 2011. Nelson Afiuni packed the last of the Tupperware into two large bags on the backseat. “You’d think my sister might have learned to cook by now.” He shrugged and smiled. “Nope. Heat stuff in the microwave, that’s it. This should last a week.” It was a balmy Sunday morning, visiting day, and the last stretch of road to the jail was lined with pine trees and hanging plants, making the city below feel very distant. After thirteen months’ incarceration Afiuni was a reluctant celebrity. Human rights activists made a rumpus over the case, ensuring she had a secluded cell away from would-be blood drinkers.

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undreds of prisoners’ relatives laden with food, medicine, and contraband (chiefly cannabis, cocaine, mobile phones) queued at the entrance. It was the same curiously lax approach as at Baduel’s jail, which allowed the comandante’s most famous prisoners to gab to foreign media. Serious tyranny would surely instill greater diligence in its sentinels.

  In Venezuela prisoners wear their own clothes, and on visiting day the women—visitors and inmates—go for glamour. Tight jeans, tight T-shirts, heels, lipstick, bangles, belly piercings. Or, if you are María Afiuni, baggy jeans, shapeless sweater, sneakers, no makeup. She was perched on her bunk toying with a BlackBerry. Prisoners were not supposed to have phones, least of all smartphones that allowed them to communicate with the outside world via Twitter. Afiuni’s daily tweets had attracted tens of thousands of online followers, including the justice minister. Every so often a comment would annoy him enough that guards would search the cell and confiscate the phone, whereupon friends would smuggle in a replacement and she would resume tweeting. “Gone through nine of these so far,” she said, stashing the phone under her bunk. The comandante had stripped her of liberty and sabotaged any chance of a fair trial but let her denounce him daily from her cell with an illicit phone. It made no sense. Afiuni nodded. “Yep.”

  The cell was small and bright, with a kettle, microwave, television, DVD player, and stick under the door to keep out rodents. There were candles, a statue of the Virgin Mary, and a portrait of the archangel Michael slaying a dragon whose features bore a distinct resemblance to Hugo Chávez. “A gift from a friend.” Rather than learn to cook—“sorry, but I’m useless, a disaster”—she passed the time with jigsaw puzzles, movies, a stack of books, and her phone. Though for her own safety she seldom went outside, conditions in the jail had shocked her. Prisoners preyed on each other for money and sex. Everything—medicine, food, mattresses, chairs, water—had to be bought or rented. Afiuni had been attacked but declined to go into details. “I knew conditions were tough but didn’t realize just how degraded. If I was back on the bench, I’d find it difficult to send anyone to jail unless the system was changed.” If she was back on the bench. The chances of that, she knew, were zero while the comandante was in the palace. He had invested his authority in branding Afiuni an enemy of the people and could hardly let her wear a judge’s robe again.

  There had been something about Chávez’s anger, its caution-to-the-wind vehemence, that some interpreted as meaning he knew—knew for a fact—that Afiuni had been bought. It was plausible. So many judges tailored rulings to the highest bidder that the justice system felt like an auction. Cedeño could have offered millions. Did he? Afiuni did not take offense at the question. “No, he didn’t. I didn’t volunteer for this case. And neither I nor my family ever had any contact with Cedeño. There was no bribe.” The voice was husky, the gaze even. Prosecutors charged Afiuni with corruption and abuse of power but after apparently finding no evidence of illicit payment accused her of “spiritual corruption.” Her guilt or innocence would probably never be reliably established. The justice system was rotten and the case too politicized. She still had no trial date.

  Afiuni sighed. She expected trouble from the Cedeño case but did not anticipate it defining her life. “I knew it was sensitive, knew they’d be angry. I just didn’t think they’d go so far as to jail me.” Voices and salsa music drifted in from the sun-drenched yard outside, where other prisoners hosted their guests, all on rented seats. The atmosphere was festive, but the judge did not dare mix with the others. Along with decapitation, she had been threatened with burning and rape. “Chávez’s instruction was that I was not to feel sunlight on my face. Well, you can see how pale I am.”

  She lit another cigarette. “I’ve too much time for these now. Don’t tell my mom or daughter how many I get through.” Pasty, drawn, and saggy, Afiuni did not look well. Within months she would be operated on for problems with her uterus, then treated for cancer. The only positive side to incarceration, she said, was seeing the justice system from the sharp end. Her neighbors included a kidnapper (“she was in love with her boyfriend, and he was in a kidnap gang, you know how it goes”), a woman who killed an abusive husband, and a corrupt ministry official who was teased by all for being possibly the only one of her kind to be caught and jailed for such a thing. Afiuni had befriended them and helped with their cases, prompting a stream of petitions from prisoners in other wings.

  When she discussed her own case, her voice hardened. Career over, health failing, daughter growing up without her, fate in the hands of a capricious ruler, it all hurt. “I’m here as the president’s prisoner. I’m an example to other judges of what happens if you step out of line.” The torment was not knowing how long she would have this role, one she played, from Chávez’s view, very effectively. Venezuela’s judges were so terrified that they did not dare join the international outcry at their colleague’s arrest, nor visit her. For the first time Afiuni, who as a girl watched television courtroom dramas and idealized judges, sounded bitter. These were friends, peers, people she had mentored, looked up to, lunched with, congratulated on their birthdays. And they all turned their backs. “Occasionally, I get a message that so-and-so sends commiserations but they’re afraid to speak out. That makes them cowards and accomplices.” She was about to say more, expound on the betrayal, then shook her head. It was too raw. Later, visiting time over, Afiuni folded the chairs, hugged her brother, and closed the door of her cell. The pasta, he said to the disappearing figure, was in the square Tupperware.

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  Afiuni’s case marked a point where even the comandante’s most exalted intellectual champion would not follow. For a decade Noam Chomsky, the feted scourge of capitalism, had lauded the revolution as a beacon and counterweight to U.S. imperialism. The passion was reciprocated. Chávez had turned one of Chomsky’s books, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, into a bestseller after brandishing it during a UN speech in 2006. Three years later he hosted the professor with pomp and bear hugs in Caracas. The man voted the world’s top public intellectual by Prospect magazine said Venezuela was taking steps toward a better world. The comandante mischievously suggested Washington could repair diplomatic ties by making him ambassador to Caracas.

  But by 2010, Chomsky, from his home near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught linguistics, had become uneasy. As a self-described libertarian socialist, he was suspicious of state authority, and the comandante was amassing ever more of it. Some other academics in the United States, Europe, and Latin America who had previously defended the comandante were feeling the same way. They confided misgivings in private but not in public, fearing accusations of betrayal from one side, naïveté from the other. So they remained silent. Chomsky had winced when Chávez centralized more powers and used enabling laws, but it was the Afiuni case that tipped him over the edge. Human rights activists at Harvard’s Carr Center relayed details of her plight. Alarmed by her cancer, authorities in February 2011 softened her confinement to house arrest but proceeded with the case. Chomsky wrote a private letter to Chávez requesting clemency. When there was no reply, he wrote an open letter in July 2011 lamenting “cruelty” and “degrading treatment” that had violated the Bolivarian revolution’s principles. “In times of worldwide cries for freedom, the detention of María Lourdes Afiuni stands out as a glaring exception that should be remedied quickly, for the sake of justice and human rights generally and for affirming an honorable role for Venezuela in these struggles.”

  It was a stinging rebuke from Chávez’s cerebral champion, and worse was to come. In a telephone interview after the letter, Chomsky, the croaky voice weighing each word, circumlocuted his way into calling the comandante an authoritarian caudillo. “Well, it’s obviously improper for the executive to intervene and impose a jail sentence without a trial. I’m skeptical that [Afiuni] could receive a fair trial. It’s striking that, as far as I understand, other judges have not come out in support of her . . . T
hat suggests an atmosphere of intimidation.” The professor praised Venezuela for standing up to U.S. bullying and championing regional integration and voiced continued hope that revolution was a step toward a better world. He was not going to explicitly denounce his ardent friend. But he returned, crablike, to the comandante’s waywardness. “Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo, and it has to be guarded against. Whether it’s over too far in that direction in Venezuela I’m not sure, but I think perhaps it is. Concentration of executive power, unless it’s very temporary and for specific circumstances, such as fighting World War II, is an assault on democracy. You can debate whether [Venezuela’s] circumstances require it: internal circumstances and the external threat of attack, that’s a legitimate debate. But my own judgment in that debate is that it does not.” It was not pithy or direct and would not fit on a tombstone, but in his roundabout, halting way the revolution’s greatest defender had declared an epitaph for the Great National Moral and Illuminating Journey.