by Rory Carroll
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The government tried to wish away the brewing tempest with a pretense of progress. Billboards showed the comandante in a white lab coat or builder’s hat smiling and saluting over slogans. “Technological development!” “Made in socialism!” The colors quickly bleached in the tropical sun. Local radio, now mostly in state hands, did its bit with cheerful jingles and stories. “Don’t miss the exhibit of Chinese bulldozers,” enthused one news broadcaster. “They are on display for two days before starting work on the motorway, fortifying the revolution.” Massaged statistics that classified the hordes of impoverished street vendors as gainfully employed were hailed as triumphs.
Morón’s patience snapped. Where traditional authorities had failed, now so too were communal councils. State propaganda made the disappointment only more bitter. Neighborhoods started daubing grievances on banners and marching out of their slums, chanting and waving fists. Morón’s demands were not political. They did not seek insurrection, only water, electricity, jobs, roads. They ratcheted up the stakes by blocking roads.
A human rights advocacy group, PROVEA, counted 1,763 demonstrations nationwide in 2008, jumping to 3,297 in 2009, hovering at 3,114 in 2010, and approaching 4,000 in 2011. The situation room beneath the comandante’s office, his eyes, ears, and tactical command center, monitored about ten protests daily. For protest leaders the objective was simple: create enough havoc—bululú in local slang—so palace watchdogs felt compelled to act, to dispatch negotiators, fire a governor, throw money at a mayor, redirect a motorway, whatever it took to defuse the demonstration. Competition drove escalation because so many towns’ hopes had turned to ash. The situation room did not tackle every eruption, only the most disruptive, so as protests multiplied, they competed for attention. Whoever caused the most aggravation won.
In this contest Morón had a competitive advantage. Two motorways fused in the town, a femoral artery linking western, eastern, and central Venezuela. Cut it and the economy hemorrhaged. So communities took turns marching down to the highway to block traffic. It was easy. A few dozen people, some placards, tires, lighter fluid, and, presto, government attention. Sometimes they did not even bother burning tires. It was enough to link arms across the four-lane highway. A monstrous traffic jam would form trapping thousands of trucks, buses, and cars in a honking, impotent, sweltering fury.
The meager road infrastructure meant there was no alternative route, no escape. Side roads led to nowhere via marshes and rocky wildernesses. Turning to the radio for information was futile since the dial was dominated by state and pro-government “community” channels that either ignored the mayhem (“after the break, details of the Alba summit”) or gave curt, useless reports accusing protest leaders of sabotage. In such circumstances Twitter became the best and sometimes only source of information, simultaneously acting like a nerve impulse to the palace, jolting the situation room into action.
Protests did not always work. Sometimes police broke up the barricades, or officials sent protesters home with false promises. But the tactic was successful enough to be imitated. Unpaid wages, unpaved roads, leaking roofs, stale school meals—to the motorway! Petrochemical workers formed their blockade beneath a billboard illustrated with a photograph from the comandante’s last visit to the plant. “Advancing with Pequiven!”
One blockade in September 2011—parts of Morón had been without electricity for weeks—continued into the night, unleashing criminal gangs against stricken motorists. After robbing wallets, phones, and jewelry, they started looting trucks en route from the port. The protesters—men, women, and children—joined in like an ant army, prying open containers, smashing windows and heaving away televisions, tinned tuna, cooking oil, furniture. The air turned festive. “Merry Christmas!” Two barefoot men slung a squealing pig between them and roared off on a motorbike. The free-for-all lasted until dawn.
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Almost anywhere else authorities would have broken up blockades that were illegal and caused havoc, but in the comandante’s realm they were largely tolerated. The police and the national guard were seldom deployed, and the few protesters who were detained were swiftly released. It was odd. Why would an otherwise authoritarian regime use a slipper when a bit of jackboot would, for once, have been widely considered legitimate? Partly because teargassing demonstrators would have violated the comandante’s image as the great benefactor. He dated his movement to the 1989 Caracas riots against economic austerity and did not want people saying the pendulum had swung.
The main reason, however, was that the protests did not directly threaten him. It was the strangest thing. A resentful, frustrated populace staging thousands of little insurrections—and the palace, calm. Rulers from Nebuchadnezzar to Mubarak feared such unrest because they knew a brook trickling down a mountain could meet other brooks, gather volume, and become a mighty river roaring toward the throne. Such a surge helped sweep away the comandante in the 2002 coup, but now, almost a decade later, he did not panic. The protests were a dispiriting panorama, true, but divide and rule kept them ephemeral, glistening flashes.
Protesters, after all, were not starving waifs. On the contrary, many were chubby and, according to statistics, consuming more protein and sugar than ever before. Average real incomes had soared from 2003 to 2008, dipped during the recession, and then recovered from 2011. Gasoline was free, and government shops, for those with patience to queue, still supplied heavily subsidized groceries. Crime, crumbling public services, and the paucity of decent jobs stoked frustration but not collective action. Oil revenues and loans from China generated enough cash to buy off protests. Even when strikes spread to nurses, teachers, students, farmers, pharmacists, civil servants, bus drivers, subway workers, doctors, and police, there were enough petrodollars to stuff in their pockets and send them, grumbling that it was not enough, back to work. As long as protests remained atomized, the palace was safe.
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State television seldom mentioned the unrest—making occasional exceptions to brand some leaders as coup plotters—so there was little media echo. It was as if the body politic had measles, irritating, fleeting blotches, but that the comandante himself was vaccinated. After all he was the great sponsor of people power, pay raises, and public works, spending hours with maps and diagrams explaining the details. If subsequently the promises failed to materialize, that was the fault of ministers, managers, and communal council leaders, fools and knaves who betrayed the comandante. This magical thinking became encapsulated in a slogan that appeared and multiplied throughout 2011. “Viva Chávez, abajo el gobierno.” Long live Chávez, down with the government.
Some only professed to believe it. They still wore red and shouted revolutionary slogans but hinted at heresy. Aporrea, a pro-government Web site and sounding board, glinted with exasperation. “Comrade President, you must tone down the populist discourse a bit and rapidly tackle corruption in the communal councils, Fundacomunal [a funding agency], and the Ministry of Communes. The decision is in your hands. The disappointment in the communities is enormous, and every day we are losing people. We cannot create socialism while such incompetence and corruption exists.” Others, in whispers, dropped the charade.
Let us call one of them Rodolfo, an unshaven, exhausted, laid-off oil worker from Maracaibo camping with colleagues outside the National Assembly in Caracas. They had been there for three weeks seeking jobs. In private Rodolfo called the president an architect of fiasco, a charlatan. He scoffed at the banners tied to railings that proclaimed his group “revolucionarios” and “ultra-Chavistas.” Theatrical props, he said. When a television camera appeared, Rodolfo broke into a loud, urgent voice to say the comandante was being deceived. Once Chávez knew the truth, he would surely reinstate the comrades. “The comandante will save us.” To directly accuse Chávez meant expulsion from the “process,” losing benefits and rights, or hope of benefits and rights, so the skeptical, the disillusioned, and the outright nonbelievers forked their tongues. They wou
ld preface every criticism with “Yo soy Chavista.” I’m Chavista. It was calculation, not cowardice. In the absence of a credible, united opposition, there was no alternative to Chávez. Revolution was the only game worth playing.
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The multiplying protests of 2011 did not threaten the palace. Divide and rule neutralized their potency. But by exposing the failure of many communal councils, they cost the comandante something precious. This should have been his glory year, an apogee of laurels and vindication, because economic crisis exposed deep discontent in the West. Alienated voters occupied Wall Street, rioted in Athens and London, marched through Madrid and Paris. They called themselves the 99 percent and demanded curbs on the ultrarich 1 percent, who, they said, had usurped capitalism and liberal democracy.
Imagine the comandante’s excitement. He had long warned capitalism was in crisis and liberal democracy a con by greedy elites. Look to Venezuela, he cried, look how we are forging real democracy, new geometry. A radical experiment with lots of money guided by an elected, charismatic rebel, why not? It could have become a beacon and drawn attention, envious comparisons, praise. If this fantasy played out in the comandante’s head, imagine the crushing disappointment when the real world proved indifferent. Crime, economic atrophy, and the multiple protests rendered the Chávez model toxic. No acclaim rang in his ears, no wisdom seekers queued outside the palace. In this moment of intense global yearning for another way, he was shunned even by those who had cheered him in earlier times. They flew over Venezuela ignoring the figure on the balcony of Miraflores waving like a shipwrecked sailor. Down here. Look down here. Newly elected left-wing presidents such as Ollanta Humala in Peru, Mauricio Funes in El Salvador, and José Mujica in Uruguay, obvious potential allies, steered clear as if he had the pox and instead invoked Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his apparently magic formula of easing poverty through government programs, a market economy, and traditional representative democracy. Foreign leaders still visited Caracas for summits and oil deals, and many still had personal affection for the comandante, but none sought to emulate him. “The Chávez of 2006 is nothing compared with the Chávez of 2011. He made a series of errors,” Yehude Simon, Peru’s former prime minister, told journalists.
Such criticism remained unheard in the palace. Even as many communal councils faltered, and with them the conceit that Chávez was delivering power to the people, nobody spoke out. The generals, of course, were handpicked loyalists and for good measure allowed to stuff their pockets. The opportunists bobbed along, playing dumb. But what of the third faction, the coalition of progressives, feminists, labor leaders, and indigenous rights activists? They had come of age politically in the 1980s and fused into a movement in the 1990s. When Chávez emerged from jail in 1994, he had fame from his coup attempt but no money, no organization, no political experience. He swept to the palace four years later largely because he was adopted by this coalition. It comprised thousands of dynamic individuals with passionate democratic convictions. What happened to them?
A single smashing of revolutionary ideals would have been traumatic and triggered an exodus, but incremental chiseling permitted exculpations. If the comandante overruled party grass roots to impose candidates, well, there was strategic need. If he ignored evidence of corruption, well, the timing was delicate. Chip, chip, chip at principles until all that was left was Chávez. By 2011 a few progressives had trickled away, but the rest bowed their heads and stayed. You found them behind ministry desks, at party offices, and in state-backed organizations, some still with the bandannas, T-shirts, and slogans of their activist days. Mother Earth. Power to the people. Disarm patriarchy. Workers of the world, unite. Human rights correct human wrongs. These were the mid-rankers who administered funding requests for Luis Blanco’s communal council, moved Morón up and down the list of priorities, studied oil pollution in the Faja.
Back in their activist days, they were united in vocal passion. Now in power, they shared stifled silences. Environmentalists said nothing about pipelines through wildlife reserves or the gasoline subsidy. Feminists bit their lips when Chávez belittled female opponents with sexist remarks (he said he would not sleep with Condoleezza Rice even if it was for the fatherland) and leered at the camera to tell his then wife, “Prepare yourself, Marisabel, you’re going to get yours tonight.” Trade unionists held their tongues when collective contracts expired and strikes were criminalized. Radicals lost their voice when Chávez, during thaws with Colombia, took responsibility for extraditing suspected guerrillas without due process.
If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, what of those who did not wield power but merely hovered around it, inhaled it—were they contaminated? The coalition of progressives, after all, had possessed an integrity alien to the kleptocratic generals and boligarchs. Some stayed simply to keep their jobs. The salaries and perks were not extravagant, merely comfortable, and that was enough to breed inertia. A job supplies identity, routine, and security. Yank it away and the void beckons. That is why so many bureaucracies, movements, and empires survive so long. The comandante understood this and so multiplied ministries, agencies, missions, councils, cooperatives. As economic waves swamped the private sector, those inside the ship of state clutched their sinecures all the more tightly. Some retained shreds of idealism and would pluck excerpts from the comandante’s speeches. “See! He still backs labor rights.” Others surrendered to cynicism. “It’s all bullshit. They ignore all my recommendations, but there’s nowhere else to go.” This was from an engineer, Isabel, who did environmental impact reports for the state oil company. She would vent her fury to me while pedaling in a gym, her fury growing as she accelerated and reddened. When she described the pro-government marches she was forced to attend, the pedals would become a blur. “¡Malditos! ¡Desgraciados!” Servants of true tyranny could at least tell themselves they had no choice, they were following orders. Chávez’s bloodless rule denied the excuse of physical fear. Disobedience meant maybe losing their jobs, not their heads. A plastic sword, and still they kneeled.
12
THE ARTIST
A balmy morning in 2011 and the comandante was on the palace terrace at an easel, brush in hand, painting what appeared to be another palace. It was vivid ocher, with big windows, a green lawn, and a statue with outstretched arms in the foreground. He stepped back to scrutinize, then added fresh blue to the sky with broad, firm strokes. The terrace was his favorite part of Miraflores, a combined office and private quarters with a thatched roof, table, chairs, and hammock. A television glowed in the corner. It was where he came to read, write, and paint. Visitors arrived: the vice president, a few ministers, the head of the National Assembly, the comandante’s brother Adán. They clustered around the painting, took turns admiring it. The comandante set down the brush, and all sat at the table that had been laid for breakfast. The guests sipped orange juice and waited for the president, who donned spectacles, to peruse newspapers (Correo del Orinoco and Ciudad Caracas, both funded by the government) before starting the meeting. All this was on television and reported in reverential detail. Exactly what was discussed was unclear, but that seemed not to matter. The images alone were news. The comandante painting, the comandante reading, the comandante taking breakfast, the comandante hosting visitors: affairs of importance unfolding before our eyes.
After twelve years in the palace the comandante’s every gesture, every action, seemed freighted with significance, tokens of power to be deconstructed and interpreted. Why was Minister X invited but not Minister Y? Was lending so-and-so the brush and inviting him to add a few strokes a portent of promotion? Why did the vice president sit opposite rather than beside the boss? Did the comandante’s jovial demeanor mean no dramatic announcements today? Or maybe it meant he had something up his sleeve? Or maybe it meant nothing at all.
The personal and the political, private and public, painting and governing, all splashed onto the same canvas. Chávez often referre
d to himself as an artist and the revolution as an unfinished portrait. As a boy on the streets of Sabaneta he had painted dogs and cats, and now was painting an entire country, brightening this, shading that, adjusting perspective, blending colors pleasing to his eye. To honor his late friend and ally the former Argentine president Néstor Kirchner, he painted a portrait of Kirchner, in profile, listening to Chávez murmur in his ear. The comandante unveiled it when Kirchner’s widow and successor, Cristina, visited the palace. “Yes, my queen, I painted it for you,” he said. “I finished it yesterday; the paint is still fresh. I put my soul into this, and it’s the best picture that I’ve painted in my life.” He gave her the original and hung a large copy in the Salon of Ministers, which was renamed the Néstor Kirchner Salon.
For many years Chávez had found that the revolution, his work in progress, was best viewed from within the palace. Outside was cold and distracting. When he visited his daughters at La Casona, the presidential residence in the east of the city, middle-class neighbors would bang pots and pans in protest. Similar eruptions had forced his mobile weekly television show to be canceled or moved at the last minute. Crafty protesters sometimes waited for the show to go on air before walloping kitchenware, forcing sound technicians into desperate dial twisting to muffle the racket. Even in loyal barrios the comandante hesitated to plunge into crowds as before. Fidel had repeatedly warned about assassination plots, and the comandante had had a premonition (related to several courtiers) that he would, like his nineteenth-century rebel hero Ezequiel Zamora, be shot by his own side. How much cozier it was inside the pink walls, where ministers nodded, generals saluted, and there was tranquillity to continue the great unfinished work.