by Rory Carroll
It seemed an age since a human river had swept the country’s youngest-ever president into Miraflores in 1999. Twelve years later the walls were no thicker and the gates no higher, but few referred to it now as the people’s palace. It was Chávez’s palace. It was easy to forget that as a candidate he had once said if elected, he would serve only one term. As he routed foes, co-opted state institutions, and abolished term limits, the horizon extended. I will stay until 2012, he bellowed to rallies. Then it became 2021, then 2030, then 2050.
It was a return to the caudillo tradition after an interregnum of liberal democracy, the so-called Fourth Republic, which for all its warts had established peaceful alternations of power. In creating the Fifth Republic Chávez updated populism for the twenty-first century, but there was something timeless in his all-encompassing persona of painter, singer, poet, horseman, warrior, father, teacher, thinker, leader. He was, quite self-consciously, a philosopher king. He cited the utopianism of Plato’s Republic and cloaked himself, especially from 2011, in nineteenth-century mysticism. “Nietzsche says the most beautiful thing about man is that he isn’t an end but a bridge between the animal and the ‘superman,’ the ‘ultra-man,’” he said. “I’m quoting Nietzsche and also expressing my agreement with those maxims of philosophy and life: to transform the world.” No matter that Plato preached elitism, that Nietzsche loathed socialism, and that Chávez’s philosophizing was a half-baked mishmash, courtiers greeted the musings with reverence.
It was easy to conclude he had spent too long under a blazing sun on his terrace and become deluded. Christopher Hitchens had accompanied the Hollywood actor and activist Sean Penn on flights with Chávez around Venezuela and later recalled their host’s attachment to conspiracy theories. “He essentially doubted the existence of al-Qaida, let alone reports of its attacks on the enemy to the north. ‘I don’t know anything about Osama Bin Laden that doesn’t come to me through the filter of the West and its propaganda.’ To this, Penn replied that surely Bin Laden had provided quite a number of his very own broadcasts and videos. I was again impressed by the way that Chávez rejected this proffered lucid-interval lifeline,” Hitchens wrote. “All of this so-called evidence, too, was a mere product of imperialist television. After all, ‘there is film of the Americans landing on the moon,’ he scoffed. ‘Does that mean the moon shot really happened? In the film, the Yanqui flag is flying straight out. So, is there wind on the moon?’ As Chávez beamed with triumph at this logic, an awkwardness descended on my comrades, and on the conversation. Chávez, in other words, is very close to the climactic moment when he will announce that he is a poached egg and that he requires a very large piece of buttered toast so that he can lie down and take a soothing nap.”
Chávez’s blinkeredness extended to foreign affairs. Once he was a hero to Arabs for denouncing Israel and the United States, his name chanted by ecstatic crowds across the Middle East. But when those same Arabs rose up in 2011, the comandante did not hail popular revolts against oppression and stagnation or even claim to have inspired them. Instead he accused the rebels of being Western-backed terrorists and defended despotic cronies like Gadhafi and Assad.
The comandante filled much of his mental canvas with what he wanted to believe and watched it reflected in state media, his personal projector. He brooked no contradiction even from physical surroundings. He would invite foreign journalists to the palace to extol the revolution’s latest advances, heedless that the building itself betrayed him: the peeling, cracking facade, broken window frames, missing roof tiles, garden balconies reeking of urine. Other Latin American presidential palaces were impeccable, even those of much poorer countries, but Miraflores suffered the same neglect and shoddy work that plagued the nation’s infrastructure. A minister confided that rain leaked into the comandante’s private elevator. Palace employees privately grumbled about unpaid overtime and slashed benefits. And yet Chávez would bask in camera lights and describe shiny developments and strategic victories.
If Chávez had been a true dictator, the final act would have been predictable: a slide further into denial until the fantasy realm unraveled and enraged subjects booted the bewildered, pathetic figure into oblivion. His enemies scripted the imagined epilogue with various endings—Chávez boarding a plane to exile in Cuba, Chávez in handcuffs, Chávez forlorn and forgotten at the family ranch in Barinas. Each version involved disgrace and comeuppance. But here his enemies themselves succumbed to fantasy. However much they shouted “Tyrant!” and willed Chávez to act accordingly, he remained a stubborn, indefatigable hybrid: an elected autocrat. His rule stopped well short of dictatorship. Repression was mostly light and selective, involving threats, fines, and jail terms. Opponents organized freely and, with the help of a shrill (albeit shrinking) private media, fought elections. That Chávez hijacked state institutions and resources did not change the fact that people could vote against him. Thus the final act, the denouement, remained uncertain.
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The comandante’s compulsion to “pound the opposition into dust” in every election—there was a vote almost every year—unleashed a populist spiral of subsidies, giveaways, and stunts, a sugar diet that left the nation flabby, enfeebled, and import addicted. To break the cycle meant tough decisions and losing face and votes, at least in the short term, and this was unacceptable. But—and here was the great riddle—what wrecked the economy saved Chávez. Elections tethered him to reality, yanked him back from the precipice. After a morning with his easel and dreams, he would leave the brush and descend into the situation room to analyze the electoral map with limpid, piercing clarity. The muddled philosopher king would become a shrewd cruncher of reports and polls: Ratings holding up in Vargas, good. But dipping in Lara. Why? What’s going on? He would demand statistics and back copies of local newspapers, summon mayors. Woe to them if they lied or euphemized, because his political antennae still hummed with instinct and experience. When a new social mission advertised information help lines in the local press, Chávez personally phoned each one to check they were working; they were not, and he roasted the officials responsible. He governed with caprice, but when it came to courting votes he was realistic, unsentimental, and utterly professional. In the urgency of campaigns he found focus.
Looking toward the October 2012 presidential election, Chávez had a problem. He no longer represented the future. He had done so while winning his first term in 1998, again when winning another term under the new constitution in 2000, and again in 2006, each time heralding a new dawn, a fresh beginning, a utopia to come. But with each victory there was a new calendar on the wall, the hourglass filled a little more, time weighed more heavily in Miraflores, and gradually Chávez represented not the future but the past. It bore his unmistakable strokes, a landscape of decisions and consequences painted in vibrant colors, now prematurely bleached.
The revolution was failing, its great projects stalled, factories rusting, fields withering. Container ships arrived laden and left empty. The exception was tankers. Stripped of ability to make anything, Venezuela exported the only thing it could, oil. It accounted for 96 percent of export earnings, compared with 80 percent a decade earlier. By 2011 doctors, dentists, engineers, accountants, architects, scientists, and artists were also leaving. For the first time in its history Venezuela, which since Columbus had received immigrant waves, exported people. Caracas became a city of farewells. More than 700,000 fled. They packed consulates for visas, signed up for language courses, and struck out for Europe, North America, Colombia, Brazil, Australia, Dubai. Venezuela’s first diaspora, scattered on a desolate wind.
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In early summer 2011, the comandante was ambushed from the last place he expected. The “body of reinforced concrete” that had so impressed García Márquez all those years earlier began to crack. The superhuman energy faltered. The comandante lost his appetite. His knee hurt and he had trouble walking. It took a while for doctors to realize that cells in Chávez’s abdomen were dividing and g
rowing uncontrollably, forming a malignant tumor, incubating the emperor of all maladies: cancer.
The comandante vanished from public view, leaving state media with an unfamiliar void. Presenters, bereft of direction, floundered. How could they opine on a topic without knowing the comandante’s view? It was a time of intense heat and sudden, violent downpours that burst gutters and flooded streets. The rumor that Chávez was ill wafted across Caracas like a zephyr, a whisper of unknown provenance. People scoffed. The man was indestructible. A human tornado. And still only fifty-six, three decades younger than the eternal Fidel.
And then, on a humid evening at the end of June, Chávez surfaced in a grainy broadcast from Havana. Looking ashen and subdued, speaking from a script, he said Cuban doctors had diagnosed “cancerous cells” and removed a tumor from his pelvic area. He asked for God’s help. “This [is] the new battle that life has placed before us. I neglected my health and I was reluctant to have medical checkups. It was a fundamental mistake for a revolutionary.”
A clap of thunder rolled across Venezuela. Disbelief and shock on both sides. A trick, he’s faking, said opponents, but their eyes shone with excitement. It’s not what it seems; there’s a plan, a strategy, cried allies. The idea that there was no Plan B, that disease had outflanked the situation room, and that the initiative lay not with the comandante but with his cancer left both sides bewildered. Now what do we do?
The opposition recovered first. Setting aside squabbles, it formed a coalition, the Democratic Unity Roundtable, and chose a presidential candidate through a primary election. Three million people voted, a record for a primary. The winner was Henrique Capriles Radonski. He had served as a legislator and mayor before ousting Diosdado Cabello, the comandante’s chief fixer, as governor of Miranda state in 2008. He had a runner’s wiry physique, dated models, and scooted around town on a moped. Of wealthy stock, he had a disconcerting intensity that dissolved only when he smiled. Just thirty-nine, Capriles billed himself as a centrist who would woo disillusioned Chavistas by promising to reboot faltering social programs. “I’ve never lost an election,” he told followers. “We can do this.” Opinion polls gave him a chance.
A decaying revolution, a ravaged body, a vigorous challenger: Chávez was in trouble. His great experiment dangled by a thread. If he died, or lost the election, it was over. There was no successor, no coherent movement to carry on without him or the succubus of oil patronage. The world would be different. Cuba would lose its lifeline; Russia, its arms buyer; Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, their ally; radicals the world over, their hero; and Middle Eastern despots, what remained of them, their cheerleader. Washington, Wall Street, and all those who considered the comandante a tyrant or an impediment to profit bolted upright, wondering if this was the endgame. The revolution’s most famous prisoners, María Lourdes Afiuni and Raúl Baduel, prayed for deliverance. The general had made a prophecy: “I will leave this prison only when Chávez leaves the presidency of Venezuela.”
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It was January 6, 2012, el Dia de los Reyes (the Day of the Kings), a national holiday to honor the wise men who brought gifts to the baby Jesus. Those who were not at the beach listening to music were at home watching television. Suddenly the airwaves, as one, switched to the sight and sound of worshippers at the shrine of Our Lady of Coromoto, Venezuela’s holiest site, in Guanare, in the western plains. It was a cadena, a chain broadcast. The comandante had news. He appeared, wearing a dark blue shirt, and entered the basilica surrounded by aides, soldiers, and worshippers. He was barely recognizable as the Chávez of old. The face and body were bloated. The hair was thin and barely covered his scalp. He walked gingerly.
Since his return to Venezuela from Havana six months earlier, the country had got used to visual shocks. First he was thin, from the surgery to remove the tumor, then swollen and bald like Humpty Dumpty from the chemotherapy. Some supporters shaved their heads in solidarity. The exact nature of the cancer and its location remained closely guarded secrets. His health dominated headlines. Contradictory reports sprouted from diplomatic and medical sources in Caracas, Sao Paolo, Moscow, Miami, and Madrid. He would disappear for days and weeks, prompting rumors of death, only to surface, Lazarus-like, and punch the air in triumph. He changed the slogan “Fatherland, socialism, or death” to “We will live and we will win” and expunged all references to muerte from official discourse. “There will be no death here; we must live.” But many supporters braced for his end and looked with hopelessness at the ministers who might replace him.
And now, with ten months until the election, he was at Venezuela’s most sacred Catholic shrine, a basilica consecrated in 1996 by Pope John Paul II, greeting worshippers, embracing priests, placing rosary beads around a statue of the Virgin. The comandante, sweating from the humidity, stood by the altar with a microphone and announced he had come to give thanks for a miracle. The battle had been hard, an existential test, and now it was over. He was cured.
“I came here to keep a promise I made in Cuba six months ago,” he said, the voice solemn. “It was a very difficult time. I put my life in the hands of holy God, Christ the redeemer, and the Virgin Mary of Coromoto. I asked God and the Virgin to give me life. Because in truth my life is not mine.” He paused, and the congregation waved red banners, willing him to go on. “It is dedicated to the struggle for the humble, for the poor, for the people. That is my life. And when I, a humble soldier, knelt before God, knelt before Christ and the Virgin and the spirit of the savanna, before the profound faith of this heroic savanna, when I knelt as a humble soldier on this earth, I made that promise.” The great chamber exploded in cheers and applause.
Was it true? Was he cured? Oncologists doubted it, especially when just weeks later he had needed more surgery after a tumor appeared in the same place as the original. It would be at least two years before he could be given the all clear, experts agreed. But the ceremony at Our Lady of Coromoto set the tone for the election campaign: Chávez was alive, for now, and his will to power undiminished. He underlined this from the basilica altar by summoning a notorious army general and former intelligence chief, Henry Rangel Silva, a man the United States accused of drug trafficking, and put his arm around him. “Today I make public his appointment as the new minister of defense of the Republic, here in this sacred temple, before the Virgin of Coromoto.” It was a warning not only to the United States but to the opposition, because Rangel Silva had publicly said the armed forces would accept no change of government. The congregation stood and cheered again.
Celestial music played, and the comandante waded into the throng as if it were the old days. Men, women, and children—all handpicked for the event—chanted and surged around him. “We ask God almighty that the cure works,” one woman, her voice trembling, said into the camera. “Because here we have a president who cares for the humble, the children, the elderly, everybody.” They reached out to touch him and, a key detail captured by the cameras, to hand him petitions. Requests, viewers assumed, for the same things they wanted: houses, jobs, scholarships, cash, help with officialdom. The message was clear: you invested hope in Chávez. Only Chávez.
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I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had just been traveling and chatting pleasantly with two opposing men. One to whom the caprices of fate had given an opportunity to save his country. The other, an illusionist, who could pass into the history books as just another despot.” Thirteen years after García Márquez penned that profile, the comandante had not shown despotic cruelty. But the writer’s other observation was pure clairvoyance. Chávez was an illusionist, a politician with a magician’s gift to distract and dazzle. The October 2012 election loomed as his ultimate test because Venezuela, more clearly than ever, was falling apart. The 2010 drought had long ended, but blackouts, the product of mismanagement and underinvestment, only worsened, knocking out traffic lights, plunging baseball games into darkness, destroying electrical equipment, and forcing people to sleep outdoors t
o escape baking homes. The electricity ministry accused its own workers of sabotage on the basis that “matches were found” near the site of some outages. It also accused a possum of having gnawed through a substation’s cables. A bridge collapsed in Miranda state, another in Monagas, and engineers warned that others were sagging. Unemployment hovered at 8 percent, comparable to that of the United States and better than Europe, but a statistical ruse classified the millions of sidewalk vendors and informal sector workers as employed. In the first half of 2012 slaughter worsened in the jails—more than 300 dead—and on the streets, with an estimated 9,500 murdered.
A dispiriting panorama? Not at all. “Tremendous achievement! Venezuela is Latin America’s leading user of Twitter. And in our use of Facebook, we are 20 points above the Latin American average.” So gushed Andrés Izarra, the minister of popular power for communication and information, during a Twitter summit in April to celebrate the second anniversary of the comandante’s account, @chavezcandanga. “Twitter is the microphone of the state. It is cultivating a new form of direct communication with the people.” Ministers, including the justice minister, ostensibly responsible for keeping the streets safe, attended to reinforce the idea this event, the main news on state media, really was news.
It was part of a strategy of distractions, every day a new story. The president said an American had been arrested on the Colombian border on suspicion of being a “mercenary” plotting his assassination. Another day it was a U.S. submarine incursion. Then he suggested that a spate of cancers afflicting the region’s leftist leaders was part of a CIA plot. “Would it be so strange that they’ve invented technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for fifty years?” Intelligence agents questioned the crossword compiler of the newspaper Últimas Noticias on suspicion of inciting assassination because answers to clues included “kill,” “gunfire,” and “Adán,” the name of the president’s older brother. State television said a team of psychologists and mathematicians detected the codes. A 3-D reconstruction of Simón Bolívar’s face was unveiled at the palace amid fanfare. “Bolívar is the fight that does not end; he is born every day in ourselves,” said Chávez. He declared the national pantheon too humble for the Liberator and ordered the construction of a $140 million mausoleum, built with imported Spanish tiles and South African marble.