Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  Judging by Chávez’s own words, expressed much later on,7 it was at the academy that he began to feel drawn to the leftist military regimes of Latin America. These were years during which the United States, consumed by the Vietnam War, began to suffer the decline of its traditional economic hegemony in the region. As a wave of nationalizations and reforms took place in various countries, the United States became more and more determined to pull political strings all over Latin America, supporting right-wing regimes and sabotaging those of the left. In Venezuela, the government of Christian Democrat Rafael Caldera (1969–74) invoked the thesis of ideological pluralism and “international social justice,” aligning itself with those who were calling for a new international order that would diminish the inequalities between North and South. His successor, Social Democrat Carlos Andrés Pérez, nationalized the iron and steel industries, as well as the mammoth oil industry at a time when Venezuela was the world’s third largest producer of crude oil. Until then these sectors had been dominated by North American, British, and Dutch interests.

  Between 1971 and 1973, the Venezuelan Army was visited by a group of Panamanian cadets, among them the son of General Omar Torrijos, who had taken control of Panama through a coup d’état, staged when he was still a lieutenant colonel. As the head of the nationalist government from 1968 to 1978, Torrijos put an end to the predominance of the economic elite in Panamanian politics.8

  “Hearing those kids talk about General Torrijos and the Panamanian Revolution, about how they reclaimed the canal…the impact was tremendous.”9 Chávez also felt the blow of September 11, 1973, when Chilean president Salvador Allende was overthrown: “Since I felt a certain affinity for those left-wing tendencies, I was very affected by that coup.”10

  The model that left the deepest mark on Chávez, however, was the nationalist revolution led by Peruvian general Juan Velasco Alvarado (president 1968–75). In 1974, Chávez traveled to Lima with a group of fellow cadets to join the celebrations in commemoration of the 150-year anniversary of the Battle of Ayacucho, which had sealed the independence of Peru. “I was twenty-one years old, in my last year at the academy, and I already had very clear political motivations. For me, as a young soldier, it was extremely moving to witness the Peruvian national revolution in that way. I met Juan Velasco Alvarado personally; one night he received us at the Palace…the revolutionary manifesto, the man’s speeches, the Inca Plan—I read all those things for years.”11 Velasco, whose government was toppled eight months later by a right-wing coup, gave each of the cadets a gift that night: a little blue paperback entitled La revolución nacional peruana (The Peruvian National Revolution), which became a seminal text and a kind of amulet for Chávez, who would carry it in his briefcase everywhere he went, from that point on, up until the day he was arrested during the 1992 coup attempt. That day, the book was lost. Some twenty-five years later, Chávez would order the reprinting of millions of copies of his own Constitución bolivariana (Bolivarian Constitution) of 1999, very possibly with that book in mind. But Velasco’s book was hardly the only volume to become a touchstone for Chávez.

  “With Torrijos, I became a Torrijist. With Velasco, I became a Velasquist. And with Pinochet, I became an anti-Pinochetist.” This was what he declared in 2002, almost three decades after the facts, in an amiable conversation with the Chilean journalist Marta Harnecker. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that, in the reference game, Chávez omitted the name of Salvador Allende when he made this comment. In other words: he did not become an Allendist. This detail may very well have been an element of the personal profile that Chávez was honing at the time, a reflection of his belief that the military order should always prevail over the civil experience.

  Every time he got the chance to return to Barinas, Hugo would spend a great deal of time with his Communist buddies. “By now, our conversations were on a whole different level, politically speaking, both on his side and ours. At this point, both of us, Vladimir and I, were active in the Causa R [Radical Cause], with Vladimir in Barquisimeto and me in Guayana, and we started talking and talking…. And in the middle of his life at the academy, putting up with things there, Chávez was a great observer of this process,” his friend Federico has stated.

  In 1971, Chávez’s friends Vladimir and Federico were indeed participating in the creation of the left-wing party known as Causa Radical, the Radical Cause, which was associated with the labor struggle. At the beginning, the group was so small that Federico likens the experience to an old joke, saying that “the Cause was founded inside a Volkswagen.” The engine behind the party was Alfredo Maneiro, a philosopher and former Communist guerrilla whom Chávez met a bit later on.

  In 1975, the first graduating class of “doctors” in military arts and sciences received their degrees in a solemn ceremony at the academy. President Carlos Andrés Pérez himself placed the saber in the hands of Hugo Chávez, a second lieutenant at the time. At that brief moment, neither could have possibly imagined that their paths would cross again. For the president, Chávez was just another cadet. Chávez had graduated number eight among a group of seventy-five students, with a concentration in engineering, a minor in land expertise, and a specialty in communications. As such he was attached to the radio communication service. The yearbook of his graduating class offers brief profiles of all the cadets, complete with individual caricatures—many of them drawn by Chávez. In this book, Chávez’s classmates praise his “camaraderie,” his pitching ability, and the “colorful, descriptive, and not least of all entertaining lyrics of his joropos, corridos, and pasajes [folkloric music from the region of Los Llanos], which he shared with us so that we might truly understand and feel the meaning of his llanero homeland.”

  LUCK WAS ON HIS SIDE. After a month, he was sent to Los Llanos, his homeland, as head of a communications unit, one of the thirteen battalions that the army had established as part of its antiguerrilla efforts in the early 1960s, a decade known in Venezuela as “the violent years.” By this time, however, in the state of Barinas and almost everywhere else in Venezuela, there was little or no sign left of the guerrilla. The majority of the country’s subversive elements had laid down their weapons in deference to the country’s peace-building policies, which made Chávez’s work somewhat routine. Drawn to the microphones and the sound of his own voice, he began to host a radio show, and every week his writing would appear in a column in the newspaper El Espacio. It was around this time that he began to consider other goals, his big goal: power. At twenty-one years of age, Hugo Chávez was no longer satisfied by the prospect of becoming just another military officer and began to flirt with the idea of staging a coup, according to a friend from Los Llanos, Rafael Simón Jiménez. “Every time he saw me, on any street in Barinas, he would get out of the car to say hello. ‘What’s up, brother?’ I would ask him, and he would answer, ‘I’m good, man, because 2000 is around the corner.’ And then he would add, ‘Before 2000 I’m going to be a general, and I’m going to do something major in this country.’”

  A lover of history, he may have felt that Venezuela’s history was on his side. In the nineteenth century, the country endured “166 armed confrontations with political intentions, of which 39 were relatively important revolutions expressly aimed at overthrowing the government.”12 During the twentieth century, until that date at least, only five successful coups and some eight unsuccessful ones had been carried out.

  The decisive year, however, would be not 1975 but 1977, which was when he began to conspire in earnest. Still a communications officer, he was transferred to a tactical operations center in San Mateo, in the eastern state of Anzoátegui.

  Over and over again his personal diary reveals the evolution of his political aspirations and his incipient vision of himself as someone predestined, a man with a historical mission. The entry dated October 25, for example, harks back to Che Guevara’s now-legendary 1967 declaration: “Vietnam. One and two Vietnams in Latin America.” A few lines away, he did the
same with Simón Bolívar: “Come. Return. Here. It is possible.” A bit further along he actually inserted himself directly into this saga: “This war is going to take years…. I have to do it. Even if it costs me my life. It doesn’t matter. This is what I was born to do. How long can I last like this? I feel impotent. Unproductive. I have to get ready. To act.” Two days later he would write, “My people are stoic. Passive. Who is going to fan the flames? We could create a great blaze. But the wood is all wet. The conditions aren’t there. We don’t have the conditions. Goddamn it! When will we have them? Why can’t we create them? We don’t have the conditions. Subjectively, we do. Objectively, we don’t. Tremendous excuse. That’s where we are.”

  The conditions weren’t there because Venezuela, right then, was enjoying an period of political stability after four consecutive democratic elections, as well as an economic boom. The country was reveling in the riches generated by its oil industry, the currency was strong, dollars were cheap, and the solid middle class was living quite well indeed. There was even a certain amount of social mobility, and people at the lowest rungs on the social ladder had actually begun to view the future with some measure of optimism. Carlos Andrés Pérez’s first term as president was marked by its ostensibly populist policies and an administration in which corruption did not seem especially easy to hide, especially in its last months, according to press archives. In the so-called Saudi Venezuela, where the nouveau riche would jet off for shopping sprees in Miami, a coup was simply not possible.

  During this time, Hugo Chávez filled his diary with expressions of frustration and irritation. This is where his nationalism and anti-Americanism began to emerge. At one point, he mentioned that his favorite baseball team, Los Navegantes de Magallanes, had lost a game, and suddenly he confessed, “I let go of that fanaticism. This baseball, it isn’t ours. It’s theirs, it belongs to the North Americans. Out there, I hear the sound of a joropo. That’s our music. And that, too, has been trampled by foreign music.” He went on to bemoan the fact that “we have no identity” and to question the consumer culture that had invaded Venezuelan society. From there, he went on to surmise that the only salvation for his country was to “cling tight” to its heroic past. Hugo Chávez was scarcely twenty-three years old at the time and married to Nancy Colmenares, also from Barinas. They were awaiting the birth of their first daughter. In his diary, however, none of this is described with the same energy that characterizes his political ruminations.

  The pages of his diary also neglect to tell the story of a guerrilla raid13 that seems to offer another perspective on the president. In the city of Barcelona, the capital of the state of Anzoátegui, Chávez was “looking for combat rations” when some wounded soldiers found their way over to him and he helped carry one of them to safety, though the man would later die in the hospital. As he later confessed to Gabriel García Márquez in 1999, that night he experienced his “first existential conflict” and asked himself some tough questions: “What am I doing here? On one side we have country peasants dressed in military fatigues torturing peasant guerrillas, and on the other side we have peasant guerrillas killing other peasants dressed in green. At this stage, with the war over, there was no point in firing a gun at anyone.”14

  Shortly afterward, Chávez created his first nucleus of conspirators with three other soldiers from Los Llanos. “We gave it a name: The Liberation Army of the People of Venezuela.”15 Around that time he was transferred to Maturín, also in eastern Venezuela. There, he reconnected with his former classmate Jesús Urdaneta Hernández and invited him to join the new initiative. According to Chávez, Urdaneta promised to talk to two other former classmates, Jesús Miguel Ortiz Contreras and Felipe Acosta Carles, who would go on to aid in the creation of the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army two years later. “Those were the first steps we took,”16 Chávez has stated.

  One month before this “first existential conflict,” however, the cards had already been dealt. His official account may describe the guerrilla raid and the torture of peasants as a critical moment that changed his way of thinking, but by that time Second Lieutenant Hugo Chávez had, in fact, already made his decision to conspire against the government. On September 18, 1977, his friend Federico Ruiz engineered a meeting with Alfredo Maneiro and Pablo Medina, general secretary and leader, respectively, of the Radical Cause. That night the men held a secret meeting in an apartment that Chávez had been renting across from a military base in the city of Maracay. And as their spaghetti with cheese and fried plantains began to simmer, so did their alliance. “Alfredo was intent on convincing Hugo that the idea right then was to build the organization and start a revolutionary movement that was totally different from the traditional model. Instead of doing it from the top down, he thought it should be carried out from the bottom up.”

  As Pablo Medina remembers, the meeting with that “skinny guy, straight out of the military, was very short—among other things because Chávez spoke very little. The one who spoke almost the entire time was Alfredo, who told Chávez that he ought to do his best to survive inside the armed forces, not to make mistakes, and, most of all, to do what he could to keep from getting desperate because we were in for a long period of political stability, since the two-party system in Venezuela was by then quite solid.” This is what Chávez had to say about this same meeting: “I remember, very clearly, when Maneiro said to me, ‘I’m only going to ask you for one thing: I need you to commit yourself and to promise me that whatever we plan together isn’t something we’re going to do right now but down the line, ten years from now.”17

  As they said their good-byes, Maneiro grabbed Federico by the shoulder, pulled him aside, and whispered, “I think we can make something happen with this second lieutenant, what do you say?” Federico simply responded, “Well, we already made some spaghetti with him, didn’t we?”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Man, the Conspirator

  AS FAR AS ANYONE KNOWS, HUGO CHÁVEZ BEGAN TO LEAD A DOUBLE life when he was around twenty-three. In the presence of military superiors, he would feign obedience and discipline. With his family he pretended to be “neutral,” as his mother put it, exhibiting no interest in politics. In his clandestine life, however, he was another person entirely, forging ties with left-wing activists, debating Venezuela’s political future with the Ruiz men, refining his powers of observation, so that he could sniff out possible recruits within the military. He was aided by his intuition, eloquence, passion, and innate histrionic streak, which emerged whenever someone pushed a microphone in front of him during armed forces cultural events. But he watched his step at every turn. Nobody inside the institution had any idea what he was up to.

  THE LIEUTENANT FROM Sabaneta was far from the only person determined to conspire against the government. In the course of a few months, Chávez made contact with several other army officers who were thinking along the same lines, among them Francisco Arias Cárdenas and air force major William Izarra. While studying for a master’s degree at Harvard, Izarra had developed “a revolutionary thesis for the armed forces,” and when he returned to Venezuela in 1979, he organized a conspiracy cell with four army officers. R-83, as the cell was named, shorthand for “Revolution 1983,” was inspired by the idea of working toward “the implantation of a serious socialist system.”1

  The Cuban Revolution left a deep impression upon Venezuela. Fidel Castro had lent a helping hand to the Venezuelan guerrillas. Toward the end of 1961, Caracas cut off diplomatic relations with Havana in response to Cuba’s open support of Venezuelan radical left-wing groups,2 and in 1963, a shipment of weapons sent by Fidel was intercepted upon arrival, causing a spark that quickly set off a diplomatic meltdown. As a result of this discovery, the Organization of American States (OAS) imposed a series of draconian economic and diplomatic sanctions on Cuba that definitively isolated the island nation.3 Cuba supported the local guerrillas for almost a decade; it wasn’t until August 1969 that Castro decided to withdraw his Sierra Madre commanders. Du
ring those years, Chávez was just entering adolescence. In 2004, he recalled those days: “I was thirteen, and I heard over the radio that Che was in Bolivia, that they had him surrounded. I was just a boy, and I remember asking, ‘Why doesn’t Fidel send some helicopters to rescue him?…Fidel has to save him.”4

  Chávez also admitted to having been affected by the battles that raged in those days. “I think that the struggles of the 1960s left behind such a strong level of fragmentation and such venom that we ended up contaminated by the product, as well.”5

  The Marxist rebels and the left-wing military officers who allied themselves with the guerrillas to stage the 1962 coup attempts known as El Carúpañazo and El Porteñazo (in reference to the towns where the action was most intense)6 electrified the country for some time, but they were defeated in the end. By the end of the 1970s, they were nothing but dim memories of “the violent years,” little more than footnotes from the past that a handful of people insisted on dredging up over and over again. Among these diehards was the unflinching guerrilla commander Douglas Bravo, the man who founded the Armed Forces of National Liberation after being expelled from the Venezuelan Communist Party in 1966 for straying from the Soviet hard line.

  Following the tactic of liaising with the armed forces, Bravo began feeding William Izarra names of officers in the armed forces whom he wanted to draw into the conspiracy. He also connected Izarra with both national and international political groups. International support for the Venezuelan guerrillas came primarily from Cuba and Algeria, and to a lesser and more sporadic degree from Libya, Vietnam, North Korea, and Iraq, according to the testimony of acknowledged former guerrilla leaders. Between 1980 and 1985, Izarra made clandestine trips to Havana, Baghdad, and Tripoli, the governments of which he admired, saying, “Their experiences could serve as lessons that might be applicable for us in our quest for power, as well as later on in the exercise of government.”7 In Tripoli, the air force officer met with Muammar Gaddafi, and the two men met on several subsequent occasions as well. He also claimed to have made contacts in Mexico with Cuban government officials, as well as in London and Barbados.8