Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  Toward 1980, Izarra’s group, which after 1983 would be renamed the Revolutionary Alliance of Active Military Personnel, made contact with the then lieutenant and antigovernment conspirator Francisco Arias, who was busy identifying potential recruits from within the military academy, where he was an instructor. “More than once they even suggested I travel to Libya, in connection with some Latin American military officers who were going there, to get a sense of Gaddafi’s experience,” states Arias, who would go on to become a mastermind, along with Chávez, of the 1992 coup attempt. In this way, the conspiring officers made contact with one another, often through Douglas Bravo and his people, slowly building their network. One of their basic texts was Gaddafi’s Green Book.

  William Izarra and Hugo Chávez met for the first time in 1981, but it remains unclear whether during those years Chávez received the same invitations to join the external training trips that Arias made. Soon enough, Arias and Chávez would be linked; as Arias recalls it, their first contact was made via one of Douglas Bravo’s men.9

  “We agreed that there was a need for an organization that could stimulate the process of structural change within the armed forces and in the country in general, and that was when we decided to join the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army,”10 Arias notes. Bravo and Chávez had still not yet met personally, but the veteran guerrilla, a key influence behind the military movement, would soon enter into contact with the restless officer from the plains.

  Hugo Chávez has acknowledged that his older brother, Adán, a physics professor, was one of his greatest political influences: “He was very important in my political education. My brother was in Mérida and was an activist in the MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, Movement of the Revolutionary Left].11 I didn’t know it, all I ever noticed was that he and his friends went around with their long hair, some of them with beards. Apparently, I didn’t fit in with my short hair, my uniform. [But] I felt very good in that group.”12 Later on, the officer would learn about the activities undertaken by his brother, who was in fact associated with the Party for the Venezuelan Revolution. Douglas Bravo indicated that “in 1982, Chávez joined the rebel officers who were already working with the FAN [Fuerzas Armadas Nacionales, National Armed Forces].”13 He did this through Adán, who had alerted the party that he had a brother in the army. At that point, through a professor at the University of the Andes, also an activist in the outlawed group, a meeting between Chávez and Bravo was engineered.

  “We met on the basis of structuring a civilian-military movement that would make long-term plans for a revolutionary insurrection,”14 says the former guerrilla leader. Hugo Chávez would meet with Bravo often over the course of several years. And he would make Bravo’s ideas his own.

  THE FINAL MONTHS of the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974–79) went by amid a flurry of corruption scandals, which paved the way for the opposition. In the 1978 elections, the Venezuelan electorate awarded the presidency to Christian Democrat Luis Herrera Campins, who announced at his inauguration that the country had been “mortgaged” by its foreign debt. Following the oil bonanza of the Pérez administration—the period of the so-called Saudi Venezuela—the inevitable lean years rolled around. The price of crude oil took a sharp nosedive: from $19.3 million in 1981, Venezuelan oil exports fell to $13.5 million in 1983. During this period, foreign investment plummeted and the state coffers were literally drained. Venezuela’s foreign debt ballooned to more than $30 billion.

  The year 1983 was a turning point of sorts, not just for the conspiring military officers but for Venezuela as a whole. With the economy teetering on the edge of insolvency, the government was forced to devalue its currency for the first time in decades and set restrictions on the sale of dollars to the general public. That day, February 18, 1983, went down in Venezuelan history as “Black Friday.” Herrera Campins’s administration, dogged by constant economic crises and occasional corruption scandals, gave way to the return of the Social Democrats. It was a time of crisis across the continent, and Venezuela was one more recession-plagued country during the “lost decade” of Latin America.

  Hugo Chávez had also entered a kind of crisis around this time: he was seriously thinking about retiring from the military. On a trip to Barinas, he confided this to his old friend José Esteban Ruiz Guevara, who recalls, “I told him, ‘No, stay. You say it’s a load of shit. Well, stay in and get rid of all that shit you see in the army!’” A captain at the time, Hugo Chávez heeded the advice of his first mentor and stayed in the army, where he began working with the younger men, still on the inside, in the very classrooms of the military academy where he worked as site officer and instructor in Venezuelan military history, from 1981 to 1984.

  “There, he took advantage of the opportunity to persuade potential followers from among the group of cadets and second lieutenants—the men who, much later on, would execute his plans. Apparently some of the students’ guardians registered complaints with the director of the academy after they heard their sons talking about coups and other related topics,”15 says General Iván Darío Jiménez. It was during that year at the academy that Chávez created the group that would later become the Bolivarian movement.

  December 17, 1983, was no ordinary December day—at least not for the four officers who met at 1 P.M. in the La Placera barracks in Maracay to commemorate the death of Simón Bolívar. The day before, they had chosen an orator by drawing straws: Hugo Chávez was to speak before an audience of a thousand. He began by quoting the Cuban José Martí: “There is Bolívar in the sky of the Americas, watchful and frowning…because what he left undone remains undone to this very day.” For half an hour he spoke about the Liberator’s life, asking himself and his audience: If Bolívar were alive today, what would he think of the way the country was being handled? Would he chastise them for failing to achieve his dream? A jumble of words fell from his lips, prompting one major to say, “Chávez, you sound like a politician.” As the event came to a close, the head of the regiment announced that, in memory of Bolívar, everyone had the afternoon off.

  Chávez took off with Jesús Urdaneta, Felipe Acosta, and Raúl Baduel. Acosta suggested they run a race. The four men, all from Los Llanos, began sprinting and didn’t stop until they reached the remains of the Samán de Güere, a tree immortalized by Bolívar, who had often rested in its shade. “We plucked some leaves, it was all very symbolic, very ritualistic—that’s the way we are, us soldiers. Inspired by the president, we paraphrased the Monte Sacro oath and swore that we would never be party, through either omission or action, to the state of things as we saw them in our country,”16 recalls Baduel, now defense minister and one of Chávez’s closest allies.

  “I swear to the God of my fathers,” they recited in unison, “I swear on my homeland, I swear on my honor, that I will not let my soul feel repose, nor my arm rest until my eyes have seen broken the chains that oppress us and our people by the order of the powerful.” Guided by Chávez’s solemn voice, the men replaced “the powerful Spanish” whom Bolívar had invoked in his 1805 declaration with “the powerful.”

  It is difficult to pin down the exact year of the creation of the military group known as the EBR (Ejército Bolivariano Revolucionario, Bolivarian Revolutionary Army) and then rebaptized EBR-200 in honor of the bicentennial of Bolívar’s birth in July 1783. Chávez and Baduel maintain that it came about in 1982. At first, Urdaneta said 1983, and then he said that perhaps it was 1982. The fourth member of the group, Acosta, died in 1989 without ever having spoken publicly about the initiation rite. Chávez himself, however, in a letter dated November 1, 1992, stated, “I have a proposal for you—which, to me, is already a decision: to reorganize the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army 200; the one that was born on December 17, 1983.”17 In the magazine Quinto Día, he spoke of the oath and recalled, “that was the year of Black Friday.”18

  The 1983 ritual at Samán de Güere reveals Chávez’s affinity for drawing parallels between landmark moments in his life
and certain historical events. This unusual act was a point of departure in many ways. Until then, Chávez had been a militant working on his own. Now he had a team. As he has remarked on occasion, “more than a lodge, it was a cell.” And it was a cell that soon started reproducing. In three years, the conspirators would hold “five national conferences” for their cause. The first one boasted a public of some fifteen people. The second one took place inside the Maracay central command. By then, Hugo Chávez was using his position as a military academy instructor to raise awareness among the cadets and spur them into action.

  Pedro Carreño, one of Chávez’s students from the 1985 graduating class, eventually became one of the disciples Chávez attracted to his cause. Today a Chávez party congressman, Carreño recalls the experience: “There, no less than thirty second lieutenants had taken the oath. We were to graduate that year, and we knew we would be scattered among all the military units in the country. Before graduating, each one of us had committed to making contact with at least two cadets before leaving [the academy], to keep the movement from dying out. That was when it began to multiply…we knew that the enemies of Venezuela were hunger, corruption, indigence, unemployment, and the misuse of our nation’s immense riches. At military school they talked about this, given the overwhelming importance of the topics of security and defense. The ceremony during which we recited our oaths was held during the day. If it was at night, as was often the case during the days of Captain Chávez, it was carried out in the academy’s parade ground, where there is a monument called ‘The Bust of the Cadet’ and, next to it, a votive candle that symbolizes the light that illuminates us all. There are also an oak tree, which represents fortitude, and a samán [rain tree], which represents endurance over time. There, we were all sworn in by Chávez himself.”

  In July 1984, when General Carlos Julio Peñaloza arrived as the military academy’s new director, some of the cadets’ parents complained to him that the school “was the center of the conspiracy.” He duly informed his superiors, and the officers under suspicion were removed from the military academy. Chávez was sent to the town of Elorza in the state of Apure, close to the Colombian border and far from Caracas. The transfer, however, did not discourage him. The most active of all the conspirators, according to Douglas Bravo, “was Hugo Chávez, in both the theoretical and the practical sense. He was tireless, moving around from Táchira to Guayana, to Falcón, to Zulia, organizing officers.”19

  A few months earlier, Social Democrat Jaime Lusinchi had assumed the presidency (1984–89); his administration would go down in the history books as one of Venezuela’s most corrupt.

  Bravo does not remember the exact date, but sometime in 1984 representatives from the conspiracies within the army, navy, and air force met in the city of Maracay. It was a year of frenetic activity, and Hugo Chávez had his eyes fixed on his goal: to storm the bastion of power. To this end, he worked tirelessly, making contacts and organizing meetings nonstop. Those present at this particular meeting included Chávez, on behalf of the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army; William Izarra, for the Revolutionary Alliance of Active Military Personnel; and an unidentified officer representing the navy.

  The men were meeting in a fifth-floor apartment where the windows were outfitted with ropes for escape. The men were tense because they were afraid that agents from the Directorate for Intelligence and Prevention Services might burst in at any moment. There were nine of them: six military officers and three civilians. Hugo Chávez called the meeting to order. According to Arias, he proposed they “search for a ‘breaking point’ by generating anarchy within the military realm.” He wanted to light the flame. He then suggested that they act as a guerrilla group inside the armed forces. “Chávez was proposing that we undertake violent actions. Blowing up electricity posts, for example,” said Francisco Arias, who was against it. “That was our first disagreement. I said to him, ‘Now? Just as we’re building steam, as we’re growing stronger, consolidating our territory?…We can’t think about blowing up electricity posts, drawing our weapons. We have to strengthen our ranks, grow, and politicize the people inside the military so that they can analyze their function critically, and then when we’re strong, in a few more years, we’ll be able to come out with a political plan.’”

  Chávez, however, was impatient and argued with Arias. “The problem is, you get to a point in the revolution, but there’s a Social Christian inside of you,” he said, referring to Arias’s connection to the Jesuits. The meeting went on for hours, and the balance eventually tipped in favor of Arias’s proposal: to grow, build strength, and arm themselves with patience. The path of the classic conspiracy. There would be two figureheads: Chávez and Arias, aka Che María and Gabriel. That dawn, they gathered in a circle and held hands to swear in Arias, transporting themselves back to the nineteenth century. To Bolívar’s oath, they added the motto of the rebel leader Ezequiel Zamora: “Popular elections, free land, and free men. Horror in the face of the oligarchy.” The civilians committed to the cause included Narciso Chávez Suárez, an uncle of Hugo Chávez; a militant from the Party for the Venezuelan Revolution; and one woman, who was given the pseudonym of Anabela, and whose real name was Herma Marksman. In addition to being the most enthusiastic of the civilian activists, she was also Chávez’s lover and had been for two years.

  PROFESSOR MARKSMAN HAD arrived in Caracas in 1984 to work on a postgraduate degree in history and was living with a friend in Prado de María, a neighborhood at the southern end of the city. The apartment of her friend Elizabeth Sánchez served as a meeting point for Hugo Chávez and Douglas Bravo. Elizabeth’s cousin, a professor at the University of the Andes, had organized the very first meeting between the two men. Though Herma was unaware of the nature of their meetings, she sensed something mysterious about them. Every time a certain “Martín” came over, her friend would ask her not to leave her room, because she didn’t want Herma to recognize Bravo. Hugo would turn up in civilian clothes. After five months of this, Herma knew they were up to something, but her friend still said nothing. Finally, Hugo himself told her everything. “Listen, Herma,” he said, “I like you a lot, more than I should, and I have to confess to you, first, that I’m married, but my relationship is traumatic because she [my wife] is someone who doesn’t really understand me, I drive in the car with her for hours on end and I have nothing to say to her…. But that’s nothing. I have a double life: during the day I’m a career military officer who does his job, but at night I work on achieving the transformations this country needs.”

  That September night in 1984, when Marksman turned thirty-two years old, Hugo proposed a double adventure of sorts: “The one thing I want is for you to help me in this struggle, and to stay at my side until the end of my days. I want you to think about it, reflect on it, and we can decide as we go along.” Herma neither thought nor reflected on it; she felt it. At that moment she decided to become a part of Hugo’s life, not just as a woman but as a member of his conspiracy. She would go on to work tirelessly on behalf of the movement, becoming well known among her comrades in the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army under the pseudonym of Commander Pedro Luis, among others.

  According to Marksman, “Hugo was the head, the one who worked round the clock for that cause, every day, all year long. I saw it all up close: he was the one who scheduled the meetings, organized the agenda, and together we would contact everyone…. During those years he worked nonstop.” Of the Chávez family, only Hugo’s brother Adán participated in some of the meetings. According to Marksman, the others were not aware of what was going on. Around that time Bravo, well seasoned in the art of clandestine activity, served as a kind of adviser to Chávez, offering him guidance on some issues and urging him to be more careful. “Douglas told him that there were already too many people involved with and aware of the conspiracy, and he advised him to close the circle,” recalls Marksman. By the time this decision was made, in 1986, it was too late: one lieutenant who had attended an earlier meeting ha
d “talked too much.” And though eyebrows had been raised before at the military academy, this was the first real accusation. “He is either a man with very good luck, or else Maisanta really and truly protects him,” says Herma, referring to Chávez’s great-grandfather, a controversial figure who participated in the rural uprisings at the turn of the twentieth century. In response to a particularly idiosyncratic need that might well etch him into the Latin American tradition of magical realism, Chávez would go on to venerate Maisanta when he became president, invoking him as one of the gods sitting atop his self-styled Mount Olympus.

  “A young man whom Hugo had tried to bring into the group found out about the accusation in the army command headquarters because he saw the report and informed them in time.” With the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army on high alert, Marksman ran off like mad with a box of documents under her arm; at dawn, she burned them on a beach at Macuto, half an hour from Caracas. Hugo was not always discreet and circumspect. He would hide what he had to hide, but every so often he did something rash, like ordering his subordinates to sing Zamora’s federalist anthem, the chorus of which is “Tremble, oligarchs, long live freedom,” or spouting impassioned speeches in plazas everywhere. In those days, Herma says, the security agencies left much to be desired: “I can’t believe they didn’t discover what he was doing.”