Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  The Venezuelan people were hungry for information. Soon enough, however, they would be able to connect a face to the uprising, for history would take a surprising turn, when Hugo Chávez transformed a failed coup into the advertising campaign of the decade.

  THE DEFENSE MINISTRY was in a feverish state. Top-ranking generals were stationed at Fort Tiuna, analyzing the best way to neutralize the rebel strongholds in Caracas, Maracaibo, Valencia, and Maracay. They didn’t think the insurgents could cause more damage at this point, but they were afraid of more confrontations erupting. Determined to wipe out the rebellion by noon, they knew their foremost objective was to prevent “an atmosphere of ungovernability” and to keep things from “spinning out of control in public protests,” as Daniels recalled. And they thought they had hit upon a solution: to put Chávez on TV, where he could exhort his fellow insurgents to surrender. The vice admiral picked up the phone to telephone Ochoa for approval.

  The defense minister discussed the proposal with the president. “Pérez insisted that we tape it, but when I got back on the phone with Daniels, he framed the situation in such a way, saying that we didn’t have time, that the possibility of a confrontation was very serious at that moment. So I made the decision to put Chávez on without taping him [editing him], and, without a doubt, that was a very grave mistake,” Ochoa later acknowledged. The president, a precursor to Chávez in his keen awareness of the power of the media, says he warned the defense minister, “‘Right now I am telling you: Do not allow him to speak on live television. They can tape him in some room and edit a version of it.’ The problem was that we wanted to resolve the problem as fast as possible, since there were a few strongholds that hadn’t surrendered.” According to Carratú, CAP had also ordered that they “strip him of his weapons and exhibit him handcuffed.”

  Daniels received the go-ahead and ordered his men to put in calls to the reporters from the TV stations, so that they could tape the message.

  Chávez was very clear about the symbolism of his clothing: “I didn’t have my beret or my decorations and the first thing that came into my mind was the image of General Noriega when the Americans presented him after the invasion, in his undershirt, completely defeated. And so I said to them, ‘Get me my beret, I’m going to go wash my face.’ ‘Write what you’re going to say,’ Vice Admiral Daniels Hernández told me. [I replied,] ‘No, no, I’m not going to write anything. I give you my word that I will tell [my men] to surrender.’”19

  The lights went up, and the cameras were set in place. Commander Hugo Chávez appeared ramrod straight in his paratrooper’s uniform and red beret, flanked by General Jiménez and Vice Admiral Daniels. Every so often, a nervous tic in one of his facial muscles would tug at his cheek, the consequence of the nasal hemorrhages he has suffered since childhood. As he stared straight ahead, he seemed confident, arrogant. He took a deep breath and exhaled a record 169 words in just over a minute:

  First of all, I want to say good morning to the people of Venezuela. This Bolivarian message is for the brave soldiers who are presently at the Paratroopers’ Regiment in Aragua and the Armored Brigade in Valencia. Compañeros: unfortunately, for now, the objectives we established in the capital were not achieved. That means that we, here in Caracas, did not succeed in taking control [of the government]. You did an excellent job out there, but it is now time to avoid more bloodshed, it is now time to reflect. New situations will present themselves. The country must find the definitive path toward a better destiny. Listen to what I say. Listen to Commander Chávez, who sends out this message so that you will please reflect and lay down your weapons, because now, truly, it is impossible for us to meet the objectives we established on a national level. Compañeros: listen to this message of solidarity. I thank you for your loyalty, your bravery, your generosity, and as I stand before the nation and all of you, I assume the responsibility for this Bolivarian military movement. Thank you very much.

  The television crews raced off to their studios. The video was broadcast, unedited, at 10:30 that morning. The eyes of the television viewers opened wide in amazement: “Listen to Commander Chávez.”

  The first thing that everyone noticed was the detainee’s superb communication skills. His impressive composure throughout the speech and his natural gifts as an entertainer came through loud and clear: After a sleepless night that had ended in a military defeat, after having to order his co-conspirators to lay down their arms, who else would have begun a speech with “Good morning to the people of Venezuela”? And when it was all over, two tiny phrases seemed to hang in the air: “I assume the responsibility” and “for now.” The former was a rarity in a country where politicians never seemed able or willing to assume responsibility for anything. And the latter, which sounded something like a threat, was slipped in as a kind of promise, or perhaps a cliff-hanger to a cinematic thriller. It was a way of saying “To be continued.” The television stations broadcast the statement over and over again, not knowing that it would become a powerful and effective promotional tool for the failed coup commander.

  After speaking, says Chávez, “I was totally broken, I felt completely defeated. I mean, I felt that I had wrought the disaster of the century. I had had to surrender, our plan had failed, and on top of it I had to tell all my men to surrender, too. Santeliz sat down to my right, and gave me a slap on the back. ‘Good job, damn, you really said it!’ But me, all I did was look at him and say, ‘What do you mean, good job? I had to tell my men to surrender!’ And he said, ‘For now.’ I didn’t even realize it. It just came out.”20 The rebellion, the attack against those in power, which he had spent fifteen years dreaming about and preparing for, had failed. But he had been its protagonist. And his fate changed drastically thanks to that chance appearance on television. That stroke of luck was what saved his coup from being a complete failure. Hugo Chávez had crossed the threshold separating anonymity and celebrity, and he would never turn back.

  His parents were stunned. Elena was so distraught that she hadn’t even found out what her son had said. “Like, around fifteen days later, a little piece came out in the newspaper with his little face. And so, I sit down to read, and I say to one of my sons: ‘Son, when did Hugo say such pretty things?’ And he said to me, ‘Oh, come on, Mamá, that’s what he said when he surrendered on television.’”

  The other commanders were dumbfounded. And furious. What on earth had happened to Hugo? Shortly after the televised message, La Carlota finally fell, after eleven hours in the hands of the conspirators. At 12:45 P.M., Arias surrendered in Maracaibo, handing over the control that four years later he would gain through legitimate elections. The last to lay down his weapons was Jesús Urdaneta, who had been determined to fight until the bitter end. When all was said and done, Chávez’s co-conspirators had fulfilled their missions superbly, successfully. The only one who had failed was Chávez himself.

  By 12 P.M. on February 4, at least twenty people were dead as a result of the uprising,21 fourteen of them military personnel, and there were scores of wounded as well. That most of the soldiers involved in the coup had been sent to fight under false pretenses remains a dark cloud over this now-historic event. In 1998, referring only to the military casualties, as if there had been no other victims that day, Chávez remarked that “On 4F [February 4] there were fourteen deaths. Fewer deaths than any weekend in Caracas, fewer deaths than [those of ] the children who die of hunger every month in Venezuela. In this light I bear the burden of my violence, and the others should take responsibility for their own violence. I have never avoided this…. Are your hands stained with blood? Someone once asked me. Yes, my hands and everything, all of me is stained with blood, from here all the way down.”22

  AS DAY FADED INTO NIGHT, President Pérez addressed the nation once more. For the fourth time, he assured the country that everything was under control. Now he was telling the truth. More than three hundred military officers had been arrested by then, and the troops who had been used for the coup had b
een returned to their barracks. At Fort Tiuna, Chávez met with Ochoa for the first time that day. The defense minister invited him to dinner. Alone together, they ate their plates of fast food and talked, one on one. The minister lent Chávez his phone, and Chávez, for the first time since his surrender, spoke to Marksman. “Herma, I want you to remember to take care of yourself. I am going to answer to all this, but I don’t want you to worry, because I am not in any danger anymore. And I will call you again as soon as I can.” Nobody would ever learn what transpired in the Chávez-Ochoa meeting. Late at night, the commander arrived at the Directorate for Military Intelligence in the company of his friend and official escort that day, General Santeliz.

  This was where he finally faced his fellow conspirators, all of them wearing the insignia that distinguished them from the rest of the world: a bracelet with a tricolor ribbon, tied to the sleeves of their uniforms. The weight of their stares bore through him.

  “Many people say I was a coward. No, I am not a coward. In every military operation you have the right to fall back…. By the time I ended up on the news, Arias had already surrendered in Zulia,”23 Chávez has said, contradicting every military brief and news report, to say nothing of the statements made by the other conspirators confirming that no other commander had surrendered before Chávez appeared on television.

  The coup leaders spent sixteen days incommunicado, in the holding cells at the Directorate for Military Intelligence. Commander Urdaneta, the most reluctant to surrender of all the insurgents, was angry with everyone. “As they brought us out, we couldn’t see one another, but as you passed by the little windows [of the individual cells], you could say a little something, very fast, to one of the other men. The first time they pulled me out, I passed by Chávez’s cell and ironically said, ‘Hey, man, you surrendered so fast, that was amazing!’ I remember his head was a mess of curls, huge curls, and I was shocked because I had never seen him like that. He moved closer and said to me, ‘Listen, compadre, I just felt like I was all alone.’ And I said to him, ‘Oh, you felt like you were all alone. Well, guess what—I was out there on my own, too. I was running out there with my battalion and my officers, I didn’t have ten lieutenant colonels with me. You had your battalion and your officers with you, too. What did you want?’ And he just replied, ‘Well, I just felt like I was all alone.’”

  He said the same to Arias. “After they put us in jail, one day Hugo and I were walking arm in arm, and I said to him, ‘Shit, Hugo, what happened to you? You didn’t even shoot one single cannon, how come?’ And he said to me, ‘Shit, I was all alone, incommunicado…. I really needed you.’”

  The following day brought more reproaches, although of a different sort, in the provinces. In Barinas, all eyes turned to stare down José Esteban Ruiz Guevara. “His mother and father went all over Barinas telling everyone that the real guilty party was the ‘guy with the beard’—me. And they said that his brilliant military career was over, all on account of me.” Ruiz’s ex-wife, Carmen, remembers, “After the coup, José Esteban came home and said to me, ‘Do you know what Chávez’s father just said to me? That I was a—’ because I had turned his son into a Communist and that that was the reason they threw him in jail, that was the reason his military career was over. They cursed his name a thousand times over. Right there on the corner.” Ruiz Guevara did not get too worked up over it: people had always said that his home was a “nest of conspirators.” What else did people expect of a man who had spent his adolescence in the library of that man? He never visited Chávez in jail, however. He always believed that February 4 was a catastrophic mistake. That was the message he sent with one of his daughters: “I sent him a message saying that I was not going to visit him because there was no way I could forgive that kind of thing. After making it to Miraflores and having the control of the government in the palm of their hands, to let it all go to shit like that? He should have gone in even if they killed him.”

  The only problem with that is that a dead man can’t run a country.

  CHAPTER 7

  A Model Officer

  THE ENTIRE COUNTRY HAD WATCHED THIS MILITARY OFFICER APPEAR on television and listened attentively to his message. The coup attempt now had a face. But what did anyone really know about Hugo Chávez? The first person to pipe up was General Carlos Julio Peñaloza, former head of the army. The general was quite familiar with the man who had made off with the ratings that February 4. The very evening of the coup, on a Venevisión opinion show, Peñaloza declared, “He is a man with charisma, aplomb—there is no doubt in my mind that he is a man, as we Venezuelans would say, echao p’alante.” That is, always moving forward, focused on the future. As the director of Venezuela’s military academy during the mid-1980s, Peñaloza had, at one time, been Hugo Chávez’s boss.

  “When I got to the academy, I found myself surrounded by a very qualified group of officers, among them a very distinguished captain, a man with remarkable leadership qualities, and that was Captain Hugo Chávez Frías, an officer who earned the admiration of his superiors and the affection of his subordinates. A model officer.”1

  Peñaloza was not surprised to see him on television. He knew that Chávez had been plotting his coup for years and moreover that he was the leader of the movement, as Peñaloza had in fact warned the Pérez government when he handed over the leadership of the army seven months before the uprising.

  The Venezuelan people, however, were wondering: What exactly were Hugo Chávez’s plans once he obtained power? How would he exercise it? What measures would he take? What kind of government would he establish? What would have happened to Venezuela had the insurrection succeeded? A pamphlet circulating in the military barracks around that time, signed by the comacates (the commanders, majors, captains, and lieutenants), swore that the corrupt would be brought to the university stadium in Caracas and, following a brief trial, shot. Another document, attributed to the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement, claimed that “The homeland shall be cleaned with blood.” In his first interview from jail, to the newspaper El Globo on February 29, Hugo Chávez shed some light on the matter of his plans for Venezuela. The political objective was “in a conceptual sense, to seize power, and in the concrete sense, to capture the president of the Republic and place him on trial in front of the entire nation.” And he acknowledged that the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement was indeed the author of the document that had been circulating. “That quote is from Thomas Jefferson,” he said. “It says, ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ With that quote, we meant to tell ourselves as well as the rest of the world that when we decided to take this step, we knew there would be bloodshed when we emerged with thousands of armed men. It was an obligatory sacrifice, because no other revolution in the world has ever been carried out any differently.”2 This was the first time the commander had uttered, in public, the word “revolution.”

  Aside from revealing that they had planned to name a joint civilian-military junta and institute a series of anti-neoliberal economic measures, Chávez vowed that his movement’s fight was one “against corruption and against this government” and neatly avoided specifying how he and his team intended to govern the country. In fact, it remained entirely unclear until six years later, when Kléber Ramírez revealed the essence of the new government in his book Historia documental del 4 de febrero (A Documentary History of February 4). First, they would have established a General Council of the Nation, made up of both military personnel and civilians, as the country’s central governing body. The president would be appointed from this group and would be “exclusively subject to the decisions and mandates” of the council, remaining in the position “as long as necessary in order to guarantee the country’s path…so that a democratic assembly might create a legal framework, via a new constitution, for a more profound democracy.”3

  The constituent act of the General Council of the Nation proposed a “national alliance to rescue the dignity of
Venezuela” as a way of facing up to the crisis, and its starting point was “the exemplary punishment, as determined by ad hoc tribunals, of those people who are responsible, at all levels, for driving the country into this general morass.”4 Oddly enough, without bothering to check in with popular opinion, the second communiqué indicated that “we might announce to the nation that the new regime enjoys the wholehearted, enthusiastic support of the majority of Venezuelan citizens.” The council also mapped out a dozen or so decrees. The first one declared that the legislative branch would cease to function as such, and all activities undertaken by the National Congress would be immediately halted. The following decrees offered an idea of what the new government would be like: all the regional parliaments, as well as the country’s highest electoral authority, would cease to exist, as would the judicial branch, which would be entirely replaced by a group of magistrates handpicked by the council. Nothing of the previous system would remain. All democratic institutions would be completely dismantled and replaced with a sole authority that would control everything. On the economic front, the new government would freeze prices for goods and services and prohibit “the free transfer of capital, in all currencies.” The privatization process would be halted as well.