Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  Although he couldn’t have possibly imagined that the phenomenon would take on such mammoth proportions, Chávez knew something was happening. It dawned on him when he was in his first cell, in the bowels of the headquarters of the Directorate for Military Intelligence: “The first human being who entered my cell was a priest, the chaplain of the military jail. Surreptitiously, he slipped me a tiny Bible, hugged me, and whispered something in my ear. I thought he was going to say something to boost my morale. But instead he said, ‘Get up, out on the street you’re a hero.”1

  The affection Chávez inspired was not just the result of his personal charisma, either. The people were fed up with the elite and were hungry for some kind of reaction to the rampant corruption in the government. The incident also jibed well with the traditional Venezuelan view of the military as a bastion of order and effectiveness not found in the civilian realm. In addition, the conditions allowed the insurgents to present themselves as victims of their own crime, victims of history. From his very first statements, Chávez invoked the Father of the Nation to justify and legitimize his actions. In an interview that appeared in El Nacional a month after the coup attempt, Chávez said that “the true creator of this liberation, the real leader of this rebellion, was General Simón Bolívar. With his incendiary verb, he has illuminated the path for us.”2 From the very beginning, Chávez created an extremely effective symbolic relationship, basically saying that he and Bolívar had staged the coup, that he and Bolívar wanted the country to change.

  Even after Chávez and another group of detainees were transferred to Yare, a prison two hours away from Caracas, the situation remained the same. Without moving an inch from the prison where he was incarcerated, Chávez was carrying out extremely important political work. Every day he drew more and more sympathizers to his cause. The entire country wanted to steamroll the traditional political ivory tower. All the parties had dismal reputations. Though isolated in jail, Chávez was becoming more of a public figure with each passing day. In the middle of his mushrooming popularity, his girlfriend began to wonder: “I said to him, ‘Hugo, this is transitory, ephemeral. And it would be terrible for you to believe all this, because look at how those famous artists all end up when their popularity dies down.’ And he said to me, ‘I’m clear about that. That’s not going to happen to me.’” But it did, according to Marksman. She feels that this process transformed him, that a messianic fire had begun to burn inside him.

  According to Chávez, his relationship with Simón Bolívar began in childhood. “Instead of Superman, my hero was Bolívar,” he has said, recalling that “in my village, my grandfather would say to me: look, there’s Bolívar’s mountain. And I would imagine Bolívar crossing the Andes. Ever since I was a child, I was always shocked at the way they betrayed him, how he died alone and betrayed.”3 Ever since becoming president, Chávez has developed a penchant for novelizing his life. But there is also something of a national culture of identification with the founding father. Bolívar is the glorious father of the nation, but he is also the glorious son the Venezuelan people abandoned, allowing him to die alone in a foreign land, Colombia. Bolívar is always a superlative, an everything: military leader, thinker, strategist, writer, caudillo, genius, lover, model, guide, God…. The relationship with him is part of an absolutely religious culture that the historian Luis Castro Leiva termed “Bolivarian theology.”4 In 1970, Germán Carrera Damas published El culto a Bolívar (The Cult of Bolívar), a seminal text about the mythification of the national hero and how it has evolved over time: “Its initial manifestation as the cult of a nation, a direct form of admiration and love, has evolved toward the formulation of a cult for a nation, with a liturgy dedicated to caring for this worshipped object and promoting its development.”5

  From his first days in jail, Chávez presented himself as the high priest of this faith, insinuating that he had rescued a hero whom all Venezuelans, with their corrupt governments, had betrayed. Chávez revived and empowered the myth, revitalizing the symbol’s function as judge and censor, commandeering its ability to inspire hope and some kind of emancipation. He brought back the idea of a paradise on the horizon. The historian Elías Pino Iturrieta maintains that by creating a new Constitution “based on Bolívar’s doctrine” and adding the word “Bolivarian” to the country’s official name, Chávez has carried out a baptism of sorts, closing a circle that began two centuries ago: “Through a new civic sacrament, a single historical actor has come to embody the destiny of Venezuela, within an incontestably legal framework. The manual of nationality has bestowed a holiness upon the great man’s thoughts. The Liberator, then, has reached the apex of secular liturgy. But he does this much like those lucky souls who approach the altar and pass through the filter of the Vatican and receive the blessing of the Popes: with no doubts and for all eternity.”6

  This is the faith, the belief system that suggests that Bolívar is eternal and present, a light that dispels shadows, a path toward salvation. But this phenomenon is also an exercise in fidelity, in the act of believing that Bolívar is the origin, the true repository of Venezuelan identity.

  “What we propose,” said Chávez to the Argentinian newspaper La Nación, “is the idea of reclaiming this primordial notion, beneath the aegis of which our Republic was born. Simón Bolívar’s idea. We don’t need to go around copying models from other latitudes…. Bolívar had a pluripolar vision of the world.” During their years in jail, the insurgents produced a document they entitled “How to abandon the labyrinth.” The title was inspired by The General in His Labyrinth, the Gabriel García Márquez novel based on Simón Bolívar that is said to be Chávez’s favorite book. By that point it was clear that the coup masterminds had earned themselves a symbolic victory by appropriating the figure of the liberator and monopolizing it for their own purposes.

  From the jail, however, a popular uprising seemed like a rather remote illusion. On November 27 of that same year another attempt was made to overthrow the government. Clearly, there was a connection between the new military insurgents and the ones behind bars. The group on the outside had been in constant contact with those in prison, and they all remained determined to take control of the country by force; the possibility of assassination was even included in their plans. They were still obsessed with removing Carlos Andrés Pérez from Venezuelan politics and history, no matter what. Everything suggests that Chávez kept himself apprised of the other group’s actions until the end—according to intelligence reports, Chávez used his brother Argenis to send messages to the conspirators from inside the jail.7 A wiretapped phone call intercepted a week before November 27 substantiates those claims.

  That day at 4:30 in the morning, as the rest of Caracas was sleeping, the insurgents activated their plan to occupy Miraflores, the presidential residence of La Casona, the La Carlota air base, and other key points on the map. Led by two air force admirals and a general,8 they commandeered the antenna that controlled the signal of three commercial television stations and then launched a violent assault on the state-run television station, murdering anyone who resisted. After successfully executing these maneuvers, they broadcast a video of Hugo Chávez expressing his support for the uprising and exhorting the people of Venezuela to join in. By sunrise, fights had broken out at the gates to Yare, as some thirty soldiers and a smattering of civilians boarded a tractor and attempted to gain entrance to the section of military detainees, in an effort to rescue Chávez. In a few hours’ time, things were not looking good.

  The insurrectionists were unable to control the commercial TV station Televén, channel 10. And in an almost exact replica of the entanglements of 4F, President Carlos Andrés Pérez appeared on TV to let the country know that he was safe and sound and that this second coup attempt had failed just as the first one had. For several hours, however, the conspirators managed to create a situation that was deeply frightening to the nation. On the state-run television channel, armed civilians and soldiers speaking in primitive, violent S
panish spouted off lengthy tirades, exhorting the audience to unearth whatever sticks, bottles, and homemade weapons they could find to overthrow the government for once and for all. In some neighborhoods at the western end of the capital, pockets of riots broke out, and the city was paralyzed by the thunderous boom of the four airplanes that attempted to bomb La Carlota and Miraflores. Most of the armed forces, however, supported the government and resisted the attack. By noon, the coup leaders stated that they were ready to surrender, which they did at around four in the afternoon. By then it was clear that no popular revolt was going to rise up and unseat the government in power. In contrast to February 4, few Venezuelans supported these insurgents, viewing them instead with fear and trepidation in light of their violent statements and bloody actions. The government had also learned its lesson and did not offer microphones to any of the coup leaders as they laid down their weapons. Seventeen planes were damaged, and four were taken down. A group of 93 conspirators fled the country by plane and sought asylum in Perú. According to official reports, the casualties amounted to 171 dead (142 civilian and 29 military), 95 wounded, and 1,340 people arrested in connection with the attack—500 officers, noncommissioned and otherwise, 800 enlisted soldiers, and 40 civilians.

  No matter how much the men behind the events of February 4 tried to distance themselves from the second coup, it was impossible not to connect the two actions. This new frustration demoralized Chávez. Despite his popularity, the situation in prison with some of his fellow conspirators had changed considerably: “During those months, December 1992 and January 1993, I was quite a loner, in the same jail, and there, for the first time in my life, I felt the bile of bitterness for having been singled out by my friends as the one responsible for the failure.”9

  None of this stopped him in his tracks, however. If he had ever envisioned his personal destiny as inextricably linked to that of his country, his experience in jail would serve as part of that romantic, woe-filled episode that heroes always endure before attaining victory. It was a test, the purpose of which was to purify his vocation for power. William Izarra has stated that Chávez “was convinced he had an earthly mission to fulfill, guided by a force superior to that of human beings.”10 This jibes with the heroic nature of Bolivarianism. The Great Father, Simón Bolívar, however, was not the lone historical figure being resurrected here. Inside this new altar were two other warrior icons: Ezequiel Zamora and Pedro Pérez Delgado, better known as Maisanta.

  Ezequiel Zamora (1817–60) was a small-town merchant who got involved in politics under the flag of the Liberal Party, spearheaded a peasant revolt in 1846, and became the icon of the Federal Revolution under the slogan “Free land and free men.” The romantic left tends to exalt this bit of history, overlooking the fact that during the administrations of José Tadeo Monagas (1847–51 and 1855–58), Ezequiel Zamora held government posts and even married a wealthy widow, which left him a very prosperous landowner. In 1858, when Monagas was overthrown, Zamora was exiled, but he later returned as the military leader of the Federal War and went on to found the state of Barinas, where, one hundred years later, Hugo Chávez was born. The leader of a popular army and a renowned military strategist, Ezequiel Zamora died on January 10, 1860. During a military operation aimed at occupying the city of San Carlos, he was shot in the head, though, according to legend, the bullet came not from the enemy but from his own comrades in arms.

  Nedo Paniz, in whose home Chávez lived for a time after his release from prison, recalls, “Once we were walking along, and he said to me, ‘You know something? I haven’t told this to too many people. I think I am the reincarnation of Ezequiel Zamora.’ After that I began to see that he had a strong tendency to that sort of thing.”

  Jesús Urdaneta, Chávez’s friend and companion from his days at the military academy, heard the same confession. “Once he said to me, ‘I’m going to tell you something I have never told anyone before, but I know it’s true. I am the reincarnation of Ezequiel Zamora.” Urdaneta described another anecdote from their years in prison: When we were prisoners—he was in Yare and I was in San Carlos—we kept our cell phones hidden so that we could call each other. One day he called me up and told me that they wanted to kill him. And then he said, ‘Remember about Zamora, they killed him from behind his back.’ And I said to him, ‘Stop thinking about that kind of nonsense. Don’t talk to me about that. Who’s going to try and kill you, come on?’ But he’s always got that idea floating around his head, especially around the anniversary of Zamora’s death. That frightens him. He’s terrified that someone is going to kill him the way they killed him [Zamora].”

  Chávez rescued Ezequiel Zamora in the theoretical sense as well, by turning him into the pillar of his political enterprise. Along with Simón Bolívar and Simón Rodríguez, Bolívar’s teacher and mentor, the federalist hero completes the tripartite theory that Chávez is fond of calling the “tree with three roots,” the ideological source of his revolution, borrowed from the ideas of Douglas Bravo and his Party for the Venezuelan Revolution. With this proposal, Chávez claims that “we have boldly tried to search for an original, indigenous reference point, of an ideological model that might fit around the premise of Bolívar, Zamora, and Rodríguez…. We are a revolutionary movement, a popular movement working on behalf of the subjugated of this country and this planet, on behalf of justice, revolution.”11

  Before the failed coup of February 4, Chávez wrote a book entitled El libro azul: el árbol de tres raíces (The Blue Book: The Tree with Three Roots), which attempted to articulate the theoretical foundations of his Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement. He presented “an autochthonous ideological model rooted at the very deepest level of our origins and in the subconscious of the national self,” which he identified as “the EBR system,” the tree with three roots of which “E” stands for Ezequiel Zamora, “B” for Bolívar, and “R” for Simón Rodríguez. E, B, and R also happen to be the initials of the Ejército Bolivariano Revolucionario, the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army. Chávez underscores Zamora’s role as the leader of a peasant rebellion against the “conservative oligarchy” with his mottos “Free land and free men,” “popular election,” and “horror in the face of the oligarchy.”12

  Néstor Francia, an author and intellectual connected to the Chávez government, defines the significance of each character in the following way: “Bolívar is the Liberator and the principal historic reference of chavismo, and he is also Venezuela’s great foundational myth. Rodríguez is the teacher and wise man, the innovator, the great figure of all that is universal within the national consciousness. Zamora is the fire of the land, the great champion of social causes, of justice.”13 The historian Elías Pino Iturrieta sees things differently, pointing out that the “tree with three roots” is “a military composition,” with deep-seated roots in a very specific vision of Venezuelan identity.

  “Chávez,” says Pino, “believes that politics is the work of men of action and confuses men of action with men of weapons, but this perception is not exclusive to Chávez. In the nineteenth century, Venezuelans always confused the man of action with the man of weapons and always tried to place power in the hands of men with weapons. Life has revolved a great deal around men of weapons—they are part of a very necessary mythology in Venezuelan society. The last representation of that myth is Chávez and the helmets and military boots that surround him.”

  Another book by Hugo Chávez, Un brazalete tricolor (A Tricolor Armband),14 is a collection of six texts written between 1974 and 1989. An apologia for the army and the military life in general, the book includes a prologue by the author that borders on patriotic kitsch, with phrases like “the armband fluttered over El Avila against a sky of midnight blue.” In his analysis of Un brazalete tricolor, Pino Iturrieta points out that “for Chávez, the laws of Venezuelan history have led to a never-ending war that will only reach its conclusion through the one transcendent entity that allows this history to exist, an entity which is to be wholly tru
sted because it pertains entirely to the tradition of liberty: the army that springs back into action to scrub clean the honor of ‘the humiliated mother.’”

  PEDRO PÉREZ DELGADO is perhaps a minor saint, especially when compared with figures like Simón Bolívar and Ezequiel Zamora. But in the personal devotional scheme of Hugo Chávez, his role is primordial because he and Maisanta are united by bonds of blood. Chávez is Pérez Delgado’s great-grandson. One of his most vivid and oft-recalled childhood memories acknowledges the importance of that connection: “When I was a boy, they told me I was the descendant of a murderer…. When I was a teenager, I tried to analyze the situation a little, because I was really very confused, it was all so vague: a great-grandfather who was a guerrilla or an assassin? I wasn’t sure of anything.”15 As far as anyone knows, Pérez Delgado was a guerrilla who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, stood up to the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. Historians have argued about him: some believe he was much closer to a common criminal than a revolutionary hero, but his war cry did go down in history, giving him the nickname by which he would always be remembered. Whenever he headed out to war, he would yell out, “Mai Santa!” which was his way of saying “Madre Santa!” or Holy Mother. It has also been said that this might be a reference to the Virgen del Socorro, the Virgin of Succor, of Valencia, whom he worshipped.