“The word ‘gratitude’ doesn’t really exist in Mr. Chávez’s vocabulary,” Caldera observes.
Pushing forty, with a pension of some $170 a month, Hugo Chávez started a new life. For the first time ever, he dedicated himself freely and openly to politics.
ON THE SATURDAY, before Holy Week, there was a festive atmosphere in the neighborhood around the military hospital, where Chávez was on the eighth floor. He had been transferred there “because of the internal problems at Yare. They were arguing too much, so we separated them. Chávez took advantage of the transfer to have his knee operated on,” said Salazar, who says he had “the pleasure of picking him up so that he might leave [the prison].” Rather anxiously the coup commander removed his military uniform, the same one he had used during his twenty-six months of incarceration, and donned civilian clothes. Anyone else would have raced home instantly. Not him. A man of rituals, he asked to be taken to the military academy. When he arrived, the place was shrouded in silence, emptied of students and teachers, all of whom had left for vacation. Standing in the courtyard, he stopped in front of what was presumably the great-grandson of the mythical Samán de Güere, the spot where he had sworn the initiation oath of the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army in 1983. He stood there talking by himself, uttering words that Salazar was unable to hear. After that he walked out, a free man.
Among the many people waiting to carry him off on their shoulders was the architect Nedo Paniz. A tall man with bushy hair, familiar with the military world thanks to his affinity for parachuting, Paniz had supported the February 4 uprising and helped, as did other civilians, plan the coup of November 1992. Toward the end of that year Paniz met Chávez for the first time, appearing at the prison even though the authorities were under orders to capture him. Using false identification, he entered the prison and came face to face with the conspirator for the first time.
“He was really something of a snake charmer: very interesting, captivating. That is definitely the word: captivating. I was one of those people captivated by him. When he was freed, the relationship grew closer. I traveled to the interior of the Republic with him, and I supported him, giving him a place to live and an office, helping him with logistics.”
The former insurgent had no intention to return to his modest home in Maracay. Caracas was the power base. And new women began to parade through his life, though only one would intrigue him enough to make him suffer. In reality, he had little desire to settle down with any of them. Nedo Paniz offered him a space in his home, a small guest cabin in the well-to-do Caracas neighborhood of La Floresta. Chávez moved in with what few possessions he had.
“In those days, he was very detached, very different from the way he is now. He had two pairs of pants, a few shirts, and three liqui-liquis: one green, one blue, and one beige. Material things meant very little to him—he didn’t even have a passport or a car. All he had was a house in Maracay that he had given his wife. He had nowhere to go.”
Chávez did not allow himself a moment’s rest. Despite the failed coup and the time in jail, his goal remained intact though distant: Miraflores. He spent many long nights receiving people in the little guest cabin. Food was irrelevant: occasionally he would order fried chicken, fast food. Every so often, he would accept an invitation to dine with the Paniz family.
“He was always pretty reluctant, though, and tended to isolate himself with the little group of lieutenants and second lieutenants who were around a lot.” This “little group” included three disciples who would pick him up and drop him off regularly, taking him wherever he needed to go. They were the former military officers Juan Carlos Castillo, José Calatayud, and fellow Barinas native Pedro Carreño, who had become Chávez’s disciple after taking his military history class at the academy.
“He was a very demanding person who liked to give long, stirring speeches, intended to inspire people,” recalls Carreño, who worked directly with Chávez as his personal assistant in 1987.
As expected, the Chávez myth deflated a bit once he was outside prison walls. Shortly after his release, the media lost track of—and interest in—Chávez, and his name stopped appearing in the headlines. The former conspirator began traveling like mad from one end of Venezuela to the other in la burra, as he and his collaborators baptized the Toyota Samurai that Paniz bought for him. Together he and his three inseparable companions traveled around, taking turns sleeping and driving. After some time, Luis Alfonso Dávila, another former military officer Chávez met through Paniz and who would later become his first foreign minister, came up with the idea of fixing up a van so that Chávez might do some preaching in more remote towns and villages.
“The agenda would begin very early in the day, and Chávez would do his number even if there were only five or six people. He would get out of the pickup truck, climb up onto the truck bed, and fire off a speech as if he were standing before the kind of throngs that nowadays pack the Avenida Bolívar whenever he comes out to speak. He was inexperienced politically, hasty,” Carreño notes. Hugo would often end up hoarse from speaking so much and eat ginger to get his voice back. Sometimes he would get depressed, but he never lost his spirit, because he was guided by a blind faith in himself.
During those “endless hours,” Chávez would read and revise documents in silence. Sometimes he would tell jokes and sing to entertain his companions, or they would listen to music or regale one another with stories of Barinas and life in the military academy. They were free men, and nobody could stop them.
“In the middle of all the bad things, we were lucky in that we were all divorced…. In those days we were convinced that you had to abandon your family.” Hugo’s relationship with his children was checkered, subject to the ups and downs of military life, the conspiracy, his time in jail, and, after that, his political adventures. He would have liked to spend more time with his children, but there was a goal that stood between them: power. He missed his children and on occasion would carve out the time to see them. He often spoke with Nancy, whom he had divorced on good terms, to see how they were. During the period when he lived at La Floresta, he had them stay with him for a little while.
“Without a doubt, it was a very fractured family nucleus. During a few of our tours, we brought the girls along with us, Rosa Virginia and María Gabriela, or Huguito,” Paniz remembers.
Nobody—not even those who eventually became his archenemies—has ever questioned Hugo Chávez’s devotion to his children. He loves them deeply and has always been an expressive, affectionate father. In the middle of those interminable road trips he would telephone them. At the other end of the line there were never reproaches. They knew their father.
“Yes, he loved them very much. But I don’t think it went deep enough. He had a lot of other things to do, more important things. I don’t think that affectionate words and comments over the telephone are substantive enough for a father-child relationship,” says Paniz. In any event, the Chávez children indeed celebrated their father’s then-limited fame and when possible would join him—especially the girls—at some of his events, and they generally seemed happy and content to be at their father’s side.
Nedo Paniz had given Chávez an office in the exclusive commercial and business district of Las Mercedes and, later on, on the first floor of a house in Chuao, a neighborhood in east Caracas. In La Floresta, things had gotten a bit difficult. The inhabitant of the small guest cabin was no ordinary man. He was someone who spent twenty-four hours a day focused exclusively on his political future. The breaking point finally came when the lady of the house, sick to death of having a minigarrison in her backyard, with people coming and going at all hours of the day and night, asked her husband to figure out some kind of solution. “Tell him to have people come to the office and use the guest house to rest,” she told him.
As Paniz recalls, “Even though I said this to him with all the humility in the world, he told me that this was his way of operating.” This was the first confrontation between benef
actor and benefactee. “After a while he left, leaving his clothes and things behind. But he stayed on in my office.”
A multitude of anonymous people who would later become government ministers, ambassadors, congressmen, and government employees passed through the doors of that office, including one curious man who looked something like an anorexic Santa Claus. Every day he would arrive first thing in the morning, sharpen about twenty pencils, climb the stairs, and disappear into Chávez’s lair on the first floor, eating little and working for hours on end. This mystery man was Jorge Giordani, a professor at the Center for Development Studies at the Central University of Venezuela. Eventually, he would become the mastermind and head guru of Chávez’s economic policy. The other regulars at the office, as one might expect, included scores of men who marched through the place like warriors. Most were former conspirators, and all of them were no doubt drawn by the tenacity and daring of the comandante.
After his release from prison, Hugo Chávez began a crusade to get people to abstain from voting, arguing that the system was “fraudulent, illegal, and illegitimate.” His period of wearing the liqui-liqui suits marked a phase of political radicalism that was not necessarily opposed to violence.
“During those first years, 1994 and 1995, we had not yet ruled out the possibility of another armed struggle, but when we went out to evaluate our situation, our actual power, our real power, we came to the conclusion that we just didn’t have it.”6 When he finally left Paniz’s guesthouse in 1995, Chávez moved to a new home very close by in the Universe building in Altamira, which was located on the plaza that, years later, would become a stronghold of the most radical anti-Chávez activists. In that building, he was offered shelter by yet another of those people who had been waiting outside the military hospital the day he was freed: Luis Miquilena. An old ex-Communist, Miquilena became his new mentor, giving him the political polish he lacked, showing him how to fight with the big boys, introducing him to certain members of the economic elite. In time, Miquilena would become the single most influential figure in the first years of the Chávez administration.
BY THE TIME HE crossed paths with Hugo Chávez, Luis Miquilena was so far removed from the Venezuelan political scene that he was a virtual unknown to anyone born after 1960. The leader of a bus drivers’ union, he had broken away from the Venezuelan Communist Party to form his own radical organization, the Proletarian Revolutionary Party, which opposed the brief presidential term of the writer Rómulo Gallegos, from February to November 1948. The members of Miquilena’s party were known as “black Communists” and “machamiquis.” Chávez’s new host spent the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship in prison, and in the mid-1960s, after an extremely active period of participation in his country’s political life, he distanced himself from the public sphere. In his mid-eighties, Luis Miquilena is as vigorous as ever, smoking a cigar as he recalls meeting Hugo Chávez: “A friend of mine told me he needed a cell phone, so I sent him mine. And a few days after he got it, at around ten in the evening he called me up—using the cell phone—to say hello and thank you. Then he invited me over to see him.”
After meeting Chávez, the veteran became convinced that the former coup leader “was absolutely committed to the idea of a project to change things, a project that would serve that immense territory of silent souls, people without voices, without resources, the poor people of this country.” This was how their relationship began, an “almost fraternal” relationship that grew closer when they lived under the same roof. The apartment they shared was tiny, some two hundred square feet at the most. Miquilena slept in one room with his wife, and Hugo Chávez had the other room. They were so close that they could practically hear each other breathing.
During this period with Miquilena, Hugo Chávez was sure that he would never be able to obtain power through democratic means. He had never considered becoming a councilman, a congressman, or a governor. It was a path that didn’t interest him. He clung to that old teenage fantasy of being a celebrity, of playing in the big leagues. And he continued thinking about an assault on Miraflores. How could he land himself in Miraflores without having to go through all that business of small-time political leadership? In December 1995, as all the politicians in the country set their eyes on the gubernatorial elections, Chávez devoted himself to creating an “abstentionist caravan,” which had little or no impact. He still hadn’t realized that the moment would soon be ripe for the outsiders. He wasn’t the only one: the traditional political parties were also unable to see their own agony. The two-party system was foundering, as demonstrated by the victory of political veteran Rafael Caldera, who sensed the crisis early in 1993 and had had the nerve to break away from COPEI, the party he himself had founded, and present his candidacy through a party of his own creation, Convergencia.
Luis Miquilena, almost twice as old as Hugo Chávez, opened the comandante’s eyes. “He was very taken with the idea of armed conflict, the idea that armed conflict was the only path. In that, we had many differences, and I was not in agreement with him on that. From his first meeting with a group of followers, we began to discuss the different paths to be considered, and I told him that here, armed conflict was not a possibility, that he needed to understand that there were many possibilities; that a project like his, the kind of project he was putting together, along with me, was viable within a democratic regime.” By January 1996, two thirds of the population had lost faith in the existing political parties, and the main concerns of the Venezuelan populace were inflation, insecurity, unemployment, and the poor quality of public services.7
Around that time, Hugo Chávez appeared at a protest in front of the congressional building. Wearing a red beret to draw attention to himself, he climbed onto the hood of a car and fired off a heated speech in support of the protesters, calling for President Caldera to resign from his position immediately and allow a transitional government to come in “before this explodes.” At that moment in the center of Caracas, in one of the wings of the legislative palace, a U.S. flag was being burned in opposition to “the imperialism of the yanqui aggressor.” A small article in the newspaper El Nacional termed it “an extemporaneous, folkloric protest.” Still two years away from the elections, Miquilena and a number of civilians began to persuade Chávez to disengage himself from the violent path. “Finally, it was life itself, which is very determined and speaks louder than words, that made him realize the virtue of the other path, the peaceful one, because every time we would bring our proposals to the popular sectors and the economic sectors, he would start to see that the plan we were offering, a plan to effect change, was perfectly viable and accepted [sic], that is, if it had a solid enough social base to win electorally,” said Miquilena.
Chávez later recalled, “We focused on finding out what people thought…we realized that a considerable portion of our nation was not interested in violent movements but was in fact expecting us to organize a structured political movement so that we might be able to take a peaceful path. From that point on, we decided to take the electoral path.”8 Still Chávez hesitated. When he finally took the leap, he did so in an ambiguous, provocative manner, so as not to disappoint his most hard-line supporters. And he made sure not to alter the combative tone of his discourse: it was with the old military-barracks language that Chávez began to effect the change, in February 1996.
“We are advancing toward the exercise of power through the peaceful path,”9 he said, but a bit later on, close to the two-year anniversary of his release from prison, he noted that “if forced, we are willing to achieve it through force.”10
For some time, Chávez had been trying to attract William Izarra to the movement, and in the middle of 1996, Izarra finally joined the group. From his perspective, what prevailed in the Chávez realm of those days
was a tendency toward a revolutionary vision, and its ideological core was the Marxist interpretation of attaining power…the tendencies ranged from hard-line militarism to the most radical revolutionary positio
ns. We also had individuals who came from right-wing political activism, who did not agree with the military sector, but who were seeking a change for the country…. There were also fanatical followers of the Chávez myth…. Generally, because of their excessive zeal, the militants did not allow the incorporation of people who came from the parties that represented the status quo or individuals who wanted nonviolent change.11
“I remember how, when we decided to go with the electoral route, we always talked about the ‘tactical window,’”12 Chávez has said. And the person to open that little window was Miquilena, of whom the comandante once said, “If I had had to pick my father, it would have been him.”
According to Izarra, Chávez’s lack of “ideological substance” was what allowed him to “change concepts” with “relative ease.” For Izarra, Chávez was
very wise and with a great deal of political intuition, which allowed him to decide, quite categorically, who was useful to him and who was not…. Who could influence him and make him change his initial positions, and whom he could ignore…. A swift learner with a prodigious memory, he assimilated the theoretical elements that he needed to understand in order to take political action in a given situation…. He always held fast to the position that he would not be beholden to anyone. Anyone who joined him did so to achieve an end, in which he was the leader and the objective was to get him to Miraflores.13
WITH THIS IN MIND, the extraordinary assembly of the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement unanimously decided, in April 1997, to go to the polls. Hugo Chávez, former coup leader, was now a presidential candidate who intended to achieve his goal “with the conviction of transforming the status quo.” His first slogans were “For the Constituent Assembly, against corruption, In Defense of Social Services, For higher salaries and wages across the board, Bolivarian Government Now.” He looked healthier. He also changed his uniform. Out went the liqui-liqui, and in came an entirely new look: a casual shirt and sweater for the campaign and suits made by the renowned Portuguese-Venezuelan tailor Clement for more elegant occasions. No longer did he look like an old-fashioned insurgent. On the eve of a trip to London, he admitted, “We have been making an effort, a logical one, out of necessity, to change clothes and get some more or less typical Western-style suits…. There is no such transmutation from the liqui-liqui to Clement. I have my combat uniform with me. And if a riot were to break out, I would get out my combat uniform to fight. It is a question of a man and his circumstances.”14
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