Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  It is the man and his quest for power.

  CHAPTER 10

  State of Grace

  THEIR PERSONAL HISTORIES, WHICH IN MANY WAYS REPRESENT THE history of modern Venezuela, had crisscrossed circumstantially for years. But for the first time, the three men found themselves together, under the same roof at the same hour. Hugo Chávez, Rafael Caldera, and Carlos Andrés Pérez. The first man was an enigma; the other two were symbols of a time, a system, and a particular way of practicing politics. The date was February 2, 1999. In the modest chamber of the Venezuelan National Congress, the former military officer who had led an armed rebellion seven years earlier was poised to receive the tricolor taffeta sash, to be placed on his person by the outgoing president. Outside, a throng of supporters in red berets were yelling themselves hoarse shouting “Viva!” over and over again in celebration of their leader, an outsider whose antipolitical discourse had transformed the apathy of his countrymen into hope and enthusiasm.

  “When God created the world,” Chávez had said a month earlier on a visit to Paris, “He gave Venezuela aluminum, oil, natural gas, gold, minerals, fertile land—everything. But He realized that this was a lot. ‘I am not going to make everything so easy for the Venezuelan people,’ said God, and so He sent us politicians!” Now, however, within this very special vision of things, it seemed that God had taken pity on the country and sent them Chávez, who would never call or consider himself a politician. Though he has refused to budge on this point, the facts have proven him a very political animal indeed: blessed with a great deal of intuition, astute and perceptive when it comes to the exercise of politics, beyond his hegemonic inclinations.

  Inside the congressional building, elation and chagrin were the two sentiments visible on the faces in the crowd, which included congressmen, a dozen or so foreign presidents (including Fidel Castro), and the members of Venezuela’s diplomatic corps. It would not be a typical inauguration ceremony in any sense. A tight, bitter grimace stretched across the features of President Caldera as he walked onto the dais to surrender the presidency to the ex-commander whose liberation he himself had ordered. This was not an easy task for him, though in the symbolic and technical senses he did not fulfill it. Contrary to tradition, Caldera did not swear in the new president. In his place, another former military officer who was now the president of the Congress, Luis Alfonso Dávila, did the honors.

  “Without a doubt, I had no desire to confer that sash on Chávez, because I could already sense all the negative aspects of his presidency,” recalls the former Christian Democrat president.

  There was, in fact, some precedent for Caldera’s gesture. The first time he had assumed the presidency back in 1969, his Social Democrat predecessor, Raúl Leoni, had “refused to confer on me the sash. He gave it to the president of the Congress, José Antonio Pérez Díaz, who then gave it to me. So it wasn’t anything shocking.” Caldera notes that even back then he could see “that what predominated in Chávez was his ambition, his desire for power. An ambition not simply to be president for a period of time, but to take over all public authority, and all aspects of the [nation’s] administrative life.” It may also have been a way of making Chávez pay for having tried to hustle himself into Miraflores. Publicly and privately, “through emissaries,” Chávez had asked Caldera to step down from the presidency the day after the elections.

  “I made a categorical statement that I would hand over [the presidency] on the day stipulated by the Constitution,” said Caldera. In other words: two months after the election results were in.

  But nothing and nobody could spoil Hugo Chávez’s joy that day. He, too, had several surprises up his sleeve that would make the moment even more bitter than his predecessors might have imagined. His first surprise, a remarkably irreverent comment, made it clear where he was coming from. Standing straight as a rod, he raised his hand in front of the president of Congress and in a thick voice solemnly thundered, “I swear before God, I swear before the Nation, I swear before my people that upon this moribund Constitution I will drive forth the necessary democratic transformations so that the new Republic will have a Magna Carta befitting these new times. I do so solemnly swear.” The impact of this death knell was not minor. And the new commander in chief was aware of the weight of his words. Not only was he inviting the Venezuelan people to the funeral of the country’s most foundational laws, established in 1961, but he was also inscribing the gravestone of the two-party system that had ruled the nation for four decades.

  Following this was an acceptance speech that was more like a two-hour tongue lashing, which began—of course—with a quote by Bolívar. The youngest-ever president of the country, born four years before the start of the democratic era, offered an evaluation of the crisis, stating that “Venezuela has received a blow to the heart, we are teetering on the edge of our tomb.” Then he rattled off a statistic that news agencies, foreign correspondents, and even local journalists would repeat over and over again without bothering to confirm it first: that 80 percent of the Venezuelan people were living in poverty. At that moment, the real poverty statistics were grim enough; they needed little embellishment. In 1999, more than half the population of Venezuela—specifically 57.2 percent, more than 13 million people—did not have what they needed to subsist.1 This, however, in no way minimizes the overwhelming predicament Chávez inherited, which he defined as “a time bomb” ready to explode. He announced his intention to deactivate that time bomb and exhorted his countrymen to join him in revolution to bring about a new political system. The audience was probably reminded of his past right then, and so was he—in fact, he took a moment to reflect upon it, saying that “the Venezuelan military uprising of 1992 was as inevitable as the eruption of a volcano.” He followed this by expressing his hope that the future would not hold any military insurrections like the one he had staged. During this speech, which lasted an hour and forty-five minutes, Chávez was interrupted by no fewer than thirty spontaneous bursts of applause.

  Hugo Chávez is not just a man of words. He is also a man of action, and showed it that day. During this address he enacted his first measure, a decree calling for a referendum to push forward his idea of creating a Constituent Assembly to bury the Constitution for once and for all. A new Constitution would not only give his country a new law, either.

  “At that time, it was urgently necessary to transform the political map in order to continue pushing forward the revolutionary project,” Chávez later remarked. “We had only three governors connected to the process…and the National Congress was in their hands: we were the minority.”2 In reality, Chávez’s Patriotic Pole had come out with eight of the twenty-three governorships in dispute during those elections. But for the new commander in chief, this was not enough. In Congress, his party, the Fifth Republic Movement, was in the minority with less than 20 percent, and though the presidential party might have been able to boost its numbers by forging alliances with smaller parties, Chávez would never have been able to come close to a simple majority. The regional and legislative elections held in November 1998, a month before the presidential elections, had left him with an opposition-controlled congress.

  When the new head of state stepped down from the dais, that new Congress’s days were numbered. At that moment, Chávez allowed himself one more marvelous, magnanimous gesture, a final surprise for the audience, the press, the whole country, and, most especially, for one man in particular. The comandante turned on his heel and began to walk toward the first row of seats, where the country’s senators were sitting.

  “I walked away from the front row so that I wouldn’t have to say hello to him, but he came right over to where I was and extended his hand, without saying a single word,” recalls ex-president Carlos Andrés Pérez, one of the people most despised and most severely damaged by Chávez. And then, when it was all over, as if to prolong the glory of his rise to power, the former insurgent walked the few blocks to Miraflores as his followers cheered him on. The preside
ntial guard was unable to contain them, and the throngs entered the palace with their new president. His first official act as president was an improvised ceremony “in memory of those fallen during the events of February 4.” An old woman, who had somehow managed to outsmart the wall of bodyguards surrounding him, hugged him tightly during the moment of silence.

  THE WILL OF THE new president would be done, and fast. The opposition was demoralized, not only by Chávez’s landslide and his enviable talent for reading the pulse of his people but also by their own lackluster performance in the elections. The echo of this punishment vote was felt on every street corner and especially at the doors to the congressional building, where the congressmen who were now among the opposition were heckled by Chávez’s most radical supporters: “Corrupt thieves, go look for a job!” Chávez quickly baptized the previous forty years of Venezuelan politics a “corruptocracy,” a newfangled expression that quickly found its place in the popular lexicon. But it wasn’t all a bed of roses.

  “In the beginning, the president did not know how to run a cabinet, despite being versed in the ways of the General Staff, because in fact a cabinet was more or less like a General Staff,” remarks his first defense minister, General Raúl Salazar, the man who had accompanied Chávez on his walk to freedom when he was released from prison in 1994.

  His first team, made up of fourteen ministers, included few people with experience in public administration. Two well-known journalists, Alfredo Peña, minister of the secretary of the presidency, and José Vicente Rangel, foreign minister, had spent most of their energies railing against the public administration, but always from afar. Power had a magnetic attraction for both men, but neither had ever exercised it from inside the government. And Chávez’s party was not rife with leaders experienced in the ways of officialdom, whether on the municipal, regional, or legislative level. According to Salazar, “They were ignorant in terms of managing the public sector.”

  Chávez, however, proved himself an able politician when it came to dodging obstacles. In an unexpected but well-received maneuver, Chávez confirmed Maritza Izaguirre as treasury minister, keeping her in the post she had held under Caldera. The state of the country’s budget was delicate. According to Salazar, “The [1999] budget was calculated at $13 per barrel of oil, and it went down to $7.20. He had to formulate a new international policy, to make not just Venezuela but OPEC competitive, so that the price would go up by July. There wasn’t enough money in the Treasury to pay salaries…. There were 76 billion bolívars in the National Treasury [approximately $130 million], and 540 billion were needed for the first trimester, and there was no more income. The president learned along the way, but he has a serious problem: he always acts as though he were still campaigning.”

  As he faced the task of leading his government, Hugo Chávez chose to rely mainly on Luis Miquilena, his interior minister, who soon became his right-hand man. According to General Salazar, during the first two months, the new commander in chief accepted suggestions and criticisms with goodwill, but after that point, “it seemed that his circle had deified him and acted as if they knew everything.” During those early days, those not in his camp gave him the benefit of the doubt, at least for the time being, and hoped that he would fulfill his promises to combat corruption and reduce the level of poverty. At that moment, it seemed unpatriotic to hedge bets on his failure.

  “As soon as Chávez won, I spoke with Miquilena and José Vicente Rangel, saying, ‘All right, now that we’ve got this man on our hands—who is going to be a dictator, I don’t doubt that one bit—at the very least we have to make sure that he remains on the path of democracy,’” said Pérez when he was still a senator for life, though this status would be revoked some months later. “On Chávez’s first trip to Colombia, I called President [Andrés] Pastrana to make sure he would be well received, and I also called the Brazilian [president] Fernando Henrique Cardoso, because that was my idea: now that this man had gotten himself in there, let’s see if we can get him on the democratic path.”

  After hearing Chávez’s speech in the congressional building, those who had hoped he might change his tone after settling into the presidency were disappointed. The comandante abandoned neither his campaign rhetoric nor his antiestablishment discourse. From his position as the most powerful man in the land, he continued to invoke the defense of the have-nots against Venezuela’s powerful, a concept that swiftly took hold among the populace. “Hurricane Chávez,” as some called him, did not let up. And in just a few months’ time he did away with entire generations of politicians that had taken decades to evolve and devolve. His first confrontations were with the opposition Congress and the Supreme Court of Justice, an institution he had inherited from previous governments and that questioned his authority to call for a referendum by decree. Resistance was useless. His campaign to impose a Constituent Assembly was simply an extension of his successful presidential campaign. And he was bound to win: the Venezuelan people were hungry for change, and the polls gave him an 80 percent approval rating.

  His newfound authority gave him the tools he needed to consolidate his leadership and confirmed the fact that he was indeed a tenacious man. Maripili Hernández saw this up close as his campaign adviser and, later on, as president of the state-run TV channel Venezolana de Televisión. (She was also vice foreign minister for North American Affairs between 2005 and 2006.)

  “Chávez is a visionary,” Hernández says. “He starts talking about things that one doesn’t understand until a year later. One clear example of this is the Constituent [Assembly]. I remember how, the first time we heard him talk about the Constituent [Assembly], we all said, ‘What is that about? What does that have to do with anything?’ Moreover, communicationswise it was a problem for us because Chávez constantly insisted that we include the topic in every speech he gave, and we just didn’t think it was promotable. But he kept insisting that it was. And so we put all our energy into making the Constituent [Assembly] an electoral offer that people would buy. And he did it, with his insistence. One or two years later we began to understand how important the Constituent [Assembly] was for the country, and if you think about it, it really was a revolution.”

  Less than three months after assuming the presidency, Chávez would savor one of his great moments: on April 25, the people of Venezuela voted, via referendum3 (albeit with a 62.5% abstention rate), to convene a National Constituent Assembly. In May 1999, as head of state, Hugo Chávez became the president of his party, the Fifth Republic Movement. It is a tradition in Venezuela that presidents formally disassociate themselves from partisan activities. Chávez ignored this tradition.

  “What interests us is that Chávez is the principal militant of this political project that we call ‘revolution.’ The other thing is a problem of formal character. It would be hypocritical to claim that the president is not also the president of a party. As it stands, things are genuine and transparent. Don’t tell me that when CAP was running the country he wasn’t an AD militant.” This is how Maripili Hernández sees things. As such, the president himself devised a campaign for the election of the Assembly members. Three months later, the Venezuelan opposition endured one of its blackest days ever. On July 25, more than one thousand candidates vied for the 128 seats at stake,4 and the result was a thunderous upset, as the Venezuelan people summarily expelled the traditional political parties from their positions. The progovernment party, the Patriotic Pole, having presented just over a hundred candidacies, won 95 percent of the seats in dispute. Only six spots went to the opposition.5

  As the day came to an end, the man from Barinas stepped onto the “people’s balcony” at Miraflores to revel in the radiant night, a “home run with the bases loaded,” as he called it. He was as ebullient in victory as his opposition was silent and crushed in defeat. In an unusual gesture, he placed a very public kiss on the lips of his also-triumphant first lady, Marisabel, whose name had quickly been placed on the list of candidates, thanks to a rather idi
osyncratic mechanism known as the “Chávez lottery.” Marisabel, it turned out, received the second highest number of votes of all the candidates for the Constituent Assembly. Among the new delegates were Chávez’s closest collaborators: nineteen military officers, three former presidential candidates, well-known journalists and personalities like the historian José León Tapia, the psychiatrist Edmundo Chirinos, and even a singer of llanera music.

  Three days later, his forty-fifth birthday, his first as president, was celebrated with a party complete with giant cake, fireworks, and mariachi band that sang mañanitas in Plaza Caracas in the city center.

  “I feel as if I’m twenty, as if I were just starting out,” he said as the crowd of ten thousand roared its approval. Could that young boy in Sabaneta, the one who envisioned standing ovations during his childhood daydreams about becoming a great baseball player, have possibly imagined this? Chávez’s passion for baseball would never wane, and later on in his presidency he took special delight in inviting Sammy Sosa to Caracas, where the big-league baseball star pitched to him in the university stadium. Back then, every time Chávez or any member of his family entered a stadium, the crowd would break out in booming applause. He was the man of the hour and he enjoyed it, though he never lost sight of his real goal: power and everything that went with it.