Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  For Chávez, the 2000 campaign was a racecourse with one minor obstacle: just two days before the May election, technical difficulties forced the government to postpone the “megaelections,” so nicknamed because for the first time in Venezuelan history, president, governors, national and regional congressmen, mayors, and councilmen would be voted in on the same day. Election day was rescheduled from May 28 to July 30. On that day, more than 36,000 candidates would be vying for 6,241 elected positions. Along the way Chávez lost a great deal of support in terms of public opinion.

  “In fifteen months as president, he has, with his intolerance and his language, clashed unnecessarily with a great deal of people. He has alienated the support of sectors that previously endorsed him. He has alienated the middle class, the Catholic Church—which supported him quite strongly—and the organized sectors of the working class,” said Teodoro Petkoff, critic, editor, and historical leader of the Venezuelan left, in May 2000.

  The face-off with his rival, his former “soul brother,” was tough. In his campaign advertisements, Arias satirized Chávez with a picture of a hen, in an allusion to Chávez’s performance—or rather, lack thereof—on February 4, though later he would regret this. Hugo Chávez, confident of his popularity, used the same formula that had worked for him in 1998. On the day of the election, the president emerged looking relaxed. After casting his vote in the morning, he played baseball with the members of his honor guard. The majority of the Venezuelan voters that day once again placed their bets on the charismatic man with the incendiary discourse, the man who continued to blame the “corruptocracy” for all the evils that plagued Venezuela and fashioned himself as an avenger out for justice. The election results, of course, were yet another blow to his desperately weakened opposition: the head of state had not lost one bit of his hold on his nation’s people. On the contrary: his voting index rose more than three percentage points. While 3,673,000 people (56.2%) had voted for Chávez back in 1998, that number went up to 3,757,000 (59%) in 2000.8

  The Chávez style, so deeply reviled by a certain sector of the middle class who consider him vulgar and common, continued to incite the fervor of Venezuela’s more impoverished citizens, who gave him carte blanche to do what he wanted. Some three fifths of the unicameral National Assembly fell into the hands of the progovernment party (99 seats out of a total of 165), allowing him to legislate as he so desired and nominate key government officials. The head of state was clear about this: “In my first campaign speech I said that I would exchange all the governorships and mayoralties for the National Assembly” he declared, aware that “that majority would determine the composition of all the other instruments of power: the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Supreme Court of Justice, the Electoral Power, the Attorney General’s Office, the Comptroller General, and the Public Defender’s office.”9 But that wasn’t all. His popularity had had an exponential effect, catapulting unknown candidates into no fewer than fourteen governorships. In addition, their allies in the Movement Toward Socialism party gained control of two more governorships. Previously with sixteen governorships under its aegis, the pro-Chávez platform now controlled a total of twenty-three, in what the president himself called a “spectacular knockout.” The most widely remarked example of what the local press termed as Chávez’s “aircraft carrier effect” was the case of Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, Chávez’s father, who was voted in as governor of the state of Barinas. It was the dream of absolute power come true. The road was wide open for Chávez, far wider than it had ever been for any Venezuelan president before him.

  Supporters banged at the doors to Miraflores as the opposition leaders glumly conceded their defeat. Before eleven that night, the heavy gates of Miraflores Palace opened, as hundreds of admirers poured in, gathering beneath the balcony that Chávez had baptized “the people’s balcony.” As the president emerged with his wife, Marisabel, the crowd roared their approval, sounding like an audience at a rock concert welcoming their idol onstage. These were the comandante’s most fervent devotees, the ones who sang, “Hungry and jobless, I’m sticking with Chávez.” They then spontaneously broke into a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” just two days late. And as all this was happening before him, Chávez overcame the knot in his throat enough to call out, “Thank you for your love…and as José Martí, the Cuban apostle, once said, ‘Love is repaid with love, and I have no choice but to love you.’” That night he made them his and transferred his importance to them: “All of you are sublime, for you have defeated all the campaigns that have come out against us.” As always, he improvised his speech, recalling the days when he had only just emerged from anonymity: “This path comes from the glorious and epic 4F.” Once again, the failed coup was invoked as a symbol and a starting point for the new Venezuela. And just as in 1998, he made a call for unity, “to push the nation forward, so that we can push the ship out to a good sea and into a safe port.” With companies going out of business left and right and foreign capital fleeing the country, the economic situation was depressed, but Chávez promised to launch a new model. When it was all over, at around twelve-thirty at night, he bid the crowd good night in classic llanero style, singing a copla for his audience. Up on stage, the president would never disappoint his followers: a night with Chávez was and always is quite a spectacle.

  THE HEAD OF STATE continued to stun his adversaries at every turn. His appetite was insatiable. Even now, with a majority in the parliament, he wanted more authority, and to this end he behaved like a real caudillo, a real Latin American strongman. Now he wanted to legislate directly from Miraflores, and he solicited extraordinary powers from the National Assembly—which was controlled by docile supporters—to put together a reform package. In the long run, however, the reforms served only to infuriate half the country and inspire his most reactionary enemies to stage a coup of their own. For almost two years Hugo Chávez had been operating in a state of grace. With one triumph after another, he was acclaimed by the masses, but as 2001 approached his fortunes turned. The first people to seriously express their disapproval of the comandante were middle-class teachers and housewives, who felt that their children’s education was being threatened. For the first time in history, the well-to-do ladies of Caracas marched into the city center toting megaphones and signs and yelling out, “Don’t mess with my children!” Two issues were responsible for igniting their ire: the decision to make premilitary instruction a mandatory course in secondary schools, and the approval of Resolution 259, which allowed the Education Ministry to rewrite history textbooks. Disgruntlement in the education community only grew as word spread about the revised contents of the textbooks, which included, among other things, a damning recap of the previous forty years of democratic government in Venezuela and praise-filled descriptions of the 1992 coup and the Bolivarian Revolution.

  But it was the announcement of the new National Education Project designed by the Marxist professor Carlos Lanz, a radical who denounced McDonald’s hamburgers for their transculturizing effects, that put Hugo Chávez’s government to the test. Private schools suddenly became hotbeds of assemblies and meetings among parents and teachers who meticulously pored over the project, analyzing it from every angle. Out of this controversy emerged the first NGO specifically dedicated to combating Chávez policies: the Civil Association Education Assembly. As terms like “ideologized supervisors,” “indoctrination,” and “Cubanization” were heatedly bandied about at these meetings, the middle class began having nightmares about pioneritos, pint-sized Communists, and these nightmares were only exacerbated by the announcement of a new prize to be awarded by the Education Ministry: the Ernesto Che Guevara Prize. On January 20, 2001, parents and teachers took to the streets in the very first anti-Chávez protests, a phenomenon that only grew as time went by. In response to the crisis, Education Minister Héctor Navarro was forced to clarify that the government was attempting not “to Cubanize education but to create a pedagogical model tailored to our culture.”

 
Chávez was not about to cave in to a group of parents he called “selfish and individualistic,” who had begun to ruin his honeymoon. In an unprecedented move, he placed himself at the head of a rally in support of Decree 1.011, employing a discourse filled with clichés that his opponents termed as entirely divisive: “They live quite well, quite comfortably, tremendous house, tremendous apartment, they have no problems, their children attend good schools and travel out of the country. Nobody criticizes them, but some of them don’t realize that a December 6, 1998, took place here…. The thoughts they express when they say, ‘Don’t mess with my children’ are contrary to the social life of a democracy. That indeed is fundamentalism, contrary to the mandate of God…. They look down their noses at everyone else, as if the rest of us were insignificant rabble. Yes, we are the same rabble that followed Bolívar…. The decree will be enforced, and I will be supervisor number one.”10

  The head of state responded to the protests with provocations, exhibiting the qualities that most irritated his adversaries: “Come out to the street and look at me! The more dirt you throw at me, the more I’ll throw at you. That is who I am!” He ended his harangue, as he often liked to do, with a song: “No soy monedita de oro pa’ caerle bien a todos”11 (I am not a gold coin to be tossed around to make everyone happy). In the end, this controversy marked not only Chávez’s first experience with resistance but his first concession, as well. The government finally backed down on Resolution 259 and abandoned Decree 1.011 in favor of a consensus-based educational program.

  Beyond its successful results at the polls, the Fifth Republic Movement, as a political party, did not come together as Chávez had hoped it would. For this reason, the president organized units from the popular sectors to revive the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement. He announced this in mid-200112 on his television show, Aló, Presidente, urging his supporters to register with the Bolivarian Circles so as to create “a great human network” to defend the revolution.

  “They will be made up of honest Bolivarian journalists, cameramen, conuqueros [farmers who own small plots of land], fishermen, true leaders who will come together to work; they may be created at universities, hospitals, Bolivarian schools, at businesses…they will need organization. We can’t wander around adrift. This project will need true leaders in every unit, on every street corner.” To organize the Bolivarian Circles, the president would avail himself of public funds. And he would not hide this. “The command post is where it needs to be. Where? At Miraflores. That is the home of the Political Headquarters of the Revolution.” There, he said, “the direct link will be created and the lists compiled.” The person assigned to head up this little operation was the former military officer and coup stager Diosdado Cabello, then the minister of the secretary of the presidency.

  Although their inspiration likely came from the Panamanian Dignity Battalions, the Bolivarian Circles were inevitably compared to Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Equally inevitable, of course, was the anxiety that broke out among the media, the business community, and the middle class. One week later, Chávez endured an avalanche of criticism and was threatened with charges of embezzlement for having used public funds to attract and organize political supporters while president.13 He responded to these accusations with outrage: “Put me on trial, then! Put me on trial. For organizing the people? For fulfilling my obligation? This is ridiculous…they say that I am violating the Constitution, well, they must have another Constitution…. They can do what they want, because the Bolivarian Circles are mechanisms of direct participation.” The objective, he said, was to attract one million volunteers and swear them in by December.

  Nobody would ever know if he managed to get those million volunteers. By December 2001, the Circles were pushed into the background. The country was up in arms over the ratification of a package of laws drawn up at Miraflores, thanks to the extraordinary powers the parliament had granted the president. The laws in question were in fact forty-nine law decrees, practically one for every week of the year. The Venezuelan business community and the media sharply denounced the hermetic manner in which the law decrees had been conceived, without consulting the specific sectors that would be affected by them. Of all the legislation, the piece that caused the greatest consternation was the Law of Land and Agrarian Development, which Chávez himself acknowledged as very controversial, adding, “I worked on it personally and directly.”14 As far as the commander in chief was concerned, it was “a truly revolutionary, modern law that does not trample upon anyone, it is just fulfilling the constitutional mandate to put an end to the latifundio; to establish a tax; to regulate the possession of land; to subordinate the possession of land to productivity and national interest with the goal of achieving high levels of agroalimentary self-sufficiency.”15 The main objection to this measure was that agricultural and livestock activities would be subject to the dictates of the government, since the government would have the power to make decisions regarding private farms. If the government determined that a particular property needed to cultivate sorghum, it would have to cultivate sorghum even if it was a cattle farm.16 Contrary to what many people outside Venezuela would believe, the new laws did not effect much change with respect to the latifundio, the large, privately owned ranches. In fact, the latifundio would continue to be defined as “all tracts of idle land” covering more than 5,000 hectares. According to the Institute of Superior Studies of Administration, at the time there were “900 lati-fundistas in existence in a universe of, depending on the sources, somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 units of production.”

  Fetishistic about historic dates, the president decided that the controversial law would be enacted on December 10, the anniversary of the 1859 battle in which his federalist idol Ezequiel Zamora defeated the forces of the landowning oligarchy. He decided to celebrate the event in Santa Inés, in Barinas state, at the very spot where Zamora’s battle took place. Picking up on this war-oriented motif, the opposition got out its artillery that very same day and responded with a general strike, the first ever to be staged in protest of the government, and the first strike ever to be jointly organized by the country’s largest trade union, the Venezuelan Confederation of Workers, and the national chamber of commerce, Fedecámaras. Their leaders, Carlos Ortega and Pedro Carmona, respectively, soon became the spokespeople of the opposition. Ortega, an oil industry union leader with ties to Democratic Action (the Social Democratic party), gave the Chávez government its first electoral defeat in the union elections on November 2, which the government called fraudulent. Chávez went on to claim that “the business leadership of Fedecámaras has turned into a political party. It has become the binding factor of the opposition, because there are no opposition parties. Where are the opposition parties? Where is the opposition leader who could bring these groups together? They simply do not exist, and so they are taking on this role.”17

  The strike proved that, though fragmented, the opposition was no longer as “anemic” or “scrawny” as Chávez scornfully termed it. Soon the affected parties initiated a series of legal actions and, amid the ensuing unrest, the parliament agreed to debate observations regarding twenty-four of the new laws. The president, however, stood his ground. There is a postcard snapshot of Chávez at a Caribbean summit on Margarita Island, in a field uniform, flanked by Fidel Castro, brandishing a pair of pliers given to him as a gift by someone who attended the enactment of the Fishing Law. “You have to turn the screws in favor of those who are the weakest, the poorest,” he said on that occasion. And there, with a crystalline bay as his backdrop, he announced that his renewed hard-line stance was a response to the fact that “we have discovered a conspiracy against the government, an attempt to destabilize the country…we cannot allow people to confuse democracy with self-indulgence so that they can do whatever they please.”

  By that time, Hugo Chávez had already earned his place in history as the president most loved and most despised by the Venezuelan people, the president
who inspired the greatest zeal and the deepest revulsion at the very same time. His “chains,” continuous and prolonged television broadcasts with which he would interrupt commercial TV programming at whatever hour and for whatever reason—to talk about some recently granted microcredits, a military decoration ceremony, a desertification conference—generated a great deal of irritation and frustration. Didn’t he realize he was going too far? Was it provocation or simple egomania?

  “I think there’s a lot of those two adjectives. There is egomania, there is narcissism, and to a certain degree he is unaware that he is not charming. He needs to be admired, that is the narcissistic part,” states his friend and onetime psychiatric adviser Edmundo Chirinos.

  In addition to the natural and typical fluctuations of any president’s popularity ratings, Chávez’s image eroded further because of his adversarial style and overexposure in the media. After almost three years in office, he was still extremely difficult to pin down. His opponents on the right called him a Communist and an autocrat, while the anti-Chávez left said he was a neoliberal. Despite his invective against savage capitalism and globalization, Chávez opened the telecommunications, gas, and utilities sectors to foreign investors and continued to follow the guidelines recommended by the International Monetary Fund. He paid Venezuela’s debt punctually and was not allergic to taxes. According to the pro-Chávez congressman Tarek Saab, “his idea is to use protectionist capitalism to generate social balance.” Hugo Chávez began 2002 with a certain level of popularity, but he could no longer boast of an 80 percent approval rate. And he knew this. It had been a long time since he had dared set foot in a stadium to watch his favorite team play ball. When the well-known baseball player Endy Chávez would come out onto the field, the crowd would roar, “Endy sí, Chávez no!” People had started banging on their cacerolas, their kitchen pots. And nothing irritated Chávez more than the sound of people banging away on those kitchen pots. Whenever he heard that noise, his proverbial good humor would instantly evaporate. On his Sunday television show Aló, Presidente, he would ask his followers to respond to the cacerolas with firecrackers, even though fireworks are theoretically illegal. For every kitchen pot banged on, he said, “we will hear the sound of five hundred firecrackers, from the great majority that supports the revolution.”