Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  AFTER A NUMBER OF MISHAPS with the old Boeing 737, the president decided it was necessary to purchase a new aircraft. As the air force began to weigh the options, Chávez placed only one condition on the purchase of the new plane when he discussed it with the experts advising him in the matter: it must not come from the United States. With this in mind, they recommended an aircraft manufactured in France, with VIP furniture and fittings, including an executive office, bedroom suite, and a luxury bathroom. When it came to light that the president with the Robin Hood airs had finally settled on this plane, an Airbus 319 that would cost a total of $65 million, the public went ballistic, for it was quite a contrast to his constant wheedling about the need for austerity. The transaction was protracted, but this did not slow Chávez down in the least. During his first three years as head of state, Chávez spent 170 days outside the country—in other words, more than five months. Visiting seventy-one countries on four continents, he circumnavigated the earth.

  Finally, when the new plane arrived in Venezuela in March 2002, the Airbus spent an entire week in the hangar because it was deemed unwise to exhibit it in a country where antigovernment protests had reached a boiling point. On April 6, when the gleaming new aircraft, named FAV 0001, performed a test run at La Carlota air base, a massive human chain—complete with cacerolas—surrounded the airport to protest what they felt was extravagance that was inconsistent with the president’s preaching. A week later, a fleeting coup attempt against President Chávez threatened his chances of ever sitting down in seat number 1, behind which hung a painting that he had personally ordered, of his hero Ezequiel Zamora. As fate would have it, he would make it back to Miraflores and debut his new plane. Months later, a video of its luxurious interior (which also boasted portraits of Bolívar and Simón Rodríguez) were broadcast on television. It was an extraordinary sight to behold, with beige leather seats and gold fixtures. According to an air force pilot familiar with the matter, the new plane had in fact been necessary, and he even added that of all the Airbus models in existence, Chávez had selected the smallest one, with forty-two seats. This, however, did not stop the newspaper El Universal from baptizing it el chupadólares, “the dollar drain.”

  The old aircraft, Chávez decided, “is going to become the first plane to be used in a new tourism program for the masses, so that the poor may see Canaima [national park] and visit the islands of the Caribbean.” Until the middle of 2004,2 this was not the case. The next time anyone heard anything about the old Boeing 737, it was during the protests that erupted when people learned that it had been used to take Chávez’s ex-wife, Marisabel, and her two children to Disney World. Later on, the former presidential pilot Juan Díaz Castillo caused a scandal when he resigned from his position and stated that the presidential plane was being used to give members of the pro-Chávez Bolivarian Circles a lift here and there on occasion. It is worth noting that during his first days as president, Chávez questioned whether the planes belonging to the national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, were being used to take certain government employees on little excursions. Díaz also stated that security regulations had been violated because people with firearms had been allowed to travel on the plane, and he also added that a colleague of his had once been assigned the “mission” of delivering, via Cougar helicopter, a box containing cereal and milk to the first lady, who was at the beach.

  The new head of state had started his term by reducing the number of government ministries from seventeen to fourteen, but by 2004 that number had risen to twenty-three. He also cut back on the security detail for former government officials and changed the names of autonomous institutions and organizations to distinguish his administration from previous ones. And he vowed to save money. The word “poverty” clung to his lips. Upon his arrival at the presidential residence, a colonial mansion tucked away in a leafy Caracas neighborhood, he expressed outrage at the luxurious accommodations. “I declare myself a socially anguished man, and that anguish only grows when I arrive at La Casona, when I contemplate that luxury and those gigantic salons and those gardens. When I am there I cannot sleep thinking of all the children who don’t have enough to eat,” he announced shortly after moving in.3 La Casona, an old coffee hacienda built in the eighteenth century, boasts four square miles of constructed space and twenty square miles of gardens. Bought in 1964 as the presidential residence, it has thirteen rooms for the family’s living quarters, two guest rooms, ten for the service and guard staff, plus ten sitting rooms, two dining rooms, seven interior patios, a pool, a gymnasium, a bowling alley, and an open-air movie theater.

  “I don’t need such a big house. I could live in an apartment with my wife and children, and I would only need one bodyguard just in case someone decided to throw a rock at me,”4 he said during one of his first press conferences as president, but he didn’t move out.

  “I don’t want to live like a king as long as there are children who clothe themselves with newspapers. I don’t want imperial paraphernalia,”5 Chávez said, and although he questioned the fact that the mansion had a swimming pool and “even a movie theater!” he would nonetheless give the okay four years later to a remodeling job so that his family could enjoy the pool. Chávez would put up with the luxuries of La Casona for his first three years in office. Later on, the ghost of assassinations and conspiracies, to say nothing of his neighbors banging away on their kitchen pots, would send him running to safety at the Fort Tiuna military base, where he decided that the house normally occupied by the defense minister needed refurbishing.

  Thanks to all of Chávez’s revolutionary-minded preaching, presidential travel and expenses have become the subject of unprecedented scrutiny. The opposition congressman Carlos Berrizbeitia, vice president of the parliamentary Commission of Administration and Services, keeps a detailed account of the president’s every trip. By mid-2004, the Venezuelan chief executive had taken 98 trips, visiting 135 countries—not counting lightning trips of less than three days, which do not require approval from the legislature—and had been out of the country for a total of 248 days. It was quite a record: eight months and three days. The countries he visited the most were Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba. Ever since controls were placed on the foreign exchange rate in early 2003, the Foreign Currency Administration Commission, which had overseen the restriction, approved $7,499,800 in presidential travel expenses for 2004. This was not the only item on the presidential balance sheet that shot up drastically.

  Hugo Chávez, who has always ascribed a symbolic value to clothing, abandoned his liqui-liqui as soon as he crossed the threshold of Miraflores. And soon thereafter he would abandon the suits fitted for him by Clement, turning instead to Giovanni Scutaro, the Italian tailor preferred by the very wealthiest men of Caracas. The military uniform, however, would always be his preferred outfit—in fact, he liked it so much that he began to use it for official events, despite being retired from the military and despite his advisers’ admonishments to put it away. Within the armed forces, people took umbrage whenever he donned the full dress uniform of the army general, since he had never actually graduated to that rank. Technically speaking, the failed coup of 1992 had put an end to his military career. Nevertheless, one day, he came up with the idea of restaging a scene that brought Venezuelans of a certain age back to the days of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship of the 1950s. Chávez arrived at a military parade on Caracas’s Paseo de Los Próceres riding in a convertible and wearing the dress uniform of a general, with a tricolor sash across his chest, and a jacket heaving with military decorations. The first lady was at his side, dressed in pink and wearing a hat that recalled the confections favored by the former dictator’s wife. The mise-en-scène provoked resentment among many in the barracks and outrage among Chávez’s adversaries. Months later, during the act of contrition he performed at his first public appearance following the failed coup against him in April 2002, his first promise was to hang up his uniform for good.

  During his early days in Mira
flores, Chávez demonstrated a predilection for shirts with wide stripes and white collars and cuffs. For more informal occasions, he favored a safari-style hybrid shirt-jacket with shoulder pads, which made him look even more corpulent than he was. Local gossipmongers swore that the outfits were gifts from Fidel and made of bulletproof material.

  Chávez has often remarked that his favorite color is blue, but during this period he was most frequently seen in green, and for proselytizing purposes, he began to favor red, for its associations with both his party and his Bolivarian Revolution. On one occasion, he spoke of the distress he had felt one day upon opening his closet to find more than one hundred suits. Someone had bought them, he said, without his knowledge. “Someone, I don’t know when, gives me these suits, and I don’t have any other choice but to put them on.”6

  His time spent in the corridors of power has only refined his tastes. In mid-1998, as he pounded the campaign trail in plaid long-sleeved shirts and heavy sweaters, the cream of Caracas’s designers agreed that he was the worst-dressed candidate, but today he is possibly the best-dressed president in the history of Venezuela. And perhaps all of Latin America. Nowadays Chávez wears only the finest suits, according to the society columnist and local fashion arbiter Roland Carreño: “Brioni, the Italian house, sends President Chávez his suits directly from New York.” In mid-2004, the ex-comandante appeared on TV looking sharper than ever in an impeccable dark suit as he announced the campaign to defend his presidency in anticipation of the recall referendum slated for August 15, 2004. The suit, by Lanvin, had cost somewhere in the vicinity of $3,000, according to Carreño, who says that “President Chávez possesses one of the most magnificent wardrobes on the continent,” with ties by Hermès and Pancaldi. He has also developed a penchant for watches by Cartier, Boucheron, and Rolex. In 2003, the attorney general’s office, headed by Chávez’s former vice president Isaías Rodríguez, who is a member of Chávez’s party, received a formal complaint regarding the presidential expenses, which had ballooned by 1,000 percent. Predictably, the investigation went nowhere.

  Berrizbeitia, who was a member of the Venezuelan Congress from 2000 to 2005, began to keep track of Chávez’s expenses in early 2002, when he heard the president, in a televised address, ask the people of Venezuela to make sacrifices for the revolution even if they were “naked and hungry.” According to the information he has gathered, based on the official budget report, Chávez as president has cost the nation between $6,000 and $7,000 a day. By 2004, the presidential expenses had increased by 54.3 percent over the previous year, placing the Miraflores budget at $60,894,764.7 According to his old mentor Luis Miquilena, “there is an abyss between the humble gentleman Chávez once was, the man who wanted to sell La Casona when he arrived because it was just too much for him, who wanted to do away with Miraflores Palace and establish a university in its place, and the dandy who dresses up in Gucci and wears Cartier watches. The Chávez of today is a Chávez completely beholden to the concupiscent pleasure of power.”

  SOME BELIEVE, THOUGH without much evidence to support their claims, that Chávez’s newfound taste for luxury is the result of the relationships he has cultivated with the sumptuous world of the Arab elite. Ever since taking office, Chávez has led the crusade to defend the price of Venezuelan oil, which in 1998 closed on a downward spiral at $10.80 per barrel.

  “Look at the inheritance you have left me: oil is at less than $10 a barrel,” he complained when he became president. He became fixated on the idea of orchestrating a meeting of OPEC member states in Venezuela, undaunted by the fact that ever since the establishment of the cartel in 1960, the member countries had convened only once before, in Algeria in 1975. The second OPEC summit was held in Caracas in September 2000, thanks to the initiative of the Venezuelan president, who traveled to the Middle East to extend his personal invitation to the kings, emirs, and heads of state in question. Chávez and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi took an instant liking to each other: Chávez had long admired him and was extremely familiar with Gaddafi’s Green Book, from his days plotting the 1992 coup. And defying the U.S.-imposed isolation of Iraq, he was the only head of state to visit Baghdad after the Persian Gulf War. When a U.S. government official asked him to cancel the trip he responded with outrage: “Can you imagine that? How unbelievably disrespectful!…I’ll go to hell if I feel like it,” he said. A photograph of Saddam Hussein driving a Mercedes-Benz with Hugo Chávez in the passenger seat traveled the globe shortly thereafter.

  In the space of two years, the Venezuelan president got what he wanted, and by late September 2000, Caracas was another city altogether. The government made a Herculean effort to fill potholes, collect garbage, repair tunnels, and hide the hundreds of roving merchants who normally battle it out on the streets of the city center, in a massive effort to show his guests a clean, tidy Caracas that the city’s residents had surely never seen before. At the closing ceremonies of the summit, attended by eleven foreign dignitaries and delegates,8 the Venezuelan president reiterated that with the Caracas Declaration “we have relaunched a united OPEC!” It wasn’t just rhetoric, either: from that point on, the cartel would act as a bloc, respecting fixed export quotas, making reductions, and encouraging the price of oil to rise. Hugo Chávez was so jubilant that at the end of the event, held in the Ríos Reyna Auditorium in the Teresa Carreño Cultural Center, he burst into song, crooning the tune “Venezuela.” Since then, the price of Venezuelan crude oil has more than doubled: by September 2006 the price was over $50 a barrel.

  Later on, the oil issue landed Chávez in his diciest predicament since the attempted coup of April 2002, though the outcome allowed him to stop feeling miserable, as he acknowledged. In December 2002, Chávez’s opposition organized a national strike, accompanied by protest marches that paralyzed the oil industry, which represents approximately 80 percent of Venezuela’s export business.9 As a result, the country was without oil for several days. According to political insiders, the strike was to last for only a few days, but a sector of the opposition, independent of party affiliation, imposed an agenda it had been hatching for a long time: an indefinite strike that would paint the government into a corner and force Chávez either to resign or to agree to a referendum that would decide his fate as president. The country’s economy fell to pieces, but Chávez refused to be bullied. After swiftly militarizing the oil facilities, he turned to his Middle Eastern allies for help in meeting his export obligations, hired retired oil industry employees and foreign technicians and engineers, and headed off his dwindling supply problem by importing food and fuel, principally from Brazil.

  The strike, which left the country paralyzed for sixty-three days and which the government called “sabotage,” ended on February 2, 2003, the fourth anniversary of Chávez’s rise to power. The strike cost the country 10 percent of its gross national product, approximately $9 billion, and crippled the industry for months. By the end, the strikers were exhausted and the populace was fed up. The Venezuelan president emerged triumphant and ordered the dismissal of some 19,500 oil workers, about half of the country’s oil industry workforce.10

  The following year, in his annual address to the nation on January 15, 2004, President Chávez stated, in front of the National Assembly, that “2003 brought with it the task of reclaiming Petróleos de Venezuela and its operations, and the management of its finances. And as I stand here today I can tell you that yes, I am able to take charge of PDVSA [Petróleos de Venezuela], whereas before I was not. And do you know how I felt? Like a miserable wretch. Bolivarian that I am, I cannot help but recall Bolívar’s words: ‘To call yourself a leader and not act like one is the height of wretchedness,’ the very height of wretchedness. That company now belongs to the Venezuelan people, and it always will.” Then he offered the following revelation: “Often, crises are necessary. Sometimes, they even have to be generated—within reason, of course. The PDVSA crisis was necessary even when we, well—it’s not that we didn’t generate it, we did generate it, b
ut when I blew the whistle on Aló, Presidente that day [on April 7, 2002] and started to fire people, I was provoking the crisis; when I named Gastón Parra Luzardo and that new board of directors, well, yes, we were provoking the crisis. They [the oil workers] responded, and the conflict came about.”

  Chávez admitted that the problems within the oil industry had started months before, in April 2002, when the workers went on strike to protest the changes at Petróleos de Venezuela. That conflict, sparked by the president’s words, exploded just a few days before a coup d’etat removed him from power.

  CHAPTER 12

  Entangled April

  HUGO CHÁVEZ THOUGHT ABOUT IT FOR A MOMENT. PERHAPS HE FELT that everything had just happened too fast in the past few hours. Perhaps he couldn’t quite figure out how that thing people call “reality” could just come to a halt, right there in the barrel of a gun. Was that the solution? What is the defining moment that leads a person to decide that the only way out is by firing a bullet? Seated next to him was his vice president, José Vicente Rangel, who urged him to fight, to resist, whatever the consequences. Suddenly someone informed them that there was a call for the president. It was Fidel Castro. The president picked up the receiver, said a few words, and listened. It was midnight. Fidel said, “Save your people and save yourself, do what you have to do, negotiate with dignity, but don’t go and sacrifice yourself, Chávez, because this isn’t going to end, do not go and sacrifice yourself.”1 Chávez hung up and asked to be left alone. He sat down, and he thought hard about things. And then, for the second time in his life, he decided to surrender.