In Venezuela, anything related to Cuba is scrutinized. Once the newspapers published screaming headlines stating that Cuba was not paying for the oil it received. In 2003, Energy Minister Rafael Ramírez was forced to admit that, in fact, Havana owed the country some $190 million. For Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez is the perfect ally who arrived just in the nick of time, when sugar prices took a nosedive and oil prices went through the roof. And the Venezuelan leader, who admires Fidel to such a degree that he himself admits he can’t decide whether to call him father or brother, feels proud to come to the aid of the Cuban leader. In Venezuela, many people have been extremely skeptical of the sudden influx of thousands of Cubans whom the Venezuelan government has put to work on literacy campaigns, health care, and athletic training. The Chávez government justifies the program by arguing that Venezuelan professionals do not make themselves available to perform the jobs undertaken by their Cuban counterparts, who set up camp in poor areas with high violence rates. The official government tally places the number of Cuban professionals and technical experts in the country at more than 20,000, which has given rise to speculations regarding the possible “infiltration” of security agents working for Castro’s G2. There are those who believe that Castro’s agents have come to Venezuela to perform special services for President Chávez, to carry out intelligence-gathering activities for the Venezuelan government, and to help train a pro-Chávez militia. These suspicions have not been confirmed, though there are people who swear they have heard the unmistakable island accent inside the ranks of the military.
Certain sectors of the opposition and some analysts insist that Fidel’s authority in Venezuela is overwhelming. According to them, Chávez’s actions are simply those of someone following a script that is written, day in and day out, in Havana. What seems evident is that Fidel Castro has been granted an unprecedented level of privilege by the Venezuelan president, who is thrilled when people liken him to the old revolutionary turned dictator who boasts the longest period in power of any Latin American leader. It is no secret that Hugo Chávez admires Castro’s feat of staying power, for he himself has admitted his intention to remain in the presidency of Venezuela for a very long time. Perhaps that wish is what led him, on one occasion, to call himself “a second Fidel.”
HUGO CHÁVEZ’S FOREIGN POLICY is a pendulum that swings perfectly in time with his leftist tendencies and his repudiation of the U.S. government, as the Venezuelan president is known for establishing either warm relations or icy distances based on ideological questions. His verbal warfare knows no bounds: he proffers flowery praise for his allies and relentless tongue-lashings for those outsiders he believes to be enemies of his Bolivarian Revolution. Ever since he assumed the presidency in 1999, Venezuela has had diplomatic run-ins with almost a dozen other Latin American countries, including Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Panama, and Mexico.
The Venezuelan president has grown fond of rewarding presidents who employ leftist policies with which he agrees, such as Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, and Evo Morales in Bolivia, whom many consider a Chávez disciple. These rewards are generally granted in the form of favorable trade agreements and oil supply treaties, and in some cases the discrimination is abundantly evident: in Nicaragua, Venezuela decided to supply oil only to townships governed by Sandinistas, and the Chávez government very openly endorsed the return of Daniel Ortega to the Nicaraguan presidency—which is exactly what happened in 2006.
There are, in fact, a number of cases in which diplomatic disputes have erupted because of the Venezuelan leader’s clear support of certain presidential candidates. Several presidents in the region have protested what they feel is interference in their internal affairs. The most emblematic examples of this are Mexico and Peru, two countries with which Venezuela’s bilateral relations are currently in limbo. The case of Mexico came to a head when, at the November 2005 Summit of the Americas, the United States proposed a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Former Mexican president Vicente Fox endorsed the proposal, and an angry Chávez declared him “the puppy dog of the empire” for doing so. As a result, both countries recalled their ambassadors and diplomatic relations were frozen. Later on, left-wing presidential candidate Manuel López Obrador’s perceived closeness with Chávez was used to frighten the Mexican electorate, and when the Mexican courts proclaimed Felipe Calderón the winner, the Venezuelan government refused to recognize his victory.
Then, in May 2006, Chávez publicly prayed that Alan García, whom he called “corrupt” and “Bush’s lap dog,” would lose the Peruvian presidential elections. He went on to promise that if García won, he would sever diplomatic relations between the two countries, and because of this, Peru recalled its ambassador from Caracas. Chávez’s favorite was the former military officer Ollanta Humala; according to some analysts, Chávez’s attitude offended so many Peruvians that it in fact ended up tipping the scales in favor of García. In late 2006, despite the mediation efforts of various countries, Caracas still refused to restore diplomatic relations with Lima.
The oil boom has become such an important tool of Venezuelan diplomacy that a new word, “petrodiplomacy,” was coined to define the manner in which Chávez uses his influence in the region. For certain countries that receive oil under favorable terms, Chávez represents relief from economic woes; for others, he is a noisy and irksome neighbor.
In 2005 and the first quarter of 2006, the ex-comandante decided, without parliamentary consultation, to allocate at least $4 billion (10 percent of Venezuela’s 2006 budget) for foreign expenditures, which would include donations to social welfare projects, solidarity-based investments such as the purchase of Argentinian debt bonds, the construction of bridges, the paving of highways, and the injection of capital to develop projects in foreign countries.26 As for the program of low-cost heating oil for poor Americans, the Spanish language daily El Diario/La Prensa of New York placed on its front page a retouched photo of Chávez dressed up as Santa Claus. In Venezuela, people began to call him Don Regalón (Mr. Gift-Bearer).
The winds have blown in his favor. Ever since he reached the presidency, there have been substantial changes on the chessboard of Latin American politics. Thanks to the failure of neoliberal economic policies and the increasing inequality they brought about, the twenty-first century has kicked off with a spate of left-wing governments in the proverbial “backyard” of the United States. As 2006 came to a close, there was no longer any doubt that Hugo Chávez was the most influential head of state in Latin America.
CHAPTER 15
The Ugly Duckling
MOTHERS TEND TO BE LESS THAN ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THE ROMANTIC fate of their sons. With a healthy Freudian spirit, which varies depending on the case in question, they are wont to bemoan the sentimental injustices that, far too often, are dealt their offspring, who never seem to find that ideal woman they deserve. Elena Frías de Chávez is no exception to this rule. Of her son, she has said, “God can never give a person everything. God has blessed him, God does bless him, but he has had very bad luck with women. There has never been an ideal woman for him.”
One can assume that she is referring to the three most stable of the president’s acknowledged partners: Nancy Colmenares, his first wife, with whom he had three children; Herma Marksman, his lover of nine years; and his second wife, Marisabel Rodríguez, the mother of his youngest daughter, Rosinés. Aside from them, there is quite a legend about Chávez the seducer and womanizer, a man who some say has quite an insatiable appetite.
There is little information to suggest that Hugo Chávez was a ladies’ man in his younger years. His secondary school classmates recall him as a sweet, easygoing kid, not much more. According to one of his female classmates from the early days, his physical appearance was a strike against him: “Hugo was really ugly, so skinny.”
Jesús Pérez, the current Venezuelan foreign minister and a friend of Chávez from those days, under
scores that “he got around a lot…he was charming, not because of his physical appearance, because I don’t think he responds to the canons of what might be called a good-looking man. Before, Venezuelan women wanted a man with hair, tall,” he says, laughing, and goes on to mention some of the classic soap opera actors of the day: “José Bardina, for example, or Raúl Amundaray.”
It is an image that bears little resemblance to the sex symbol he would become, specifically after he rose to fame following the 1992 coup attempt. There may well be more than one melodrama, more than one lustful affair between the postcardlike images we know of his childhood and the myth described by Luis Pineda Castellanos, his security chief in 1998: “My God! The furor that man unleashed was about as conclusive evidence as you could ask for, unbelievable: girls, young, middle-aged, old women, single, married, divorced…they all wanted to touch him, see him, stroke him, have his baby.”1
It is without a doubt an intoxicating experience to become the object of such intense desire overnight. Not even Chávez himself was prepared for it. His upbringing, with respect to women, was characterized by the very straitlaced standards of his mother, Elena.
“At home there were never many girlfriends. I did not accept my sons’ girlfriends. If they had them, they had them outside. And still…I will accept a woman who is a wife, or with whom [a son of mine] may live, or if they already have a child; in that case, yes, they can come here. But just because they have a little fling, they’re going to bring her over here? No, no, no. Not then, and not now.” Even after fulfilling these formal requirements, it does not seem easy to earn the approval of the mother of the Chávez Frías boys. And the first wife of the Venezuelan president was not very lucky in this sense.
“That one, I met her before, I don’t like to even talk about that,” mutters Elena, ending the discussion abruptly.
Nancy Colmenares became Hugo Chávez’s first wife when she was twenty-three. She is also the mother of his three eldest children. Curiously, Nancy has managed to live in a strange and difficult kind of anonymity. Some people attribute this to the fact that by the time Chávez became a public figure, their relationship was already somewhat nonexistent, or at least had deteriorated significantly. Others believe that this anonymity is attributable to Nancy’s personal style, for she is known as a modest, reserved woman. There are others still who feel that she is a woman who started her life over, who shares her life with another man now, and as such has made a conscious effort to keep away from the more dramatic parts of this story. Even today, not much is known about her. Apparently among those who know her she is la negra—the black lady. In Venezuela almost every family has a negro or a negra—terms that, despite their remotely racist origins, are widely accepted in Latin America as expressions of endearment and affection.
One incontrovertible fact is that Nancy does not give interviews. The photographs of her that have circulated in the media are few and far between. The image of her that lingers in many people’s minds is one that dates back to 1992, when she was the overwrought wife going to jail to visit her husband, after he was imprisoned for his attempt to overthrow the government. Those who know her or knew her in some way—even those who have since distanced themselves from Chávez and joined the opposition—speak well of her. Nedo Paniz is a good example: “I know for a fact that at one point they tried to persuade her to make it seem that Chávez beat her. Nancy was not willing to do that, which says a lot about her,” he said, referring to a political group that was known for its efforts to demonize Chávez during his presidential campaign.
All those who were close to the couple say the same thing when it comes to Nancy’s qualities as a human being. A good friend of Nancy’s recalls the wedding: “It was a very simple wedding. La negra was a very simple woman, a very good person. Just like him, very humble…. She didn’t go to school. She was the kind of woman who stayed at home.” Carmen Tirado seconds this opinion, saying that Nancy was “a very nice girl, very humble, a great woman.” Hugo and Nancy became husband and wife in 1977. They had a daughter, Rosa Virginia. Next came María Gabriela and then Hugo Rafael, known as Huguito. During those years, the official reports on his itineraries, political and geographical, never mention his wife and children. Nancy and the family remained in the shadows, drawing little attention to themselves. And Chávez, nowadays so inclined to talk about his family in public, has almost never spoken of that early family experience.
Francisco Arias, the number two conspirator of the 1992 plot, says he thinks that “Nancy was a woman who was a lot like all the other llanera women, the kind that belong to their husbands, they got married, and they cook the food, they keep things together, take care of him, take care of their kids—a very elemental kind of thing, you know? But I think that he loved Nancy in all the right ways, and that he respected her, too.” Despite all this, Arias makes a point of mentioning a quality that Hugo possessed even back in those days, one that quickly became the stuff of legend: “He had a good relationship with Nancy, but since he has a way of falling for women easily…” From very early on, there were rumors regarding Hugo Chávez’s womanizing ways. According to his friend at the time Jesús Urdaneta, “He had started to separate from Nancy when he was a captain—meaning, from the first half of the 1980s. He had problems with her. ‘Try to keep your home together,’ I told him, but we never talked more about it after that. Later on at some point he mentioned they were separating…. Then everything that happened happened, and Nancy would come and visit him in jail. She was a marvelous woman, very humble, very noble, simple, hardworking. She is in Barinas. I think she eventually married her first boyfriend.”
THE DYNAMICS OF THE military lifestyle made certain things easier for Hugo Chávez. It was in this environment that he met Herma Marksman, with whom he was romantically attached for almost a decade. It began in 1984, in Caracas, by chance. A historian and the divorced mother of two children, Herma was trying to get herself a job transfer to Caracas. When she met Chávez, she was living temporarily in a house where her sister Cristina lived. The owner of the apartment, Elizabeth Sánchez, knew Hugo Chávez. A chance encounter and that mysterious thing called “chemistry” took care of everything else. By September 1984, five months after they first met, they were lovers.
“When I first met him,” Herma recalls, “he had a reputation for being a womanizer. Around then he was going out with someone, a psychologist, I think…. I don’t know if he kept on womanizing during those years, when he was with me. I don’t think so. Although he is a very affectionate man, always tossing out compliments.” Five months after they met, “he appeared with flowers” on her birthday. His sincerity was very disarming: right away he told her how much he liked her, and then he went on to explain his situation.
“He never deceived me—he did that later, when he was in jail. From the very first moment, when he wanted our relationship to become more serious, he was very clear with me—and now I’m not going to say that he’s a slime, a degenerate,” says Marksman, now an open adversary of her former lover’s governing style.
Herma also comes from a humble family. Her father had been quite closely linked to social causes, particularly the workers’ struggle in the region of Guayana. He was a man of nationalist devotions and Bolivarian passions. Because of this, the relationship between Marksman and Chávez grew deeper on other levels as well. Marksman soon found herself joining Chávez in his conspiratorial pursuits. From the very start, Chávez told her that he was married and that he was plotting to overthrow the government. He would later apologize to her, however, for having had her secretly followed and investigated. He had had to take care of himself, he must have said. It was no easy task: between war and love, he was already leading more than a double life.
During this period, at least in the romantic and marital sense, Hugo Chávez proved that he was cut from more or less the same cloth as many Venezuelan men of his day and age. His lifestyle, moreover, was quite typical of men in the military. He operated on t
wo fronts: there were “headquarters” and a “branch office.” The distances probably helped. The two women in his life lived in different cities, and, at least during the early years, Chávez managed to make sure that neither of his two houses caught on fire. He saw Herma frequently, and together they created a kind of everyday life, to the extent that this was possible. She still remembers Chávez as a loving, affectionate man: “He would write such pretty things for me, and I remember him as the man who brought me chocolates, who would come by to serenade me, who would sing me rancheras; the man who always remembered my birthday, the man who brought me flowers.” Herma had just come out of a very traumatic divorce and at the time was not especially keen on formalizing their relationship in any way. Even so, their life as a couple grew more and more stable and solid and was filled with all the rituals that mark the life of a couple.
“I don’t think he is such a machista,” says Herma. “But he is jealous. My mother always told me to be careful because he was jealous. And he would write to me and say so himself.”
Her whole family knew him. “Yes, my mother, my children always knew, I felt I had to be honest with them about these things.” And she was honest with them not only about the relationship but about the conspiracy, though some of them didn’t take it very seriously.
“My daughter says she never thought they would actually pull off the uprising.” Despite the fact that Herma’s mother was never very thrilled that her daughter’s boyfriend was a married military officer, her house in the city of Valencia, some two hours from Caracas, occasionally served as a meeting place for the conspirators. In fact, the last time Hugo Chávez and Francisco Arias saw each other before the 1992 insurrection was on her spacious terrace.
Hugo Chavez Page 26
