Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  The most difficult moment probably came the night that, according to Pineda Castellanos, Hugo came home to the building where they lived, in a housing complex in southeast Caracas, and found his son, Huguito, fourteen at the time, sobbing. Marisabel had thrown him out of the apartment. The situation was so difficult that, shortly before Hugo became president, his three oldest children had to be moved to an apartment that one of his supporters in the Jewish community lent him. The day after his electoral victory, he moved to La Viñeta, an official residence inside Fort Tiuna, but his daughters Rosa Virginia and María Gabriela “did not go because Marisabel didn’t want them there.”

  Nedo Paniz is more categorical: “Marisabel was very difficult. Full of problems. Dealing with her was a real drama…. Chávez had a very complicated relationship with her. It was always very strained.” The majority of the time he spent with them was during the campaign. He remembers one occasion when Marisabel insisted on joining them on the road, bringing along their newborn baby and a nanny. She seems to have had a way of turning their plans upside down in the space of a few seconds. Once in a plane, as they were taxiing down the runway for takeoff, she suddenly decided that the plane had to be stopped, because she had a feeling that it was going to crash and that they would all die. She also had a recurring fear that Chávez would be assassinated. She developed a reputation for being insecure and paranoid, an image that has stayed with her to this day. Bodyguards did not like looking after her, privately calling her “Lalo,” shorthand for la loca—the crazy lady.

  Although she never said as much, clearly there was something else she was afraid of: that Chávez would get involved with another woman. Many people agree that Marisabel was an extremely jealous wife, forever trying to keep tabs on the president—making sure she knew where he was, what he was doing, and who he was with at all times. And people say she caught him by surprise on more than one occasion. “Once Chávez was confirmed as president-elect, he went off on a tour of Europe. During a stop in Madrid, Marisabel suddenly turned up and caught him in the middle of the act, with the daughter of some small-time boss in the revolutionary government…a major scene broke out on account of that,” Pineda Castellanos recalls.9 All of this, however, remains in the murky terrain of speculation. Nothing ever escalated to the point of becoming a public scandal.

  Eventually, Marisabel toned down her high profile. As time went by she seemed increasingly less like her old self and more like Chávez’s wife. It is common knowledge that many people within Chávez’s inner circle were not fond of her and began pushing her away from the political sphere, away from any kind of role in the public eye. She, on the other hand, suggests an explanation for this: “I noticed, among many of the people who were close to my husband, a hunger and a desire for power, for money. My mistake—and perhaps this was not very intelligent of me—was that I confronted them. And I did this very early on, without any shield or protection for myself. Immediately, they all turned into my enemies.”10 Another theory maintains that Chávez himself was the one who decided that his wife’s high profile was not good for the revolution and that he pressured her to move out of the limelight. In 1999, amid ambiguous claims regarding personal health and conflicts with some sector of the pro-Chávez party, Marisabel resigned from the National Constituent Assembly. Even so, after the constitutional reform process was over, the polls continued to rate her the second most popular figure in the country, right after her husband. Political offers poured in from every direction. There was even a group of people who, based on the polls, wanted to present her as the candidate for governor of the state of Miranda in the 2000 elections, but her husband, who was also the head of his political party, deemed it inconvenient and chose to present another candidate, who went on to lose the election.

  There are also those who say that the couple had an air of the Peróns about them, which generated a certain degree of alarm. At one point, when Marisabel updated her appearance, people began to perceive a symbolic likeness to the Argentine heroine: for many people, one particular variation in her hairstyle seemed to reproduce the image of Eva Perón. And whether or not this dynamic actually existed, the relationship between Hugo and Marisabel was rocky at best. In January 2001, Marisabel emerged from the low profile she had been maintaining by granting an interview to the newspaper El Nacional, which infuriated Chávez. The interview quoted her as criticizing the parliament (“the National Assembly is wasting its time”)11 and featured a photograph of her in shorts, thirty pounds lighter, during a spinning session at La Casona with her personal trainer. The following day, she had been planning to join her husband on a trip to Puerto Rico, but as she boarded the plane Chávez had her removed and condemned her to a long period of silence. At that point she vanished from the headlines and did not reappear until more than a year later, on the day of the coup against Chávez, April 11, 2002.

  By 2002 the situation must have been intolerable, given the judicial order issued on February 27, which granted her permission to abandon the official residence with her two children, Raúl (from an earlier relationship with a tennis instructor) and Rosinés, eleven and four years old, respectively. Though at first her departure was attributed to the constant presence of opposition protesters outside La Casona, she later stated, “I could not continue to subject my children to the stress of living in a place we had already fled three times before, practically with a bag of clothes slung over our shoulders. That is no kind of life for anyone.” Most people viewed that step as confirmation of the rampant rumors regarding an imminent separation. Marisabel returned to live in Barquisimeto.

  In any event, the relationship seemed to keep going, ups and downs notwithstanding, as Marisabel frequently turned up in Caracas, even though she never really warmed up to the capital city. It was there that the April 11 coup caught her by surprise. That night, before General Lucas Rincón publicly announced Chávez’s resignation, she boarded a plane bound for Barquisimeto in the middle of a military operation. Nobody in the government or Chávez’s party seemed terribly concerned about her fate. During those chaotic and confusing days, she nonetheless demonstrated the loyalty that her husband clearly needed from her. On April 13, via CNN, Marisabel stated, “My husband has not resigned and is being held incommunicado, and his life is in danger.” There she was, the first lady of Venezuela, confirming for all the world that a coup d’état had indeed taken place. Chávez’s return to power, however, would not signify a return to stability for the couple.

  Two months later, in an interview granted to the newspaper El Universal and held at La Casona, Marisabel expressed herself in no uncertain terms:

  I said it two years ago, that I would never carry on my shoulders the role of a wife of convenience, a wife of appearances. I prayed to God that this moment would never come, because nobody wants their family to come apart, especially someone who believes that it is the cell of society and its vital impulse. But I think that by now, it is no secret to anyone that the situation of the president and the first lady is now in a process of separation that has gone from personal to legal, and it is time to let the country know. I imagine everyone was expecting this. It is no surprise to anyone. Now we just have to wait for the president to officially initiate the legal proceedings.12

  During this interview, she also denied the rumor spread by the opposition that her husband had abused her physically:

  “No, there has been no act of violence in any way.” She did, however, qualify this statement by saying, “Two years ago I stated that, for me, perhaps because I am hypersensitive, there are other kinds of violence, like, for example, when you are not listened to.”13

  Given the general polarization and confusion that were wrought by the events of April, one question posed by the journalist seemed especially pertinent: “Are you also getting a divorce from the Bolivarian Revolution?”

  Marisabel’s response was equally categorical, and it was every bit a definition of her personality and her perspective of the entire process that s
he had lived through. “Where have you ever heard that I am married to the Bolivarian Revolution? I am married to the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. When I made my commitment to Hugo, I did so with a normal man, with the father of a daughter, and everything else is [a series of ] circumstances that have occurred around us.”14

  The next day, her confessor, Jesús Gazo, a Jesuit priest, could not keep from expressing his opinion and publicly sided with Hugo Chávez, offering an ideologized explanation for their separation: “Marisabel could not accept that Hugo Chávez is married to his countrymen…. She did not understand the political process, she did not understand the revolution, she did not understand what he could do with the immense potential he had.”15 That last sentence would remain in the air for posterity, like a bit of unfinished, tricky, difficult business. The priest, who saw them regularly, also felt that “they did not know each other, and they were both unable to accept certain things about each other’s personality. They have very different characters, different expectations, different life plans. That is the essence of their problems, problems that existed before they moved into La Casona and that have nothing to do with the current political situation. I have spoken with both of them before, to try to see if they might be able to forgive each other for many things.”

  A month went by before Marisabel appeared in public again, and when she did, it was to participate in an evangelical music concert entitled “Sana Nuestra Tierra” (Heal Our Land), the purpose of which was to pray and intercede before God on behalf of the country and its political leaders. Toward the end of the year, during the turmoil of the national strike between December 2002 and January 2003, as the country reeled from the impact of almost twenty thousand oil workers who had gone out on strike, the first lady made a brief appearance in the media, surrounded by her children. The message she sent over the television airwaves was terse: “President: Listen to your people.” The government resisted the sentimental message of the former first lady and crushed the opposition’s new effort to undermine it. This may well have been the incident that definitively buried Marisabel as a public persona. After that, nothing more was heard from her.

  In the middle of 2003, Marisabel refused to be interviewed, saying, “I don’t want to know anything about that man. I cannot work the miracle of extricating myself from the life of the man. I do not want to make any comment, neither positive nor negative. I do not want to have anything to do with his life.” The courts would soon grant this wish, as their divorce became final in January 2004.

  THE WOMEN WHO HAVE stood at Chávez’s side at different points in his life are certainly quite different from one another, but one might also venture to say that the man himself has also transformed over time. The Chávezes who were with each of those women were very different men. After his second divorce, Chávez’s love life seemed to slip beneath the mysterious cloak of power. There has been no dearth of easy jokes, hallway gossip, and wild speculations. It was rumored that he had a twenty-three-year-old girlfriend, the daughter of a good friend and a general; that he had a fling with a foreign correspondent; even that he was going to marry a former Venezuelan beauty queen. Chávez seemed quite amused by this last story, though he very flatly denied it.

  “How do they come up with these things? Me, get married?…My own mother actually called me up to ask me how I could get married and not invite her. Well, I am here to make it clear that it is completely untrue.” Chávez later promised that he would not celebrate his third nuptials until 2021 at the earliest, the year he vows to retire from political life. In the meantime, the sentimental life of the Venezuelan president remains an enigma.

  The only foreseeable change in this vein is related to his image, and his family—specifically, his two oldest daughters, with whom he often appears in public. Ever since 2003, the private universe of Hugo Chávez has became a symbol and reflection of the myth that has been built around him, revolving around the notion that his one true love is the Venezuelan nation. From that point on, it seems, his private life became the stuff of mystery, his intimacy practically a state secret.

  Now, more than ever, it seems that his mother’s declaration has managed to turn this entire saga into a bolero: “He has had very bad luck with women. His perfect woman has not appeared.”

  If that is in fact the case, one might argue that more than a few women could reply by saying that plenty of women have had equally bad luck with him. Perhaps it is part of a process that happens to many people. Love affairs, at least as we conceive of them, are never easy to navigate. Perhaps, in this case, it has something to do with the manner in which Hugo Chávez perceives himself—or others. On two separate occasions when Hugo Chávez found himself mired in depression, both Nedo Paniz and Herma Marksman recall how he used the exact same words when lamenting his romantic miscalculations: “I destroy everything I touch.”

  CHAPTER 16

  La Chavera

  THE VENEZUELANS WHO FOUND THEMSELVES SITTING IN FRONT OF the television that evening, idly watching a soap opera or waiting for the ten o’clock news, were suddenly jolted out of their reverie by a sudden change of protagonist and programming. Yet again, President Hugo Chávez had interrupted the television broadcast of the hour so that the Venezuelan people might see him, hear him, feel his presence. The date: July 28, 2004. That evening, he had a very important message for the nation: it was his fiftieth birthday. And he wanted everyone to know about it.

  The camera focused on the supreme leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, dressed in black denims, tennis sneakers, and a red shirt, sitting on a pristine white fence. Perched atop that slender fence with a book in his hands, Chávez appeared rather uncomfortable as he struggled to keep his balance. What was this about? At first, his perplexed viewers didn’t have the slightest idea. What did he want now? With the intonations of a television announcer, the head of state solemnly read the first paragraph of One Hundred Years of Solitude. You see, he explained to his nation, he had just received the novel as a gift. This was his way of announcing, loud and clear, “Venezuela, it’s my birthday today! And, coming up next, you can forget about the soap opera you were watching.”

  Up next was a personal evaluation of half a century on earth, another kind of soap opera entirely.

  In the background, a group of magnificent stallions promenaded through the fields, as if to prove that this was not some studio in the back lot of Venezolana de Televisión—this was a real-life hacienda. The head of state was just a few days away from the country’s evaluation of his performance as president of the Republic. The polls were on his side, but he still had no way of knowing for sure whether or not this would be his last birthday in power. That evening, Hugo Chávez looked visibly emotional, and even slightly nervous. Still, he had full command of the scene and gazed directly into the camera as he stepped down from the fence and walked over to a group of people standing in front of a large house. Equally emotional and jittery, the Chávez Frías family, convened for an extraordinary session, awaited the president.

  In the foreground, quite appropriately, stood his parents, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez and Elena Frías de Chávez. Married for fifty-two years and with six grown sons, they seemed on top of the world there on television, but in the past they had had to weather many an economic crisis as an emotional crisis or two, which had been a cause of concern for their son Hugo during his years at the military academy. His father, seventy-two years old, had first earned a living as a rural schoolteacher in the 1950s. That was how he had met Elena, in the tiny village of San Hipólito.

  “He was nineteen years old, I was sixteen. A girl,” recalls Elena, who was born and bred in San Hipólito and raised by her grandmother, a very typical custom in the rural Venezuela of those years. Elena, by all accounts a peasant girl who dreamed of going to school one day, says, “I wanted to be a professional, I liked education a lot, probably because that was what I saw in San Hipólito…. I saw the school, the teacher, and the idea began to take root in my mind that I w
anted to be a teacher because the teacher was so well dressed, so pretty, and so I said, ‘When I start studying, I want to be a teacher so I can get dressed up.’” But she was never able to study because she started having children in rapid succession, one after the other, seven in all: Adán, Hugo, Narciso, Argenis, Aníbal, and Adelis, and Enzo, who died at six months.

  During their first years as a married couple, and despite the family’s meager economy, all of Elena’s time and energy were dedicated to caring for her little boys, though her mother-in-law, Rosa Chávez, did help out by taking in and raising her two eldest, Adán and Hugo. According to two family friends, after they had moved to the city of Barinas so that her sons could go to secondary school, she was finally able to work and held a job purchasing food and supplies for the public school, though this information does not appear anywhere in Elena’s official résumé.

  In the year 2004, when a sitting room was dedicated to the educators of Barinas, some local schoolteachers were shocked to see Elena Frías de Chávez’s name on the list of “illustrious educators.” Her official résumé describes her as a retired teacher with twenty-five years of experience. She herself has said that occasionally she helped out at school, filling in for absent teachers.

  “I was in adult education. I didn’t really like working with children. I would go with the group where my husband was the director. I always went, at least, to cover someone on three-month maternity leave, or on vacation…. And that was extra money coming in,” states the president’s mother in her new home for the past six years—the Barinas state governor’s residence.

  Her husband, Hugo de los Reyes, had been able to advance professionally with the courses offered by the education ministry and for twenty years was a teacher at the Julián Pino school, the only one in Sabaneta. Some of his former students remember him as a marvelous teacher, “a very serious, responsible person, with a great deal of discipline, always very quick to give someone a rap on the head with his knuckles as punishment for bad behavior. He was strict, though never arbitrary…. At home, it was the father who imposed the discipline, the studies, the concern for doing better, the need to move to Barinas.”