Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  Lameda’s rivals found their campaign backfired. The annoying general was vaulted in October 2000 to a position of immense power and patronage: president of Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), the state-owned petroleum company. Guardian of the golden goose. Venezuela’s oil had been drilled by big Western corporations until 1976, when Carlos Andrés Pérez, in his first presidential term, nationalized the industry and turned PDVSA into a corporate behemoth. It employed thirty thousand people, pumped three million barrels daily, making it the world’s fifth-largest exporter, and fed the state more than half its revenues. It was hailed as proof that a state enterprise could compete with the likes of BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron.

  The problem, from Chávez’s viewpoint, was that PDVSA operated as a state within a state. Its Harvard-educated executives considered themselves a technocratic elite. Swaggering, superior beings who flew in private jets over the mess fumbling politicians made of the rest of Venezuela. They fed the state revenue, yes, but retained much for the company to reinvest—too much said some critics—and regulated payments to the state with a wagging finger. Miraflores would plead in vain for more. Sorry, Mr. President, that’s it for this year, good luck. This was how Venezuela had long worked, except Chávez had no patience for begging from golf-playing, chino-wearing yuppies. He wanted control. Lameda’s mission was to tame the executives and increase the petrodollar flow to the state. He had no background in oil but knew numbers and could decipher the accounting tricks and legal ruses PDVSA used to fob off previous governments. Just as important, Lameda was a soldier and therefore had sworn loyalty to his commander in chief.

  Lameda patted the boxer nuzzling beside his desk and smiled. “There had been problems between me and Chávez, but I always told him the truth. There were ministers who tried to hide bad news. I didn’t. I told him, and it would bother him. You know the easiest thing in the world is to fool a president.” Lameda took thick brown folders from a drawer and piled them up. “Each minister puts one of these on his desk. Twenty-eight ministers, it rises and rises. You think the president can read them all? No. So each minister briefs him. Everything’s going great, sir, marvelous, humming.” Lameda snorted. “Well, at that time the deficit was growing way too fast, but nobody dared say it. All the pressure came on PDVSA, every minister clamoring for more money. I arranged a private meeting with the president in the palace. He was having his hair cut. It was the same barber who used to cut our hair when we were cadets, Don Corleone we called him.” Lameda had brought graphs and charts and talked quickly as scissors clipped around the comandante’s ears. The republic owed PDVSA $2 billion in unpaid debt, he said, and to fill the gap, the company would have to seek funding abroad. Lameda concluded with typical bluntness. “Mr. President, they are lying to you.”

  The next day his phone rang. Chávez. “Lameda, I’m here with the ministers, and I’m showing them your graphs. I’ll put you on speakerphone so they can hear you explain.” His briefing ended with the ministers’ cold anger—even over the phone that was obvious—but no decision from Chávez. The fiscal dilemma was left dangling. “What the president did was trigger a war. Me versus the ministers. They all started conspiring to get me out of the government.”

  In this game of cat and mouse around the throne, the general found himself cornered time and again by Giordani, the planning minister who had locked him out of the budget meeting. “When the history of this government is written, there should be a chapter just for him. He is a master at pulling the strings of power.” In mid-2001, Lameda found himself bypassed until the last minute in drafting a law to squeeze foreign oil companies for more royalties. A committee of Giordani’s allies rejected Lameda’s request for more time, then leaked to the press that certain officials were delaying the law, and those that delayed were enemies of the revolution.

  It was courtiers’ bad luck to serve a micromanaging sovereign in the cell-phone era. “About thirty of us, mostly ministers, were given a special phone and told to always answer. Chávez was number one. I don’t think I ever received a pleasant call on that phone. He rang me several times at 3:00 a.m. to ask about this and that, but really it was to show he could. A demonstration of power.” Lameda’s wife, who entered the room at this part of the interview, shuddered at mention of the phone. “It was a decade ago, and I can still remember the ring tone.” It had pricked the general’s pride to submit so totally to a former lieutenant colonel, and he took refuge in impudence. Chávez once called him when he was in Chile negotiating an $850 million loan to say he had left the country without permission and should return immediately. Lameda refused. The president took this as an affront to his authority and quoted Bolívar: “To call yourself a leader and not act like one is the height of wretchedness.” Lameda replied that, for his part, “I am the president of PDVSA, and I am not wretched.” A friend engraved the exchange on a plaque that sat on his desk.

  Relations between the two men deteriorated. “He noticed I didn’t use words like ‘compatriot’ and didn’t laugh at things that were supposed to be funny but weren’t. I’m very transparent; I can’t hide my feelings. He said: ‘Lameda, you don’t absorb the revolution.’ I said I was a technocrat and didn’t want to give political statements.” Vacations offered no respite from the growing tension. In the fall of 2001, Lameda received a call from number one. His heart sank. “Chávez asked where I was. I said, ‘My president, I will be precise. I am on holiday, sitting on a bench at the Dolphin Mall in Miami opposite Victoria’s Secret, where my wife is buying underwear.’” The comandante hung up, then rang the next day to order Lameda’s immediate return for an urgent meeting. “It was the eleventh of September. Fifteen minutes later I was watching a plane hit the Twin Towers. Getting back was a nightmare, but I caught the last flight before the airport shut. I reported straight to the palace. I was left waiting, then an aide told me the president no longer needed to see me, that I could go home.”

  The comandante honored Guaicaipuro with pomp and ceremony that December by moving the warrior chief’s symbolic remains to join Simón Bolívar’s in the National Pantheon. He moved the other Guaicaipuro, slowly and without glory, to irrelevance. Allies in the oil company were pressured to leave. The government bought ailing energy companies against his advice. The comandante ordered Lameda to fire a colleague on suspicion of plotting his assassination. The comandante ordered him to donate $1 million of oil profits to Bolivia’s opposition and glowered when Lameda refused, citing regulations. Nicknames mocking his appearance began to surface in state media: Conehead; Bullethead; Egghead. Giordani, the planning minister, returned to the attack, ambushing the general in meetings, withholding reports, contradicting PDVSA estimates. Lameda flailed back. Giordani, by all accounts a man of personal honesty, could not be accused of corruption. Instead, Lameda gave Chávez a private dossier making different allegations about his tormentor: Giordani had been born in the Dominican Republic; Giordani was a Cuban spy; Giordani led a shadowy socialist cabal called the Garibaldi group. Chávez laughed and told Lameda he was imagining things.

  In February 2002, Chávez fired him. The president wanted a more cooperative keeper of Aladdin’s cave. It was announced on the Saturday of carnival, when Venezuelans were at the beach drinking, drumming, and dancing. No one read newspapers that week. The president, Lameda said, told him he could remain in government and pick a lesser job. The general pondered the offer awhile, then declined, and also requested immediate retirement from the armed forces. He wanted to cut all ties.

  It was a turning point. Lameda was a symbol of old-fashioned norms, the earnest numbers man who kept the oil flowing and the nation’s accounts in order amid Chávez’s rhetorical thunder. And now he was leaving. The comandante had given Lameda, and the country, a choice. With him or against him. It was not about ideology or great policy differences. It really boiled down to him. Lameda had been catapulted into PDVSA to bend its Ivy League barons to the comandante’s will but, little by little, lost faith in his master. Chávez’s
personality and style made him wince, while the barons made him feel like one of them. And so he changed sides.

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  By late 2001 three protagonists were impelling events in Venezuela. One, of course, was Chávez. After obtaining special powers from the National Assembly, he unveiled forty-nine decrees affecting agriculture, industry, and state institutions. Few were truly radical, but the lack of consultation and the secret drafting infuriated farmers, business leaders, and trade unions. Luis Miquilena, the president’s veteran political mentor, and string puller, quit in despair. “That fake revolutionary language . . . I would say to him, ‘But you haven’t touched a single hair on the ass of anyone in the economic sector! You have created the most neoliberal economy Venezuela has ever known. And yet you go on deceiving the people by saying that you are starting the blah, blah, blah revolution. Which means you deceive the crazy revolutionaries we have here, plus you scare the people, the businessmen who could help you build the country.’” This he said years later to the biographers Marcano and Barrera Tyszka. In late 2001 the shrewd, old fox was still a minister but preparing to jump. He had lost faith in his protégé. And maybe sensed what was coming.

  A second protagonist was the privately owned media, especially the television networks Globovisión, RCTV, Venevisión, and Televen. They launched a relentless barrage against Chávez, criticizing, condemning, exaggerating, and distorting everything he said and did. News anchors, reporters, and interviewees fused into a shrill, sustained diatribe depicting the president as an ogre, an out-of-control menace to society. It fueled a protest movement, comprising mostly middle-class professionals. Some adopted his insult “escuálido” as a badge of honor. They organized strikes and jeered the comandante at baseball games, so he gave up going to stadiums and watched his beloved Magallanes on television. They interrupted outdoor presidential broadcasts with increasingly loud cacerolazos, leaning from balconies and occupying street corners to clang pots with ladles. “Let’s record them and make a CD,” Chávez joked to aides, but he hated the cacerolazos with passion.

  And then there was a third force. Los amos del valle. The masters of the valley. Tycoons, executives, generals, and bishops, allies of the media lords, who agreed the monkey in the palace was going too far. The cardinal of Caracas, Monsignor Ignacio Velasco, acted as a bridge between the military and civilians. They met in mansions and talked late into the night, consulted the calendar, made plans, clinked tumblers of scotch. They did not emerge into the sunlight, not yet, but rumors swirled. The air turned heavy, expectant.

  Watching all this were the Americans. Bill Clinton was gone, and his successor had no intention of inviting Chávez back to the White House. George Bush viewed Venezuela’s president through the eyes of Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte, and Otto Reich, cold warriors who had served the Reagan administration’s counterinsurgency campaigns in Central America in the 1980s. Another way of putting it was they had facilitated right-wing dictators’ war crimes. Two decades later the cold war was history, but they returned to the White House just as suspicious of anything left-wing in Latin America. To these agents of U.S. power Fidel Castro was an abomination. And now he seemed to be nurturing an heir. An heir with oil. They spent 2001 sniffing the wind from Caracas and worrying it would gust across the region. After the Twin Towers fell, the stakes rose. In the immediate aftermath of the al-Qaeda atrocity, almost everyone—including Chávez—expressed solidarity with the United States. The unity was fleeting. A month later Chávez condemned U.S. bombing in Afghanistan as a “slaughter of innocents,” provoking fury in Washington.

  —

  The screen shook as if the cameraman was nervous, or maybe just excited. It zoomed on a pair of feet, then panned low and wide across Baralt Avenue. A million feet, maybe more, marching on the palace. By some counts the biggest march in Venezuela’s history. They had tramped the city from east to west, stamping and singing—“he’s going to fall, he’s going to fall”—and were now just a few blocks from Miraflores. All of a sudden, as if on command, they stopped, hesitated. Something was blocking them. A gray vapor filled a corner of the screen, clouding the picture. Tear gas. A rock hit the asphalt, then another, and another, a meteor shower. The screen shook again, as if the cameraman was running. It was April 11, 2002, and the throne was under siege.

  The images from outside Miraflores that mesmerized the country—whoever was not at the march seemed to be watching it—were replaced by a government logo and the sound of trumpets. “This is a special announcement from the Ministry of Communication and Information.” The president appeared, looking solemn. He was wearing a suit and sat at a desk framed by a Venezuelan flag and a portrait of Simón Bolívar. “Good afternoon, my dear fellow countrymen and countrywomen of Venezuela. Here we are, as ever, facing our responsibilities.” The president was in Salón Ayacucho, named after the battlefield that sealed South America’s independence, a handsome room of caoba-paneled walls used for televised ceremonies. It was beneath the palace, beside a chapel and a dungeon reinforced to withstand bullets and bombs. He continued. “I have taken this decision—according to my watch, it is fifteen minutes to four in the afternoon—to call this special radio and television broadcast to send a message to all Venezuelans . . . especially that minority who appear to not want to hear, who appear to not want to see, who appear to not want to accept reality.” All channels had been chained to carry the broadcast. The president wished to show he was in command. But he was not.

  While he was talking and monopolizing the nation’s screens, mayhem erupted outside the palace walls. Molotov cocktails shattered and flamed. Bullets hissed. A voice cried: “They’re shooting!” Who was shooting? The marchers looked around in panic. Gunfire seemed to be coming from all directions. They stampeded, feet tangling and twisting. People collapsed onto the asphalt and lay motionless, blood pooling around them. A massacre was unfolding.

  The crisis had started a week earlier when the president made a very different broadcast on his television show. Ebullient and combative, he had fired and humiliated PDVSA executives, reading out names one by one. “Eddy Ramírez, general director, until today, of the Palmaven division. You’re out! You had been given the responsibility of leading a very important business . . . This Palmaven belongs to all Venezuelans. Señor Eddy Ramírez, thank you very much. You, sir, are dismissed.” He blew a whistle, as if he were a soccer referee. The audience cheered, and the comandante continued working his way through a list. “In seventh place is an analyst, a lady . . . Carmen Elisa Hernández. Thank you very, very much, Señora Hernández, for your work and service.” The voice dripped sarcasm, and he blew the whistle again. “Offside!” The broadcast delighted supporters and enraged opponents. They said enough.

  Within days the opposition called a general strike, then this march. Ostensibly, it was to demand the executives’ reinstatement, but really it was to channel the boiling resentments of those—half the country, according to polls—who hated Chávez. The media lords and the masters of the valley pulled strings behind the scenes. If they were going to attempt a coup, this was the moment. A human river filled streets and avenues, overran plazas, burst onto highways, singing, chanting, drumming, banging pots. Hundreds of thousands of people, some said more than a million. At the front, leading them all, holding a giant Venezuelan flag, three men: Pedro Carmona, Carlos Ortega, and Guaicaipuro Lameda. Carmona, patrician and grandfatherly, headed Fedecamaras, the business federation. Ortega, a chunky, gravel-voiced firebrand, headed CTV, the country’s biggest union federation. Lameda, just two months out of government, symbolized the fired PDVSA workers and those who had believed in, then broken with, Chávez.

  The march was supposed to end at the oil company’s headquarters in Chuao, but the speeches demanding the president back down, reverse course, change tune—or else!—didn’t satisfy the turbulent sea of banners and faces. It had heard this before and now, intoxicated by its size and energy, demanded more. Demanded that Chávez go. It appeared spont
aneous, but opposition leaders, it was later revealed, had planned it. “Let’s go to Miraflores!” yelled Ortega. “Let’s go to Miraflores!” And with a great roar the sea again became a river and surged through the valley, west, toward the palace. Marching on Miraflores was forbidden, but the crowd was heedless and rushed on, rushed to sweep Chávez away.

  Halfway up Baralt Avenue, with Miraflores just a few blocks away, national guard troops and pro-Chávez grassroots groups called Bolivarian Circles occupied side streets. They were vastly outnumbered but armed and resolved to protect the president.

  Lameda, his suit rumpled and tie askew because he had been carried on shoulders to stay ahead of the crowd, had planned with other leaders to demand to meet Chávez, but the path to Miraflores was blocked. The human river met the improvised Chavista defense. Insults flew, then stones. The marchers sang the national anthem. Each side eyed the other, the atmosphere electric. Lameda hopped on the back of a motorbike and roared toward Venevisión, the country’s largest, privately owned television network, “to explain,” he said later, “what was happening.” There he was met by Carmona, the business leader, and Gustavo Cisneros, the channel’s billionaire owner.

  While Lameda and other interviewees—all anti-Chávez—explained why the president should resign, the standoff around Baralt Avenue exploded into violence. Stones, rocks, Molotov cocktails, tear gas, gunfire. The president cut in with his broadcast, obliging Venevisión and all other channels to show his soothing message from Salón Ayacucho. Television was driving events, and for as long as he spoke, no channel, in theory, could show the violence unfolding outside. Chávez’s tone was calm. He asked those who had marched on the palace to reflect and repent. He told the nation to focus on happy topics, like a new scheme to subsidize vehicles. After ninety minutes he concluded with reassurance. “The situation isn’t serious. The situation is under control.”