Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  Baduel served as Chávez’s private secretary in the palace in 1999, then returned to Maracay as a general to fulfill his boyhood dream: command the city’s paratroop brigade. It was from there he unraveled Pedro Carmona’s usurpation in April 2002 by rallying not just his brigade but the entire Fourth Division against the coup. It was Baduel’s commandos who rescued Chávez from his island prison and returned him in triumph to the palace. Baduel became the revolution’s hero, his bond with the comandante the stuff of legend. Chávez, confronted by new threats in the form of the 2002–3 national strike and the 2004 recall referendum, needed loyalists in key posts, so he brought the general back to Caracas. He promoted Baduel to head of the army, then defense minister. The president continued to call him Papa and became godfather to his youngest daughter. With his incense and chants, Baduel was an unusual but respected, powerful figure in government.

  And then something stirred. It began with small things. Guaicaipuro Lameda remembered phoning Baduel in January 2003 to complain about Luis Acosta Carles’s televised belch. “He was just as indignant as I was. He said it was an affront to military dignity.” Yet a few days later Lameda watched Baduel applaud the belcher on the president’s television show. “Chávez told everyone to clap, and Baduel went along with it.” In January 2005 the president declared himself, for the first time, a socialist and married the Bolivarian revolution to what he termed “twenty-first-century socialism.” Everyone in government parroted that they too were socialists. Baduel talked about Scandinavia-style socialism.

  Chávez herded his political coalition into a single socialist party, the PSUV, but also wanted the armed forces, the state’s most venerable and respected institution, to embrace socialism. This was consistent with his long-held belief that the military was the sacred heir of Bolívar’s liberation armies. The constitution banned the military from political activity, but for Chávez it could not simply stand to attention, neutral, as Venezuela advanced toward a new destiny. It needed to lead. To mold society just as it had molded him. More pragmatically, he wanted military men in government because they understood discipline, obedience, and the chain of command in a way state bureaucracies and civilian leftists did not. Thus he fast-tracked selected officers up the ranks and brought others into government. About a third of senior officials had epaulets. Baduel’s mission, as defense minister, was to steer the armed forces down their new ideological path.

  The first public hint of a breach came on a hot, humid night on the eve of the president’s December 2006 reelection. He was addressing a rally in front of the palace and summoned Baduel, wearing green fatigues and black beret, to join him onstage. Here, said the comandante, wrapping an arm around him, was an embodiment of revolutionary passion and faith. He thumped the stage. “Long live General Baduel! Long live the Bolivarian armed forces! Long live the revolutionary people. Here we are, lifelong brothers!” The crowd roared. Chávez hugged Baduel closer and shouted: “Let us proclaim the eternal motto: Fatherland, socialism, or death! We will prevail!” It was a recent import from Cuba, where Fidel’s soldiers and young communist pioneers had long cried, “Fatherland or death. We will prevail.” To emphasize Venezuela’s ideological turn, Chávez inserted the extra word. Baduel froze. He did not smile or wave or punch the air; instead, stood motionless, arms dangling, expression hollow. He bit his lower lip and gave a brief, awkward salute when the comandante swallowed him in a hug, then scurried offstage. Chávez waved to the crowd as if all were well. But his minister had just failed a test.

  Years later Baduel would explain the moment in terms of principle. He wanted to keep the armed forces out of politics out of respect for the constitution. He was alarmed by the comandante’s version of socialism, which sounded more Cuba than Scandinavia. And he loathed the comandante’s idea of creating armed civilian militias. “I didn’t want to go to the rally,” recalled Baduel. “The constitution banned us from such events, but it was a direct order. I tried to hide in a corner, but the president brought me onto the stage. He wanted me to shout the motto, but I kept my mouth shut and just saluted.”

  Relations between the two men began to cool. Palace tongues noted Papa no longer had ready access to the ear, in fact was no longer Papa, only Baduel.

  The next test came in February 2007 when Chávez ordered a military parade to commemorate his 1992 uprising. Baduel protested, in vain, that it was inappropriate to honor a coup. “The day before the parade he requested the protocol arrangements. I knew he was planning something, and during the ceremony it happened.” An officer on the parade ground shouted the new motto—the first time it was used at an official army event. It ricocheted around the country, a warning the armed forces were becoming openly political. Baduel was furious and told the media he had not approved it. Chávez shrugged, saying the shout reflected a spontaneous revolutionary spirit within the ranks.

  Baduel felt trapped. How much easier it was to leap out of a plane. In free fall he could turn and roll, but as defense minister he felt tangled and trapped. He was still in government, still with influence over the armed forces, but mistrusted by Chávez.

  The comandante had noted political ambition in his old friend. Baduel acquired economic advisers and began expressing opinions on oil policy. Privately, he criticized the government’s nationalizations, saying they would lead to ruin. Guessing his intentions became a new political parlor game around El Silencio. Supporters in the armed forces and media whispered he should be the next president, that his calmness and moderation would soothe and unite the nation. Chávez, however, could not fire him without exposing division in his ranks, something to avoid in the middle of the 2007 referendum campaign.

  Baduel increasingly sensed a heaviness when he entered the palace. He had no doubt his phones were being tapped and suspected he was under physical surveillance. He sensed a sword being sharpened. When it swung, it broke the last rule left in Venezuelan politics: private lives remained private. Around the palace and El Silencio everyone gossiped about who was sleeping with whom. There were bountiful rumors of adultery among ministers, opposition leaders, and their spouses. It was taboo, however, to publicly use the ammunition. Until Baduel.

  One morning an anonymous source sent a series of excruciating photographs to newspapers. Then, in case anyone missed them, they were hacked onto the National Assembly Web site. First, here was the general, naked, brushing his teeth over a blue-tiled bathroom sink. Unshaven, with a hairy chest, he looked at the camera, his groin partly obscured. Next, sprawled on a bed with a pink blanket, apparently asleep, wearing only a white T-shirt, his penis seemingly semi-erect. Then the coup de grâce: naked on a different bed, obviously awake, apparently masturbating with a doll. Beside him a yellow pillow in the form of a Japanese cartoon character called Pikachu. It was as if Baduel’s dignity had been taken out and shot. A former mistress—a female officer—had taken the photographs some years earlier as a joke. But who disseminated them now? Baduel felt sure it was intelligence services trying to sabotage his credibility. He was branded the Bolivarian Pikachu. His wife stood by him, and he continued as defense minister, but the humiliation burned.

  In July 2007 his term as minister expired, and he let the veil slip. At an elaborate handover ceremony at Fuerte Tiuna, he said the country needed not Marxism but democratic checks and balances. He warned of dark clouds ahead and said he would retire to his farm, like the Roman consul Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who renounced power after saving the republic, and reflect on a return to public life. The comandante, looking shaken, thanked the general for his services. But after the ceremony, away from microphones, he hugged his old comrade for the last time. Baduel later recalled: “He pushed his face very close to mine and whispered: ‘Now you will have plenty of time to enjoy your latifundios.’” In ancient Rome latifundia were landed estates worked by slaves. In Venezuela it was a pejorative term for farms and businesses ripe for expropriation. It was a threat.

  Baduel was not intimidated. He revered Sun Tzu’s a
ncient text, The Art of War, and would cite its axiom: “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” On the eve of the December 2007 referendum, with polls giving the comandante a narrow lead, Baduel held a press conference. Vote no, he told the nation, or tyranny will reign. It had a dramatic, immediate impact. Here was the president’s savior, his brother, tolling a bell of warning. Moderate Chavistas who had misgivings about the referendum felt emboldened to abstain or even vote no. The opposition, which had not really believed it could win, felt an eleventh-hour surge of energy. It tilted the vote against the comandante. Baduel now had the satisfaction of watching a giant inflatable Chávez hiss and deflate in front of the palace. In the war of the dolls the score was even.

  Throughout 2008, Baduel gave more press conferences, surrounded himself with political advisers, and published a book, My Solution: Venezuela’s Crisis and Salvation. But he miscalculated. The opposition did not invite him into its ranks, leaving him isolated. More gravely, he underestimated his old friend. Chávez rallied his followers against Baduel and denounced him as a traitor, a stooge of the extreme right. He directed chants for the general to be taken to the “paredón,” the execution wall. In November 2008 military prosecutors charged Baduel with stealing $14 million from the defense budget. A few months later he was arrested. State agents forced him into a car, put a gun to his temple, and said: “You don’t talk.” The paratrooper had jumped without a parachute. He was sentenced to eight years for corruption and jailed in Ramo Verde, a military prison on a hilltop outside Caracas with three layers of guards.

  —

  A Sunday morning in March 2011. Cruz María Baduel, an attractive woman with blond hair and a confident manner, made her weekly visit to the prison. Baduel stood up to greet her. A burly figure, ramrod posture. The hair had grayed in the two years he had been here. He wore a short-sleeved shirt tucked into ironed jeans, a Tommy Hilfiger belt, and polished black shoes. The cell was dark and windowless but big, with its own kitchen and bathroom—a sign of the prisoner’s status—and adorned with posters of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and religious icons. Gregorian chant seeped from the stereo. Books on politics, religion, and philosophy lined the shelves. A pile by his bedside was topped by a tome on military history: The Audacity of Icarus: Venezuela’s Paratrooper Pioneers, 1949–1979. Newspapers were stacked in the corner. They had stopped mentioning Baduel some time ago.

  Sunday was visitors’ day, and other members of his family—his father and several children—arrived, as well as an evangelical pastor. They gathered around a table to hear an ululating, melodramatic peroration about salvation and sin. “May Jesus hear his children’s prayers! May Jesus show his divine mercy! May Jesus smite the chains of injustice!” The sermon’s length seemed to test the family’s patience, though nobody said anything. When the pastor finally finished, his face wreathed in perspiration, tears in his eyes, he was profusely thanked, embraced, and shown the door. This being Sunday, the comandante was at this moment hosting his show, episode 373, but the Baduels kept the television off. Their four-year-old daughter also asked for the Gregorian chant to be turned off. “She can’t stand it,” Baduel said, shrugging. She sat on his lap and nuzzled his neck. “People say I asked Chávez to be her godfather,” he said, nuzzling back. “But he asked me.”

  They drank sweet black coffee from little plastic cups while the family prepared a lunch of arepas, Orinoco whitefish, shrimps, and salad. Baduel told an anecdote about his time as head of the army. “One day Chávez summoned me to La Casona [the presidency’s private residence]. He was upset because in Moscow the previous week the Russians showed him a case with $20 million, which they said General Carneiro [the then defense minister] had tried to skim from an arms deal. The president was furious and used a vulgarity . . . It starts with a, but I’d rather not repeat it. Anyway, we were walking around the pool discussing who should replace Carneiro when the former Argentine president, Duhalde, comes up. Chávez had forgotten he had invited him to lunch. He decided to play a trick. He gripped my arm and said loudly, ‘Yes, your divisions attack Colombia from the west, and the rest will swing around in a pincer movement.’ You should have seen Duhalde’s jaw drop. Chávez burst out laughing. It was his way of breaking the ice. He told me we should finish our conversation later that night with Diosdado over a game of bolas criollas. That’s how he was: angry one moment, joking the next.”

  Power changed Chávez, continued Baduel. “When I was his private secretary in 1999, he attended cabinet meetings, but by the time I was a minister in 2005, he had lost interest. For him it was small potatoes. He preferred to be elsewhere saving humanity. Our purpose as ministers was to rubber-stamp things he had already decided . . . unilateral decisions based on things he had been reading the night before. To me that was capricious, an insult to the Venezuelan people.”

  The politicization of the armed forces, he said, was the breaking point. “It became obvious the only thing Chávez cared about was being president for life. The mask kept slipping. I was told that Fidel warned him about me, said I wasn’t to be trusted.” Baduel considered himself a martyr who stood up to a tyrant. Why did he serve him faithfully for so long? Baduel shifted in his seat. “I never called him comandante, you know. I referred to him as president, nothing more.” His opposition, he said, began earlier than people realized, in subtle ways. “I didn’t smile during those ceremonies when they shouted out, ‘Fatherland, socialism, or death.’ You could see I did not approve.” Resistance through scowling: not exactly the samurai code. Still, Baduel had paid a heavy price in the end.

  He called the corruption charge a judicial farce. With the courts under palace control, his conviction was clearly political—even Chávez’s allies admitted that in private. That did not mean Baduel was necessarily innocent. There was no way of knowing.

  “I am tranquil. They can jail my body but not my mind. That remains free. We have become a dictatorship with a facade of democracy. I know I will leave this prison only when Chávez leaves the presidency of Venezuela.” The general walked me to the end of a passageway with grilled windows; the only spot where he could observe his beloved sky.

  —

  Locking up Baduel was one thing, containing the consequences of his revolt another. Losing the December 2007 referendum left Chávez suddenly vulnerable. As 2008 began, two shoals threatened Chávez. With finely honed survival instincts, he rolled and rebuffed each one.

  The first was the military. As a fighting force, Venezuela’s armed forces were feeble, but they were potentially lethal to their commander in chief. In theory, the military was Chávez’s bulwark. The army, navy, air force, and national guard, encompassing 113,000 men and women, all swore an oath of allegiance, and after Baduel he entrusted only his most loyal lieutenants to the Defense Ministry. But he still could not completely trust the institution. For half a century its top brass had considered itself the United States’ Latino cousin. Officers played baseball, drove Chevys, drank scotch, and trained at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. Chávez purged many generals after the 2002 coup but still worried about revolt over the military’s radical new path.

  Many officers were affronted by the incorporation of an estimated five thousand Cuban military and ideological specialists in government offices and military bases. Others were appalled by the tacit cooperation with leftist guerrillas waging a cocaine-funded, decades-long insurgency against the Colombian state. Officially, Chávez was neutral but in reality adopted a fickle policy toward the guerrillas. He turned a blind eye to their incursions along the thirteen-hundred-mile porous border and appointed his interior minister, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, to act as liaison. There was evidence he funneled weapons and money. Then, during diplomatic thaws with Colombia’s government, he would have guerrillas arrested and deported. “He has an enormous muddle in his head that nobody understands,” one exasperated FARC operative wrote in an intercepted e-mail. Chávez was a “deceitfu
l and divisive president who lacked the resolve to organize himself politically and militarily,” complained another commander.

  Many Venezuelan officers were just as angry because of the rupture in traditional military policy. Two centuries of Venezuelan history had been written through military coups, and Baduel’s rebellion could have triggered another. But it didn’t. First, Chávez deliberately jumbled the hierarchy, shuffling and leapfrogging promotions so that officers tangled with each other and new rules in efforts to climb the career ladder. (Efficiency suffered. When the comandante abruptly ordered ten battalions to Colombia’s border, tanks got lost, helicopters failed to show up, and troops went AWOL. It was the Keystone Kops. But since the mobilization was political theater—a periodic, fleeting “crisis”—the farce did not matter.)