Hugo Chávez, who has won a new mandate at the July elections, has engaged in a series of sweeping reforms since his triumphant election as president of Venezuela in 1998: Congress has been dissolved and a new constitution approved. But despite a spectacular increase in oil revenue, he has failed to remedy serious economic and social problems, and observers wonder if his current populism may not degenerate into despotism.
by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
Night was falling as Carlos Andrés Pérez got off the plane from Davos in Switzerland. He was surprised to see that General Fernando Ochoa Antich, his minister of defence, had come to meet him. “What is the matter,” Pérez asked, intrigued. Antich was so persuasive and reassuring that the president did not drive to the Miraflores palace, in the centre of Caracas, but to his residence at La Casona. He was dropping off to sleep when Antich woke him with a phonecall to tell him that a military uprising had started in the Maracay region. He had only just reached the Miraflores palace when the first artillery salvoes were heard.
That was on 4 February 1992. Colonel Hugo Chávez Frías, who has an almost religious obsession with historic dates, directed the revolt from improvised headquarters in La Planicie museum. Pérez realised that his only hope was to rally popular support and went to the television studios to speak to the nation. Two hours later the coup was over. Chávez surrendered, but on condition that he too might speak to the people.
The young Creole colonel, with his paratrooper’s red beret and admirable gift for public speaking, took full responsibility for the movement. His broadcast speech was a political master stroke. He spent two years in prison before being amnestied by President Rafael Caldera. However, many of his supporters – and opponents – realised that his speech, at a moment of defeat, was the start of an electoral campaign that would ultimately make him president of the republic.
Chávez told me this story a few weeks ago in the Venezuelan air force plane that flew us from Havana to Caracas. We had met for the first time three days earlier in Havana, at a meeting with Fidel Castro and Andrés Pastrana, president of Colombia. What impressed me immediately about Chávez was the sense of power in his muscular frame. He had the spontaneous warmth and Creole grace of a native Venezuelan. We both tried to meet, but failed on account of our respective schedules, and so it was only in the plane to Caracas that we were able to discuss his achievements and projects.
It proved an instructive experience for an off-duty journalist. As I listened to him telling the story of his life, I discovered a personality that did not fit the despotic image projected by the media. Here was a different Chávez. But which was the real one?
The main argument against him in the 1998 election campaign was his record of plotting and mounting a putsch. But Venezuela’s history had already survived at least four similar figures. The first was Rómulo Bétancourt, who is rightly or wrongly recognised as the father of Venezuelan democracy. He ousted Isaías Medina Angarita, a former soldier and democrat who was attempting to put the country to rights after 36 years’ dictatorship under Juan Vicente Gómez. His successor, the writer Rómulo Gallegos, was overturned by General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who stayed in power for almost 11 years. In turn, he too was dethroned by a whole generation of young democrats, opening the way for the country’s longest succession of elected presidents.
The coup in February 1992 is apparently the only thing that Chávez ever did wrong. But he sees it as a providential setback, in keeping with his perception of his luck, and everything associated with the magic that has guided his acts since he was born in Sabaneta, in the region of Barinas, on 28 July 1954. Appropriately his star sign is Leo, which symbolises power. Chávez is a fervent Catholic and attributes his good fortune to a scapular over a century old that he has worn round his neck since childhood. He inherited it from Colonel Pedro Pérez Delgado, a maternal great-grandfather and one of his personal heroes.
His parents found it hard to make ends meet with what they earned as schoolteachers, and from the age of nine he had to help out, selling sweets and fruit in the street. Sometimes he would ride the family donkey to the nearby village of Los Rastrojos to visit a maternal aunt. He thought it was a proper little town because it had a power station capable of providing two hours’ electricity as night fell. It also boasted a midwife who delivered him and his four brothers. His mother wanted him to be a priest, but he only managed to be a choir-boy, ringing the bells so beautifully that everyone noticed when it was his turn. “Listen, Hugo’s ringing the bells,” they would say. One day, rooting through his mother’s books, he stumbled on a providential encyclopaedia. He was immediately drawn to the first chapter, entitled “How to succeed in life”.
Under the sign of Bolivar
In fact it was a directory of careers and he must have tried almost all of them. As a painter he was a great admirer of Michelangelo and David, winning the first prize in a regional competition at the age of 12. As a musician, his mastery of the guitar and his voice made him in great demand for birthday celebrations and serenades. On the baseball field he proved a superb catcher. The army was not on the list of options and apparently he would never have considered the idea if someone had not suggested that the best way to get into one of the top baseball teams was via the Barinas military academy.
He studied political science there, and history from Marxism to Leninism. He developed a passion for the life and work of Bolivar, his greatest “Leo”, and learnt all his speeches by heart. The death of Allende in 1973 brought him face to face with political reality for the first time. Chávez could not understand why the military should overthrow Allende, given that the Chilean people had elected him. Shortly afterwards his captain gave him the job of watching José Vicente Rangel’s son, a suspected communist. “Life is full of surprises,” Chávez said to me, bursting out laughing. “His father is now my minister of foreign affairs!”
By another twist of fate, at the end of his career he received his officer’s sabre from Carlos Andrés Pérez, the president he would attempt to topple 20 years later. “What is more,” I said, “you almost killed him.” “Not at all,” he protested; “our plan was to set up a constitutive assembly and then return to our barracks.”
From the moment I met him I realised Chávez was a born story-teller, a typical example of Venezuelan popular culture, which is creative and poetic. He has a great sense of timing and almost supernatural memory, enabling him to recite whole poems by Neruda or Whitman, and complete pages of Rómulo Gallegos.
When he was very young Chávez discovered that, contrary to what his mother said, his great-grandfather was not a highway robber, but a legendary warrior of the Juan Vicente Gómez era. He was so excited that he decided to write his biography and clear his name. He dug into the historical archives and military libraries, and explored the whole area in an effort to retrace the routes taken by his ancestor, on the basis of the eye-witness accounts of survivors. Finally, he decided to add Gómez to his list of heroes and wear his ancestor’s protective scapular around his neck.
One day, totally absorbed by his research, he wandered across the border on the bridge over the Arauca river. The Colombian officer who searched his bag found numerous reasons to accuse him of spying: he had a camera, a tape-recorder, secret documents, pictures of the area, a military map with charts and two regulation pistols. As with any self-respecting spy his identity papers could well be forgeries.
They argued the toss for several hours in an office with a picture of Bolivar on horseback. “I was going crazy,” Chávez told me, “the more I explained to him, the less he understood.” Then he had a brainwave. “Listen, captain, this is how things stand. Less than a century ago we would have belonged to the same army and the man in that picture would have commanded both of us. How could I be a spy?” The captain was moved by this plea and started singing the praises of Greater Colombia. The two of them ended up spending the night in a tavern in Arauca, drinking beers from both countries. The next morning found them both with a hangover and the officer gave Chávez back his historian’s tools, but before parting, they embraced in the middle of the bridge between the two countries.
“It was around this time that I started to realise that something was wrong in Venezuela,” said Chávez. He had been put in charge of a platoon of 13 soldiers and a transmissions team in the province of Oriente, and instructed to clean up the last guerrilla strongholds. One rainy evening a colonel from military intelligence asked for shelter at their barracks. He was accompanied by a patrol and a handful of pale and scrawny suspected guerrilleros. At about ten o’clock, as he was about to fall asleep, Chávez heard piercing screams from the next room. “The soldiers were beating up their prisoners with baseball bats wrapped in rags so as not to leave marks,” Chávez told me. Indignant, he ordered the colonel to hand over the men or leave the camp immediately. “The next day they threatened to court martial me for disobedience,” Chávez added, “but all they did was put me under observation for a while.”
A few days later he had a more trying experience. An army helicopter landed in the courtyard of the barracks loaded with soldiers who had been seriously wounded in a guerrilla ambush. Chávez picked up a terrified young soldier, who had taken several hits. The boy pleaded, “Don’t let me die, sir.” He had just enough time to settle him in a vehicle. Seven others died too. That night, in his hammock, Chávez wondered, “What am I doing here? On the one hand, there are peasants dressed up as soldiers torturing peasant guerrillas, and on the other, peasant guerrillas killing other peasants disguised as soldiers. Now that the war is over it’s senseless to go on shooting at each other.” On the plane taking us both to Caracas, he told me, “It was my first existential crisis”.
The next day he woke up convinced that he was destined to found a movement, and at the age of 23, he did just that. He gave it an obvious name, the Venezuelan people’s Bolivarian army. Its founder members were five other soldiers and himself, with the rank of sub-lieutenant. “What is the purpose?” I asked. It was very simple, he replied: “our aim was to prepare for an eventuality.” A year later he had become a paratroop officer with an armoured battalion in Maracay and he started plotting seriously. He did, however, stress that he only used the word “plot” figuratively. In other words, the aim was to attract people with a common aim.
Saviour or despot
This was how things stood on 17 December 1982 when an unforeseen event occurred, that Chávez sees as a decisive moment in his life. He was now a captain in the second parachute regiment and an intelligence officer. Quite unexpectedly, the regimental commanding officer, Angel Manrique, asked him to speak to 1,200 officers and men. The battalion assembled on a football field, at one in the afternoon, and the master of ceremonies called on Chávez to speak. “But where is your speech?”, asked Manrique, seeing him approach the dais empty-handed. “I did not write one,” replied Chávez, and started to improvise. He gave a short speech, inspired by Bolivar and Marti, but including some personal thoughts on the injustice that still prevailed in Latin America 200 years after independence.
The officers listened unmoved. They included Felipe Acosta Carle and Jesús Urdaneta Hernández, who supported his movement. In a furious outburst to the assembly Manrique protested, “Chávez, you would appear to be a politician.” Felipe Acosta, a six foot six giant, walked up to him and said, “You are mistaken, sir. Chávez is not a politician, he is a captain of the new generation, and when some of our corrupt rulers hear what he has to say, they shit in their pants.”
After that Chávez rode off with Acosta and Urdaneta to Samán del Guere, ten kilometres away, where they repeated the solemn vow made by Simon Bolivar on Mount Aventin (in Rome). “Of course I changed the end a bit,” Chávez told me. Instead of “When we have broken the chains that oppress us by the will of the Spanish,” they said, “Until we have broken the chains that oppress us and the people by the will of the powerful.”
From then on all the officers who joined the secret movement had to take the vow. For years they organised clandestine conferences with military representatives from all over Venezuela. “We organised two-day meetings in secret places to study the state of the country, produced reports and made contact with friendly civilian groups. In 10 years we managed to hold five conferences without being discovered,” Chávez told me.
One of Chávez’s stock phrases is, “Napoleon said that in a second of inspiration a strategist can decide the issue of a battle.” He developed three concepts on the basis of this idea: first, the historic hour, second, the strategic minute and lastly, the tactical second. But perhaps the most important event in his life caught the conspirators unawares. “Yes,” admitted Chávez, “we were surprised by the strategic minute”. He was referring to the insurrection on 27 February 1989, known as the “Caracazo”. Carlos Andrés Pérez had just been elected president with a large majority and it was inconceivable that little more than three weeks later such a violent revolt should occur. “On the evening of 27 February I was on my way to the university, for a class preparing my doctorate, and I stopped at the Tiura barracks to fill up with petrol,” Chávez explained to me a few minutes before we landed at Caracas. “I saw troops coming out. I asked a colonel, ‘Where are these soldiers going?’ They were even mobilising men from logistics who had not been trained at all, let alone for street fighting. They were recruits frightened by their own rifles. So I asked the colonel, ‘Where are these people going?’ He answered, ‘To defend the streets. My orders are to use all available means to stop the disturbance. And I shall do that.’ To which I replied, ‘But colonel, just think what might happen.’ He answered, “Listen, Chávez, it is an order. There is no choice. May the Lord protect us.'”
Chávez recalled that he had an attack of German measles that night, with a high fever. When he started his car, he saw a little soldier running towards him with his helmet askew, his rifle swinging wildly, spilling munitions on the road. “So I stopped and called him over,” said Chávez. “He climbed in the car, all excited, sweating profusely. He was young, about 18. I asked him, ‘Where are you running?’ ‘I have lost my brigade,’ he answered. ‘They are in the lorry that is driving away down there. Help me to catch up with them, sir.’ So I caught up with the lorry and asked the officer, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘nobody knows!'”
Chávez paused for breath. He was almost shouting, on the verge of choking with the pain of remembering that awful night. “You know, they sent panic-stricken soldiers into the street, with a rifle and 500 rounds. And they shot at anything that moved. They sprayed bullets all over the streets, the shanty towns and poor neighbourhoods. It was a disaster, with thousands killed. Felipe Acosta was among their number. My instinct tells me, they had him killed,” Chávez maintained. “It was the moment we had been waiting for to act,” he added. So they started to prepare the coup that would fail three years later.
The plane landed in Caracas at about three in the morning. I looked out of the window at the sea of light formed by that unforgettable city. The president took his leave with a Caribbean embrace. As I watched him walk away, surrounded by his military guards with all their decorations, I had the odd feeling that I had travelled and talked pleasurably with two quite separate men. One, to whom obstinate good fortune had given the opportunity to save his country, and the other, an illusionist, who could well go down in history as yet another despot.