Hugo! (3 page)

But the road to professional baseball took a detour in the academy
when he discovered South American independence hero and Venezuelan
native son
Simón Bolívar and launched a mission to change his country's
destiny. He later organized a secret conspiracy of fellow soldiers disgusted
by the nation's rampant corruption and moral decay, creating a
clandestine cell dedicated to studying the Liberator's teachings. He met
secretly for years with former guerrilla leaders such as
Douglas Bravo,
arriving for clandestine encounters in a secret location in Caracas that
became a "house of conspiracy." He cultivated an underground following
of progressive and nationalist civilians who wanted to pursue his
dream with him, operating under the noses of military superiors who
failed to stop his expanding
movement.

In 1992 the conspiracy burst into public view when Chávez led a
failed coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez. The paratrooper and
his allies were enraged by Pérez's orders to troops three years earlier to
mow down hundreds of people in the wake of
food riots triggered by an
International Monetary Fund-endorsed economic "shock package." It
ended with one of the largest massacres in modern Latin American history,
rivaling Tiananmen Square for the number of dead.

Chávez landed in jail for two years, but became a hero to millions
of impoverished Venezuelans for standing up to a corrupt ruling elite.
His detractors dismissed him as little more than a two-bit demagogue
who was fomenting class hatred and hawking leftover 1960s Marxist
economic policies.

After Chávez got out of
jail, he spent several years "in the desert,"
crisscrossing the country in a mission whose ultimate goal not even he
was certain of. Dead broke, he relied on friends and supporters to feed
him and give him a place to sleep. The media wrote him off as a has-been,
and he all but disappeared from the local and international press.
Secretly, he was still weighing another coup attempt. The United States
and others hailed Venezuela's
"model democracy" as an island of stability
during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when civil wars and brutal dictatorships
reigned in the region. But Chávez was convinced that this
model democracy was a fraud controlled by a corrupt ruling class, and
that it would never allow an outsider like him who wanted to destroy the
status quo to take power via elections.

In 1997, after his fellow
coup leader
Francisco Arias Cárdenas won
the governorship of oil-rich Zulia state, Chávez underwent a change
of heart and launched a campaign to win the presidency. He was the
quintessential outsider — a man who had tried to overthrow the system
in a coup. Most of the nation's eyes were on his opponent, a former Miss
Universe: six-foot-one strawberry-blond Irene Sáez. Before Chávez,
Venezuela was known for two things — beauty queens and oil. As a
successful mayor in an affluent Caracas municipality, Irene, as she was
universally known, was leading the polls.

But the contest between the beauty and the beast, as the campaign
was dubbed, shifted ground as Irene's sugary platitudes revealed an
alarming vacuousness and Chávez's fiery rhetoric captured the imagination
of millions of shantytown residents seething over the nation's
vast gap between poor and rich. In the end Chávez won the December
1998 election in a 56 to 40 percent
landslide.

He started his presidency trying to take control of the state oil giant
PDVSA (pronounced
pay-day-vay-suh
), which he dubbed an out-of-control
"state within a state" that was serving the country's wealthy elites rather
than its majority poor. He also played a leading role in reviving the
nearly defunct Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, hosting
the first summit of
OPEC leaders in twenty-five years. By helping take
world oil prices from rock bottom, when he assumed office, to record
highs, he boosted Venezuela's
income from $14 billion in 1998 to $40
billion in 2006.

In his first year in office he convoked a
constitutional assembly,
helped it rewrite the constitution, and then watched
voters approve it
by a 72 to 28 percent margin. The same day, a torrential downpour of
biblical proportions wiped hundreds of communities off the map along
Venezuela's Caribbean mountainsides, burying thousands of people
under mud or washing them out to sea. The greatest natural calamity in
Venezuela in at least a century, it took its heaviest toll among the poor.

Before long Chávez's policies set off a maelstrom of anger, fear,
and resentment among Venezuela's ruling elites and their allies in
the United States, provoking street marches, searing newspaper editorials,
and ultimately the April
2002 coup attempt. It was followed eight
months later by one of the most devastating strikes in modern Latin
American history, when opponents shut down PDVSA for two months.
The economy nearly collapsed, food and gasoline became scarce, and
Chávez was on the verge of being forced to resign. Somehow he survived
again.

With the opposition debilitated and discredited, Chávez was able to
focus on governing. He instituted a series of New Deal-like
"social missions"
that became the hallmark of his first term as president, teaching
a million and a half illiterate Venezuelans to read, subsidizing food
markets, opening soup kitchens, distributing land to the landless, and
inviting twenty thousand Cuban doctors into the poorest neighborhoods
of the nation to live and work.

Chávez pursued his dream of implementing Bolívar's vision of a
united Latin America, creating a television news network that spanned
the region, selling cheap oil to his neighbors, and proposing a continentwide
oil cartel — a
Latino OPEC. He envisioned building a fifty-six-
hundred-mile, $20 billion
natural gas pipeline starting in eastern
Venezuela, slicing through Brazil's Amazon jungle, and ending in
Argentina, with trunk lines to Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. He even proposed
creating a
Latin American version of NASA and sending Latinos
into space. To his opponents, it was all lunacy. To his supporters, he was
a visionary in action.

Today Chávez is one of the most colorful, charismatic, and controversial
figures on the world stage. He is widely depicted in the mass media
worldwide as a kind of monster, a communist dictator-in-the-making
who has destroyed Venezuela's economy, fomented class warfare, trampled
on human rights, attacked the free press, and undermined democracy.
But the reality about Chávez is far more complex. In many ways
the media has missed the story by failing to explain why he is so popular
and viewing Venezuela mainly through the lens of the light-skinned
elites. As Venezuelan political scientist
Edgardo Lander puts it, the
international media "is presenting day after day grotesque distortions of
what is happening in Venezuela."

Chávez won a landslide victory in an August 2004 recall referendum
by a 59 to 41 percent margin in a free and fair vote in which voters had
the unusual chance to toss him out of office before his term was up. He
followed that with another landslide victory for reelection in December
2006, giving him a new six-year term. It was his tenth electoral triumph
in eight years including a plethora of referendums, "re-legitimization"
votes, and national and state elections. Like all governments, Chávez's is
flawed. But for millions of Venezuelan slum dwellers and for a growing
number of progressives around the world, he is waging the most radical
social transformation in Latin America since at least the Sandinista
Revolution in Nicaragua in the early 1980s.

For decades a forgotten Latin American backwater, Venezuela today
is a hot destination for revolutionary tourists who are flying in from
the United States, Europe, and other destinations to see the Bolivarian
Revolution in action. Chávez counts among his friends African
American leaders, including Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, and Jesse
Jackson, who see a parallel between his Bolívar-inspired revolution on
behalf of Venezuela's dark-skinned majority poor and black Americans'
Martin Luther King Jr.-inspired struggle for social and economic justice
in the United States. The Venezuelan leader delivers discounted
home
heating oil to impoverished neighborhoods in Harlem and the
Bronx and as far away as Alaska, where Indian tribes benefit from the
deal. When he visited New York City in September 2006, he traveled
to Harlem and spoke
at Cooper Union in the East Village, becoming
the first foreign president to deliver an address in a hall where eight US
presidents, including Lincoln, had given speeches. A few months earlier
Time
magazine had listed him among the one hundred most influential
people in the world.

But Chávez is not universally loved. He has generated intense
hatred, too. He has powerful enemies at home and abroad who see him
as a reincarnation of his mentor in Cuba, a "Castro with oil," as some
like to say, although in reality profound differences separate the two
men. One of Chávez's most formidable opponents is media mogul and
Cuban immigrant Gustavo Cisneros, whose fortune was estimated by
Forbes
at $5 billion, making him the 114th richest person in the world.
Cisneros is a friend of former president
George H. W. Bush, who
has gone on fishing trips to Venezuela with him. Most of the rest of
Venezuela's fabulously wealthy upper class also despises Chávez, as do
the other interconnected power elites who used to control Venezuela.
They include many members of the Catholic Church hierarchy, business
leaders, union bosses, media barons, and heads of the traditional
political parties whose organizations were annihilated by Chávez's string
of electoral triumphs. Aligning itself with Venezuela's elites, the Bush
administration has openly pushed for Chávez's demise. Top political
leaders from both parties in the United States consider him a pariah,
egged on by the mass-media depiction of him as a crazed leftist dictator
and many of his own incendiary statements.

To Chávez's supporters, the opposition to him is driven by one
basic fact: The poor have taken power in Venezuela for the first time in
the country's history, and the moneyed classes who live in gated mansions
and travel to Miami for weekend shopping excursions don't like it.
While the opposition hotly disputes it, Chávez's government, his allies,
and a number of organizations contend that life really has improved
for poor people in Venezuela, who are less poor, fewer in number, and
filled with hope for the first time in decades. Chávez has retaken
control
of the oil industry, implemented laws taking a larger share of profits
from foreign companies, and instituted a historic shift of the revenues
to the majority poor. A plethora of new
Bolivarian schools and the social
missions are providing the underclass with a fresh chance at health and
education now and
sustained prosperity down the line. A participatory
democracy model has energized and incorporated millions of disenfranchised
people into the political process in a way that promises to
outlive El Comandante's presidency and spread to other countries.

Chávez is at the forefront of a new wave of leftists who are rising to
power across
Latin America with widespread support from the underclass,
from
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil to
Néstor Kirchner in
Argentina to
Evo Morales in Bolivia to
Rafael Correa in Ecuador. They
are leading a backlash against free-market "neo-liberal" economic programs.

Also known as the
Washington Consensus, the programs swept
the region in the 1990s and 2000s and were supposed to herald a boom
in living standards and a reduction in mass poverty. That didn't happen.

Latin America still has the most unequal distribution of wealth in the
world — "gold medalists in inequality," as Chávez puts it. The result is
leftists, reformers, and radicals led by Chávez who are seeking a new
path, something between "savage capitalism" and failed communism.

He calls it
socialism for the twenty-first century.

Not surprisingly, Chávez's reform program is under attack from the
Bush administration, which returned to power several key figures from
the Iran-contra scandal and the "dirty wars" in Central America during
the 1980s Reagan era. They include
Otto Reich, Elliot Abrams, and
John Negroponte, who brought with them what progressives consider a
backward, retrograde view of Latin America and a willingness to distort
facts and undermine democratically elected governments if they do not
serve US interests as they perceive them.

Since the declaration of the
Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United
States has considered Latin America its "backyard." For decades it
engineered coups, backed dictators, and bankrolled governments
charged with widespread human rights abuses. US Marines occupied
Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933 to head off a leftist insurgency, while the
CIA mounted a coup in
Guatemala in 1954 that overthrew a democratically
elected president and ushered in a thirty-year civil war that left
two hundred thousand people dead. Since the early 1960s the CIA and
the US
government have waged a campaign to undermine, overthrow,
and at times even assassinate
Fidel Castro. In 1973 the CIA helped
engineer another coup in
Chile, deposing
Salvador Allende, the first
democratically elected Marxist president in the Western Hemisphere.
His successor,
General Augusto Pinochet, installed a bloody dictatorship
that systematically killed, tortured, and "disappeared" Chileans,
leaving three thousand dead. In the 1980s the United States supported
a
"death squad" government in El Salvador that regularly killed priests,
nuns, peasants, and teachers, decapitating some victims and putting
their heads on fence posts to terrorize the population.

By almost any measure the US history of intervention in
Latin
America is a travesty and a contradiction of the democratic principles
that it espouses. This was a fact that did not escape Chávez and his supporters,
who knew that history far better than most Americans — whose
knowledge of the region tended to focus on its exotic climate and historical
attractions, such as the Amazon rain forest in Brazil or the Inca
ruins in Peru.