Hugo! (5 page)

After the putsch failed and Chávez returned to office,
Condoleezza
Rice issued a warning to respect democratic norms. Stunningly, it was
aimed not at the opposition that had tried to oust him, but at Chávez.
As Chomsky noted, Chávez's anger at Bush wasn't hard to understand.
"The Bush administration backed a coup to overthrow his government,"
he said. "Suppose Venezuela supported a military coup that overthrew
the government of the United States? Would we think it was a joke?"
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of
The Nation
, added, "To be fair, how
much diplomatic tact does Chávez owe to a President whose administration
supported a coup against him?"

Besides backing the coup, the United States engaged in a constant
verbal war with Chávez. On July 31, 2006, Bush told
Fox News in an
interview that "I view him as a threat of undermining democracy," even
though Chávez was freely elected and reelected by the Venezuelan
people — unlike US allies such as Pakistan dictator General Pervez
Musharraf. Bush's former point man for Latin America, Otto Reich,
wrote a cover story in April 2005 for
The National Review
on
"Latin
America's Terrible Two." The cover featured a photograph of Chávez
and Fidel Castro speaking closely in conversation and a banner that
read, "The Axis of Evil . . . Western Hemisphere Version."

In February 2006 Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld went so far
as to compare Chávez to Adolf Hitler. "We've got Chávez in Venezuela
with a lot of oil money," Rumsfeld told the National Press Club. "He's
a person who was elected legally just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally
and then consolidated power." Six months earlier the evangelical minister
Pat Robertson, who had close ties to the Bush administration, had
publicly called for Chávez's assassination.

After Chávez's speech, the US ambassador to the United Nations,
John Bolton, who boycotted the talk, said: "You know, it's a phenomenon
of the United States that not only can he say those things in the
General Assembly, he could walk over to Central Park and exercise
freedom of speech in Central Park, too, and say pretty much whatever
he wanted. Too bad President Chávez doesn't extend the same freedom
of
speech to the people in Venezuela." The
Daily News
went even farther:
"Back home, a Chávez critic who dared voice such colorful language
about El Presidente would risk prison or, worse, a bullet."

It was typical of the US government and international media hysteria
about Chávez. While like any world leader he had his flaws, accusing
him of eliminating free speech at home was absurd. In Venezuela the
media was rabidly anti-Chávez, with television stations running non-stop
vitriolic propaganda calling him everything from a dictator to a
madman. Along with most major newspapers, they openly supported
the coup. When the political opposition went on strike, so did the newspapers,
refusing to publish. Television stations preempted regular programming
to run wall-to-wall coverage of the walkout. Chávez enemies
regularly appeared on television calling for his
overthrow, sentiments
sometimes expressed by news anchors themselves. His opponents held
protest demonstrations attracting hundreds of thousands. If this was a
dictatorship, it was a strange one indeed. If people in the United States
called for the military to overthrow George Bush, they would land in
jail. In Venezuela they went free, even when they not only talked about
overthrowing the president but tried to do it. Chávez's Venezuela was a
far cry from
Castro's Cuba.

While the mainstream media ignored them, Chávez made other
points in his speech at the United Nations that many saw as worthwhile.
He offered an innovative four-point program to reform the
body. He also explained some of the source of his rage against Bush
and his administration: The United States, he said, had blocked his
personal doctor and his chief of security from entering the country,
locking them inside the presidential airplane.

More gravely, Chávez noted that "the biggest terrorist of this continent,"
former CIA operative
Luis Posada Carriles, was in the United
States, where authorities
refused to extradite him to Venezuela to face
charges of bombing an airliner. An infamous anti-Castro Cuban exile,
Posada masterminded the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that left
Venezuela for Cuba. No one survived.

Posada eventually spent several years in prison in Venezuela, and
then, "thanks to the CIA and then-government officials, he was allowed
to escape, and he lives in this country, protected by the government,"
Chávez told the United Nations. "The US government has double standards;
it protects terrorism when it wants to." Posada had entered the
United States illegally in 2005
and was detained in Florida. He was later
transferred to an immigration jail in Texas. By May 2007 he was freed.

To Chávez, Americans were outraged by his calling Bush the devil,
but unfazed that the United States was harboring a known terrorist
with blood on his hands. What was worse? When Venezuela sought
Posada's extradition, the United States refused. A judge claimed he
would face torture.

Chávez is a
Latin American original, a leftist firebrand destined
to alter the landscape of the continent perhaps in a way Bolívar only
dreamed of and reach even beyond Latin America. To the lighter-skinned
elites of Venezuela who despise him, he is
ese mono
— that
monkey. "The peon has taken over the farm," some like to say.

But to the millions of poor people languishing in Venezuela's barrios
and to a growing number of supporters around the world, he is
El Comandante — the man who is leading Venezuela out of its bleak
abyss in the name of their nation's greatest hero and paving an alternative
route for undeveloped nations around the world to emerge from
centuries of exploitation and misery. His story echoes that of Latin
America and the struggle of the underclass today, from Caracas to
Harlem to Johannesburg to Bombay. As Venezuelan Jesuit priest and
Chávez critic the
Reverend Arturo Peraza once observed, "The man
touches the souls of the poor."

Hugo Chávez touched the souls of the impoverished because he was
one of them. He grew up dirt poor at a time when Venezuela's oil wealth
was creating fabulous fortunes for a fortunate few. He was born on July
28, 1954, in the mud house of his grandmother
Rosa Inés Chávez. She
lived in the rural village of Sabaneta in the
state of Barinas. It was a forgotten
little place of a thousand people and a few dirt streets that had
to be watered in the hot, dry winter to keep the choking dust down.
During summer monsoons they turned into seas of mud.

Sabaneta was located in
los llanos
, a vast expanse of sparsely populated
grassy marshlands that were Venezuela's version of the Great
Plains of the United States or the pampas of Argentina. Home to
Venezuela's legendary cowboys, the llanos were a kind of Wild West, a
remote and undeveloped region near the Colombian border that took
up one-third of Venezuela's landmass. It was a world apart from the
exclusive enclaves of Caracas, with their tuxedo-clad servants and elegant
champagne parties.

Chávez's parents, Hugo de los Reyes
Chávez and Elena Frías de
Chávez, lived in a village called Los Rastrojos that was even smaller and
more destitute than Sabaneta. It had no doctors, hospitals, or clinics.
When it came time for Elena to give
birth to her first son, Adán, and
then Hugo Rafael a year later, the family traveled a couple of miles to
Sabaneta. At least there they could find a midwife to deliver the babies
in Rosa Inés's house. They had a total of seven boys, although one,
Enzo, died at six months from leukemia.

It wasn't unusual in those days for older children in large, poor families
to be taken in by grandparents who helped raise them. Chávez's
parents, schoolteachers who traveled constantly by bicycle between Los
Rastrojos, where they worked, and Sabaneta, asked Rosa Inés to care for
Hugo and Adán. Abandoned by her husband and then widowed long
before, she had time on her hands and motherly love to spare.

She lived alone in a simple house that was typical of the impoverished
region. Its walls were made of mud and straw, its roof of palm
leaves, its floor of dirt. When it rained, water poured through the
ceiling. Rosa Inés scampered about placing pots on the floor in a
fruitless effort to keep it from turning to mud. The house had no
refrigerator, no fan, no running water, no indoor bathroom. Rosa
cooked over a wood fire, fetched water from a well, and utilized
an outhouse. Her single luxury was a small radio run by batteries.
She was lucky to get a few hours of electricity at night from the village's
small gas-oil-fueled power plant. Vehicles were rare. People got
around on bicycle or walked, often making the hour-long trek to Los
Rastrojos by foot. Half a century later, the streets of Sabaneta still
teemed with bicycles.

After Rosa took Adán and Hugo into her home, she became more
of a surrogate mother than a grandmother. She spent more time with
the boys than did their parents, who came into Sabaneta on weekends
when they could. In the early years of Chávez's life, they still maintained
their home in Los Rastrojos. By the time Hugo and Adán started
to talk, they didn't call Rosa Inés "Grandma," but rather
"Mama Rosa."
For her part, she called them "grandchildren-children." In many ways
Hugo was closer to Rosa than to his own mother. At Rosa's side he
learned to walk, to read, and to write before he entered first grade.

Rosa gave him and Adán all the affection and wisdom she had.
She didn't have much else to offer. On the
first day Hugo attended the
Julián Pino elementary school down the block, he showed up wearing a
ragged pair of rope sandals. Most of the other students wore shoes, and
mocked him. He came home crying, prompting Rosa to break down
into tears of shame and frustration. With the help of family and friends
she scraped together the funds and bought Hugo a pair of shoes.

Money was tight. Rosa had to rely on the boys to help her survive
financially. She ran a small business out of her house selling sweets
and tropical fruits that grew in her backyard. Her specialty was sugarcoated
arañas
, spiders. She made them by cutting papayas into thin
strips, cooking them in a pan, slathering them with sugar, and then
fashioning them into spider shapes.

Every day Hugo took a jar of Rosa's highly popular products to
school and sold them to classmates during recess. After school and on
weekends, he roamed the village selling them to locals watching cockfights
or playing
bolas criollas
— a kind of bocce ball. He also sold them
to people gathered at Sabaneta's Plaza Bolívar or near its sole extravagance
— a movie theater that showed Mexican films. Unlike his brother
Adán, Hugo enjoyed the job. It gave him a chance to get around town
and talk to people. But it also underscored the precarious economic situation
of his family. These years of selling candies left a lasting imprint.
Some of his classmates were even worse off. They had to drop out of elementary
school completely to help support their families.

Sabaneta didn't offer much in the way of entertainment, so Hugo
had to invent his fun. Like many local youngsters, he was obsessed
with
baseball. The sport was introduced to Venezuela in the 1920s by
American oil workers, who arrived in droves after the first major wells
blew out. In contrast with the rest of Latin America — where soccer
reigned — baseball became the national sport in Venezuela and an
object of intense devotion by fans. Hugo and his friends played constantly.
They used bottle caps or rolled-up socks for balls; sticks or
broom handles were their bats.

Hugo was so obsessed with the sport that when he wasn't in school,
he spent hours playing a game he made up. On a table inside Rosa's
house he drew a circle and divided it up like pieces of a pie. Inside each
slice he wrote the key events of a game — single, double, strike, ball, out,
double play. He put a knife in the middle of the circle, spun it around,
and played baseball with himself, Adán, or friends. He kept score in
a notebook, jotting down every play inning by inning. Sometimes,
playing alone, he leaped out of his chair and shouted, "Home run!" —
startling his grandmother.

Despite the economic privations, Chávez recalled a joyful early life.
"We were very poor children, but very happy." Rosa had a large backyard
filled with tropical fruits and plants. Hugo spent hours watering
the plants and even singing to them — something Rosa insisted helped
them grow. His favorite songs were Mexican rancheros and
llanero
ballads,
melancholy tunes that dealt with frontier themes of romance or
knife fights, hard drinking or skill in breaking horses. He learned to
plant and harvest corn in the backyard. He ate the oranges, pineapples,
grapefruits, and mangoes that grew there. He helped Rosa tend a
garden of tomatoes, onions, and other vegetables. He also played baseball
and other games with Adán and friends. "Ours was a backyard of
dreams," he said, "an entire universe."

He loved drawing and painting, was fairly good at it, and eventually
got a slightly less impoverished uncle in the state capital to buy him
supplies. From a young age he also developed an astounding ability
to quickly memorize and recite long poems, songs, or book passages,
many of them about
historical subjects or the llanos. It was a skill he
would continue to exhibit as president.

Rosa was Chávez's first
role model. A strict and upright Roman
Catholic who prayed in her home, she brooked no foolishness and
kept the boys in line. She also encouraged something common among
Venezuela's lower classes — solidarity with the less fortunate. When
a neighbor needed some food or clothes, Rosa was there to help, even
though she possessed little herself. Her
influence seemed to rub off. For
a short time Hugo served as an altar boy in the local Catholic church.
He also took part in a government-sponsored
literacy program called
cadenas abajo
, or "off with the chains." He taught several adults to read
and write even though he was only ten and eleven years old himself.

While Hugo was deeply attached to his grandmother, his relationship
with his parents and especially his mother seemed more ambivalent.
Elena and Hugo Chávez eventually moved from Los Rastrojos to
a cement house on the same street in Sabaneta as Rosa's. But Hugo kept
living with his grandmother. Again, this wasn't unusual for the times,
but it did underscore his closeness with his grandmother. Often absent
in the early years of Hugo's life, his mother was also a stern taskmaster.
She didn't hesitate to pull out a strap to discipline the boys — another
common practice in the era. Hugo and his brothers often ran to Rosa's
house, where she hid them in a closet to ward off a beating.

While his family strongly denies it, by some accounts Chávez eventually
had a
falling-out with his mother, with the two reportedly refusing
to speak for a couple of years and even ignoring each other when they
passed on the street. The alleged conflict seems to have been rooted
in bitter feelings from his
childhood when she beat the boys and, by
at least one account, erupted into open conflict in the late 1970s when
she disapproved of the first woman he married,
Nancy Colmenares, and
they stopped talking. Chávez denies he suffered a falling out with his
mother and that they did not communicate for two years — an assertion
which appeared in
Hugo Chávez Sin Uniforme,
published in Venezuela
in 2004 and later in the United States. In an interview in April 2007, he
said "such a thing never happened." He said he and Nancy married in
late 1977 while she was pregnant with Rosa, and that his mother was not
overly enthusiastic about the marriage. But there was never a dramatic
break in their relationship. "There certainly were not, let's say, good relations
between my mother and Nancy," Chávez said. "But to arrive at a
rupture of two years where we did not speak, no."

He said he always visited his mother with Nancy during vacations
while they were still together, and noted that later the two women often
visited him together when he was in jail. After Chávez became president,
his mother managed a government-run children's foundation in
Barinas, and Nancy worked with her for a time.

Chávez's brother Adán, in a rare interview in April 2007, also denied
that Hugo and his mother stopped talking for an extended period and
ignored each other on the streets.

Still, reports and rumors about the sometimes strained relationship
between Chávez and his mother provided fodder for his detractors to
speculate that he suffered from an unhealthy lack of maternal affection
in his childhood that affected his personality. Of course, he had
the unquestioned and constant love of Rosa, and many people emerged
unscathed from far worse childhoods than his.

He seemed closer to his father than to his mother — at least when
he got to see him. After his parents moved to Sabaneta, his father went
to work at the Julián Pino elementary school and at one point served as
Hugo's fifth-grade teacher. He dabbled with a leftist
political party, the
Electoral Movement of the People (MEP), but had a longer affiliation
with the Social Christian COPEI, one of the two parties that dominated
Venezuela for decades. When Chávez eventually won the
presidency,
his father became a
state governor. His mother was Rosa Inés; he'd
grown up selling
arañas
on the streets, too.

The younger Chávez often speaks publicly of Rosa and the impact
his grandmother had on him. Of his four children, he named one Rosa
and another Rosinés. He named his only son Hugo. "I adore my parents,
but I have to recognize that the education Rosa gave me was very
important for me. She was a pure human being . . . pure love, pure kindness
. . . At Rosa's side I got to know humility, poverty, pain, sometimes
not having anything to eat. I saw the injustices of this world . . . I learned
with her the principles and the values of the humble Venezuelan, those
that never had anything and who constitute the soul of my country."

Her
death in 1982 was one of the most painful moments of his life.
Plunged into sadness, he wrote a poem of love and admiration, pledging
never to forget her lessons or betray his roots in Sabaneta. He said he
hoped to be buried beside her when he dies.

Perhaps one day
My dear old woman
I will direct my steps
Toward your grave
And then
Only then
At the end of my life
I may come to look for you
My Mother Rosa
I may arrive at the tomb
I may water it
With sweat and blood
And I may find comfort
In your love of a mother
And I may tell you
Of my disappointments
Among the mortals
Then
You may open your arms
And you may hug me
Like when I was an infant
And you may lull me
With your sweet song
And you may take me
To other places
To release a shout
That never stops

Rosa encouraged another trait that turned into a cornerstone of
Hugo's personality: a love of
history. Starting when he was five or six
years old, Rosa would sit in the house or backyard and spend hours
telling him stories of the past. A favorite was the tale of how legendary
nineteenth-century guerrilla fighter Ezequiel
Zamora had ridden
through Sabaneta with his men on their horses. They passed right in
front of her family home, kicking up dust as a bugle blared. Rosa didn't
see the scene herself, but was told the story by her mother.

Zamora was a revolutionary, a lesser-known heir to Simón Bolívar's
dream of a more just society. He helped organize local peasants and
slaves into an army that in the 1850s and 1860s waged a civil war against
troops tied to the landowning oligarchy. Zamora harbored a passionate
hostility to the elites and had a radical vision for reforming Venezuelan
society. "There will be neither rich nor poor, neither slaves nor owners,
neither powerful nor scorned, but brothers who disdaining leadership
will treat each other equally, face to face," one of his slogans declared.