Hugo! (6 page)

A man ahead of his time, Zamora offered a platform that included
abolition of the death penalty, complete freedom of speech, and universal
suffrage. He advocated an end to restrictions on the free movement
of workers, who at the time could be arrested and sentenced to
forced labor on haciendas if found idle on the streets. He even called
for a kind of social security system that assisted people stricken by
"incapacity or general scarcity." He also wanted large landowners to
be forced to provide ten milking cows that would be farmed out on
common land and provide "free milk each day to the homes of the
poor."

Zamora remained committed to unconditional respect of property
rights, but his egalitarian rhetoric alarmed even some of his allies.
Popular myth has it that he was killed in 1860 not in battle but by
some of his own troops, who shot him in the back. Some predicted
that Chávez himself might someday meet a similar fate. In the end
Zamora's crusade did little to transform Venezuela's unjust social structures,
partly because his federalist forces did not offer a comprehensive
program of economic and social reform. But he left behind a legacy as
a progressive liberal with a strong sense of solidarity with the rural poor.
It was a philosophy that was to fit neatly into Chávez's emerging vision
for a new Venezuela.

Many of Zamora's battles were fought not far from Sabaneta,
leaving intriguing memories for schoolboys like Chávez. But Hugo had
an especially close link to Zamora. His great-great-grandfather, Colonel
Pedro Pérez Pérez, was one of those men who rode off into the endless
fields of the llanos to do battle at Zamora's side. Moreover, Pérez Pérez
had a son,
Pedro Pérez Delgado, who was Chávez's great-grandfather.

This relative, however, was hardly a source of pride for Chávez
when he was growing up. Pérez Delgado was known as Maisanta. It
was a sobriquet he earned from his battle cry — "Madre Santa, Virgin
of Socorro." In his crunched
llanero
vernacular, the first two words
became "Mai Santa." While his father had risen to the rank of colonel,
Maisanta was known in Sabaneta and its environs as little more than
a thief and an assassin. In one of the most notorious crimes attributed
to him, he was said to have killed a colonel and fled for the hills. His
unsavory reputation grew to the point that many believed he often tied
people to trees and shot them, or even decapitated them in front of their
children and stuck the severed heads on fence posts.

Hugo Chávez grew up half believing all this, since most other
people seemed to. It wasn't until 1974 that he discovered another version
of Maisanta. That year, a prominent doctor in Barinas, José León
Tapia, published a book arguing that Maisanta was not an assassin
but a freedom fighter. Like his father and Zamora before him, Tapia
asserted, Maisanta had risen up in rebellion against social inequalities
and oppression by joining a guerrilla movement. In this case, it was one
aimed at overthrowing General Juan Vicente Gómez, a brutal dictator
who ruled Venezuela from 1908 to 1935.

Maisanta, it turned out, had indeed killed a colonel when he was
a teenager. But it was no simple case of cold-blooded murder. The colonel
had gotten Maisanta's sister Petra pregnant and refused to marry
her. Maisanta tracked him down and, following the Wild West tradition
of the day to save the family's honor, shot him. Then he fled and joined
the guerrillas fighting Gómez.

The book was a revelation to Chávez, who believed it vindicated
Maisanta. He was convinced the oligarchy had twisted his predecessor's
reputation the same way it had Zamora's. "The truth liberated me," he
said. Maisanta and others "were leaders of a revolution that perhaps
they did not understand well, but it was on behalf of those from below.
An agrarian revolution . . ."

He wrote a poem in Maisanta's honor and set off on an investigation
of him that turned into a lifelong pursuit. At one point several
years into his career as a soldier Chávez
retraced his great-grandfather's
steps in the llanos, interviewing old-timers who still remembered him
and inadvertently crossing over the border into Colombia. Armed with
a tape recorder, a camera, military maps, notebooks, photographs of
the region, two pistols, and a couple of hand grenades, Chávez was
mistaken by the Colombian military for a spy. He was arrested and
detained for three days until he convinced the Colombians he was
engaged not in espionage but in a quixotic historical journey to recapture
his roots. The Colombians finally accepted his unlikely tale. One
officer shared a beer with Chávez and then gave him a brotherly hug
at the midpoint of a bridge connecting the two countries as Chávez
headed home.

While some still argue whether
Maisanta was a courageous freedom
fighter, a two-bit criminal, or something in between, he became one of
Chávez's heroes, along with the more undisputed revolutionary heroes
Zamora, Bolívar, and Bolívar's visionary tutor,
Simón Rodríguez. As
one of his mentors in the military put it, Chávez "carries in his soul
the spirit of Maisanta." He eventually tracked down Maisanta's two
long-lost children, by then elderly adults. When one of them, Ana
Domínguez de Lombano, opened her door and Chávez informed her
he was Maisanta's great-grandson, she said he didn't have to tell her
that. It was obvious. Chávez was "the living portrait" of Maisanta with
his broad forehead, thick nose, and deep-set eyes, she said. He would
come to resemble Maisanta not only physically, but also in his "desire
to struggle, his love of liberty."

Pedro Pérez Delgado and his legacy grew out of a long tradition of
frontier
rebellion in the llanos. Along with the pampas of Argentina and their
gauchos, Venezuela's llanos were home to some of South America's finest
horsemen. Fearless fighters, they made up the backbone of Bolívar's liberation
army, turning the llanos into the scene of some of the bloodiest
fratricidal battles of the nineteenth century.
Llanero
cowboys gained a
reputation as hard-bitten, independent men with an egalitarian spirit
forged from living in the wild. Even today, the region holds a special
place in Venezuelan mythology and its sense of national identity. It
is the setting for the country's most famous novel,
Doña Bárbara
by
Rómulo Gallegos. For many people the still largely undeveloped region
of half-asleep, dusty frontier towns embodies the "real Venezuela," in
contrast with the Westernized capital city of Caracas with its gleaming
skyscrapers, shopping malls, and American fast-food chains.

The llanos remain a place of haunting beauty, where the grassy
plains seem to stretch on forever. Royal palms, zebu cattle, and
sprawling ranches dot a landscape that teems with exotic wildlife in its
more remote corners: jaguars, piranhas, freshwater porpoises, electric
eels, fluorescent-colored birds, twenty-five-foot-long anaconda snakes,
and even the world's largest rodent, the capybara — a watergoing
guinea pig that is a delicacy among
llaneros.
Off in the distance from
Sabaneta stand the majestic Andes Mountains, where rivers flow down
into the
llanos and eventually into the mighty Orinoco River in the
Amazon rain forest. When he was a boy, on a clear day Chávez could
see snowcapped
Bolívar Peak. At 3.1 miles tall it is the highest mountain
in
Venezuela and higher than Switzerland's Matterhorn.

The llanos' legacy as a place of resistance,
rebellion, and revolution
was not lost on young Hugo Chávez. He grew up in a region where
more than a few people viewed rebels such as
Fidel Castro and
Ernesto
"Che" Guevara sympathetically. As a thirteen-year-old in 1967, Chávez
listened to news reports pouring in over the radio as troops closed in on
Guevara in Bolivia. The revolutionary icon was surrounded in the forests
and almost alone. Chávez thought of it as a movie. He wondered
why Castro didn't send in airplanes and his own troops to rescue Che
as he made his final stand. "It was infantile," Chávez later remarked,
"but it demonstrated an absolute identification with them, a point of
view marked by the sympathies that I perceived in Barinas toward both
leaders."

Like Castro's
revolutionary movement against the dictator Fulgencio
Batista in Cuba in the 1950s, the
llaneros
of Venezuela had plenty to
rebel against.
Bolívar had led his
independence war in the early nineteenth
century in the name of social justice and equality, but the battles
left the
unjust social structures intact and the country devastated. The
landed oligarchy still presided over a primitive system of labor exploitation
that treated workers like peons. Decades of dictatorship, bloodshed,
and anarchy followed Bolívar's failed quest. The 1858-1863
Federal War
fought by Zamora and others against the landed elite left sixty to a hundred
thousand Venezuelans dead. It also decimated the cattle industry,
with herds plummeting from 12 million to 1.8 million head. By 1888
Venezuela had suffered 730 battles and twenty-six major insurrections
since Bolívar's war. As the twentieth century dawned, barely 19 percent
of the population was literate. Venezuela was an impoverished, forgotten
Latin American backwater.

By 1908 the country's most notorious dictator,
General Juan Vicente
Gómez, seized power. Self-educated, a teetotaler, unmarried but sexually
promiscuous, Gómez was a mixed blessing. He brought order to a
country racked by anarchy. He professionalized the
military. He balanced
the budget. He oversaw the birth of the oil industry, which put Venezuela
on the map and attracted oil companies from all over the world.

But Gómez was also a notoriously corrupt and brutal dictator. He
turned modest personal assets he acquired as a cattle feedlot operator in
Táchira state into an immense personal fortune — up to $300 million
in 1927 and $400 million when he died in 1935. The richest man and the
largest landowner in the country, he stopped at nothing to maintain his
grip on power. "Dissidents found themselves condemned to primitive
jails where one of the dictator's sons supervised tortures. Some prisoners
were hung by their feet or genitals; some had straps tightened by a tourniquet
around their head until their eyes nearly popped out. Prisoners
customarily wore hundred-pound leg irons around each ankle; one dissident
editor languished for twenty years in this condition."

In the
late 1940s Venezuela experienced a brief experiment in
democracy, then returned to another period of dictatorship in the 1950s,
this one led by
General Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Like Gómez, the general
was a study in contrasts. He was a master builder and a visionary
full of grand dreams. He blasted tunnels through mountains. He paved
thousands of miles of highways and created one of the best road systems
in Latin America. He built a mammoth bridge across the largest lake
in South America, Lake Maracaibo. He erected the world's longest and
highest cable car in the picturesque Andean city of Mérida. He built a
hotel on top of Mount Avila overlooking Caracas, ferrying supplies up
the mountainside by mule and later by a cable car he also built.

But Pérez Jiménez was also another brutal, corrupt dictator. Bribes,
kickbacks, and assassination were common. Pérez Jiménez modernized
many of Gómez's methods of repression, employing phone taps,
radio surveillance, and electric cattle prods on political opponents. The
regime released four hundred political prisoners in January 1954 and
acknowledged that it held at least three hundred more. Some believed
additional thousands languished in jails including a notorious labor
camp deep in the Amazon jungle. The dictator and his cronies, many
of them from his native Táchira, also plundered the public treasury.
They lavished money on luxurious officers' clubs and extravagant hotels
and theaters. On weekends Pérez Jiménez flew to the small Caribbean
island of La Orchila, where he romped on the beach with naked
Venezuelan beauties.

Despite his brutal rule, the United States viewed Pérez Jiménez
favorably. He was a loyal ally throughout the Cold War. In 1954, the
year Chávez was born,
President Dwight Eisenhower awarded him the
nation's highest civilian award, the Legion of Merit. The honor outraged
many Venezuelans who were trying to overthrow Pérez Jiménez,
often risking their lives.

Pérez Jiménez's regime gave way to the
formal establishment of
democracy in Venezuela by 1959. But it did little to change the society's
unjust social structures. The great masses still suffered in poverty.
Leftist rebels who thought Venezuela's practice of democracy was a
sham dominated by the elites for their own benefit mounted an armed
insurgency in the 1960s to overthrow the government. The rebels
included men and even a few women who were to become central figures
in the nation's political life right into the Chávez era, among them
Alí Rodríguez and
Teodoro Petkoff. The Cuban-backed rebels turned
into one of the strongest insurgencies in Latin America. They carried
out a series of spectacular actions including train bombings, the
kidnapping of foreign executives and US embassy personnel, and
commando raids on cities. Petkoff gained fame for escaping twice
from prison.

Many of the guerrilla fronts were based in the llanos. Chávez did not
have any direct contact with the rebels as a teenager, but he did have
his first significant exposure to the left through a neighbor. In the mid-
1960s he and Adán left Sabaneta and moved with their grandmother
Rosa Inés to the city of
Barinas to attend the
Daniel O'Leary High
School. Named for an Irishman who joined the South American independence
movement and became one of Bolívar's most trusted confidants,
it was the only high school in the rural state.

The boys and their grandmother moved in across the street from a
family whose patriarch was a small, erudite man named José Esteban
Ruíz Guevara. A founder of the Communist Party in Barinas,
Ruíz
Guevara was a historian who owned an extensive library and the city's
largest collection of books about Bolívar. He named his two sons for
Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin, although the latter's name was
misspelled on his birth certificate as
Wladimir
and stayed that way.
While communism was anathema in the United States, the party was
vibrant in many parts of Latin America, where disgust for the Americans'
support of dictatorships ran strong. Communists played a central role in
the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez. Ruíz Guevara himself was jailed by the
dictator for his political activities.