Hugo! (7 page)

Chávez became best friends with the
Ruíz brothers. By one
account, the biography
Hugo Chávez Sin Uniforme
, their father played
a key role early on in forming Chávez politically, with a decidedly leftist
bent. The three teenagers "tossed themselves on the rug of the family's
library every afternoon to listen to an impassioned communist"
— the elder Ruíz Guevara. According to this account, Ruíz Guevera
encouraged Chávez and his sons to read books such as Rousseau's
The
Social Contract
and the works of Karl Marx. While not completely "catechized"
in communism, Chávez was "inoculated" through this contact
with Ruíz Guevera. By the time he entered the military academy
at seventeen, the account contends, he carried one book under his arm:
Che Guevara's diary.

In an April 2007
interview Chavez denied this suggestion that he
was somehow indoctrinated in communism or Marxism starting when
he was as young as thirteen. He said that he went to Ruíz Guevara's
house mainly to get the brothers to play baseball or to hang out on the
streets, and simply said hello to their father once in a while. "That as an
adolescent at fifteen or sixteen I had sat down even one time to talk politics
with Ruíz Guevara, no. With no one," Chávez said. He was, he said,
"a normal boy . . . I didn't have any political motivation."

Chávez added that it was false that he entered the military academy
with a copy of Che Guevera's diary, and that the assertion was part of
black legends sprouting up to try to discredit him. "It's a lie," he said,
laughing. "I had never read almost anything political."

He said it was true Ruíz Guevara may have indirectly influenced
him politically early on through some general commentaries, but that
the real influence occurred later when he was in his early twenties,
after he graduated from the military academy and was stationed back in
Barinas. "Then there was an intense exchange with Ruíz Guevara," he
said. "He was a great moral, political, and ideological reference." Many
of their talks focused on Bolívar, Zamora, Maisanta, and other historical
Venezuelan figures.

Ruíz Guevara's son Wladimir concurred with Chávez's contention
that his father was hardly out to convert them into adolescent
communists. "My father didn't sit us down like a priest and give us
classes in communism," he stated, noting that he himself did not read
the
Communist Manifesto
until he was twenty-three, not thirteen as
Hugo Chávez Sin Uniforme
contends. "My father didn't set as a task
converting Hugo Chávez to communism." At O'Leary High School,
another one of Chávez's friends was the head of the Communist Youth
Party, but Chávez never joined.

His mind wasn't on revolution. It was on his studies, girls . . .
and baseball.
He spent hours at night listening to the radio as longtime rivals
Los Leones and the Magallanes faced off in Venezuela's professional
winter league, which attracted many of Venezuela's top stars, including
players from the US major leagues. During the day Chávez played baseball
with friends or practiced pitching by throwing rocks against a can
he set up in Rosa Inés's backyard. He jogged, lifted weights, and studied
pitching techniques.

He was a talented left-hander. His hero was
Isaías "Latigo" (Whip)
Chávez. He picked him for several reasons. They shared the same last
name, for one — although they were not related. Latigo was also on
Hugo's favorite team, the Magallanes. And he was a pitcher, too. Hugo
never actually saw his idol on the mound because televisions were scarce
in rural, impoverished Barinas. Instead, he imagined him in action as
he listened to the radio. Hugo was so good himself that locals called
him "Latigo" and "Golden Lefty."

One Sunday morning in March 1969, Chávez received some devastating
news about his hero. Rosa Inés was preparing breakfast in the
kitchen when a radio announcer broke in with an urgent bulletin: Latigo
Chávez had been killed the night before in an airplane crash. Chávez,
who was fourteen, was shocked. He was so depressed he stayed home
from school that Monday and Tuesday. In his mourning, he wrote a
poem that he started repeating every night, swearing he would be like
Latigo Chávez someday — a pitcher in the major leagues.

The problem was how to get there. No scout was going to discover
him in the backwaters of Barinas and Sabaneta. He needed to be in a
place with professional baseball. As he neared the end of his high school
years, he contemplated joining his brother Adán at the University of the
Andes in Mérida. He thought about studying mathematics and physics.
But when he learned that Mérida had no professional baseball team, he
dropped the idea.

Then one day a recruiter from the military academy visited O'Leary
High School to give a talk. Chávez wasn't very interested in joining the
military . . . but the location of the academy did attract his attention:
Caracas, where the Magallanes often played. He started thinking that
he could enter the academy, spend a year or so training, and then drop
out to pursue his real passion. The academy would be "like a transit
point," he later remarked, "a bridge."

Around the same time, a friend from Barinas who was a cadet
came home to visit and urged Chávez to sign up. "I asked him if they
played baseball, and he said, yes, and that José Antonio Casanova and
Héctor Benitez Redondo were the managers. Casanova? Benitez? But
that was the glory, like Olympus, and immediately I signed the papers."
Casanova and Benitez Redondo were Venezuelan baseball legends.
Casanova was a shortstop and later a manager of the Caracas Leones in
Venezuela's winter league. Benitez Redondo had been a cleanup hitter
in the 1940s and 1950s.

Chávez passed a preliminary entrance examination held at the
local barracks in Barinas. Later he received a telegram instructing him
to report to Caracas for more tests. He got on a bus and traveled to the
nation's bustling capital for the first time in his life. It was another world
compared with provincial Barinas. He passed that test, too. But after he
returned to Barinas, he ran into a problem.

Chávez was generally a good student and an avid reader. But he
could not get himself interested in one class: chemistry. He sat in the
back of the room and asked few questions. His teacher, Manuel Felipe
Díaz, thought Chávez was grasping everything he presented. Chávez
wasn't. Díaz was a tough teacher. Students dubbed him
Venenito
—
little poison. When it came time for the tests, Chávez's grades were
poor. So Díaz flunked him.

That presented a problem for getting into the military academy.
Applicants with a failed course generally were not accepted. There was
one exception: If they played a sport well enough, they could get in and
retake the course. That was fine with Chávez. At his next interview at
the academy, instructors sent him to a nearby stadium for a tryout to
"see if you can really play," as he recalled it.

When Chávez walked into the stadium, his jaw dropped. Casanova
and Benitez Redondo were conducting the tryouts. The two stars told
the young men that their first test would be to see who could put on
their uniform the fastest. Those who couldn't put it on properly would
be eliminated. Chávez had played on organized teams in Barinas, and
he was among the first out on the field.

The coaches put him on the mound to see how he could pitch.
Chávez had thrown in a game in Barinas a few days earlier. With his
arm still sore, he was wild. The coaches pulled him off the mound.
He was one step away from losing his chance to get into the
military
academy. Luckily, Chávez also played first base and was a respectable
hitter. The coaches sent him to the batter's box to see what he could do.
A teenager from the city of Maracaibo was on the mound. He hurled
three fastballs. Chávez smacked them against the outfield wall.

The performance saved him. Chávez was admitted to the military
academy. His hitting arguably altered the course of Venezuelan history.
If he had struck out, he probably never would have become president.
After his ascent to power, his chemistry teacher, Díaz, spent years
second-guessing himself, thinking he had failed as an instructor and
nearly derailed Chávez's
career.
Chávez often made good-natured jokes
about
Venenito
on national television and radio.

On Sunday, August 8, 1971, Chávez and 374 other aspiring cadets
entered Fort Tiuna military base in Caracas. They lined up for the
induction ceremonies on a sprawling courtyard surrounded by a glistening
white, U-shaped building. Chávez had made it to Venezuela's
version of West Point. Back in Barinas, Rosa Inés was horrified. She
didn't think the military was right for Hugo, and she worried that
his rebellious streak would get him into trouble. She took to lighting
votive candles, praying to the patron saint of Sabaneta that he would
come home.

Despite his initially lukewarm feelings about the military, Chávez
soon felt comfortable. When he found himself "in uniform, with a rifle, on
the live firing range, the close order drills, the marches, the early morning
runs, the studies of military science, of the general sciences . . . in sum, I
liked it, man. The courtyard.
Bolívar in the background . . . I felt like a fish
in water. As if I had discovered the essence or part of the essence of life, of
my true
vocation."

Chávez was finding a new calling — and leaving behind an old
one. On one of his first leaves a few months after entering the academy,
he bought a bouquet of flowers and went to the Southern General
Cemetery in Caracas. He had read that Latigo Chávez was buried there.
Dressed in his blue uniform and white gloves, he asked a gravedigger for
his hero's tomb. When he found it, Chávez took off his gloves, cleaned
the tomb, and lit a candle. He left the flowers on top of the grave.

He was doing penance. His dream of becoming a professional baseball
player was shifting to new pursuits. "I went because I had a knot
inside me, like a debt that had been forming since that oath, that prayer
. . . I was forgetting it, and now I wanted to be a soldier . . . I felt bad for
that reason . . . It was as if I was saying, Forgive me, Isaías, I'm not going
to follow that path. Now I am a soldier."

When he left the cemetery, he said, "I was liberated."

Hugo Chávez's arrival at the military academy in August 1971 at the age of
seventeen coincided with a radical restructuring of the school by a group
of nationalistic military officers. They wanted to give
cadets a broader,
more humanistic foundation than the traditional course of studies
focusing exclusively on military sciences. They called it the
Andrés Bello
Plan, for the nineteenth-century Venezuelan poet and philosopher.

For the first time in the school's history, cadets were to receive
university-level degrees and needed a high school diploma to be
admitted. They were also to study the liberal arts along with military
history and strategy. The school's directors brought in civilian professors
to teach economics, political science, world history, constitutional
law, physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, and other subjects,
including classes that looked at Venezuela's history and current reality.
The soldiers could go on to graduate studies at civilian universities.

Paradoxically, cadets who were undergoing training to combat a
fading leftist guerrilla movement also started reading the
Communist
Manifesto
. Chávez delved into everything from Mao to Clausewitz to
Napoleon to Claus Heller, a Prussian general who wrote about the military
as an agent of social change. Some of the cadets' studies ran even
further afield from the traditional course material of their predecessors.
One who entered a year after Chávez and became a close ally,
Raúl Isaías Baduel, specialized in Eastern philosophy and meditation.
He eventually took to burning incense in his room, playing Gregorian
chants, and reading Sun Tzu. Friends nicknamed him El Tao.

The
Andrés Bello Plan marked a clear divide between the old guard
and the new in the Venezuelan
military. Unlike their predecessors, most
of the new cadets did not study at US-run counterinsurgency institutions
like the
School of the Americas, then based in Panama and today at
Fort Benning, Georgia. If they did attend, they went "well-fortified with
progressive ideas." The school, dubbed the "School of the Assassins" by
critics, was infamous for training some of Latin America's most notorious
dictators and human rights abusers. They included General Hugo
Bánzer of Bolivia and, later, many of the "elite" Salvadoran troops that
massacred nearly a thousand elderly men, women, and children in El
Mozote in December 1981.

Even before the Andrés Bello Plan, Venezuela's military differed
significantly from many others in Latin America. There was no discrimination
in Venezuela's armed forces — anyone could reach the
highest ranks or enter the prestigious military academy. There was no
"military caste" like those in Chile and Argentina, where the sons of
the light-skinned elites dominated the upper ranks and elite units of
the armed forces. In Venezuela many senior officers came from
poor
urban and peasant families, and knew from their own experience the
difficulties their people faced in putting food on the table. That did not
mean, of course, that all of them were "immune to the clever co-opting
maneuvers of the oligarchy with whom they inevitably come into contact
once they reach the higher ranks." But a large number of the new
cadets who rose through the ranks — like Chávez, Baduel, and another
classmate, Jorge Luis García Carneiro — never forgot their roots. Some
were so poor, their families could not afford shoes.

The Andrés Bello Plan and the Venezuelan military's historical
openness to all social classes combined to produce a new kind
of soldier in the early 1970s — much different from the right-wing
officers who were launching coups and installing bloody dictatorships
elsewhere on the continent. "In sharp contrast to the archetypal,
muscle-flexing neo-Nazis that comprised the Armed Forces in
Argentina and Chile, in Venezuela a new type of soldier returned
to the barracks with professional skills,
civilian contacts and a fresh
social sensitivity."

The Andrés Bello Plan had a tremendous impact on Chávez, who
did not forget it or the men who created it. He was mesmerized by
the classroom lectures of
Lieutenant Colonel Jacinto Pérez Arcay, an
author and historian who told tales of Zamora and the Federal War.
When Chávez reached Miraflores Palace three and a half decades
later, he gave Arcay — by then a retired general — a small office next
to his. He named the former director of the academy who conceived
of the Andrés Bello Plan,
General Jorge Osorio García, ambassador to
Canada.

Arcay and other professors also spoke in the classroom about
Venezuela's towering historical figure,
Simón Bolívar. As a boy and a
teenager, Chávez received a cursory education about the Liberator in
school. "Instead of Superman, my hero was Bolívar," he once said. Now,
spurred by Arcay and others, he delved more deeply into the life of the
man who had freed six South American nations from Spanish rule and
turned into an icon in Venezuela. A small, wiry man who stood five-foot-
five and sported long sideburns and Napoleonic garb, Bolívar was
George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ all rolled into
one for Venezuelans, a "secular saint" in the words of political scientist
Daniel Hellinger.

Chávez developed more than a passing interest in Bolívar. His fascination
turned into deep devotion that bordered on obsession. He
started reading everything he could about the Liberator. After the 9 P.M.
bell rang at the academy calling for silence, he often headed back to
the empty classrooms, where cadets were allowed to stay until 11 P.M.
to study. Sometimes Chávez remained even later, occasionally falling
asleep on a desk where someone would find him with his head down
and a book open.

It wasn't surprising that the Liberator was captivating Chávez.

Simón Bolívar's life was a mind-spinning series of triumphs and
defeats played out on the world stage. Born into one of the most aristocratic
families in the New World, he was orphaned at a young age,
inherited one of the New World's greatest fortunes at twenty-one, and
then exhausted it pursuing a quixotic dream of first liberating and
then
uniting Latin America as the world's largest nation. Exiled from
Venezuela twice and the target of numerous assassination attempts,
Bolívar led some of the most audacious military campaigns in history.
During one, he marched a ragged, starving army of twenty-four hundred
men — many of them shoeless
llaneros
— across icy Andean peaks
to launch a surprise attack on loyalist troops in Colombia.

Bolívar achieved part of his goal. He liberated Venezuela,
Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and the country named for him
— Bolivia. He was feted as a hero in all the capitals as he marched
down pathways strewn with flowers in his honor. He declined repeated
offers to crown him emperor. But in the end Bolívar's dream came
crashing down as the nations he freed succumbed to squabbling
among competing
caudillos
, strongmen
.
The brief union of Venezuela,
Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador known as
Gran Colombia fell apart.

Bolívar was outlawed as a traitor in his native Venezuela, where the
same crowds who had cheered him wildly just a few short years earlier
now jeered him. He died in 1830 in exile in Colombia, penniless and
nearly friendless.
Bolívar is now almost unknown to most people outside Latin
America. But in Venezuela and other parts of South America he is a
towering giant. Venezuelan schoolchildren memorize his sayings and
speak of him in reverential tones. People hang portraits of him in their
living rooms, something it is hard to imagine Americans doing with
paintings of George Washington. Even the smallest and most remote
villages have a Bolívar statue and plaza. Until the 1950s men could
not pass through the plazas unless they were wearing a tie and jacket
out of respect for the Liberator. Main streets, municipal buildings, airports,
schools, hospitals, stadiums, tunnels, and even dams are named
for him. His sayings are painted on walls all over the country. MORALITY
AND KNOWLEDGE ARE OUR FIRST NECESSITIES appears in virtually every
Venezuelan school.

Today few historians doubt Bolívar was a genius, although his
detractors deride him as a reckless dreamer. They depict him as an arrogant,
unpredictable, and sometimes cruel man who was also a notorious
womanizer. Admirers lined up at a legendary country house he had outside
Lima, Peru, eager to offer themselves. The shrieks from Bolívar's
lovemaking reputedly made one cavalry officer move out of the residence
because he couldn't sleep. Every time Bolívar triumphantly
entered a new town, "local leaders chose the prettiest girl for the honor
of delivering a crown of flowers. If she delivered more, well, he was the
Liberator."

Bolívar was born in 1783. By the time he was nine both his parents
were dead — his mother of a chest infection, probably tuberculosis,
his father simply of old age and an indulgent lifestyle. Simón
lived for several years with his tutor Simón Rodríguez, a brilliant and
eccentric schoolteacher who was a visionary in his own right. Along
with Bolívar, Zamora, and Maisanta, Rodríguez was to become one
of the
guiding lights of Chávez's "Bolivarian" project for Venezuela
and Latin America.

Even less known outside of Latin America than Bolívar,
Rodríguez was a young devotee of the French philosopher Rousseau.
He espoused his own radical philosophy. To the shock of the city
fathers, he publicly proclaimed that the school in Caracas where he
taught the children of wealthy whites should also admit blacks and
mixed-race
pardos.
His advocacy for the underclass got him into constant
trouble, and eventually he was fired from the school. He then
spent five years as Bolívar's tutor before finally fleeing Caracas in
1797, when he was implicated in one of the first revolts of the independence
movement against Spanish rule.

Years later in the 1820s, he found himself in trouble again when he
landed in Bolivia. He insisted that the children of Indians be admitted
to the free public schools he was setting up. Before long authorities
under pressure from white parents who did not want their children educated
with Indians found an excuse to shut down the schools.

Before he fled Caracas, Rodríguez brought his revolutionary
notions to the tutoring sessions with Bolívar, who while absorbing the
calls for radical social change was at the same time protected by great
wealth. After his formative years under Rodríguez's wing, Bolívar's
uncles sent him to Spain in 1799 at the age of fifteen. He spent three
years
in Europe, where he was captivated by the revolutionary environment.
A sprouting intellectual, he devoured the works of Voltaire and
Rousseau. By now he was well read in the classics.

He was also falling in love. At seventeen he met the daughter of
one of Spain's leading aristocratic families, Maria Teresa Rodríguez y
Alaiza, who was two years his elder. They eventually married in May
1802 and returned to Caracas. But just eight months after their wedding,
unaccustomed to the tropical climate, she contracted yellow fever
and died. Grief-stricken and half mad, Bolívar vowed never to marry
again — and never did. Instead, he was to throw himself into his dream
of liberating South America.

A few months after Maria Teresa's death, a restless and disconsolate
Bolívar headed back to Europe. He spent several years in France
and Italy and was reunited with his mentor Rodríguez. In one famous
encounter in August 1805, no doubt embellished in the telling, the two
climbed the slopes of Mount Aventino in Rome where Bolívar took a
romantic
oath, swearing to God that he would not rest until his home-land
was free. His words were immortalized and even today remain
deeply ingrained in the psyche of the Venezuelan people, learned by
schoolchildren and memorized by soldiers performing their military
service. Chávez was to invoke them in 1982 when he organized a secret
conspiracy in the military that led to the birth of his Bolivarian movement
and eventually his ascension to the presidential palace:

I swear before you, and I swear before the God of my fathers, that
I will not allow my arm to rest, nor my soul to rest, until I have
broken the chains that oppress us . . .

Three years later and after a trip through a United States of America
basking in its freshly won independence, Bolívar was back in Venezuela
to directly take up the struggle in Latin America. He immersed himself
in the embryonic and clandestine independence movement. Despite
his young age, he quickly rose to a leadership position. By April 1810
the movement was fully under way. A full-fledged uprising broke out
against the Spanish in Caracas, where a revolutionary junta took over.
Less than a year later, on July 5, 1811, Venezuela declared its independence.
But a decade of bloody fighting still lay ahead.

Bolívar suffered defeat after defeat, some from human causes, others
natural. On March 26, 1812, a powerful earthquake struck Venezuela,
leveling entire towns, destroying much of Caracas, and burying complete
corps of independence troops. In the city of Barquísimeto alone
one regiment of fifteen hundred men was swallowed by a fissure and
vanished. In Caracas, where ten thousand people were said to have
died, Bolívar was helping dig out victims when a pro-Spanish acquaintance
came by and remarked that
nature had put itself on the side of the
Spanish. A defiant Bolívar responded, "If Nature is against us, we will
fight it and make it obey us."

It became one of his most famous sayings. Chávez invoked it in
December 1999 when
mudslides and floods devastated Caracas and the
nearby Caribbean coast, leaving an estimated fifteen thousand dead
in Venezuela's worst natural disaster of the twentieth century. In an
echo of Bolívar's time when the pro-Spanish Catholic Church declared
that the earthquake was evidence of God's displeasure with the revolutionaries,
Caracas archbishop José Ignacio Velasco suggested from the
pulpit that the floods were a punishment against Chávez.