The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (17 page)

The cost has been much greater for the people on the disc. In one case documented by Human Rights Watch, a ninety-eight-year-old woman was denied medical prescriptions she had been receiving for years; when her family inquired, they were told it was because she had signed the referendum. One person I met told me a similar story. Her fiancé required immediate medical attention and went to the emergency room of a government-run hospital. The hospital representative was in the process of admitting him, until she ran his voter identification card through the computer. He was told he would have to go someplace else.
Statistical analysis supports the anecdotal evidence. Several academics compared the list of people who signed the referendum with data from household surveys and found that Chávez’s opponents saw a 5 percent drop in income and a 1.5 percent drop in employment after the voter rolls were made public. In a society ruled by patronage politics, being identified as an enemy of the state can have serious consequences. Once the information was released, it did not even require the government to use the data against its opponents. Venezuelans used the list against fellow citizens to decide everything from who is hired or fired to who gets a passport or is audited by the tax authorities. If Chávez knows who his friends are, then it is best if you don’t do business with his enemies.

María Corina Machado knows firsthand the price of opposing Chávez. She is the co-founder of an election watchdog group called Súmate. During the 2004 recall referendum, her organization played a lead role in encouraging people to participate in the vote. Her work did not go unnoticed.
The government brought charges against Machado and three other members of Súmate for conspiring to “destroy the nation’s republican form of government.” In particular, the government latched onto the fact that Súmate had received a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington-based organization, for $53,400. The money had been used to conduct workshops to educate citizens on the referendum. Ultimately, the government could not prove how educating Venezuelans about their government’s own constitutional process threatened to destabilize
the regime. But it did not stop Chávez from launching a full-scale media war to try to destroy the NGO’s credibility; Machado and other members of Súmate were regularly attacked on TV and in the press as traitors and lackeys of U.S. imperialism. “
They choose people in every sector, in the media, in the private sector, in the unions and some political parties, to intimidate, hurt, or persecute,” Machado told me. “That has a direct effect on the rest of the people.”

Seven years after founding Súmate,
Machado stepped up her opposition to the regime: she decided to become one of the only independent female political candidates to run for the National Assembly. On a warm evening in July 2010, I went to see her on the campaign trail. It was just about dusk, and the street was starting to fill up with people. It is hard for opposition candidates to find public spaces to hold their events, so on this evening the meeting is in the middle of a quiet street behind a neighborhood development in Bonita. The banners say, “Somos Mayoría” (We Are the Majority). The people turning up tonight are old and young, professionals and pensioners—and nearly all of them are women. It is not entirely surprising that so many women would come out to see María Corina Machado speak. Magalli Meda, Machado’s campaign manager, tells me that women, especially mothers, have been key to the campaign. “
Our communication strategy has always been to talk about families,” says Meda, an expert on branding and a mother of two. “The thing is, every time you talk about family here, you empower women. And they bring their family along.”

Mothers had, in effect, become ambassadors of the campaign, mobilizing their entire families to come out to vote. And the results were obvious, not just on this evening, but in Machado’s level of support. In order for candidates to run for office, they must first collect a required number of signatures. It took most candidates several weeks to collect these names. “It took them two to three weeks,” says Meda. “It took us one day to get four times the minimum number of signatures.”

Although it is her first election, Machado’s time at Súmate made her a veteran of the election wars, well schooled in the ways in which an authoritarian wins at the ballot box. She rattles off demographic data on states around the country. She recalls the percentages for
seemingly every election of the past decade. She knows the election laws backward and forward. When I ask her why the government has been so successful, she settles on one word: fear. “Fear does not leave fingerprints,” she tells me. “I think it has been Chávez’s biggest and best-used instrument from day one.”

She makes her case by pointing to one of the figures she thinks matters most: 49 percent of Venezuelans do not believe the vote is secret. “Remember,” she tells me, “there are about 5.6 million people, according to official data, that depend on money given to them by the government, either from pensions or jobs. And then somebody comes and knocks on your door and asks how you feel about crime? Horrible. Corruption? Terrible. President Chávez? Oh, I love him. The conclusion is that Chávez is a charismatic leader that has an emotional connection. And of course he does. But I believe it is also fear.” If you believe the vote may not be secret, that your political preferences could be used against you—hardly far-fetched after the creation of the Tascón List and the Maisanta—you might think twice before answering the third question. “You do not have the incentive to risk voting against [Chávez], because either nothing is going to happen or you will be punished,” says Machado. “The whole idea of making people that dissent believe that anything they say or do will hurt them … is strategic.”

Sometimes, of course, the regime is hardly subtle in the ways it tries to intimidate. A decade after she had invited Chávez to discuss oil policy at Simón Bolívar University, Maruja Tarre, the former diplomat and professor, had become a sharp critic of the president. She regularly gave interviews or wrote articles criticizing his statements and policies. Much of her commentary came via Twitter, where she would give real-time reaction to Chávez’s public addresses. In September 2009, she wasn’t watching Chávez speak; she was on the phone, talking to her daughter, who lived in Washington, D.C. On that evening, they were discussing a recent spate of anti-Chávez demonstrations that had been held abroad. They compared them to some of the international protests that had been held in solidarity with the Green Movement in Iran, which was still struggling to take to the streets after it had erupted a couple of months earlier. It was a conversation between a mother and a daughter.

Two nights later, it was on the six o’clock news. Tarre and her daughter, Isabel, were shocked to see their private conversation broadcast on national television. The news anchor offered his TV audience no explanation of how he had acquired the recording; it was simply understood that Tarre’s phone had been bugged. Once it aired, Alberto Nolia, the host of the show
The Devil’s Papers
, proceeded to deconstruct the conversation to help viewers understand what they had just heard. He said that Tarre’s daughter had just admitted to being the organizer of “anti-Venezuelan” demonstrations in foreign countries, although the protests were against Chávez’s government, not Venezuela, and she hadn’t organized anything. Nolia then went on to say, in an aggrieved voice, “What type of mother calls her daughter abroad to talk about politics?”

If people missed it, then they might have caught the conversation a few hours later when it was rebroadcast on a late-night political talk show called
The Razor
. The host, Mario Silva, an ardent Chávez supporter, regularly attacks members of the opposition in the strongest possible language. Projecting a thuggish persona, Silva uses his show to threaten or humiliate people, often promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. After re-airing the conversation, he argued that Tarre had just admitted the Venezuelan opposition had failed. He made fun of her daughter, saying she must have lived abroad for a long time judging by her “Spanglish.” He then read from their Twitter accounts. “
They record everything we say,” Tarre told me. “They say I am in the ‘hands of the empire.’ I don’t know what it means to be in the hands of the empire. I do know it was meant to scare us.”

The National Institute of Female Orientation sits high on a hilltop. The name is a euphemism for the overcrowded, dilapidated structure that serves as Venezuela’s only women’s prison. (Like the military prison that holds Raúl Baduel, it is in Los Teques.) Wednesday mornings are visiting day, and more than two hundred people have lined up early. It takes about forty-five minutes to reach the front of the line, register, be stamped on your forearm, searched, and then cleared to enter. A pack of stray dogs, however, simply wander in and out, sauntering
by the security guards and into the prison complex. One small brown-and-tan shepherd mix, not more than six months old, sits in the shade, watching as people inch closer to the front gate. Occasionally, he gets up to sniff at the bags of food people have brought—the prison sometimes runs out during the week—hoping for a handout. When I pass through security and walk onto the prison grounds, the same puppy is already there, on the inside, looking for another spot to avoid the midday sun.

The prison is disorientating at first. Many guards don’t wear uniforms. It’s hard to distinguish who is an inmate and who works there. Some guards wear the correct prison-issued pants, others are in street clothes. But it may not make any difference. As soon as I am inside, a prisoner in a tank top and shorts asks me, “
Who do you want to see? I’ll take you.” I had come to see Judge María Afiuni.

Eight months earlier, Judge Afiuni had been presiding over a hearing in her courtroom, at the Thirty-First Control Court in Caracas. The case involved a man named Eligio Cedeño. The government contended Cedeño, a Venezuelan businessman, was corrupt, guilty of evading currency controls. But the hearing on December 10, 2009, wasn’t about the merits of the case. At issue was whether the government had the right to continue to hold Cedeño in custody. The Venezuelan government had kept the businessman in pretrial detention for three years, although the country’s laws permit someone to be held for only two years. Judge Afiuni had grown aggravated when the prosecutor’s office had failed to send an attorney to two prior hearings. Basing her decision on Venezuelan law and guidance from a panel of United Nations legal experts, Afiuni ordered Cedeño’s conditional release on bail. He would have to surrender his passport and report to the court every fifteen days, but he could not be held in indefinite detention. Cedeño, who believed himself to be a political prisoner—he had previously helped finance opposition politicians—immediately fled the country. But even before he did, Judge Afiuni found herself in handcuffs. “
The intelligence officers, the same ones that brought Cedeño into the hearing, were the ones that arrested me—fifteen minutes after I made my judgment,” says Afiuni, sitting on a green plastic stool outside her jail cell.

When I visited her, she was being held in a wing of the prison with additional security, separate from the general population. The prison
was built to hold 250 inmates, but today it holds 682. Afiuni shares a tiny cell with two other women; there is only one bunk bed, so someone must sleep on the floor. Light comes in from the grid of twelve small windows at one end of the cell, most without any panes of glass. The paint on the walls seems relatively fresh. (The last inmate in this cell burned herself alive, Afiuni tells me, so they had to repaint.) Suicides, violence, and deaths are common here. Only a couple of weeks earlier an inmate down the hall hanged herself.

Afiuni never goes beyond the narrow hallway that leads to her cell. It’s a necessary precaution since she is responsible for sending at least twenty-four criminals to the same prison that now holds her. For the first four months, there was no lock on her cell door. “When I first got here, they would come near my cell and yell, ‘I am going to cut your eyes out. I’m going to cut you to pieces, bitch,’ ” she tells me, smoking Belmonts. Several inmates had to be transferred to another prison. They had been discovered waiting outside her cell’s window with cans of kerosene. Even now, sequestered from everyone but the twenty other women on this wing, she receives death threats outside her door. How do prisoners from the general population get past the guards and locked door at the end of the hallway? “That’s a good question,” she says, smiling.

Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz charged Afiuni with corruption, abuse of power, and facilitating the evasion of justice. The very handcuffs that had been on Cedeño were soon slapped on the judge. “All of my court was detained for twelve hours—three assistants, two bailiffs, my bodyguards, and intern—nine people in total,” says Afiuni. The next evening, Chávez took to the radio and television airwaves to denounce Afiuni. He accused her of being guilty of crimes “
more serious than an assassination.” He railed that in earlier times she would have been executed by a firing squad. “
That judge must pay, with all the force of the law, for what she did, along with any judge who thinks about doing something similar,” exhorted Chávez. As he spoke, the television cameras panned over to the attorney general, who sat there dutifully listening. If Afiuni were guilty of the charges, Venezuelan law would allow a maximum of seven years’ imprisonment. Chávez found that unsatisfactory: “I call for thirty years in prison in the name of the dignity of the country.”

Afiuni did not watch Chávez’s remarks on television. The intelligence
police had already confined her to a jail cell. But she remembers how she found out about Chávez’s tirade. “A senior intelligence official came in and said, ‘We have good news, and we have bad news. The good news is that we have found nothing against you. The bad news is that Chávez just condemned you to prison for thirty years on national television.’ ”