The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (18 page)

Apparently, Chávez’s words were enough. Eight months later, the government had still failed to substantiate any of its claims. The attorney general explained that Afiuni was guilty of “spiritual pollution.” Judge Leidys Azuaje—who, Afiuni told me, was a magistrate the government had relied on in the past to handle political cases—presided over the case. At her first preliminary hearing, the government’s prosecutors admitted that they had found no evidence to support the charges. Despite the fact that evidence of a “benefit” is an essential element for a charge of corruption, Judge Azuaje saw nothing amiss. “The prosecutor said there is no evidence. There is no money, no contact [between me and Cedeño],” recalls Afiuni. “And the judge said, ‘Well, you are going to trial.’ ”

Chávez had long since stripped the Venezuelan judiciary of its independence. In 2004, the National Assembly passed a law that allowed him to pack the Supreme Court with loyalists. The law also made it easy to purge any justices whose “
public attitude … undermines the majesty or prestige of the Supreme Court.” This new pro-Chávez high court then fired hundreds of judges across the judiciary, replacing them with more politically acceptable choices. If there was any question whom the members of the Supreme Court served, they answered it at the beginning of the 2006 judicial session. At that opening ceremony, several judges began chanting, “¡Uh, ah, Chávez no se va!” (Uh, ah, Chávez is not leaving!).

I asked Afiuni if she had ever felt political pressure on a case. “Never. Never,” she replied. She had generally handled routine criminal cases. “It would be naive to say that I didn’t know what goes on in the judicial system. There is executive pressure in all the branches. But I was not going to resign or give up my post because other people were being pressured. I had been a judge for nine years, and I had not had to deal with that.”

Nor did she think of herself as a hero or have any regrets. “This
man had been detained for three years. I did what I was constitutionally bound to do,” she tells me. She expected there might be some reprisals for her decision or that she might be relieved of her duties. “But I never thought it could get to this,” says Afiuni. “I never thought that my freedom or life would be at stake. What happened to me sent a clear message to all the other judges. Even Chávez said this is an example, she has to be made an example of.”

When you exit the prison, the security guards sign you out. The form includes a space for your name, the name of the inmate you are visiting, and the crime that person has committed. Up and down the rolls, the crimes are listed. Drug smuggling. Theft. Murder. Next to Afiuni’s name the space for her crime was left blank. It was as if even the guards didn’t know what to say.

As she marked time in prison, Afiuni was diagnosed with cancer. In February 2011, after months of her pleading, the attorney general agreed to let her continue her pretrial detention under house arrest. Eligio Cedeño, the Venezuelan businessman, was granted political asylum in the United States. Judge Afiuni is still waiting for her day in court.

After twelve years of Chavismo, the mask is slipping. Despite the largest oil boom in Venezuelan history and despite large infusions of cash funneled into social programs, the signs of decay, deterioration, and disorder are abundant. First there is crime: everyone’s chief worry is for his or her own safety. Under Chávez, homicides have reached epidemic proportions.
Caracas is the most dangerous capital in the world, and one of the most violent cities. On the average weekend, more people will die in Caracas than in Baghdad and Kabul combined. In 2009,
there were 19,133 murders in Venezuela, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence. (The Venezuelan government stopped publishing the number of murders several years ago after it began to skyrocket.) The number of violent deaths in Venezuela has outpaced the body count of Mexico’s drug war. And for the slain, there is little hope of justice: 91
percent of murders go unprosecuted.

Everyone I met knew someone who had been robbed, kidnapped,
or worse.
One afternoon I attended a lunch thrown by a number of academics and former diplomats. The host arrived late, his face pale and his hands trembling: he had just been robbed—inside a bank. When you point out the level of crime to Chávez’s own supporters, some will admit it is a worry. They then quickly point out that it was a problem in 1998, before Chávez became president. That is true. But the number of murders each year is now triple what it was when Chávez became president.

The second major concern is the economy. More and more, Venezuela finds itself alone among South American countries, as its economic prospects plunge. Despite being the continent’s only oil-rich economy,
it is also the only country in South America that saw its economy shrink in 2010.
Its levels of inflation have exceeded even Africa’s most mismanaged economies. Foreign investment disappeared after a wave of nationalizations ordered by Chávez. In 2010, Venezuela was the only South American country with
a negative balance sheet for foreign investment. In the same year, Transparency International listed Venezuela as the continent’s most corrupt country, ranking it 164 out of 178 states, alongside the likes of Laos and Angola. Corruption, graft, and a failure to invest in its basic infrastructure have led to power outages, rolling blackouts, and water shortages. Even the country’s cash cow, PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, is suffering: it reported falling profits in 2010, even as the price of oil rose.

One of the most basic ways Venezuela’s economic crisis reaches the general public is in the shortages of staple foods like meat, milk, and sugar. But how could a member of OPEC have a shortage of groceries? A local butcher, who asked that I not use his name, said sometimes it made more sense for butchers not to sell anything. Once or twice a month, he explained, the government sends inspectors to check his prices. He told me that the inspectors wanted him to sell meat at 17 bolivares a kilo. The problem is that he could usually only buy a kilo of meat for 19 to 21 bolivares. If the inspectors found his prices were above 17 bolivares, they would fine him 11,000 bolivares each time. “
The problem is the price [controls],” he explained from behind his counter. “Since the price is regulated, you can’t sell. Sometimes you buy with a little fear. I have three fines to pay right now.”

It is not complex economics; the government’s insistence on price
controls during a period of massive inflation had predictably led to shortages.
The butcher pointed to another butcher’s shop down the street that had just closed. He didn’t see the point in staying in business. I looked at the prices he had listed that day, and I noticed they were above 17 bolivares. “It’s a risk we are running,” he admitted. But he added that there was one upside to Chávez’s economic policies. “When people are scared, they sometimes buy a lot,” the butcher said, laughing. “Even a rumor can make people buy.”

The fact that so many ingredients of everyday life are in a state of disrepair, if not utter ruin, presents a conundrum: How is it possible for Chávez to maintain public support when so much is going so wrong? Of course, his electoral strategies have been part of the equation. So too have the government’s enormous handouts to its supporters and to those who have been living hand to mouth for years. Chávez’s gross centralization of power has also left his government less reliant on swings in public opinion. But one of his most innovative tools is one available any hour of any day. As president of Venezuela, Chávez is CEO of a media empire unlike any other, and its main product is Chávez himself.

Chávez is everywhere. Turn on the television, change the radio station, walk to the newsstand, surf the Internet, and you will find him. Perhaps the most effective and utterly unique weapon he wields is the
cadena
. It is, in essence, a national presidential address. According to Venezuelan law, during a
cadena
all radio and television channels must broadcast the president’s words. Typically, presidents resorted to using a
cadena
during an emergency or special event. Chávez uses it constantly. Specifically, in his first eleven years,
he delivered nearly two thousand
cadenas
, which amounts to one every two days. He will use any occasion to call for a
cadena
, denouncing his enemies, extolling his work, or discussing whatever is on his mind. And once he starts talking, no one other than Chávez knows when he will stop. If you add up the length of all of his
cadenas
, they would amount to fifty-four full days. Chávez can effectively throttle all radio and television broadcasts and then saturate the airwaves with whatever message he chooses. “The
cadenas
are a huge form of control,” says Andrés Cañizález, a professor and leading expert on Venezuelan media. “Chávez is able to control at any moment the content and the time that the
cadena
goes on the air nationally. It is basically a nonexistent tool in any other country.”

The centerpiece of Chávez’s media universe is his unscripted Sunday afternoon television show,
Aló, Presidente (Hello, President)
. Here, each week, Chávez sings, dances, rants, raves, shouts, jokes, questions, reports, prays, and—sometimes—calls Fidel Castro on the telephone. The show has no precise running time, although it averages a little less than five hours. It is a rambling program that resembles a telethon with a heavy dose of politics—a cross between Jerry Lewis and Glenn Beck but with an emphasis on “the socialism of the twenty-first century.” (For the show’s tenth anniversary, he aired a four-day special episode.) Chávez will often use the show to visit government projects, lambaste his opponents, or denounce the United States. As he downs one cup of coffee after another, he unveils new policies and makes bold announcements. Famously, during one episode, he ordered the head of the military to send ten tank battalions to the Venezuelan-Colombian border. Special guests have included Danny Glover, Diego Maradona, and, of course, Fidel.

Although the showman never acts like a head of state, one of the program’s more important elements is the picture it gives of Chávez governing. Amid his monologues and impromptu tirades, Chávez will quiz his ministers—whose attendance is mandatory—often berating them for their failings. The Comandante has even been known to fire a minister live on television. The whole lot of them sit among the audience, wearing socialist red, their heads tilted down, praying that they are not called out on a whim. Chávez dressing down a hapless minister for the pleasure of the viewing audience on national television is what passes for accountability in Venezuela today. It is also a vital part of the image making that keeps him blameless for the country’s mounting troubles. The message is clear: if the incompetent ministers and bureaucrats would only do what Chávez told them to do, everything would be fine.

If Chávez’s antics are unrehearsed, his creation of a media state is anything but spontaneous. It began in the wake of the April 2002 coup. When Chávez came to power, the Venezuelan government operated one state television channel and two radio stations, and Chávez had done surprisingly little to change that in the early years of his
presidency. After the coup, Chávez saw the crucial role the media played in shaping events and, in his view, encouraging his ouster. He referred to the four private television channels as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “[Chávez’s government] saw how weak they were after April 11, 2002,” says Cañizález, referring to the short-lived coup. “They realized they were a communication minority, so they developed a strategy to create a strong media infrastructure.”

In 2004, the National Assembly provided the government with the legal framework to control the media. The government was given broad discretionary powers to punish slander and disrespect of public officials. Defamation of the president can lead to thirty months in prison, and the government has the right to impose hefty fines on any media company for “offending” public authorities. Two of the major television channels—Venevisión and Televen—soon changed their editorial stance to fall in line with the government’s wishes. Politically objectionable shows were canceled, and the channels’ focus shifted to entertainment. In one telling example, a popular political talk show was replaced with a program on astrology and tarot readings. A third channel, RCTV, was closed, and the fourth, Globovisión, remains in a bitter struggle with the government, always under the threat of sanctions. (In October 2011, for example, Globovisión was fined $2 million for reporting on deadly prison riots a few months earlier.) Meanwhile, Chávez has poured millions into creating his own pro-government media conglomerate. Today, there are six government television channels, two national radio stations, three thousand community radio stations, three print media companies, and a growing presence on the Internet. “These channels are clearly a propaganda machine of the state,” Cañizález told me. “It is sort of what you would think of the official state TV of Cuba.”

Perhaps the regime’s most sophisticated tool has simply been uncertainty. In August 2009,
Chávez shuttered 34 radio stations for alleged “administrative infractions.” At the same time, the government announced that it was investigating 240 other stations for similar violations. However, it never specified which stations were under its microscope, nor did it intend to notify them. With the threat of closure already made real, the government knew the stations would do its censorship for it. In such an environment, any story that comes
too close to the edge is either watered down or killed. “Their strategy is to keep them on their heels,” says Cañizález. “This is a way that media critical of the government can exist, but always under threat and at a high cost. Because the government doesn’t give a clear set of rules, it puts independent media in a constant state of uncertainty.”

If Chávez’s media war began with television and radio, his sights now appear to be set on the Internet. (He has largely ignored print media. The majority of Venezuelans watch or listen to their news, and he knows that a significant percentage of those who regularly read newspapers would never support him anyway.) Several years ago Chávez nationalized CANTV, the only central provider of the Internet in Venezuela. In late 2009,
he appointed a former head of the intelligence police to the company’s board of directors. And in December 2010,
the National Assembly passed laws forbidding any Internet provider to post content that causes “anxiety or unrest among the public order.”