Comandante , livre ebook

The paperback edition published in 2013 First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.co.uk
Copyright © Rory Carroll, 2013
The right of Rory Carroll to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in the USA in 2013 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books
Photograph credits Insert page 1, 2 (both), 8 (middle): Luis Cobelo/Latin Focus; 3 (both): Jose Francisco Sanchez Torres; 4 (all three): Guaicaipuro Lameda; 5 (top): Photo by Geraldine Afiuni; 5 (bottom): Vladimir Marcano; 6 (both): Raul Baduel; 7 (all four): Sean Smith/ Guardian ; 8 (top and bottom): Reuters/Miraflores Palace/handout
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 151 1 eISBN 978 0 85786 154 2
Designed by Amanda Dewey
For Ligi, for my parents, Kathy and Joe, and in memory of Heidi Holland
CONTENTS


Acknowledgments

P ROLOGUE
THRONE
1. H ELLO , P RESIDENT !
2. I NSIDE M IRAFLORES
3. D EFECTORS
4. T HE Y OUNG L IEUTENANT
PALACE
5. S URVIVAL OF THE F ITTEST
6. T HE A RT OF W AR
7. T HE D EVIL ’ S E XCREMENT
8. T HE S TORYTELLER
KINGDOM
9. D ECAY
10. T HE G REAT I LLUMINATING J OURNEY
11. P ROTEST
12. T HE I LLUSIONIST

Plates
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I didn’t know it at the time, but this book began upon my arrival in Venezuela in September 2006. I was a correspondent for the Guardian and found an apartment in Caracas, my new home after a decade covering Africa, Iraq, and the Mediterranean. Caracas was to be a base for covering Latin America, but the best story was on my doorstep. On trips to Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti and elsewhere, my mind would wander back to Venezuela and its unfolding revolution. When I returned, I would catch up with interviews and reporting trips, talking to street vendors, taxi drivers, security guards, housewives, farmers, prisoners, pensioners, professors, palace functionaries, ministers. All told different stories, but all, one way or another, lived in the shadow of the president, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. He bestrode society like a colossus, commanding attention, everywhere his voice, his face, his name. It did not matter whether you despised or adored him; you looked. Covering Venezuela was like wandering through a vast, boisterous audience that simultaneously booed and cheered the titan who turned the presidential palace, Miraflores, into a stage.
My notebooks filled and I filed copy to London, but there was never enough scope to capture this experiment by the Caribbean that supporters called el proceso, the process. A laboratory of power and charisma that veered between hope, dread and farce. There was no capturing that in five-hundred-word news stories. Thus Chávez retained a mystique abroad, depending on partisanship, as a tyrant or a messiah. Cartoonish images. The reality was more complex, strange and fascinating. Thus was born the idea for this book. By 2012, I had four boxes bulging with notebooks, but they were not enough. I needed to see how Chávez constructed his stage. I needed to get inside the walls of Miraflores. I took six months’ leave from the Guardian to seek and interview those who had, at one time or another, access to the throne. Aides, ministers, courtiers, bodyguards, supplicants, all played a role in the court of Hugo Chávez. All, in different ways, bore witness. Some spoke eagerly to criticise and settle scores with a ruler they no longer believed in. Others spoke to laud, to eulogise a one-off, a man of unique, unforgettable talents. Others had to be cajoled, or offered anonymity, for fear their testimony would create ructions in what was left of the revolution. Most sources are named. A few are not. To all who spoke, named or not, I am grateful. Private letters from Chávez published in Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s excellent 2004 biography helped plug gaps.
I owe a debt to many others: Marianella García, my assistant, for her contacts, generosity and friendship; Virginia López for her ideas, solidarity and humour. Heidi Holland, Francisco Toro, Brian Ellsworth, Phil Gunson, and Dan Cancel, fonts of expertise, for reading the draft and intercepting blunders; Lolybel Negrin for the transcriptions; Will Lippincott, my agent, for shepherding each step with agility and wisdom; Ginny Smith, Laura Stickney, Ann Godoff and Scott Moyers at the Penguin Press, and Nick Davies and his team at Canongate, for flair and dedication in turning a manuscript into a book; my colleagues at the Guardian for indulgence and support; my family in Caracas and Dublin for encouragement; and, above all, my wife, Ligi, for her patience, passion and belief in helping me to write about her country. To all, thank you.

Los Angeles, July 2012
COMANDANTE

PROLOGUE
I t was approaching midnight when the Venezuelan air force plane climbed over Havana and wheeled south, skimming over a moonlit Caribbean, bound for Caracas. Gabriel García Márquez sat with a pen and notebook next to Hugo Chávez. There was little physical resemblance between the two men. The writer was small, with a white mustache, dark eyebrows and grey, retreating curls over a lined, alert face. Chávez was not especially tall but was powerfully built, still athletic, with cropped black hair, a hatchet nose and a smooth, dark complexion. Standing next to him, García Márquez resembled a gnome. Seated and buckled, however, they shrank to more equal dimensions.
Both men had been guests of Fidel Castro. Cuba’s old fox had taken close interest in the Venezuelan, and now it was the turn of the Nobel laureate. It was January 1999, and Chávez was returning to his homeland to be sworn in as president. He had won an election a few weeks earlier and was now set, at forty-four, to become the republic’s youngest leader. A Colombian magazine had commissioned García Márquez to write a profile. Before finding fame as a novelist, Gabo, as friends called him, had been a newspaper reporter and still had a newsman’s instinct to interview and probe. ‘We had met three days earlier in Havana,’ he subsequently wrote. ‘The first thing that impressed me was his body of reinforced concrete. He had an immediate friendliness and a homegrown charm that were unmistakably Venezuelan. We both tried to meet up again, but it was not possible for either of us, so we decided to fly together to Caracas so we could chat about his life and other miracles.’
Chávez had yet to take office, and already his rise seemed extraordinary. Venezuela had once been considered South America’s most successful and therefore boring country, a realm of oil wealth and beauty queens that sat out the region’s cold-war–era dictatorships and revolutions in a haze of petrodollar complacency and bloodless elections. That changed one explosive night in February 1992 when an unknown lieutenant colonel named Hugo Chávez attempted a coup and sent tanks and soldiers with camouflage-painted faces to assault the presidential palace, Miraflores. President Carlos Andrés Pérez escaped, the coup failed, and Chávez went to jail, but six years later he stormed back as an election candidate, swept aside rivals, and here he was, president-to-be, flying beneath the stars to an unwritten fate. Who was this man?
García Márquez had special reason to accept this assignment. In novels such as The Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His Labyrinth, he had explored the psychologies of Caribbean leaders. Many dictators had thrived on these humid coasts over two centuries and woven themselves into the culture as mythic personages. The master of magical realism studied and did not necessarily condemn them. Fidel, in fact, was a personal friend. Having just won a clean, landslide election, Chávez was no dictator but came with a whiff of cordite. Supporters called him comandante.
García Márquez’s pen skimmed across the notepad as his interviewee related his childhood and political rise. The article observed: ‘The February coup seems to be the only thing that did not turn out well for Hugo Chávez Frías. He views it positively, however, as a providential reverse. It is his way of understanding good luck, or intelligence, or intuition, or astuteness, or whatever one can call the magic touch that has favoured him since he entered the world in Sabaneta, in the state of Barinas, on 28 July 1954, born under Leo, the sign of power. Chávez, a fervent Catholic, attributes his charmed existence to the hundred-year-old scapular that he has worn since childhood, inherited from a maternal great-grandfather, Colonel Pedro Pérez Delgado, one of his tutelary heroes.’
The son of poor primary-school teachers, as a boy he found among his mother’s books an encyclopedia whose first chapter seemed heaven-sent: ‘How to Succeed in Life’. Young Hugo did not last long as an altar boy (‘he rang the bells with such delight that everyone recognised his ring’) but excelled at painting, singing and baseball. His dream was to pitch in the major leagues, and for that the best route was the military academy. The cadet gradually abandoned his fantasy of a roaring stadium because in the academy he fell in love with military theory, political science and the history of Simón Bolívar, the Liberator who expelled the Spanish from much of the continent in the nineteenth century. Lieutenant Chávez received his graduation saber from Carlos Andrés Pérez, the president he would try to overthrow two decades later, an irony he acknowledged. García Márquez prodded at this. ‘What’s more, I told him, "You were about to kill him." "Not at all," Chávez protested. "The idea was to set up a constituent assemb