Hugo! (37 page)

By Chávez's reckoning, the plan dramatically altered the public perception
of the Venezuelan military. "This represented quite a change,
because after the February 27th massacre, for instance, to go to a poor
neighborhood a soldier had to dress as a civilian," he said. "He was
taking a risk because the army had massacred the people. Today, when
a soldier shows up, people greet him with enthusiasm and happiness."

The plan was not without its critics. Some saw it as another dangerous
intrusion of the military into civilian life, opening the door to
authoritarian rule. The Venezuelan newsmagazine
Primicia
ran a cover
article warning of a surge of "military nationalism." Others worried
that the military's civic activities would undercut efforts to strengthen
civilian and governmental institutions. Some believed Plan Bolívar was
shifting the armed forces too far away from their traditional role of military
defense. For their part, butchers and bodega owners complained
that the military-run "people's markets" were undercutting their business.
Others simply saw it as a Band-Aid that didn't get at the country's
root problems.

But to Chávez and his supporters, the plan was a pragmatic first step
to address Venezuela's pressing problems, at least short-term. Some compared
it to Depression-era public works programs in the United States
under
Franklin Delano Roosevelt such as the Civilian Conservation
Corps, which included paid work for the unemployed. Others noted
that the US military itself plays a role in civilian life, with the Army
Corps of Engineers helping with flood control, wetlands management,
and beach erosion projects. The National Guard is often called in to
help during emergencies and natural disasters. Many Venezuelans saw
the military as one of the few institutions in the country that worked.

Chávez didn't think he had much choice but to implement the
plan. "Imagine February 2, 1999, with almost all the state and municipal
governments opposing us," he recalled:

The Congress against us; the Supreme Court against us; a budget
written by the previous regime; a government almost without
resources to pay the salaries; the price of oil down to seven dollars
a barrel; on top of this, pressure from the high expectations our
electoral triumph had generated. Around the palace there were
lines of thousands of people asking for jobs, with their sick kids,
sleeping there, on the ground, not letting my car pass. "We are
not leaving until Chávez sees us." . . . So I decided to turn to the
armed forces.

It was his first effort as president at creating a "civil-military union."
The program was not an unblemished success. Months later accusations
of
corruption emerged, with critics charging that high-ranking military
officers were skimming off thousands of dollars from what turned into
a loosely supervised $1 billion program. By December 2001 Chávez, to
his credit, removed the general in charge of the program, Victor Cruz
Weffer. But the battle against corruption, one of the pillars of Chávez's
1998 campaign, was to remain a weak flank in his early presidency. Few
major figures ended up in court or behind bars.

Chávez argued that it wasn't easy dismantling an ingrained culture
of corruption where many people believed it was their right to take whatever
they could get their hands on. It was, he said, like "a cancer that
has metastasized in all directions." Some people called it the "
piñata
culture," where the "candy" or the money from oil revenues spills to the
floor after the piñata is broken open and everyone grabs what they can
in a free-for-all as they elbow others aside. Those who didn't take what
they could were considered
pendejos
, fools.

A best-selling book,
The Dictionary of Corruption in Venezuela
, cataloged
some of the most infamous pillaging. It was three volumes long.
It picked apart three hundred cases of graft among the high and mighty
between 1959 and 1989. The series didn't even go into the second term
of Carlos Andrés Pérez, considered a gold-medal contender in the category,
or mention his mistress Cecilia Matos. One of the most vile cases
in the book was known as the six-year
milk scandal. Venezuela imported
powdered milk from Belgium and other countries supposedly to be distributed
to poor children. "Instead, government employees sold it at
inflated prices. Worse, the milk had been contaminated in the wake of
the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. But instead of following orders to
destroy the milk, employees repackaged and sold it."

As Plan Bolívar kicked into high gear and tended to Venezuelans' daily
needs, Chávez focused on his initiative to transform the country long-term
— the constitutional assembly. The Supreme Court settled the dispute
between the president and the Congress, which contended that he did
not alone have the power to decree a referendum asking Venezuelans if
they wanted to convoke a constitutional assembly. The vote was set for
April 25. Chávez considered it a triumph of democracy, and proof that
he was a democrat. It was the first time in Venezuela's history that the
people would be allowed to vote on a major public issue.

Most Venezuelans considered the result a foregone conclusion.
Chávez was wildly popular, and he saw a constitutional assembly as
the centerpiece of his new administration. Many of his moves since
assuming the presidency had simply elevated his popularity. While
skeptics predicted that the political neophyte who'd never before held
public office would crumble once he took over the nation's top post,
Chávez was turning out to be a master politician. He had a common
populist touch that was softening the hearts of even some of his most
ardent
opponents.

He gave up his $1,200-a-month
salary as president, donating it to a
scholarship fund instead. He dispensed with the presidential limousine.
A virtual insomniac, he paid
surprise visits to decrepit public hospitals at
3 A.M. and fired doctors he found asleep on the job. On other occasions
he stopped the presidential convoy after midnight to chat with stunned
garbage collectors. At Miraflores he
served guests decidedly lowbrow
fare —
arepas
, the tortilla-like corn patties that are the national dish.
He ran his entourage ragged with eighteen-hour days, making himself
a
teetotaling role model of
hard work in a fiesta
-
intoxicated nation. He
launched an
attack on waste, too. When he found out the government
owned 128 civilian aircraft, he put the entire fleet up for sale. He cracked
down on
tax evasion, which was a national sport.

An open, friendly, and informal man given to breaking protocol,
Chávez disarmed some of his most bitter opponents with charm. The
same newspaper editor and opposition senator who had warned during
the campaign that Chávez would unleash "a reign of terror" — Rafael
Poleo — declared after meeting with the president, "He treated me very
affectionately."

Chávez was the most popular president in Venezuelan history and
one of the most popular in Latin America. A couple of months later,
in June, he was to take his show to New York. He banged down the
closing gavel at the New York Stock Exchange and charmed one thousand
bankers and businessmen at meetings aimed at attracting foreign
investment. He threw out the first ball at a New York Mets game at
Shea
Stadium. Then he wandered up to the broadcast booth and provided
color commentary in Spanish for the audience back home. He won
over the investors and financiers in part by enlisting the help of Frank
Sinatra, paraphrasing in English from one of the crooner's trademark
songs: "If I can make it in New York, I can make it anywhere."

A host of one the meetings, Susan Kaufman Purcell, director of
the Americas Society, commented that "Chávez put those financiers
in his pocket. I don't know if they will actually invest their money in
Venezuela . . . but they were enchanted with him. He seduced them
all."
Citibank president William Rhodes, who was leading a group of
sixteen US banks with an interest in Venezuela, said his bank planned
to increase its investments, and others did, too. Chávez finished off his
whirlwind tour with a stop in Houston, where he met with US oil executives
and attended a
breakfast hosted by former president George H. W.
Bush and another person with whom Chávez was to cross paths down
the road — his son George W., then the governor of Texas.

Despite Chávez's popularity, the
international media painted him
as a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" or — as one economist linked to the oligarchy
put it —
"President Jekyll and Colonel Hyde." They questioned
whether he was a democrat or a dictator. While Chávez was donating
his salary for scholarships and turning over Venezuela's version of Camp
David to the homeless, he was also threatening the Supreme Court
with a popular uprising and generally looking "the part of the Latin
American strongman."

Some reporters referred to a famous comment by Colombia's
Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez. In an article
titled
"The Enigma of the Two Chávezes," he recounted a conversation
with Chávez aboard a flight from Havana to Caracas. While impressed
with Chávez's charm, his intellectual restlessness, and a "supernatural"
memory for the poems of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, the left-leaning
writer also echoed fears about the former coup leader. "I was
struck by the impression that I had traveled and talked delightfully with
two opposite men," García Márquez wrote. "One whom good luck had
given the opportunity to save his nation. And the other, an illusionist,
who could go down in history as just another despot."

Chávez did make statements that could make it hard to pin down
where he stood or what he believed in. In reality he was a mix of many
things. He was a Latin American original, an iconoclast not easily defined
as simply another Juan Perón or Fidel Castro or Salvador Allende. He
famously told interviewer Agustín Blanco Muñoz in May 1996: "I am
not
Marxist, but I am not anti-Marxist. I am not communist, but I am
not anti-communist." Three years later, he made a similar comment
to
The New York Times
. "If you are attempting to determine whether
Chávez is of the left, right or center, if he is socialist, Communist or
capitalist, well, I am none of those, but I have a bit of all of those."

He was
socially progressive but
fiscally conservative, with a bit of
a strong-arm streak thrown in. After all, he was trying to break up a
mafia, a bankrupt political system that had helped turn Caracas into
what
The New Republic
called "a paved-over monument to urban chaos
and mismanagement." He deployed the military in Plan Bolívar to meet
social needs, but followed an orthodox free-market economic plan in his
first year by paying the
foreign debt, imposing
new taxes, and reining
in
spending as the country faced economic decline. Izaguirre, his conservative
finance minister, described Chávez as eager to learn the most
arcane details of state spending. What was the one overarching constant
in all his efforts was that they gave
priority to Venezuela's majority poor.

In the early months of Chávez's presidency, the media also pounced
on his relationship with
Norberto Ceresole and a letter he sent that
April to
Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born international terrorist
whose real name was
Illich Ramírez Sánchez. Ramírez masterminded
the 1975 seizure of OPEC ministers in Vienna, Austria, and the 1976
hijacking of an Air France jet to Uganda. He was serving a life prison
term in Paris for murder. In an unwise public relations move, Chávez
sent him a letter of "human solidarity." He later explained that "I was
in prison for two years, and know it is heartening when one receives a
letter. This does not imply political solidarity. It is simply human solidarity.
Every human being deserves respect."

Many of Chávez's supporters felt the media's emphasis on his missteps
and its drumbeat of Chávez the
dictator-in-waiting was unfair and
failed to capture the real story of what was happening in Venezuela
at the grassroots level — a breakthrough in democracy. They thought
reporters were writing about Chávez's revolution from the comfortable
perch of their five-star hotel balconies or their penthouses in exclusive
neighborhoods while failing to delve into the trenches in the barrios
where the majority of the people lived.

That fall eight men from a group called the Congress of
Venezuelan Artists and Intellectuals occupied the Caracas office of
the Associated Press and
AP-Dow Jones to protest the international
media's treatment of Chávez. The peaceful eight-hour sit-in ended
when Interior Minister
Ignacio Arcaya called the AP bureau late that
night and told the protestors' leader that Chávez, who was visiting
Washington, DC, considered the takeover illegal and counterproductive.
Moments later Caracas governor Hernán Grüber ódreman, the
Caracas police chief, and four members of the secret police arrived to
escort the protestors out.

Chávez got around what his supporters saw as biased international
reporting and even worse local coverage by creating his own
media outlets. In May he launched his own Sunday-morning radio
show,
Hello, President
, on the state radio network. That was followed
by his own Thursday-night television program,
Face to Face with the
President
, on the state television channel. Then in July came his own
newspaper,
The President's Post.
Chávez was editor in chief. He also
convoked frequent
cadenas
, or nationally broadcast addresses that
commercial television networks were obliged to run, preempting regular
programming. They often ran for hours.

Hello, President
was Chávez's most successful media venture.
There wasn't anything quite like it in Latin America or, for that matter,
the world. Every Sunday morning Chávez went on the air live. Anyone
who wanted to could call in and ask the president a question. Most
called about problems they wanted him to resolve. They ranged from
getting help collecting a pension to obtaining a job transfer to fighting
government bureaucracy. One listener even wrote in asking Chávez to
denounce her husband on the air for having an affair. Chávez listened
patiently to the callers and assigned aides to tackle their problems.