[R-G] Fidel’s Heir

[Anthony Fenton]

THE NEW YORKER
A Reporter at Large
Fidel’s Heir
The rising influence of Hugo Chávez.
by Jon Lee Anderson June 23, 2008

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_anderson

Venezuela’s oil money has brought better living standards for the  
country’s poorest citizens. It has also given Chávez the means to buy  
influence with his neighbors, usually at the expense of the United  
States. Photograph by Chris Anderson.

Venezuela’s oil money has brought better living standards for the  
country’s poorest citizens. It has also given Chávez the means to buy  
influence with his neighbors, usually at the expense of the United  
States. Photograph by Chris Anderson.

A few years ago, when Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, said  
that he wanted a new jet to replace the nearly thirty-year-old Boeing  
bequeathed to him by his predecessor, his critics raised an outcry.  
But Chávez went ahead with his plans. His new plane, which cost sixty- 
five million dollars, is a gleaming white Airbus A-319, with a white  
leather interior, seating for sixty passengers, and a private  
compartment. The folding seat-back trays have gold-colored hinges, and  
there is plenty of legroom.

Chávez has spent more than a year altogether on trips abroad since  
taking office, in February, 1999, and so the jet is a kind of second  
home. His seat bears an embossed leather Presidential seal. Paintings  
of nineteenth-century Latin-American independence heroes hang on the  
walls, including a prominent one of Simón Bolívar, known as El  
Libertador. Bolívar led military campaigns to free large parts of  
South America from Spanish rule, and in 1819 he helped create a vast  
nation called Gran Colombia, which encompassed the present-day  
republics of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. But political  
rivalries and internecine warfare frustrated Bolívar’s dream of a  
United States of South America, and Gran Colombia fell apart soon  
after his death, in 1830.

Bolívar is Chávez’s political muse; Chávez quotes and invokes him  
constantly, and is unabashed about his desire to resuscitate Bolívar’s  
dream of a united Latin America. In his first year in office, Chávez  
held a successful referendum to draft a new constitution, which  
officially renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.  
More remarkably, he has adopted Fidel Castro as his contemporary role  
model and socialism as his political ideal, and, a decade and a half  
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is leading a left-wing revival  
across Latin America. Chávez’s hemispheric ambitions have made him one  
of the most compelling, audacious, and polarizing figures in the world— 
one of a number of post-Cold War leaders trying to form regional power  
blocs. A generation ago, Castro sought to undermine United States  
authority by supporting armed guerrilla forces; Chávez has pursued  
that goal mainly by using money—thanks, in large measure, to U.S. oil  
purchases. Venezuela is the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the U.  
S., providing around a million barrels a day, and its proved oil  
reserves are among the world’s largest.

One recent Sunday, I flew with Chávez to La Faja del Orinoco, an oil- 
rich belt of land in eastern Venezuela. In May, 2007, Chávez ordered  
the nationalization of pumping and refining facilities in La Faja  
owned by foreign oil companies. The move was one of a series of  
measures that Chávez had taken to increase Venezuela’s share of oil  
revenues, including increases in royalty payments from 16.6 per cent  
to 33.3 per cent, and its ownership stake from around forty to at  
least sixty per cent. (As recently as 2004, these companies were  
paying royalties of one per cent of the oil’s value.) Most of the oil  
companies, including Chevron and B.P., agreed to the terms;  
ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil did not, and pulled out.

ExxonMobil had been pumping as many as a hundred and twenty thousand  
barrels a day out of La Faja. Seeking compensation, the company  
secured injunctions from judges in the United States, Great Britain,  
and the Netherlands that froze up to twelve billion dollars in  
overseas assets of Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de  
Venezuela, S.A., or P.D.V.S.A. Chávez, decrying “imperialist  
aggression,” threatened to cut off all oil sales to the United States.  
Analysts estimate that if he should ever make good on that threat the  
price, which has already risen vertiginously, would spiral even  
farther upward. (A London court later overturned the British  
injunction, in what was seen as a major victory for Chávez, but the  
legal fight continues. ExxonMobil will not say publicly how much it  
asked for, except that the sum is “multiple billions of dollars.”)

On the plane to La Faja were several of Chávez’s ministers and aides,  
along with a dozen or so bodyguards and three Cuban doctors, who  
travel with him everywhere. Just after boarding, Chávez pushed through  
the curtains from his compartment to the main cabin and greeted  
everyone. He joked that the Cuban doctors must be guerrillas on an  
“internationalist mission.” Halfway through the hour-long flight, I  
joined Chávez in his compartment. Chávez, who is about five feet  
seven, is a youthful-looking fifty-three, and has a thick neck and  
chest. He introduced me to General Gustavo Rangel, his Defense  
Minister, and René Vargas, Ecuador’s Ambassador to Venezuela.

Chávez began our conversation by asking, “Tell us, why didn’t Saddam  
put up more of a fight when the Yankees invaded?” Before I could  
reply, General Rangel said that the Americans had successfully  
degraded Iraq’s air-defense system in the run-up to the war. Chávez  
looked at me for confirmation, and when I agreed he smiled, and said  
that, just in case the Americans were thinking of doing anything  
similar to Venezuela, he had bought an air-defense system from  
Belarus. (In the past four years, Venezuela has spent four billion  
dollars on foreign arms purchases, mostly from Russia.) The Belarusian  
system probably wasn’t the most sophisticated in the world, Chávez  
said, but it was what Venezuela could get: “We do what we can to  
defend ourselves.”

Chávez campaigned for the Presidency, in 1998, with promises to bring  
radical change, but, for a time after he won, it was unclear whether  
he could deliver much more than symbolism and oratory. When he took  
office, oil was at a mere ten dollars a barrel, and his first  
government budget was seven billion dollars; last year, as oil  
approached a hundred dollars a barrel (by last week, it was a hundred  
and thirty-six dollars), the budget rose to fifty-four billion. The  
oil money has allowed Chávez to triple spending on social programs.  
Even though many of these “missions,” as they’re known, have foundered  
or have proved inadequate, the volume of revenues has meant an  
improvement in living standards for the country’s poorest citizens,  
who are, unsurprisingly, Chávez’s strongest supporters. It has also  
given him the means to buy influence with his neighbors, usually at  
the expense of the United States.

Chávez’s relationship with the United States, which was strained from  
the start, became openly hostile after a short-lived military coup, in  
2002, that seemed to have the blessing of the Bush Administration.  
Chávez discontinued long-standing military ties and ended Venezuela’s  
coöperation with the Drug Enforcement Administration, while Secretary  
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, before he left office, compared Chávez to  
Adolf Hitler. In 2006, the State Department placed Venezuela on a list  
of nations that it described as “uncoöperative” in the war on terror.

Despite the harsh language, unofficial U.S. policy in the past few  
years has generally been to ignore Chávez, in order to avoid being  
drawn into a confrontation. This reflects a broader disengagement from  
the region during the Bush Administration. Since 2001, the United  
States has been distracted from Latin America by the war on terror and  
by Iraq, and that has given Chávez room to operate. Venezuela  
outspends the United States in foreign aid to the rest of Latin  
America by a factor of at least five. Last year, U.S. aid amounted to  
$1.6 billion, a third of which went to Colombia, mainly to fund Plan  
Colombia, a drug-eradication program administered by the U.S. security  
contractor DynCorp. Chávez, meanwhile, pledged $8.8 billion for the  
region. This included subsidized oil for Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia;  
the purchase of public debt in Argentina; and development projects in  
Haiti. (Chávez has, in addition, provided discounted heating oil to  
poor Americans through Citgo, the Venzuelan state oil company’s U.S.  
subsidiary.)

There is also evidence that Chávez has fostered a relationship with  
the Colombian Marxist guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas  
Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. The FARC operates along  
Venezuela’s border with Colombia and holds hundreds of hostages— 
civilians, soldiers, and politicians—in secret camps. Chávez has, at  
times, publicly distanced himself from the FARC, most recently last  
week, but the group’s espousal of Bolivarian ideals, and its strategic  
position, appears to have tempted him into seeing the organization as  
a means, if only by proxy, of confronting the U.S.; Colombia is one of  
America’s closest allies in the region.

The present in Latin America may be analogous to the nineteen-sixties,  
when the U.S. was mired in Vietnam and deeply unpopular  
internationally, and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara (another hero of  
Chávez’s) saw an opportunity to foment guerrilla insurgencies elsewhere 
—“one, two, three, many Vietnams,” as Che said—by which U.S. strength  
could be sapped.

Cris Arcos, who was, until recently, President Bush’s Assistant  
Secretary of Homeland Security for International Affairs, told me he  
feared that the moment had passed for the U.S. to do much to contain  
Chávez. “The problem with the war on terror is that the Pentagon can’t  
engage anywhere else—it’s tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Arcos  
said. “Our foreign policy is all about China and the war on terror, so  
where does that leave Latin America?”

In Latin America, Arcos said, “the political left has lost its fear of  
the gringos and the right has lost its respect for the U.S. Why?  
Ironically, because both expected the U.S. to smash the left,  
especially now that it is the sole superpower.” He continued, “The  
U.S. predictably considers Chávez to be annoying and crude, and thinks  
that he behaves inappropriately for a head of state. His cavorting  
with Iranians and other pariahs is alarming to the U.S., yet it’s not  
taken seriously by his South American neighbors.” Their tolerance for  
Chávez, he said, was “evidence of the U.S.’s eroding influence in the  
region.”

Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, first met Chávez in 1999,  
when, as President Clinton’s Energy Secretary, he represented the  
United States at Chávez’s inauguration. (He brought him a baseball  
glove as a swearing-in gift.) Richardson told me, “I am concerned  
that, because of our policy to isolate Chávez, we may have created a  
vacuum in Latin America, where he already outvotes us on certain  
issues. I am not saying that this means we have to go along with him,  
but there may be ways we can establish a working relationship with  
him. Isolating him is not in our interest.” Richardson said, “I  
question whether we would be wise to brand Chávez a state sponsor of  
terror”—a move that the Administration has considered—“because of our  
energy needs, and our energy relationship with Venezuela.”

The old ExxonMobil station in La Faja was immaculate, all swept gravel  
and pristinely painted structures. Chávez, who has a regular live  
Sunday television show, “Aló Presidente,” planned to broadcast from  
the facility that day.

It was humid but pleasant. An advance team had set up several hundred  
folding chairs outside the refining station, and a plank floor had  
been laid down as a stage, with a desk for Chávez, furnished with  
maps, notepads, and books (including a Spanish edition of Joseph  
Stiglitz’s “The Roaring Nineties”). Young aides in red T-shirts  
emblazoned with Chávez’s image and the words “Democracia en  
Revolución” (“Democracy Within Revolution”) and matching red baseball  
caps dispensed coffee and bottles of water. Chávez was dressed in a  
red guayabera and black jeans. His bodyguards and many of his  
ministers wore similar red guayaberas.

By the time Chávez sat down at the desk, he had been on the air for  
more than an hour, walking through the facility, followed by  
cameramen, with his daughter María Gabriela. She is a wide-faced young  
woman with a toothy smile. As they made their way, he explained what  
they were seeing, for the benefit of the television audience.  
Periodically, he stopped to hug or kiss her. She, her sister, Rosa  
Virginia, and a brother, Hugo Rafael, all in their twenties, are  
Chávez’s children with his first wife, Nancy Colmenares, whom he  
divorced in the early nineties. Chávez also has a ten-year-old  
daughter, Rosinés, with his second wife, Marisabel Rodríguez.  
Rodríguez left him in 2002, and has since married a tennis instructor.  
Recently, she has begun speaking out publicly against Chávez, accusing  
him of being obsessed with power, and hinting that she would like to  
run for the Presidency herself.

Sitting at the desk, Chávez began with a long pep talk for his  
supporters. When the camera cut away for a short, sharply critical  
film about ExxonMobil—it opened with a montage of images of Hitler,  
oil spills, and John D. Rockefeller—an aide held up a large white  
screen to shield Chávez while a young woman applied powder to his  
face. Another aide poured him espresso from a thermos, which he  
carried in a black leather briefcase.

Back on the air, Chávez spoke scornfully of the students known as los  
chamos (“the kids”), who, in demonstrations last year, rallied  
considerable public opposition to him. Some of the leaders of los  
chamos have expressed interest in running against Chávez’s candidates  
in mayoral and gubernatorial elections scheduled for November; Chávez  
called out to those who might “throw themselves” into the race, “Go  
ahead, jump!” He then added, “Better put on parachutes.”

Chávez has a gospel preacher’s deftness with language and an actor’s  
ability to evoke emotions. Within a single soliloquy, he comes up with  
rhymes, breaks into song, riffs on his own words, gets angry, cracks  
jokes, and loops back to where he started. His speeches can be highly  
entertaining, but it is sometimes difficult to know if he means what  
he says or has simply been carried away by his own oratory. A couple  
of years ago, at the United Nations General Assembly, he announced  
that he smelled “sulfur” at the lectern. The stench, he said, had been  
left by President Bush, who had spoken the day before, and was “the  
Devil.” (Chávez has a repertoire of colorful labels for Bush,  
including “coward,” “donkey,” “drunkard,” and “Mr. Danger.”) At a  
summit meeting in Chile last November, Chávez repeatedly interrupted  
Spain’s Prime Minister, until Juan Carlos, Spain’s king, snapped,  
“¿Porque no te callas?”—“Why don’t you shut up?” The King’s rebuke  
became an instant YouTube sensation. In Spain alone, more than half a  
million people downloaded it as a cell-phone ring tone.

Chávez, sitting at the stage desk, drew a diagram on a large white  
card, and, holding it up to the “Aló Presidente” cameras, told viewers  
that he’d been thinking about a new “windfall profits” tax on oil  
companies. He called out to Rafael Ramírez, the president of P.D.V.S.A. 
—a tall, blue-eyed man who resembles Tim Robbins—and he promptly stood  
up and began taking notes, nodding furiously. This was not a rehearsed  
moment; to an unusual degree, “Aló Presidente” is Chávez’s government  
in action, and it is a government that Chávez does not so much  
administer as perform live. A couple of Chávez’s younger advisers told  
me that they frequently felt like supporting actors in Venezuela’s own  
“Truman Show.”

The show went on for five hours. At one point, Chávez spoke darkly  
about an assassination plot against him involving Colombian and  
American agents. He blamed Venezuela’s private companies for shortages  
of food—milk, for instance, had become extremely scarce. Chávez  
informed his audience that, a few hours earlier, a cargo of powdered  
milk from Belarus had been unloaded at a Venezuelan port. He elicited  
a round of applause, as if the mere fact of the milk’s arrival were a  
feat worth saluting, and pointed out a delegation of Belarusian  
officials in the audience. Chávez talks incessantly about building an  
alliance of nations that can challenge the United States; he has  
sought out relationships with Iran (and had earlier sought one with  
Saddam Hussein), China, Russia (Chávez has called Putin one of his  
“buenos amigos”), and, of course, Belarus.

The show cut away by satellite to a group of Belarusians and  
Venezuelans at the site of a joint seismic-mapping project. After a  
few minutes of pleasantries exchanged through an interpreter, Chávez  
remarked, “That translator, from the sound of things, is Cuban, for  
sure.” He smiled. “Cuba all over the place!”

Then Chávez turned to the camera and, looking directly at it, asked,  
in English, “How are you, Fidel?”

Fidel Castro, who will turn eighty-two this summer, has been sick  
since July, 2006, when he vanished from view after returning from a  
trip to Argentina with Chávez. Despite rumors that he had cancer, it  
appears that Castro was suffering from diverticulitis, a severe  
intestinal disorder, which nearly killed him, and from which he has  
not entirely recovered. He has not appeared in public since, but  
photographs and video footage have offered glimpses of a diminished  
man. In all this time, Chávez has been one of the few people outside  
Castro’s immediate family who are allowed to see him. He has taken it  
upon himself to visit the Old Man regularly and to cheer him up.

“For me, Fidel is like a father. Like a beacon. Fidel is, I believe,  
irreplaceable,” Chávez told me. “He is a giant of the twentieth  
century, and, just as he entered its history, he has also entered into  
that of the twenty-first. And there he is, even now, doing everything  
he can to keep on fighting what he calls the battle of ideas, until  
his last breath.”

The deep friendship between Chávez and Castro began well before Chávez  
took office. In 1979, when Chávez was a young lieutenant in the  
Venezuelan Army, he and other junior officers began talking about a  
revolution. Their plans became more serious in 1989, after the  
Caracazo, a three-day riot that began when the government of Carlos  
Andrés Pérez implemented International Monetary Fund reforms,  
resulting in a spike in the cost of gasoline and public  
transportation; the Army was called into the streets, and hundreds of  
civilians were shot dead. Three years later, in 1992, Chávez, then a  
lieutenant colonel, led a military rebellion. But he surrendered when  
it became clear that his men were outnumbered, and that continuing  
would only mean further bloodshed. (At least twenty people died.)  
Allowed to appear on television, he said that the coup was over, but  
only “por ahora”—for now. The bombast, and the implicit threat of  
Chávez’s words, captivated Venezuelans, and launched his political  
career.

Chávez was imprisoned, along with his co-conspirators. They were  
released two years later, in 1994, after Pérez was impeached for  
corruption, and the criminal charges against them were dismissed. One  
of the first things Chávez did was go to Havana and meet Fidel Castro.  
Castro received him warmly, and treated him like a head of state.  
When, five years later, Chávez came to power, he returned to Havana  
and paid his respects to Castro.

Chávez told me that while he was in jail he had read an interview with  
Castro that impressed him deeply. At the time, the Cuban economy had  
all but collapsed, owing to the abrupt end of Soviet subsidies. “Fidel  
said, ‘There will be a new wave, sooner or later. The people of Latin  
America will awaken and there will be a new wave, and it will have to  
be seen,’ ” Chávez said. “Now, as for the new wave, it’s here”—he  
slapped the arm of his chair—“and if someone can’t see it, it’s  
because he’s blind, and if he can’t feel it, it’s because he’s dead.”

Since 2001, Cuba has received shipments of subsidized Venezuelan oil,  
estimated to be worth $2.5 billion a year, in exchange for the  
services of thousands of Cuban teachers, sports instructors, and  
doctors, who work in Venezuela’s slums and rural areas. Thousands of  
Venezuelans are studying in Cuba, and more than a hundred thousand  
Venezuelans with eye problems have been sent to Cuba for specialized  
medical treatment. In 2004, Chávez and Castro signed a sweeping trade  
deal that eliminated tariffs between their countries, and  
simultaneously committed themselves to Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative  
for the Americas, or ALBA, which means “dawn” in Spanish. ALBA is  
intended to counter the “neoliberal” trading bloc envisaged under the  
U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas. (Bolivia, Nicaragua,  
and the small Caribbean island nation of Dominica have since joined  
ALBA.) Chávez has become Cuba’s primary benefactor while positioning  
himself as the inheritor of Fidel’s mantle.

In February, Castro released a letter saying that he was giving up his  
post as Cuba’s President. “Fidel hasn’t resigned from anything,”  
Chávez, loyally, told reporters. “He’s just stepped aside for  
others.” (Fidel’s younger brother Raúl replaced him as President.)  
Chávez promised to “continue fighting” at Fidel’s side.

Teodoro Petkoff, who ran against Chávez in the 2006 Presidential  
election campaign and is one of his leading critics on the center- 
left, told me that Castro had been “a moderating influence” on Chávez— 
a source for level-headed and pragmatic consultation for the younger  
man. He thought that Castro’s departure from active politics had, in  
that sense, hurt Chávez. “Chávez doesn’t have anyone to talk to, and  
there’s no one who can argue with him; the people around him are all  
mediocre personalities,” he told me. “The relationship with Fidel is  
key, because Chávez has a kind of adolescent devotion to him.”

I was reminded of something that Román Ortiz, a security-affairs  
analyst with a Bogotá think tank, told me: “Chávez and his plans don’t  
fit into the minds of those who read and believed in Fukuyama and  
thought we were all going to be liberals. They don’t really grasp that  
he has a political project, one that shares certain elements with the  
FARC, which is to rebuild Gran Colombia.” Ortiz added, “He will have  
to be contained in order for war to be avoided. Chávez is more  
dangerous and unpredictable than Fidel Castro. In this scenario, we  
are going to miss Castro.”

The nature of Chávez’s relationship with the FARC, which has been  
fighting to overthrow the Colombian government for more than forty  
years, is one of the most controversial questions about him. The FARC  
occupies large areas of the remote jungle of southern and eastern  
Colombia and finances itself by taxing illicit coca farmers and  
cocaine processors and traffickers. Chávez’s perceived support of the  
guerrillas has alienated even some of his natural allies and, since  
last year, has been the focus of a dispute between him and his  
Colombian counterpart, Álvaro Uribe, that has taken on increasingly  
bizarre dimensions.

Last August, Uribe asked for Chávez’s help in negotiating with the  
FARC for the release of hostages, some of whom have been held for as  
long as a decade. Chávez agreed. Then, in late November, Uribe, after  
learning that Chávez had spoken with the commander of the Colombian  
Army without first asking his permission, abruptly cut Chávez out.  
Chávez responded, in one tirade after another, by calling Uribe a  
“mafia boss,” a “coward,” and a “liar.”

Uribe does have a problematic background. In a 1991 U.S. Defense  
Intelligence Agency document, he is described as being a “close  
personal friend of Pablo Escobar,” the late drug lord. As a regional  
governor, Uribe helped establish a civilian vigilante organization,  
CONVIVIR, that metamorphosed into an armed paramilitary network.  
Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary forces have fought a vicious war  
against the country’s leftist guerrillas and their sympathizers,  
killing thousands of civilians. And, like the FARC, they became  
involved in the drug trade. In the complex web of relationships that  
characterize Colombian society, however, few politicians can claim  
never to have had a relationship with a narcotraficante, a guerrilla  
commander, or a paramilitary warlord. During the past five years,  
thousands of paramilitaries have given up their weapons in a  
demobilization deal that has been criticized by human-rights groups as  
amounting to amnesty, but Uribe has been unwilling to broker a similar  
deal with the FARC. In the early nineteen-nineties, his father was  
killed during an attempt by the FARC to kidnap him.

In his attacks on Uribe, Chávez also claimed that the United States  
was using Colombia as a staging ground to plot his overthrow and  
assassination. In response, a senior U.S. diplomat in Caracas told me,  
“The things President Chávez accuses the United States of are just  
implausible. The United States has three citizens in the FARC’s hands  
in Colombia. We, in fact, supported President Chávez’s initial role as  
an arbitrator.”

Chávez continued to negotiate with the FARC on his own, and, in  
midJanuary, he secured the release of two women. One of them, Clara  
Rojas, had been the campaign manager for Ingrid Betancourt, who was  
kidnapped in 2002 while running for President, and is the best known  
of the hostages. The episode had all the melodrama of a telenovela, as  
Rojas was reunited with her three-year-old son, Emmanuel, to whom she  
had given birth in the jungle, and whose father was a FARC guerrilla.  
Her captors had taken Emmanuel from her, and he had ended up in an  
orphanage. The women told of hostages being held in inhumane conditions 
—some were kept chained to trees. Chávez, however, chose that moment  
to urge Colombia to recognize the FARC as a “belligerent party,” which  
would give it diplomatic legitimacy, and to call on foreign  
governments to stop listing it as a terrorist organization. Chávez’s  
statements left him isolated. In February, some four million  
Colombians demonstrated to repudiate the FARC; many were also critical  
of Chávez.

Gustavo Petro is an outspoken leftist Colombian senator who is well  
known for his opposition to Uribe, but last year he publicly condemned  
the FARC for its drug trafficking and its human-rights abuses. He  
attributed Chávez’s position to naïveté. “The FARC has latched on to  
Chávez and his good will because it is in need of political varnish,”  
he told me. “It behaves like an occupation force, and has abandoned  
attempts to win over a base of support among the civilians. It  
actually kills more indigenous Colombians than any other armed group  
in the country today. Chávez doesn’t accept any of this. He is a  
romantic. If he sees people he thinks are ‘revolutionaries,’ Chávez  
salutes them and says, ‘At your service!’ ”

In official circles in Caracas, I found a near-total disconnect with  
the mood in Colombia. Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Nicolás Maduro,  
dismissed the public’s support for Uribe as the product of “a media  
dictatorship, with the means of communication in the hands of the most  
rancid, racist, retrograde oligarchy on the continent.”

A few hours after I spoke to Maduro, I was summoned to meet  
Venezuela’s reclusive Interior Minister, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, a  
former naval captain. He was a participant in Chávez’s abortive coup,  
and, like him, served two years in prison. More recently, Rodríguez  
Chacín has been Chávez’s personal emissary to the FARC. It was widely  
noted in Colombia that, in television coverage of a recent hostage  
release, he hugged the guerrillas and urged them to “keep up the  
struggle.”

I met Rodríguez Chacín at night in a remote part of Fuerte Tiuna, the  
Venezuelan Army’s headquarters, in the mountains on the outskirts of  
Caracas. A small man in jeans and a red windbreaker, with a stubbly  
shaved head, he was waiting in a large, bunkerlike room. There were  
piles of military gear, a desk with half a dozen telephones on it, an  
exercise bike, and a cot. On a low table I saw the “Selected Works of  
V. I. Lenin” and “The Diary of a Snail,” by Günter Grass.

We went outside to talk. The lights of the city appeared far below us  
like stars in an upside-down sky. Periodically, bursts of automatic  
gunfire could be heard. Rodríguez Chacín said that a military firing  
range was situated on the side of the mountain. “Sometimes they miss,  
so it’s unwise to go too near the edge when they’re shooting.”

He told me that he was negotiating the release of four more Colombian  
hostages—members of parliament who had been kidnapped six years  
earlier. The FARC was to bring them to a rendezvous point in the  
jungle; he alone would be informed of the exact location, he said. He  
was just waiting for the word. (The hostages were in fact released,  
four days later.) Rodríguez Chacín said that the FARC wanted peace,  
“but a different kind of peace from what Colombia’s oligarchy has in  
mind.” Colombia, he said, was the United States’ “last bastion,  
practically the last secure beachhead it has in Latin America. So the  
real enemy, behind this whole circumstance, even more so than the  
Colombian oligarchy, is the Empire.” (In Bolivarian Venezuela, “the  
Empire” is the United States.)

At the entrance to a grimy traffic tunnel in downtown Caracas stands a  
statue of Simón Bolívar. One day, I saw a handwritten sign there,  
reminiscent of the revelatory messages on placards sometimes seen in  
front of the White House. It carried an admonition, in Spanish,  
saying, “Barack Obama will be the Beast, and the last President of the  
United States.”

The apocalyptic message was somehow fitting. Caracas is, in many  
respects, a failed city, and it looks and feels like a place that has  
spun out of control. The crime rate is shockingly high; there were an  
estimated five hundred and fifty murders in the first three months of  
this year. Indigents live openly in the public parks and along the  
embankments of the city’s sewage trough of a river, the Guaire. Here  
and there are skyscrapers built in the boom years of the sixties and  
seventies, their concrete carcasses discolored and crumbling. Hundreds  
of thousands of shanties scar the surrounding green mountains. Garbage  
lies uncollected, and the streets are choked with traffic—and, since  
Venezuela is flush with oil money, there are brand-new cars  
everywhere. Four hundred and fifty thousand new vehicles were sold  
last year. Wealthy Venezuelans, meanwhile, live in gated communities  
and secure apartment buildings on hilltops with panoramic views over  
Caracas; a nouveau-riche class has emerged from the official ranks and  
is known, disparagingly, as the boliburguesia, for Bolivarian  
bourgeoisie.

Five years ago, Chávez took direct control of the state oil company,  
P.D.V.S.A., after sitting out a two-month strike by its union. He  
fired more than eighteen thousand employees, replacing many of them  
with his supporters. Since then, he has used P.D.V.S.A.’s revenues to  
fund his most revolutionary schemes, which include the so-called  
missions to Venezuela’s poor. Rafael Ramírez, the P.D.V.S.A. chief,  
told me that Chávez intended to use P.D.V.S.A. as the vehicle for  
transforming Venezuela from an “oil sultanate to a productive society  
within a socialist framework.” Like a state within a state, the oil  
company has begun to replicate or supersede many of the functions of  
the national government. New P.D.V.S.A. branches oversee everything  
from agriculture to shipping, construction, and food distribution.  
“The plan is to make P.D.V.S.A. like Gazprom,” Ramírez told me,  
referring to the Russian energy giant, “but with a social role.”

Venezuela has a complex and volatile economy, with rampant corruption  
and high rates of unemployment and oil-fuelled inflation. A prominent  
Venezuelan economist, Orlando Ochoa, blamed Chávez’s policies and the  
inefficiency of his government for many of these problems. He  
described the situation to me as a “perfect economic storm.” He said,  
“No price of oil can forestall the rate of inflation and its social  
consequences.” But Ochoa acknowledged that, as long as oil prices  
remained high, the government could probably stave off collapse  
indefinitely.

Chávez’s current term ends in 2013. Last year, he held a referendum to  
amend the constitution and remove provisions that would prevent him  
from running for a third term. He let it be known that he would like  
to stay in power until 2050, when he would be ninety-six years old.  
The referendum was narrowly defeated; it was his first loss at the  
polls since becoming President, and it reinvigorated the political  
opposition.

Petkoff, who campaigned against Chávez in 2006, told me, “Chávez is a  
charismatic leader, and he understood that the result of the  
referendum meant that his popularity with the people had been somewhat  
eroded. He needed to find a way to reconnect more directly with the  
people, and so he has turned everything into a kind of personal  
‘They’re coming for me’ drama.” Petkoff added, “Chávez is bipolar,  
really. One side of his brain is Girondin, and the other is Jacobin.  
He is prudent, and he is also radical.”

Petkoff’s wife, a psychologist, who was listening to us, demurred:  
“He’s a psychopath, in my opinion.”

Petkoff replied, “Yes, maybe, but a psychopath with a mission.”

José Vicente Rangel, who served as Chávez’s Vice-President from 2002  
until 2007, said he thought that Chávez’s “infatuation” with foreign  
affairs and his neglect of Venezuela’s domestic problems had  
contributed to the referendum’s defeat. “Public insecurity is the  
scourge of Venezuelans, but Chávez never comprehended it,” Rangel  
said. “He sees the crime rate as a product of poverty, a social issue,  
and this is because he believes in a mythology of poverty in which all  
the poor are good, and it just isn’t that way; the poor are criminals,  
too.” Rangel said that the rebuke to his government was something  
Chávez took seriously—“He’s in a period of deep reflection.” The loss  
had shattered Chávez’s “myth of invincibility,” Rangel said, “and that  
has damaged us.”

In the early hours of March 1st, two days after the release of the  
four parliamentarian hostages, Colombian troops crossed into Ecuadoran  
territory and destroyed a FARC camp there. The FARC’s second-in- 
command, Raúl Reyes, was killed, along with twenty-four others. Uribe  
telephoned Ecuador’s President, Rafael Correa, to apologize for the  
incursion, but said that it had been done in self-defense—FARC  
fighters had fired on Colombian troops from the Ecuadoran side of the  
border.

On the next day’s “Aló Presidente,” which was broadcast from a plaza  
in Caracas, Chávez referred angrily to the “cowardly murder” of Reyes,  
whom he called a “good revolutionary,” and he said that the incident  
could be “the start of a war in South America.” Looking straight into  
the cameras, he added, “Try that here, President Uribe, and I will  
send you some Sukhois!” (Venezuela recently bought twenty-four Sukhoi  
fighter jets from Russia.)

Then Chávez turned to his Defense Minister, General Rangel, who was in  
the audience. Rangel stood up and snapped to attention. “Mr. Defense  
Minister, send ten battalions to the border with Colombia  
immediately,” Chávez said. “Tank battalions.”

In ordering the movement of troops on live TV, Chávez reinforced the  
unconventional aspect of his Presidency, in which statecraft is also a  
reality show. He then told viewers that he was closing the Venezuelan  
Embassy in Bogotá.

The next day, the chief of Colombia’s national police, General Oscar  
Naranjo, announced that three laptops and several hard drives had been  
seized during the raid on the FARC camp. According to General Naranjo,  
e-mail exchanges found on Reyes’s computer indicated that Chávez had  
offered the FARC three hundred million dollars; one e-mail message,  
allegedly from a FARC official, suggested that Rodríguez Chacín had  
asked the FARC to help train Venezuelans in “guerrilla  
warfare.” (There were also murky references to an attempt by the FARC  
to buy uranium for a “dirty bomb,” although these seemed less credible.)

Chávez dismissed the e-mails as fabrications. Uribe said that he  
intended to seek an indictment against Chávez before the International  
Criminal Court, for what he called “the patronage and financing of  
genocidists.” Uribe’s approval ratings soared to eighty-four per cent,  
while Chávez was viewed unfavorably by ninety per cent of Colombians.

Suddenly, there was talk of regional war. Television broadcasts showed  
Venezuelan tanks moving toward Colombia’s borders; trade between the  
two countries ground to a halt, and diplomats were expelled. One Latin- 
American diplomat told me he feared that the situation could easily  
escalate into a larger armed conflict. “Chávez is using this incident  
to divert public attention from his internal problems,” he said. “And  
I think he is also trying to demonstrate that he is the leader of the  
region’s popular forces. It is a very risky calculation.”

A few days after Chávez ordered his tanks to the Colombian border, I  
interviewed him at Miraflores, the Presidential palace. We sat under a  
large portrait of Simón Bolívar. Chávez was wearing black jeans, a  
green military jacket, and a red T-shirt. The next day, he was to fly  
to Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, where some twenty Latin- 
American leaders were gathering for a summit, which would address the  
crisis. He intended to confront Uribe there.

I asked Chávez if his dispute with Colombia was getting out of hand.  
He replied, “If you look at the situation clearly, the reality is that  
you have an anti-imperialist revolutionary country here and, over  
there, a counterrevolutionary, pro-imperialist country. It’s an  
explosive contradiction.” Over the years, he said, he had mostly  
managed to maintain good relations with Uribe. He mentioned a dispute  
involving a FARC emissary kidnapped in Caracas at the direction of  
Colombian agents. On that occasion, Chávez had been about to break off  
diplomatic relations when Uribe asked Fidel Castro to intercede.  
“Fidel called me, and so we found a solution,” Chávez said.

“All this garbage is going to come back and fall on Uribe himself,” he  
said. “First of all, just to clarify, the mobilization of troops on  
the border, that’s all defensive—eminently defensive. Because we are  
faced with a government, the Colombian government, that has publicly  
assumed the Bush doctrine—preventive war, preëmptive attack.”

He expressed understanding for the FARC. When, during a ceasefire in  
the mid-eighties, the FARC established a political party, thousands of  
its members were murdered, Chávez said. He said that he couldn’t  
“dismiss the possibility that a group of guerrillas can cross the  
border—ours with Colombia is more than two thousand kilometres long— 
and install themselves, as occurred with Ecuador, here.” He went on,  
“Anyone would understand that I was obliged to reinforce the border. I  
had to warn Uribe that he should not dare to do here in Venezuela what  
he did in Ecuador.”

As for Uribe’s accusations and his threat to bring him before the  
International Criminal Court, “I laugh at them—they are risible.”  
Uribe was the one who should be investigated for genocide, Chávez  
said. “There are documents detailing the massacres by the  
paramilitaries in Colombia. It’s a horrible thing. They burn people,  
they cut them into pieces—into pieces! And Uribe supported that.” He  
added, “Uribe says I will be accused? Well, to paraphrase Fidel, who  
once said that history will absolve him, history has already condemned  
Álvaro Uribe.”

I asked Chávez if he believed that a confrontation with the United  
States was inevitable.

“Look, once, when I was a boy, I nearly drowned in a river,” Chávez  
said. “The current took me. Friends saved me when I was swept into a  
rock. Imagine if I had not been saved, and I had drowned at fifteen.  
This would have happened anyway. . . . If the oligarchies of this  
continent, directed by the United States and that group of extreme  
right-wing fascists with their imperial strategies of war who are in  
the White House, try to stop this revolution, Latin America will go up  
in flames.”

Chávez said that it was not his intention, as some said, “to be the  
leader of a continental revolution. Nor do we plan to export the  
Bolivarian revolution. It is a process that is happening—it is the  
people who are doing it. . . . Now, does this project necessarily have  
to confront the United States?” He paused. “I would say yes—not the  
United States as such but the imperial line of the United States.  
Confrontation is inevitable.”

Chávez’s jet took off for the Dominican Republic the next afternoon 
—“Hola, guerrilleros!” he called out to his Cuban doctors as we  
boarded. Maduro, the Foreign Minister, said, smiling, “Let’s go  
confront the Empire.”

The summit began the next morning, in a convention center set among  
the resort hotels and casinos on Santo Domingo’s seafront. At Chávez’s  
suggestion, I was given a lapel pin identifying me as a member of the  
Venezuelan delegation so that I could get into the Presidents’  
session, which was closed to the press. President Uribe, a pale,  
small, trim-looking man, was the first head of state to enter the  
hall, followed by Chávez and Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s President.  
Ortega wore a suède jacket and jeans; all the other leaders, including  
Chávez, wore suits. (Ortega, the former Sandinista leader, was  
reëlected President last year, in spite of an unending series of  
scandals, and has begun to restore his image, thanks in part to  
Chávez’s financial and political largesse.) Chávez and Uribe ignored  
one another.

The Dominican President, Leonel Fernández, opened the meeting and gave  
Rafael Correa, of Ecuador, the floor. “The government of Colombia  
bombed my country,” Correa began. Ecuador, he said, was prepared to  
pursue its grievances to their “final consequences.” Looking at Uribe,  
Correa said, “Your insolence offends us even more than your murderous  
bombs.”

Chávez and the rest of the Venezuelan delegation gave Correa a  
standing ovation.

Uribe spoke next. He described Raúl Reyes, the FARC leader killed in  
the raid, as “one of the most frightening terrorists in the history of  
humanity.” (A Chávez adviser next to me rolled his eyes.) He conceded  
that his troops had bombed the camp in Ecuador—but said that the bombs  
had been launched from Colombian territory. As for the guerrillas who  
were killed, “they weren’t there preparing for Easter festivities.”

At one point, Daniel Ortega got up, walked behind Correa, and stared  
hard at Uribe, looking like a man spoiling for a fight. When Uribe  
suggested that he sit down, Ortega said, “I am not your son! Who do  
you think you are?” After a while, he sauntered back to his seat.

Following Uribe’s remarks, Correa said that Uribe would bomb the  
Dominican Republic if he suspected that it harbored another Raúl Reyes.

“Don’t inflict on me the cynicism of those who are nostalgic for  
Communism,” Uribe interrupted.

Correa, continuing, raised his arms. “These hands are clean and free  
of blood.”

The session seemed close to breaking down. Then Chávez spoke. He began  
by telling stories, goading the others and drawing them in. In the  
nineties, he said, he had been accused of giving arms to Bolivia’s  
President, Evo Morales, who was then a cocalero activist and a  
congressman, and to another indigenous Bolivian leader, Felipe Quispe.  
Chávez said to Morales, “Evo—I think Quispe’s even more radical than  
you.” Morales smiled modestly.

Chávez said he found ironic the accusation that he was providing three  
hundred million dollars to the FARC, since he had recently financed a  
three-hundred-million-dollar gas pipeline for Colombia—he and Uribe  
had attended the groundbreaking together. Chávez looked across at  
Cristina Kirchner, the President of Argentina, whose populist, left-of- 
center government is supportive of his. “Witness the infamy that was  
invented that I had sent suitcases full of dollars to Cristina.” (Last  
August, a Venezuelan-American businessman travelling to Buenos Aires  
was found to be carrying eight hundred thousand dollars in undeclared  
cash in his suitcase. Although Chávez has denied it, the widespread  
assumption is that he was secretly financing Kirchner’s Presidential  
campaign.) “And now it’s suitcases in the jungle!”

By now, many of the leaders were laughing. Chávez had created an  
atmosphere of entente cordiale, and momentarily blunted Uribe’s  
charges against him. “I could have sent plenty of rifles to the FARC,”  
Chávez said. “I could have sent them plenty of dollars—I will not do  
it, ever.”

Chávez then had a surprise: the FARC, he said, had just informed him  
that it was prepared to release six more hostages. Uribe spoke in  
urgent whispers with his aides. Chávez asked President Fernández if  
protocol could be broken to allow the mother of Ingrid Betancourt to  
come into the hall. After some commotion, Betancourt’s mother, Yolanda  
Pulecio, an elegant woman in her late sixties (and a former Miss  
Colombia), entered. With her was Piedad Córdoba, a flamboyant left- 
wing Colombian senator who has worked with Chávez in negotiations with  
the FARC, and who was wearing a white turban. Uribe looked furious;  
Chávez was showing that he, not Uribe, was the one who could save the  
hostages’ lives.

By now, some eight hours had gone by, and waiters brought the leaders  
plates of food while they talked. Finally, an agreement was worked  
out, as part of which Uribe promised, reluctantly, not to conduct new  
cross-border raids. Fernández asked Uribe and Correa to embrace. After  
some hesitation, they shook hands. Chávez walked up to Uribe and  
greeted him, too, and the crisis seemed to be at an end. Then, moments  
later, Correa began berating Uribe, who bristled. The other leaders in  
the room looked alarmed. Chávez swiftly spoke in mollifying tones to  
Uribe, who relaxed.

I walked out with Piedad Córdoba and Yolanda Pulecio. Córdoba was  
gleeful. She said that she and Chávez and Cristina Kirchner had  
planned everything in detail—the revelation about the new hostages,  
and Pulecio’s dramatic appearance.

Chávez had shown himself capable of sparking a regional confrontation  
and then, by defusing it, appearing as the peacemaker. It was similar  
to the moment in 1992 when he called off his coup attempt. Uribe  
understood that he had been temporarily outmaneuvered, and had  
responded to Chávez’s gesture. Both leaders, to an extent, could  
declare victory, although it was clear that this was just a skirmish  
in an ongoing conflict.

We were boarding the flight that was to take us back to Caracas when  
Chávez announced that he had changed his mind: the plane was going to  
Cuba instead. A wave of elation swept through the delegation. When we  
arrived in Havana, it was nearly midnight. Raúl Castro, wearing a  
military uniform, a brimmed hat, and large glasses, which gave him an  
owlish appearance, was waiting to greet Chávez as he got off the  
plane. Chávez was exuberant, and called me over to introduce me to  
Raúl, who looked me up and down with a cautious smile and shook my  
hand. As the rest of the delegation headed to a state-run hotel,  
Chávez disappeared with Raúl.

The next day, Raúl saw Chávez off at the airport. As we taxied away,  
Chávez came to the rear of the plane. He was beaming. He had spent  
three hours with Fidel, who was “just fine.” He added, “Fidel asked me  
to say hello to all of you for him!”

Afterward, a senior Latin-American diplomat told me he learned that  
Chávez had lowered the tension with Uribe at the summit “because Fidel  
advised him to.”

In mid-May, the Interpol team investigating the captured FARC laptops  
announced that the hard drives had not been tampered with since their  
discovery. The investigators cautioned that they did not verify the  
authorship or the accuracy of the e-mails, but the report was damning.  
Chávez responded by deriding the investigators, calling Interpol’s  
secretary general, an American, an “international vagabond.”

Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon said that he was  
“surprised” at Chávez’s flippant reaction. Two days after the release  
of the report, on May 17th, a U.S. Navy jet strayed into Venezuelan  
airspace, owing to what the Pentagon said was a navigation error.  
Defense Minister Rangel called the incident a “provocation.”

A series of embarrassments and setbacks for Chávez followed. A decree  
law, intended to bolster the country’s intelligence in case of  
“imperialist attacks,” passed on May 28th and came under immediate and  
widespread criticism; many Venezuelans feared that it would require  
them to inform on one another. Ten days later, on June 7th, the  
Colombian government announced the arrest of a Venezuelan officer whom  
they accused of smuggling forty thousand AK-47 bullets to the FARC.  
Chávez’s government said that it was investigating. Adding to the  
sense of disarray, the FARC was forced to confirm reports that its  
legendary leader, Manuel Marulanda, had died of a heart attack.

Chávez seemed to realize that he had gone too far. The day of the  
smuggling arrest, he announced that he would suspend the new  
intelligence law, saying, “There is no dictatorship here.” Then, on  
his June 8th “Aló Presidente” broadcast, he unexpectedly called on the  
FARC to give up its armed struggle and let its hostages go, saying  
that guerrillas did not have a place in today’s world. Chávez appeared— 
for now—to be withdrawing from the battlefield he had helped to  
create, pragmatically cutting his losses. Above all, he had shown the  
strength of his instincts as a survivor.

Whether his call to the FARC was more than a tactical ploy remains to  
be seen. “Those were very useful words,” Assistant Secretary Shannon  
said at a talk in Miami. “That does not mean we aren’t aware of what  
is happening, and the kind of relationship that has been built over  
time between some members of the Venezuelan government and the FARC.”  
The question is, Shannon said, will the Venezuelan government “use  
that relationship in an effort to get the FARC to come in out of the  
cold and end a four-decade conflict? Or will it continue to conspire  
against a democratic neighbor? . . . That, I think, is what everybody  
in the region is waiting for: how Venezuela will define itself.”

Bill Richardson said that, in April, he had travelled to Caracas to  
speak to Chávez on behalf of the families of three American defense  
contractors being held by the FARC. Chávez had been effusive and  
friendly—Richardson is Mexican-American, and they spoke for an hour  
and a half in Spanish. He told Richardson that he did not comprehend  
the Bush Administration’s hostility toward him: “He told me he didn’t  
like being demonized.” When Richardson asked him if he would get in  
touch with the FARC about the American contractors, Chávez said, “Sí,  
te ayudo”—“Yes, I will help you.” Richardson said, “We need to  
establish some lines of communication with him, and this—coöperation  
on the hostage negotiations—is a possible way to start. I think we  
should keep a stable relationship with Venezuela; it’s in our interest  
to do so.”

On June 7th, Chávez had also said, “Whoever is the next President of  
the United States, I’d like to start preparing the way to start  
working together.” When I asked Ana Navarro, an adviser to Senator  
John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, about the offer, she  
said, “Senator McCain thinks that Chávez is a charlatan and a thug.  
The Senator doesn’t trust Chávez, and does not think it worth getting  
into a back-and-forth with him.” Last year, Senator Barack Obama was  
asked in a debate if he would be willing to meet with leaders who are  
hostile to the United States—Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Chávez, and  
Castro—“without precondition.” Obama answered that he would, prompting  
Senators McCain and Hillary Clinton to suggest that he was naïve.  
Obama subsequently said that high on his agenda in any talks with  
Chávez would be addressing “the fomentation of anti-American sentiment  
in Latin America,” and “his support of the FARC in Colombia,” which,  
he said, was “not acceptable.”

I asked Richardson if he had carried a message to Chávez on behalf of  
Senator Obama, whose candidacy he endorsed after dropping out of the  
Presidential race himself. Richardson said that he hadn’t, but that  
the thought had seemed to occur to Chávez, too. “He said that he had  
noticed my endorsement. And he said, ‘We could use better treatment  
from the United States.’ But I don’t think he sees me as a  
representative of Obama, but as a fellow Latin-American,” Richardson  
said. “His message to me was ‘Take me seriously, and treat me better.’  
” ?