Hugo! Page 2

  Shots were still raining down on the crowd. About fifty people were in the immediate area around Aranguren. Half a dozen or so had bullet wounds to their feet, legs, torsos, or arms. People were walking, trotting, sprinting in all directions. Others just stood there, dumbfounded. No one knew where the shots were coming from or what was happening.

  Aranguren kept running, turning his eyes quickly again to the street in front of him. Ten yards away he saw another man lying on his back on the sidewalk in front of a men's clothing store. A protestor running in front of Aranguren spotted the man at the last minute and leaped over his body. The man was motionless except for his lower left arm and hand, which were extended into the air and moving back and forth weakly in a sweeping motion. Just as Aranguren reached him, his arm fell to the ground and stopped moving.

  Aranguren stopped in front of the man and looked down. He was about forty, had black hair, a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and white sneakers. His face was full of sweat from running in the tropical heat.

  On the left side of his neck was a gaping bullet wound. Blood was gushing out. He didn't look like he had much life left in him. His lips were white. His eyes were 90 percent closed. His head moved slightly from side to side.

  Part of Aranguren wanted to leave the man and flee, since his own life was in danger. But he had seen his arm move a moment earlier, and thought he might still be alive. He couldn't just abandon him. He dropped to the ground and straddled the man with one leg on either side. Then he did the only thing he could think of to stop the bleeding: He shoved the middle finger of his right hand into the warm, slippery wound, which swallowed his finger completely. The man's bleeding slowed but did not stop. The wound was near his artery. Aranguren could feel blood pulsing against his finger. Maybe there was a chance to save him after all, he thought. Another marcher came over, crouched down, and said, "How is he? Is he alive?"

  "I think so," Aranguren responded. "Call the rescue squad. Call civil defense."

  Luckily paramedics were in the area in case the protest turned violent. Two quickly came zooming up the sidewalk on a motorcycle from the south of Baralt, where most of the protestors were massed. One jumped off and shouted at Aranguren, "Don't take your finger out of there! Wait a second!" The paramedic was in his midthirties and wearing a bulky jacket that served as his medical kit. Its pockets were filled with bandages, needles, sutures, rubber gloves, splints, gauze, little bottles with liquid medicines. He was a walking emergency room.

  He crouched down next to the man on the sidewalk, pulled out a needle and a small bottle of medicine, and told Aranguren he was going to inject the man with it. If he was still alive, he would respond, the paramedic said. He jammed the needle into the man's right arm, squeezed the lever, and pulled the needle out. Then he opened the man's eyelids and looked at his eyes. Nothing. "I'm going to put another injection in his arm," the paramedic said. "If he responds, he's alive. If he doesn't, he's dead, and I have to go to another victim that needs help."

  Aranguren protested, "But he's alive. I can feel the pulse. You've got to do something." He told the paramedic he wanted to at least carry the man out of there, out of the line of fire, to a safe location where he could be treated.

  The paramedic explained that Aranguren might simply be feeling the man's blood draining from his brain. He injected him a second time, looked at his eyes, and again saw no response. "This person can't be saved," he said. "He's practically dead."

  Aranguren exploded with anger. "How is it possible you can't do anything?" he yelled. The two shouted back and forth, and the paramedic ordered Aranguren to back away so he could look at the wound. He pushed him against the chest, but Aranguren, instead of backing away, simply pulled his finger out of wound and stood up.

  Just as he did, he felt something strike the back of his right leg. He turned around to see if someone was behind him, shooting, but didn't see anyone. He wasn't sure if he'd been hit by a bullet or a rock. It didn't hurt much. But as he reached around, he felt that his pant leg had been ripped open. Blood was on his leg, just below the buttock. He'd been shot. He realized to his horror that the spot he'd been hit on the leg was exactly where his head had been just a second earlier, before the paramedic pushed him. The bullet had been aimed at his head. He was in the sight of a sniper.

  Panicked, adrenaline pumping, he took off running down Baralt. He had his eye on the Plaza Caracas, a football field or so away, where he thought he might be out of the range of the snipers. He ran diagonally across the street, desperate to reach the plaza. But as he ran, his leg felt strange, like it was asleep in the area where he'd been shot. It was getting harder and harder to move it, as if he had a weight attached to it. Then the part that was numb got bigger and bigger. By now he was practically dragging his leg. He made it across the street but only halfway to the plaza before collapsing onto a sidewalk. Terrified that the snipers were going to get him as he lay defenseless, he started screaming for help. "I've been shot! Get me out of the line of fire because there are snipers!"

  Just a few minutes had passed since the first shots rang out.

  One of the most extraordinary events in modern Latin American history was unfolding. The gunfire went on for several hours, and before long a television network owned by billionaire Gustavo Cisneros, the richest man in Venezuela and one of the richest in the world, was showing a video of Chavistas purportedly firing from the Llaguno Bridge at the marchers. In reality, they were firing at the Metropolitan Police, who were controlled by a Chávez opponent, and not at the protestors, who were too far away to be hit by their handguns. But it didn't matter. The world was soon blaming Hugo Chávez for the "Massacre of El Silencio."

  Military officers appeared on television declaring that they no longer recognized Chávez as the head of state. Opposition political and business leaders came on, too, pronouncing Chávez an "assassin." Eventually Chávez gave in to threats by military rebels that they were going to bomb Miraflores Palace, surrendering himself to them while a general announced to the world that he had resigned. Then Chávez disappeared for the next two days. No one in the public knew where he was. In fact, he was secretly shuffled among four different locations, including a remote Caribbean island. At one point in the middle of the night, his captors took him to a dark, desolate road, where it appeared they were going to execute him.

  Forty-seven hours after his disappearance, Chávez returned to power when tens of thousands of his enraged supporters took to the streets and loyalist military officers launched a countercoup to rescue him and bring him back to the palace. The two-day putsch was one of the most dramatic chapters in a life that has taken one remarkable turn after the other and transformed Hugo Chávez into a seminal figure in modern Latin American history — the most controversial and closely watched leader in the region since Fidel Castro.

  Chávez's life story is the stuff of Hollywood, a Lincoln-like rise from poverty to power . . . with a Venezuelan twist. He was born in a mud hut on the Great Plains of Venezuela, delivered by a midwife because few doctors worked in the impoverished countryside. As a child he sold candies in school and on the streets to help his family survive. By the time he was seventeen he had entered the country's prestigious military academy, Venezuela's version of West Point, mainly to play on its baseball team and pursue his dream of pitching in the major leagues.

  But the road to professional baseball took a detour in the academy when he discovered South American independence hero and Venezuelan native son Simón Bolívar and launched a mission to change his country's destiny. He later organized a secret conspiracy of fellow soldiers disgusted by the nation's rampant corruption and moral decay, creating a clandestine cell dedicated to studying the Liberator's teachings. He met secretly for years with former guerrilla leaders such as Douglas Bravo, arriving for clandestine encounters in a secret location in Caracas that became a "house of conspiracy." He cultivated an underground following of progressive and nationalist civilians who wanted to pursue his dream with him,
operating under the noses of military superiors who failed to stop his expanding movement.

  In 1992 the conspiracy burst into public view when Chávez led a failed coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez. The paratrooper and his allies were enraged by Pérez's orders to troops three years earlier to mow down hundreds of people in the wake of food riots triggered by an International Monetary Fund-endorsed economic "shock package." It ended with one of the largest massacres in modern Latin American history, rivaling Tiananmen Square for the number of dead.

  Chávez landed in jail for two years, but became a hero to millions of impoverished Venezuelans for standing up to a corrupt ruling elite. His detractors dismissed him as little more than a two-bit demagogue who was fomenting class hatred and hawking leftover 1960s Marxist economic policies.

  After Chávez got out of jail, he spent several years "in the desert," crisscrossing the country in a mission whose ultimate goal not even he was certain of. Dead broke, he relied on friends and supporters to feed him and give him a place to sleep. The media wrote him off as a has-been, and he all but disappeared from the local and international press. Secretly, he was still weighing another coup attempt. The United States and others hailed Venezuela's "model democracy" as an island of stability during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when civil wars and brutal dictatorships reigned in the region. But Chávez was convinced that this model democracy was a fraud controlled by a corrupt ruling class, and that it would never allow an outsider like him who wanted to destroy the status quo to take power via elections.

  In 1997, after his fellow coup leader Francisco Arias Cárdenas won the governorship of oil-rich Zulia state, Chávez underwent a change of heart and launched a campaign to win the presidency. He was the quintessential outsider — a man who had tried to overthrow the system in a coup. Most of the nation's eyes were on his opponent, a former Miss Universe: six-foot-one strawberry-blond Irene Sáez. Before Chávez, Venezuela was known for two things — beauty queens and oil. As a successful mayor in an affluent Caracas municipality, Irene, as she was universally known, was leading the polls.

  But the contest between the beauty and the beast, as the campaign was dubbed, shifted ground as Irene's sugary platitudes revealed an alarming vacuousness and Chávez's fiery rhetoric captured the imagination of millions of shantytown residents seething over the nation's vast gap between poor and rich. In the end Chávez won the December 1998 election in a 56 to 40 percent landslide.

  He started his presidency trying to take control of the state oil giant PDVSA (pronounced pay-day-vay-suh), which he dubbed an out-of-control "state within a state" that was serving the country's wealthy elites rather than its majority poor. He also played a leading role in reviving the nearly defunct Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, hosting the first summit of OPEC leaders in twenty-five years. By helping take world oil prices from rock bottom, when he assumed office, to record highs, he boosted Venezuela's income from $14 billion in 1998 to $40 billion in 2006.

  In his first year in office he convoked a constitutional assembly, helped it rewrite the constitution, and then watched voters approve it by a 72 to 28 percent margin. The same day, a torrential downpour of biblical proportions wiped hundreds of communities off the map along Venezuela's Caribbean mountainsides, burying thousands of people under mud or washing them out to sea. The greatest natural calamity in Venezuela in at least a century, it took its heaviest toll among the poor.

  Before long Chávez's policies set off a maelstrom of anger, fear, and resentment among Venezuela's ruling elites and their allies in the United States, provoking street marches, searing newspaper editorials, and ultimately the April 2002 coup attempt. It was followed eight months later by one of the most devastating strikes in modern Latin American history, when opponents shut down PDVSA for two months. The economy nearly collapsed, food and gasoline became scarce, and Chávez was on the verge of being forced to resign. Somehow he survived again.

  With the opposition debilitated and discredited, Chávez was able to focus on governing. He instituted a series of New Deal-like "social missions" that became the hallmark of his first term as president, teaching a million and a half illiterate Venezuelans to read, subsidizing food markets, opening soup kitchens, distributing land to the landless, and inviting twenty thousand Cuban doctors into the poorest neighborhoods of the nation to live and work.

  Chávez pursued his dream of implementing Bolívar's vision of a united Latin America, creating a television news network that spanned the region, selling cheap oil to his neighbors, and proposing a continentwide oil cartel — a Latino OPEC. He envisioned building a fifty-six- hundred-mile, $20 billion natural gas pipeline starting in eastern Venezuela, slicing through Brazil's Amazon jungle, and ending in Argentina, with trunk lines to Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. He even proposed creating a Latin American version of NASA and sending Latinos into space. To his opponents, it was all lunacy. To his supporters, he was a visionary in action.

  Today Chávez is one of the most colorful, charismatic, and controversial figures on the world stage. He is widely depicted in the mass media worldwide as a kind of monster, a communist dictator-in-the-making who has destroyed Venezuela's economy, fomented class warfare, trampled on human rights, attacked the free press, and undermined democracy. But the reality about Chávez is far more complex. In many ways the media has missed the story by failing to explain why he is so popular and viewing Venezuela mainly through the lens of the light-skinned elites. As Venezuelan political scientist Edgardo Lander puts it, the international media "is presenting day after day grotesque distortions of what is happening in Venezuela."

  Chávez won a landslide victory in an August 2004 recall referendum by a 59 to 41 percent margin in a free and fair vote in which voters had the unusual chance to toss him out of office before his term was up. He followed that with another landslide victory for reelection in December 2006, giving him a new six-year term. It was his tenth electoral triumph in eight years including a plethora of referendums, "re-legitimization" votes, and national and state elections. Like all governments, Chávez's is flawed. But for millions of Venezuelan slum dwellers and for a growing number of progressives around the world, he is waging the most radical social transformation in Latin America since at least the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in the early 1980s.

  For decades a forgotten Latin American backwater, Venezuela today is a hot destination for revolutionary tourists who are flying in from the United States, Europe, and other destinations to see the Bolivarian Revolution in action. Chávez counts among his friends African American leaders, including Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, and Jesse Jackson, who see a parallel between his Bolívar-inspired revolution on behalf of Venezuela's dark-skinned majority poor and black Americans' Martin Luther King Jr.-inspired struggle for social and economic justice in the United States. The Venezuelan leader delivers discounted home heating oil to impoverished neighborhoods in Harlem and the Bronx and as far away as Alaska, where Indian tribes benefit from the deal. When he visited New York City in September 2006, he traveled to Harlem and spoke at Cooper Union in the East Village, becoming the first foreign president to deliver an address in a hall where eight US presidents, including Lincoln, had given speeches. A few months earlier Time magazine had listed him among the one hundred most influential people in the world.

  But Chávez is not universally loved. He has generated intense hatred, too. He has powerful enemies at home and abroad who see him as a reincarnation of his mentor in Cuba, a "Castro with oil," as some like to say, although in reality profound differences separate the two men. One of Chávez's most formidable opponents is media mogul and Cuban immigrant Gustavo Cisneros, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $5 billion, making him the 114th richest person in the world. Cisneros is a friend of former president George H. W. Bush, who has gone on fishing trips to Venezuela with him. Most of the rest of Venezuela's fabulously wealthy upper class also despises Chávez, as do the other interconnected power elites who used
to control Venezuela. They include many members of the Catholic Church hierarchy, business leaders, union bosses, media barons, and heads of the traditional political parties whose organizations were annihilated by Chávez's string of electoral triumphs. Aligning itself with Venezuela's elites, the Bush administration has openly pushed for Chávez's demise. Top political leaders from both parties in the United States consider him a pariah, egged on by the mass-media depiction of him as a crazed leftist dictator and many of his own incendiary statements.

  To Chávez's supporters, the opposition to him is driven by one basic fact: The poor have taken power in Venezuela for the first time in the country's history, and the moneyed classes who live in gated mansions and travel to Miami for weekend shopping excursions don't like it. While the opposition hotly disputes it, Chávez's government, his allies, and a number of organizations contend that life really has improved for poor people in Venezuela, who are less poor, fewer in number, and filled with hope for the first time in decades. Chávez has retaken control of the oil industry, implemented laws taking a larger share of profits from foreign companies, and instituted a historic shift of the revenues to the majority poor. A plethora of new Bolivarian schools and the social missions are providing the underclass with a fresh chance at health and education now and sustained prosperity down the line. A participatory democracy model has energized and incorporated millions of disenfranchised people into the political process in a way that promises to outlive El Comandante's presidency and spread to other countries.

  Chávez is at the forefront of a new wave of leftists who are rising to power across Latin America with widespread support from the underclass, from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil to Néstor Kirchner in Argentina to Evo Morales in Bolivia to Rafael Correa in Ecuador. They are leading a backlash against free-market "neo-liberal" economic programs.