My First Life Read online

  MY FIRST LIFE

  MY FIRST LIFE

  Conversations with Ignacio Ramonet

  Hugo Chávez

  Translated by Ann Wright

  This book was translated with the support of Mémoire des luttes

  This English-language edition published by Verso 2016

  Originally published in Spanish as Mi primera vida

  © Penguin Random House Spain 2013

  Translation © Ann Wright 2016

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-383-9 (HB)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-385-3 (UK EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-386-0 (US EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Châavez Frâias, Hugo, interviewee. | Ramonet, Ignacio, interviewer. |

  Wright, Ann, 1943– translator.

  Title: My first life : conversations with Ignacio Ramonet / Hugo Chavez ; translated by Ann Wright.

  Other titles: Mi primera vida. English

  Description: Brooklyn, NY : Verso Books, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016011444 | ISBN 9781784783839 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Châavez Frâias, Hugo – Interviews. |

  Presidents – Venezuela – Interviews. | Presidents – Venezuela – Biography. | Venezuela – Politics and government – 1974–1999.

  Classification: LCC F2329.22.C54 A5 2016 | DDC 987.06/42092 – dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016011444

  Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Hewer Text UK, Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the US by Maple Press

  To Maximilien Arveláiz

  Contents

  Introduction: One Hundred Years with Chávez by Ignacio Ramonet

  PART I

  Childhood and Adolescence (1954–1971)

  1.‘History will absorb me’

  2.Family Secrets

  3.Hard-Working Boy

  4.Politics, Religion and Encyclopaedia

  5.Secondary School in Barinas

  PART II

  From Barracks to Barracks (1971–1982)

  6.Cadet in Caracas

  7.Young Officer

  8.In Cumaná

  9.In Maracay

  10.Conspiring and Recruiting

  PART III

  The Road to Power (1982–1998)

  11.Rebellion in the Making

  12.The Caracazo

  13.The Rebellion of 4 February 1992

  14.The Fertile Prison

  15.The Victorious Campaign

  Notes

  Acknowledgements and Further Reading

  INTRODUCTION

  One Hundred Hours with Chávez

  We had arrived the previous evening at a house somewhere in the middle of the Llanos, the seemingly endless central plains of Venezuela. It was nine in the morning and already baking hot. The house had been lent by a friend and was a simple, rustic, one-storey building typical of the Llanos. It had a tiled roof and at the front a wide, open veranda, furnished with low wrought-iron tables, wicker rocking chairs and dozens of lush potted plants. All around, the hard cracked earth was dotted with bright shrubs, some grandiose tall trees, and others laden with blossom. A tenacious breeze stirred up a golden, perfumed dust but, punished by these burning gusts, the surrounding vegetation appeared limp and exhausted.

  In a shady part of the garden, a table had been prepared for the interview with documents and books. While I waited for Hugo Chávez, I sat on a wooden fence surrounding the ranch, or hato as they are called in Venezuela. The silence was broken only by bird-song, the odd cock crowing, and the distant throb of a generator.

  There were no buildings in sight, no noise of traffic. It was an ideal retreat. No Wi-Fi, not even a mobile phone connection, only a few satellite phones, via a military network, for the bodyguards and the president himself.

  The previous afternoon, the Falcon light aircraft in which we were travelling had landed at the small airport of Barinas. Before starting our conversations for this book, Chávez wanted to show me the land of his childhood, the roots of his destiny. The ‘setting that made me what I am’, he said.

  He had arrived almost incognito to avoid protocol and ceremony: simply dressed in trainers, black jeans, white shirt and a lightweight blue military-style jacket, accompanied only by Maximilien Arveláiz, his brilliant young foreign affairs adviser, and several bodyguards in olive-green uniforms. At the foot of the aircraft steps, the Saharan heat and two discreet black 4x4s were waiting for us. Chávez got behind the wheel of the first jeep. Maximilien and I jumped in beside him, while the bodyguards boarded the one behind. Night was beginning to fall. We set off for the historic centre of Barinas.

  A low, ramshackle city, Barinas had the feel of a ‘frontier’ town. It was full of battered pick-up trucks and the spanking 4x4s of the new rich. The men all wore wide-brimmed hats and leather boots. The Llanos is cowboy country, a land of adventure, mythical exploits, contraband, rodeos and wide open spaces. And of corridos and joropos, the typical ballads and dances of the plains, their own unique country music. Seen from Caracas, this is still very much the Wild West, and the heartland of Venezuelan identity.

  Barinas, capital of the state of the same name, has mushroomed in recent years. We were surrounded by frantic activity: construction sites, cranes, road works, gridlock … On the outskirts, the architectural style of downright ugliness had wreaked havoc, as in so many other cities, but as we approached the old urban centre, the geometric colonial harmony and the odd impressive historic building reappeared.

  In his beautiful calm baritone voice, Chávez recounted the history of the city. He showed me where the Liberator, Simon Bolívar, had passed; where the plainsmen of Páez ‘the Centaur’ had crossed; where Ezequiel Zamora – ‘the general of free men’ – liberated Barinas, proclaimed the Federation and left for the decisive battle of Santa Inés on 10 December 1859.1 Not only did Chávez know Venezuelan history, he expressed it, lived it, with enthusiasm, and illustrated it with a thousand anecdotes, memories, poems and songs. ‘I love my country,’ he told me. ‘Profoundly. Because, as Alí Primera says, “the country is the man”.2 We must connect the present with the past. Our history is our identity. If you don’t know it, you don’t know who you are. Only history makes a people aware of itself.’

  Suddenly the phone peeped. It was a text message from Fidel Castro congratulating him on that afternoon’s speech. He showed me: ‘21h 30. I was listening to you. I thought it was very good. Congratulations. You’re taking a gamble. It was terrific. You’re brilliant.’ He made no comment, but I could see he was happy. He had a deep affection for Fidel.

  We reached the historic centre. It was already dark and the city was not well lit, but we saw the striking Palacio del Marqués and the enormous old prison. That was followed by a tour of Chávez’s own personal geography. He showed me his old secondary school – the Liceo O’Leary – and the art academy where he had studied painting; where he had lived as a teenager on the Rodríguez Domínguez estate, and where his friends the Ruiz Guevara family had lived; the local baseball pitch; the house of his first girlfriend. ‘I used to walk along this avenue with Nancy Colmenares … we called this bar “The Faculty” … Radio Barinas was in this building – I did my first radio broadcasts from here.’

  The dark night and the tinted car
windows meant I could hardly see a thing. What’s more, in his nostalgic pilgrimage, Chávez was interweaving memories from the two different periods he had lived here: first during his secondary school years (1966–1971), then as a graduate fresh out of the Military Academy (1975–1977). I got somewhat lost in the labyrinth of his past experiences. He realized, and made a disarming apology: ‘Forgive me, memories suddenly came flooding back. You know how memories ambush you at every bend in the road.’ He patiently started again, reorganizing the chronology.

  The son of schoolteachers, Chávez was a natural pedagogue, who knew instinctively how to put himself on the level of the listener. He enjoyed explaining things clearly and deftly. He was never overbearing. He hated boring his audience. He wanted to be understood and tried hard to achieve it. Almost always, when he was with me, he carried a handful of coloured pencils and a notebook. With his left hand – he was left-handed – he would sketch, draw figures, jot down statistics, and explain concepts, ideas, numbers. He tried to make the abstract visible, and had the knack of simplifying quite complex problems.

  He’d acquired that passion for teaching when he was very young: ‘I even used to accompany my mother. She was a rural schoolteacher in a village called Encharaya. I loved the schoolroom, and listening to my mother teaching the class. I helped in some way or other. I always loved education, the classroom, studying.’

  As a schoolboy, student and cadet, Chávez was always a bright spark, that is, top of the class, the one who was exempt from end of year exams because his marks throughout the year had been excellent. Especially in science. His teachers and lecturers adored him. He was keen to learn, avid for knowledge, curious about everything. He also wanted to fit in, to please, to seduce, to be liked and loved.

  Two types of learning came together to form his intellectual make-up: the academic, at which he always shone, and the autodidact, his favourite, which enabled him to educate himself, and goes some way to explaining his particular temperament. A gifted child with a high IQ, he learned to make good use of everything he read. This included children’s educational magazines like Tricolor, or encyclopaedias like Quillet’s, which he’d learned almost by heart. Chávez was a hyperthymesiac, meaning that everything he read remained imprinted on his mind. He absorbed it, processed it, assimilated it, digested it, and incorporated it into his intellectual capital.

  He was always reading. He always had two or three books with him – essays rather than novels – which he read simultaneously, and took notes, underlined things, and made comments in the margins. As an intellectual, he knew how to ‘read productively’: he picked out concepts, analyses, stories and examples which he engraved on his prodigious memory, and then beamed out to the public at large through his torrent of speeches and talks. His bedside reading varied. There was the period of The Path of the Warrior, by Lucas Estrella, which he quoted hundreds of times and which the whole of Venezuela ended up reading. Then came, among others, The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, and Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky, essays which became the indispensable handbook of every good Bolivarian. There was also, more recently, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, ‘a wonderful book which I recommend, about people who lived in poverty all their lives. You must read it.’ It was astonishing; every book he recommended became an immediate best-seller nationally and, sometimes, internationally.

  He could also do anything with his hands, from growing corn to repairing a tank, driving a Belorussian tractor or painting a canvas. He owed this trait, like many others, to his deceased grandmother Rosa Inés, a very intelligent, humble, hard-working woman, with a good education and exceptional common sense. She brought him up, educated him and transmitted to him, from a very early age, a whole philosophy of life. She explained the history of Venezuela as experienced by the common people, the example of solidarity, the secrets of agriculture, how to cook, and how to clean and tidy the modest house, with its thatched roof, earth floor and adobe walls, in which they lived with his brother Adán.

  As a boy, Huguito Chávez was very poor – a poverty alleviated by the enormous love of his grandmother, his ‘old mum’ as he called her. ‘I wouldn’t swap my childhood for any other,’ he told me. ‘I was the happiest child on earth.’ From the age of six or seven, he used to sell arañas in the streets of his small town, Sabaneta; they were spider-like sweets his grandmother made from the fruit picked in her garden. The revenue from his street vending was almost their only income, although he also made papagayos, colourful kites made out of straw and paper, and they brought in a bit more money.

  So, very soon this third way of learning joined the other two in the brain of the young Chávez, and gave him skills he retained all his life: school, or the theoretical; the instinctive, or self-taught; and the manual, or practical. Combining these three sources of knowledge – with none being considered superior to the other two – is one of the keys to understanding his personality.

  His mental make-up, though, was also determined by other qualities.

  First was the incredible ease with which he formed relationships and communicated his ideas. He controlled and manipulated his own image with great skill. And he had an admirable facility with words, acquired no doubt during his years as a sweet-seller, a street kid, chatting and haggling with potential clients as they came out of cinemas, shops, games of bowls or cockfights. He was an exceptional communicator, skills honed in senior school and at the Military Academy, where he showed promise as a party organizer and master of ceremonies. He was especially adept at beauty pageants …

  An exceptional orator, his speeches were entertaining and easy on the ear, colloquial, illustrated by anecdotes, jokes and even songs. However, contrary perhaps to appearances, they were also real didactic compositions: highly structured, with concrete objectives, and prepared with seriousness and professionalism. They generally aimed at transmitting one central idea, pursuing one main avenue of thought within a roundabout discourse, so that nothing was boring or laboured. Chávez would stray from this main avenue of thought and make detours into related themes, memories, anecdotes, jokes, poems, or ballads which did not appear to have any direct connection to his main subject. Then, after seemingly having abandoned his central theme for quite some time, he would swing back to the exact point at which he had left it, creating an awesome subliminal impact on the admiring audience.

  This rhetorical technique allowed him to make immensely long speeches. He once asked me, ‘How long do speeches by political leaders in France generally last?’ I replied that in electoral campaigns they rarely lasted longer than an hour. He pondered for a while and confessed, ‘I would just be warming up, I need to speak for about four hours.’

  His second quality was his competitive nature. He was a born winner. From very young he had been obsessed by sport; a baseball player of an almost professional standard, a terrible loser, known for giving his all in order to win, within the boundaries of sportsmanship. ‘I was a really good pitcher,’ he recalled. ‘Baseball was my obsession. It taught me to be tough, to endure, to give my best, to show character. It’s Venezuela’s main sporting passion. We have about 30 million inhabitants, and the same number of baseball experts.’

  Third: his enthusiastic enjoyment of popular culture. He loved the tales and ballads of the Llanos, reams of which he could recite by heart; traditional Mexican rancheras; protest songs by Alí Primera; the unforgettable box office hits of Mexican cinema of the 1950s and 60s, and the films of popular Hollywood tough guys like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood. He was also a fan of television, well versed in the programmes and personalities of all the Venezuelan channels. All these symbolic reference points of mass culture, which he shared with the Venezuelan public, meant he could immediately connect with the majority of the population.

  Fourth: his popular religion. ‘I’m more of a Christian than a Catholic,’ he admitted, ‘and more than a Christian, let’s say I’m a “Christist”, that is, a fervent follower of the teachings of Jesus
as told in the Gospels.’ He saw Jesus as the ‘first revolutionary’. He clearly did not go to mass every Sunday, nor did he particularly respect the Church hierarchy, with a few exceptions. But he believed in magic and the miraculous power of the saints – canonized or not – and, like his grandmother, he was particularly devoted to the Virgin of the Rosary, patron saint of Sabaneta. His popular faith was sincere, and extended to other beliefs, whether indigenous, Afro-Caribbean or Evangelical. In this he felt an empathy with the vast majority of Venezuelans too.

  Fifth: his military leadership. In the Military Academy, he learned to give orders and be obeyed. He was taught to behave like a leader, a chief. He never forgot it. Chávez knew how to command. And woe to any who did not know it; the full force of his wrath could fall on them! Although he was generally recognized to be a good-natured man, his temper and bouts of anger were legendary. He had been the best cadet of his generation. He had undergone a strict military training – theoretical and practical – the harshness of which sprang from the Prussian tradition of the Venezuelan Army. He was a military man to the core. And this had forged the distinctive intellectual quality he had, of thinking strategically. He got used to forward thinking, to setting ambitious objectives, and finding a way to achieve them. He put it this way: ‘From the very first moment, I liked being a soldier. In the Academy I learned what Napoleon called the “arrow of time”. When a strategist plans a battle, he has to think in advance of the “historic moment”, then of the “strategic hour”, then of the “tactical minute”, and finally of the “second of victory”. I never forgot that pattern of thinking.’

  Sixth: his ability to make people underestimate him. His adversaries – and even some of his friends – regularly tended to do so. Perhaps because of his simplicity, or his physical appearance, or because he talked a lot, or liked making jokes, whatever … The fact is that many people fell into the trap of not appreciating his true worth. A very serious mistake. Those who did, bitterly regretted it, and ended up biting the dust.