The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (14 page)

The road leveled off as we approached Los Teques’ traffic-clogged streets. Just as we did, I saw him: García, wearing a helmet and reflective sunglasses, was following us on a motorcycle. I only caught a glimpse of him for a second; he was traveling a safe distance behind us, at least two, maybe three, curves in the road. At the same moment, I also saw our contact with the sheaf of notes. He was driving a four-door sedan and appeared to be trying to angle his vehicle so that he could pull up alongside us, presumably to pass the papers from one car to the other. But now, with García following us, it was far too risky. We darted ahead, pulling into the city’s traffic to prevent our contact from pulling alongside us. He followed, merging into the lane, three or four cars behind us. Several cars behind him, I could now see García take his position in the line of traffic.

We had to find a way to warn our contact about García. He had no idea we were being followed, and if he attempted to pass the notes to us again, there would be no way García would miss it.

Traffic was at a crawl. As we inched through Los Teques, vendors lined the road. Some of the more aggressive hawkers walked between the traffic lanes, coming directly up to car windows to try to make a sale. I motioned one man selling trinkets toward us. As I rolled down the window, he began to show me the items he had today—small
wooden figurines, strings of beads, and the like. Looking at him, I said, “Go to the car three cars behind us. Tell them, ‘You are being followed.’ ” I then reached for my wallet and offered to buy something. The middle-aged hawker smiled and raised his hand, saying, “No, no.” A purchase wasn’t necessary.

He slowly strolled through the traffic, approaching several vehicles to make his pitch. Then he stopped at our contact’s car and lowered his head near the window for a moment. A second later, he moved on, making his way again through the line of vehicles that stretched as far as you could see.

A quarter of a mile later, the traffic began to ease. Up ahead, there was a fork in the road. We bore to the right; our contact veered to the left. Keeping an eye on the rearview mirror, we saw García steer to the right. We would have to retrieve the notes from our contact later. It could wait.

It is roughly an hour-long drive between Caracas and Los Teques. The bulk of the distance, the portion on which you can make the best time, is the Pan-American Highway. During this stretch, Venezuelans whiz along at a fast clip, enjoying the rare chance to open up their engines before hitting the wall of Caracas’s notorious traffic jams. We had no hope of trying to lose García with speed; our cheap rental car couldn’t outpace his motorcycle. Then fate intervened. Just before we turned onto the Pan-American, our car hit a crater-sized pothole. The front passenger-side tire exploded.

We had no choice but to pull over to the side of the road. The tire had an enormous gash in the sidewall. Fortunately, the rental came equipped with a spare, and we set about swapping it. As we did, we looked around; García was gone. “You can never find a police officer when you need one,” my friend joked.

Twenty minutes later, we were on the Pan-American, hugging the right lane and driving much slower than the rest of traffic heading back to Caracas. We hadn’t driven more than a few minutes when we spotted a motorcycle several vehicles behind us, hiding behind a tractor trailer. García had never left.

No one enjoys being followed by military police. But at this point García’s attempt to trail us took on a comic feel. With cars moving at seventy or seventy-five miles per hour, it is difficult to inconspicuously follow a vehicle that is barely moving half as fast. Every vehicle
that García tried to hide behind quickly joined the flow of traffic and raced by us. García had to keep braking, finding another car, bus, or pickup for cover. Even worse, we stopped several times to gauge the spare tire’s air pressure, which was flagging. Each time we stopped, our furtive military escort had to hide. The third time we pulled over, we got out of the car and stood over the tire inspecting it. As we did, I looked out of the corner of my eye and spotted García. He had slid off his motorcycle and hidden in a thatch of tall grass reeds. I could see his sunglasses peering out at us where he parted the grass with his hands. We jumped back in the car and headed to the highway ramp a hundred yards away. As we did, we had to laugh: we could see the surprised, slightly round García scrambling back to his bike.

García followed us all the way to Caracas. He was now a long way from his hillside prison. We didn’t want to take him to where we were staying; even if the authorities could find our whereabouts, we weren’t about to lead them there. So we chose a large shopping mall in the center of downtown Caracas. We could stow the car in the bottom of the mall’s parking lot, several stories below ground, and García would then have no choice but to follow us on foot. Once inside the mall complex, we would have several options for transportation among the cabs and microbuses that came and went. The last time I saw García was as we descended into the mall’s underground parking. He had come to a full stop a couple of traffic lights away. He seemed to be thinking about what to do next, his helmet and sunglasses reflecting the sun in our direction.

What had been the point of having García follow us back to Caracas? Perhaps it truly was an attempt by authorities to spy on us. It might not even have ended when García turned his bike back toward Los Teques. He may have only been called back to his post once someone else was in place to take over his surveillance duties, someone we wouldn’t know or recognize in advance. Or, more likely, we were supposed to know we were being followed. (It would be the more charitable explanation for the Keystone Kops nature of García’s pursuit.) The order to tail us had been an attempt to frighten or intimidate. Either way, the entire episode seemed consistent with almost all my interactions with the Venezuelan government. On the one hand, it was permissive enough to allow a journalist to enter one of its prisons. Most authoritarian regimes would have kept the doors locked. On the other
hand, it suffered from a paranoia that compelled it to send García on a long, winding drive across the state of Miranda. It felt like the same reflex that led most members of the government I met to refer to me, without jest, as a “member of the empire.” The government wanted to appear permissive and open, but that appearance was at odds with a siege mentality that saw enemies lurking everywhere.

The trigger for that paranoia may have been the person I had visited that morning: Raúl Baduel. Few people know Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, better than Baduel, a former general. They first met as young cadets in Venezuela’s military academy in 1972. They were close in age and struck up a friendship. So close were their ties that on December 17, 1982, Chávez, Baduel, and two other young officers made a secret oath to defend Venezuelan democracy. All four men were worried about the direction in which the political class was taking the country; much of what was wrong with Venezuela—its economic decline, massive poverty, deteriorating social services—they blamed on an increasingly corrupt and venal leadership. At the time, Chávez and Baduel were on a military detachment in Maracay, west of Caracas. It was the anniversary of the death of Simón Bolívar, the great South American liberator, and the four young officers had gone for a jog. Under a very old tree, the Samán de Güere, under which Bolívar is said to have once rested, they made a promise to one another. “
We paraphrased the oath that our liberator Bolívar took in front of his teacher,” Baduel told me. “We swore not to give rest to our arms or rest to our souls until we saw a true democracy consolidated in our country.”

This secret cell of officers was the birth of Chávez’s revolutionary movement, which was originally known as the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement-2000. (The 2000 was a reference to the year 2000, when they believed they would have ascended to high command. A year later it was changed to 200, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Bolívar’s birth.) In February 1992, Chávez’s underground cell led a failed coup against the government. After two years in prison, Chávez returned to public life and began to build a populist, antigovernment political persona that would help catapult him into the presidency in 1999. The most vital test of Chávez’s friendship with Baduel came in the third year of his presidency in April 2002. It was then,
during a brief coup against Chávez’s government, that Baduel, now a general, came to the aid of his comrade. During the coup, Chávez was temporarily ousted and exiled to Orchila Island, a dot in the Caribbean 150 miles off the Venezuelan coast. From there, Chávez fully expected he would be either killed or sent to Cuba to live out his days. Factions within the military, which had initially either acquiesced or supported Chávez’s ouster, started to waver. As military opinion began to turn,
Baduel sent an elite team of paratroopers in three Super Puma attack helicopters to rescue Chávez and reinstall him in the presidential palace.

Chávez eventually repaid Baduel by making him minister of defense, and in many ways this is when Baduel’s troubles began. Now in Caracas, he was in close proximity to Chávez and his political advisers. Baduel told me he was bothered by what he saw; his longtime friend ruled like an autocrat and was surrounded by people who told him he could do no wrong. Baduel claimed that his criticisms quickly made him an outsider with Chávez and his circle. At the same time, Baduel was also gaining critics within the military, especially among senior officers who believed he had been too accepting of Chávez’s interference in military affairs. When Chávez sought to change the military’s salute to “Fatherland, socialism, or death”—something that offended the most professional officers—Baduel claims he told Chávez it was a violation of the constitution, which “clearly states that the [military] is a service to all and not personal or party interests.” Chávez simply went around him, instructing individual generals to spread the slogan to soldiers directly. When they began to repeat it, “Chávez said it was coming from the hearts of the soldiers,” recalled Baduel.

The breaking point came in 2007. Chávez put forward a constitutional amendment that would grant him extraordinary executive powers, including the ability to be president for life.
Baduel felt compelled to resign and soon became an outspoken critic of the proposed amendment, which was defeated. The last time he spoke to Chávez was at his farewell speech as minister of defense. “Chávez came near me to say good-bye,” says Baduel, sitting in his jail cell. “He told me to say hello to my family. And in an ironic tone, he put his hand on my arm and said, ‘I imagine you are going to have a lot of time on
your vast lands.’ I looked at him and laughed. But I took it as a subtle threat.” It was a threat, he believed, because Baduel had no vast lands to retire to. “I knew he was going to retaliate against me,” he said. “I was certain it would happen.”

In April 2009, Chávez confirmed his fears.
Military intelligence officers forcibly detained Baduel, putting a gun to his head and pushing him into a waiting vehicle. In May 2010, he was sentenced to seven years and eleven months in prison on allegations of corruption. I met with him in Ramo Verde military prison two months later. Baduel told me the sentencing was pointless. “When will I leave?” Baduel asked. “Only when Chávez is out of power.”

Baduel knew Chávez the cadet, the soldier, the politician, and the president. He had helped him plot against the old Venezuelan political order and had been a defender of Chávez’s own government. He no doubt must have had suspicions about Chávez even before his brazen 2007 constitutional referendum. No one who rises to minister of defense could be entirely blind to the man he served. Perhaps he had simply underestimated Chávez. But now, in prison, Baduel wonders if he ever knew Chávez at all. “They say I know him well, but now I think I met an impostor. He wanted power. He was able to hide that well through the years,” he told me. “He takes actions to sustain his only political project, which is to be president for life.”

But Baduel did offer one parting insight into who Hugo Chávez is. He told me that everyone always makes a fuss over the fact that Chávez is a military man and that he thinks and acts like a soldier. This, however, struck the former Venezuelan general as far too vague to be instructive. “Military experience influences everything we do, and yes, he is military. But we have to be more precise,” says Baduel. “His specialty is tanks and armored vehicles. That is the type of weaponry he knows. Those units, we call them the armored hurricane. The concept is to roll over your adversaries, to flatten them. That’s his approach, to flatten his enemies.”

What would make four young military officers take a secret oath to defend Venezuelan democracy? When these officers had first met, in the 1970s, it appeared that Venezuela might catapult itself into the
ranks of the world’s top-performing countries. In 1970,
it was the wealthiest country in South America and ranked among the twenty richest countries in the world. As many reeled from the 1970s oil crisis, Venezuela, with the largest oil deposits outside the Middle East, enjoyed a bonanza. There were so many highway and high-rise construction projects that people in Caracas started referring to their city as “Miami with mountains.” When Venezuelans traveled abroad to splurge on luxury items, they were often known as the
dame dos
(give me two!).
Colombians, envious of their neighbor’s success, would say, “The Venezuelans fell out of trees and into Cadillacs.”

But those Cadillacs soon began to sputter. The high price for a barrel of crude had masked the inefficiency, mismanagement, and corruption of the Venezuelan government. As the price of oil fell, Venezuela’s economic troubles came into full view. Venezuela soon had the highest per capita debt in Latin America.
Real per capita income dropped 15 percent between 1973 and 1985. The country’s neediest were largely ignored: between 1980 and 1989,
poverty rose 150 percent. Inflation and unemployment soared, surpassed only by the sharp rise in violent crime.