The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (20 page)

As soon as we get out of the pickup, we can hear the ruckus. The noise is coming from the Chaguaramal Primary School. Nearly all of the school’s three hundred children, ranging from kindergarten to sixth grade, plus parents, teachers, and a very proud school principal, have gathered to celebrate the inauguration of their newly renovated school. They are waiting for Governor Capriles to arrive. It’s hot outside
as the sun takes its position directly overhead and even hotter under the school’s bright new roof. But the students aren’t sitting still. Wearing their school uniforms and sporting brand-new book bags emblazoned with “State of Miranda,” they are singing, dancing, and jumping up and down. Enormous stereo speakers in the corners of the room are blaring reggaeton, Shakira, and fast-paced Venezuelan dance beats. As the girls spin in their pleated skirts and the boys belt out Latin pop hits at the top of their lungs, the place looks more like a dance party than a pep rally for a renovated school.

We hear a helicopter pass overhead. For a moment, the students pause and their eyes go wide as it dawns on them that it must be the governor. A few minutes later, Capriles jogs through the school’s entrance and the students erupt with screams. The thirty-seven-year-old leader of Miranda is wearing a blue baseball cap, oxford shirt, and sweatpants. You can see the sweat on his face and shirt, as if he has run all the way from his office to the school’s front steps. In fact, you might mistake him for the school’s gym teacher rather than the governor of Venezuela’s most politically important state and, by many people’s reckoning, the man most likely to challenge Chávez for the presidency.

Slowly, Capriles makes his way through the crowd to the podium in front. He begins by pointing to homemade banners hoisted up by parents in the back of the room and reading them aloud. One sign reads, “Our Schools Are Falling Down”; another says, “Governor, Our Children Need New Schools, Too.” The children of these parents aren’t attending the newly renovated school in Pedro Gual. The parents have traveled from other parts of Miranda to bring their concerns directly to the governor. Capriles asks them to tell him about the condition of their schools.

His manner of speaking is as informal as his clothes. He says his goal is to help every single school in the state of Miranda. In the next twelve months, his team is aiming to repair 166 schools and build 14 new schools, followed by 40 more in the next four years. More than 150,000 new book bags have been handed out. He asks one of the schoolboys in the crowd to come up front and show him his book bag. Capriles reaches in and pulls out several books. “Arithmetic. Science … but no politics,” he says as he looks at each of the books, and
the crowd laughs. Capriles’s joke is also his message: he won’t practice President Chávez’s divisive brand of politics; his is an inclusive style that is unconcerned with whom you have supported in the past. “I don’t care what political party you are from,” he says. To make his point, he tells a story about a day laborer he met recently. Recounting their conversation, Capriles says, “The man told me, ‘I love Chávez, but I love you, too.’ I said, ‘That’s okay. Sometimes a man falls in love with two or three women or a woman falls in love with two or three men. It’s all right—it’s part of life.’ ” As if on cue, an older woman in the back can’t resist any longer. She pushes her way through the raucous crowd, comes up to the podium, and says she must kiss him. Beaming, Capriles is happy to oblige.

A few minutes after the rally has come to an end, the governor and I meet in the school’s new air-conditioned computer lab. Capriles is bathed in sweat and still radiating the energy from the crowd outside. He is downing bottles of water, and one of his advisers reminds him how much time he has before the next event. As we sit down to talk, I comment on how grueling a schedule he seems to keep. “
It’s not going to be a fair fight, but you have to fight. The challenge is to fight and keep fighting,” he says. Then, pausing, he takes another swig of water, smiles, and says, “Whoever gets tired loses.”

Few jobs are harder than being a member of the political opposition in an authoritarian country. Your rallies and marches are banned or disrupted. You are forbidden to raise money at home or abroad. You have virtually no opportunity to communicate your message on national television. The only time you appear in national media is when you are being vilified or accused of corruption. Your party leaders live under constant surveillance. The voting rules are consistently revised to stack the odds against you. The courts refuse to hear your complaints. The regime creates clone opposition parties that crowd you out come election time. Your most popular candidates are either forbidden to run for office or occupied fighting trumped-up charges in courtrooms, keeping them off the campaign trail. Supporters are intimidated and, in the worst cases, silenced.

Vocal, independent, rabble-rousing opposition leaders are public enemy No. 1 for an authoritarian regime. They are the small group of people who are willing to confront a regime head-on, speaking out
against abuses, denouncing illegitimate policies, and, when permitted, challenging the strongman at the polls. Often, they do all of this at great personal expense and sacrifice. Opposition leaders I have met from Caracas to Cairo, from Moscow to Kuala Lumpur, have told me stories that invariably involve similar plot points, similar twists and turns, as the regime they challenge ratchets up the pressure. They have been imprisoned. They have been harassed, beaten, and denied their livelihoods. Their names and reputations have been destroyed, their families torn apart. And despite the hardships these leaders endure, the regimes work hard to deny them even the symbolic value of their suffering. Rather, they aim to distance and divide these would-be democratic leaders from the people they hope to mobilize. “
They are extremely sophisticated in what they do, and I’m not only talking about the Russian regime,” says Vladimir Milov, a leader in the Russian opposition, referring to modern authoritarians. “They stay away from too much pressure on the general public. They prefer a very focused repression against a few people who are active in proclaiming opposition feeling. They alienate the active opposition from the general public, saying, ‘Look, these are not repressions against you, but instead these are guys who are against you, foreign spies financed by the CIA, a fifth column if you will.’ ”

It isn’t easy fighting a dictator. But while it may seem unfair to criticize anyone who would take on such a burden, it is true that some political opposition leaders are less effective than others. Some refuse to innovate, sticking stubbornly to the same strategies and making the same mistakes that marginalized them in the first place. Like any political party, they can be distracted by petty power struggles and outsized egos. Some are merely reactive, criticizing but never proposing new ideas or political alternatives to distinguish their vision from that of the ruling party. Indeed, for regimes that wish to hide behind a democratic facade, some semblance of a democratic opposition is necessary, even desirable. Opposition parties can, in the worst cases, become outgrowths of the regime itself, providing cover for the government’s true dominance. Co-opted opposition leaders are a vital piece of the architecture of authoritarianism. Thus, the sheer fact that the leader of an opposition party declares himself to be in a pitted struggle against a regime isn’t reason enough to applaud his
efforts. They too can become another piece of the state’s authoritarian machine, in sharp contrast to those who are engaged in a genuine fight.

Often when Venezuelans talk about Henrique Capriles, they call him a fortunate man. Sometimes they are referring to his good looks or the fact that he comes from a prominent and wealthy family. Sometimes they are referring to his political stardom. His career has been a series of firsts. In 1998, at twenty-six, he was elected to the parliament, the youngest person ever to be elected to the body. He was soon catapulted to Speaker of the National Assembly, again the youngest in the country’s history. But not long after he met Chávez, Capriles’s luck ran out. “My first experience meeting him was as Speaker of the House,” Capriles recalled to me. “I had the opportunity to meet Chávez and interact with him. I thought, ‘This is the guy who is going to transform Venezuela.’ ” The transformation that followed—for his country and himself—wasn’t what he expected.

In 2004, while serving as the mayor of Baruta, a relatively affluent municipality in Caracas,
Capriles was arrested for inciting an attack on the Cuban embassy during the 2002 coup against Chávez. In fact, Capriles had been invited to the embassy, which sat in his district, to try to dissuade rioters from looting the Cuban ambassador’s residence. In the aftermath, the Cuban ambassador, Germán Sánchez Otero, even thanked Capriles for personally coming to his aid. Nevertheless, Capriles was imprisoned for two years on the trumped-up charges. To delay a final verdict, the government transferred his case from one judge to the next, as each recused himself. Ultimately, it was passed among more than forty judges before he received a final verdict. In 2008, after four years and two sets of trials, he was declared innocent. During this time, he had inadvertently achieved another first: while he sat in prison, much of the time in solitary confinement, he was among Chávez’s first political prisoners.

With the charges against him dropped, Capriles came back with a vengeance. In 2008, his victory in the race for governor of Miranda was one of the biggest for the opposition camp. Miranda is Venezuela’s
second-most-populous state, with more than three million people, and arguably the most important politically. Perhaps an even greater sting for Chavistas was that the man Capriles defeated, Diosdado Cabello, was a key Chávez ally, often referred to as the “super minister.” Underlining how bracing a loss it was for Chávez, Capriles says that “it’s like defeating Raúl Castro.”

Of course, if you beat Chávez’s right-hand man, there are consequences. Capriles was met with an overnight assault on his ability to govern the state. Chávez immediately began to strip Capriles’s young government of its resources. With the help of an aide sitting behind him, Capriles begins to tick off the costs of his winning the last election. Chávez closed 19 of his hospitals and 250 emergency and primary care centers and seized highways, airports, and state government land. More than $200 million was lifted from his budget, and seven thousand state workers became federal government employees. Capriles puts his hand to his throat and says, “He is slowly trying to drown the state.”

The rally that brought us to Chaguaramal Primary School is a small part of Capriles’s plan for fending Chávez off. One of the governor’s aides gave me a tour of the school before Capriles arrived. It was pretty much as one would expect. Classrooms with chalkboards, bulletin boards, and desks. But when we opened the door to what I assumed would be another classroom, it wasn’t. Behind the door was something completely unexpected: a dentist’s chair and examination room. As the aide explained, because the central government had closed so many health facilities in retribution for Capriles’s election victory, they were taking the opportunity of renovating the school to provide the community with additional services. The thinking was that it would be much harder for the government to close a health facility that was embedded in a remodeled school, something the community had clearly embraced as its own and would not give up. “[Chávez] is taking away competencies and resources, but he can’t take away contact with the people,” says Capriles.

For all his passion, Capriles has no illusions about what he is up against. “In Miranda, we are in the Barlovento region. It has the biggest population of African descent in Venezuela. The violence is at the point that 136 people are killed by guns per 100,000 a year—four
times the crime rate in Latin America. A hundred and forty thousand children in Miranda are still not going to school. I have to build new schools. It is not going to be enough. It means working seven days a week.”

But in his mind, the one antidote to Chávez and the political barriers he has constructed across the country is building a direct line to the people, very much the connection he was forging on this Sunday in the countryside. It was losing this connection, becoming alienated from the vast majority of Venezuelans, that was the democratic opposition’s original sin. “In the past, the opposition dedicated all of its efforts to certain spaces but didn’t put effort in the rural areas. When you have a woman and you don’t like her, but she is the only one you have—it is the same. In some areas, Chavistas only have Chávez. There is no competition. We are changing that reality,” says Capriles. “If poor people hadn’t voted for me, I wouldn’t be governor. Seventy percent of my state is poor.”

His aides are looking at their watches, and the governor must move on to his next meeting. I ask him how he would describe Venezuela after ten years of Chávez’s rule. He tells me there is a phrase he recently heard that he thinks perfectly sums it up. He heard it from, of all people, a member of the Chinese Communist Party. “I was invited to China, at the official invitation of the Chinese Communist Party,” Capriles explains. “A Chinese official asked me, ‘What is happening to Chávez? He is a good friend, but what is he doing?’ ” Capriles told the Chinese official that if he, a friend to Chávez, didn’t know, why should he? “Then the Chinese official gave me his opinion,” says Capriles. “ ‘Venezuela is a country that grows but does not make progress.’ ”

Beijing is more than nine thousand miles from Caracas. But one morning in Petare, one of the larger slums that ring the hillsides of Venezuela’s capital, the Chinese Communist Party official’s observation strikes me as spot-on. Petare is a crowded and notoriously dangerous corner of Caracas. Yovanny, a middle-aged man and father of two who has invited me into his makeshift home, calls his neighborhood a place that has been good for
little more than “robberies, stripping
cars, and rape.” Nevertheless, Yovanny is proud of the house he has built there for his wife and two daughters, and rightfully so—he has had to fight for every inch of it. The structure is built from pieces of corrugated scrap metal, wood, and brick and held together by wire and a little joint compound. It rests, like the homes of all his neighbors, somewhat precariously on the edge of a steep incline. On this morning, a light breeze is coming off the mountains. We sit on a small open-air patio behind his house, underneath an avocado tree that has grown out of the hillside. Butterflies fly overhead, land for a few seconds near our glasses of orange soda, and then retreat to the tree. For a moment, you almost forget that you are in one of Caracas’s most dangerous neighborhoods.