The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (26 page)

This time the students had a clear objective: defeat the referendum. But there was probably no one in Venezuela—including among the students—who would have been willing to wager that they could succeed. The magnitude of Chávez’s electoral victory eight months earlier made him look invincible. He had the full weight of the state’s apparatus behind him, which seemed to get larger by the day as he nationalized one industrial giant after another. Although there was very little critical media left, what remained had been largely tamed by the example Chávez had made of RCTV. The opposition political parties were so demoralized by their bruising defeats it appeared they might sit out this round.

In fact, it wasn’t even clear on Venezuelan campuses that students were interested in defending their democratic rights. After Chávez announced his referendum, Barrios remembers they called for a student assembly at his university; eight people showed up. He said student leaders realized that despite the success they had mobilizing students only a couple of months earlier over RCTV, they had to start all over again. “That was a real challenge for us, to jump-start something that had been spontaneous,” says Barrios.

The movement’s leaders spent nearly a month getting their classmates motivated for the fight. The first step was pure education. They needed to make the students understand what was at stake and force them to take notice. Some of the referendum’s provisions would allow the government to seize private property. So student organizers would seize the school cafeterias, marking them off with yellow tape and signs saying they were now government property. They filled the universities’ gardens with faux tombstones; on each tombstone,
they wrote a political right that would soon expire. As people joined, they were made to feel a part of the movement. Everyone had a job to do and felt ownership in the effort, even those among the rank and file. Student leaders became pragmatic about how they branded the movement. They made T-shirts. They created their own version of the Live Strong wrist bracelets. “It needed to be cool for you to be in the student movement,” says Barrios. “And if that’s what you need to do in order to drive thousands of people into the streets, that’s what you need to do.”

The students’ sharpest insight was in how they chose to present themselves to the public. One of Chávez’s most potent rhetorical weapons against the opposition parties had been to conjure up the past. Venezuelans remember that the democratic governments of recent decades were mired in corruption, incompetence, and poor management. As long as Chávez could link the parties to those days—which wasn’t difficult when many of them had served in those governments—he could win. But the students understood that they didn’t carry this political baggage. After all, many of them had been no more than ten or twelve years old when Chávez was first elected.

The slogan for the opposition parties had been “Chávez, get out now!” To the students, that had been a mistake. They had no interest in furthering the polarizing war of words that Chávez had begun. For starters, the goal was to defeat the referendum, not unseat Chávez. The president had demonstrated his popularity, so the students realized that demonizing him would likely be a losing strategy with voters they needed to sway. “We weren’t against Chávez,” says Goicoechea. “We didn’t start this to take out Chávez. The first important thing that distinguished us was our message. It wasn’t radicalizing people against Chávez. It was inclusive. We started our campaign focused on positive values.” Indeed, they felt so strongly about it that they took pains to avoid even mentioning the president. “I worked on the communications side,” recalls Alvarez, “and we would never say ‘Chávez’ at all. We would speak about the government. We would always speak about values.”

And like youth movements elsewhere, the clearest advantage that the students brought was their age and political independence. “People started supporting us because we were too young to be politicians
and we were too young to be asking for something in return,” says Alvarez. “We were not fighting to get elected to something.” Such seemingly pure motives put the regime on the defensive. Chávez reverted to his polarizing rhetoric, referring to the students as “rich kids,” “sons of the empire,” and “fascists.” But these attempts to tie the students to the wealthy or the United States largely fell flat with the public. By the fall, it became clear that the student movement had achieved something no one else ever had: Chávez was responding to his opponent’s political message rather than the other way around.

Of course, Chávez brought more than his political rhetoric to this fight. Like all authoritarian leaders, he had the power to suppress the students through force and intimidation. Here the students liked to say that the approach they took to fighting Chávez was like trying to fight Mike Tyson. “If you’re going to fight Mike Tyson, you’re not going to box against him, because, even though he is crazy, he’s going to kill you,” says Barrios, laughing at the thought. “But if you can challenge him to a game of chess, you might have a chance to defeat Mike Tyson. We’re not going to fight [Chávez’s military or police], because they have guns and weapons; they’d kill us. But if we can take them away from their game and put them in our game, a game that we control, then we can defeat them. Yes, it’s possible that Mike Tyson will get angry after you beat him in chess and hit you. But if he does that, you’re going to have the support of the population. If Mike Tyson hits you in a boxing match, everybody says you deserve it. After all, you went into a boxing ring with Mike Tyson.”

How do you keep Chávez and his regime on their heels? The answer was creative, original, and unexpected forms of protest. It was well and good to have marches and demonstrations in the streets. But the students resisted falling into a pattern of going out, marching, and getting repressed day after day. Instead, in October and November, Venezuelans witnessed an incredible array of new and creative protests led by the students. Like many of the actions they had first taken on their campuses, their demonstrations were often aimed at educating the public about what Chávez’s constitutional referendum would mean for Venezuelan life.
Sometimes when they blocked roads, they would let people pass only if they could name one article of the constitution Chávez wanted to change. They made and distributed cartoons
that explained the issues in clear and simple language. Instead of a protest with a thousand people, they would dispatch teams of ten people to a hundred subway stations. There they might distribute newspapers they had created with headlines from the future. Each headline revealed the consequences that had befallen Venezuelans because of the government’s unlimited powers.

Humor proved a potent weapon. “Venezuela is very famous for having Miss Universe. We really care about Miss Venezuela,” Alvarez told me. So the students made a picture of Miss Venezuela from the future, and it was an old lady who refused to give up her crown. “Everyone wants a new girl every year,” says Alvarez, laughing. “But what if the actual Miss Venezuela wanted to keep her crown for fifteen years?”

In a move familiar to authoritarian regimes, Chávez and his supporters began to claim that the students were agents of the CIA. So a group of students started a demonstration outside a government bank. Once there, they shouted that they were CIA spies and that they had come to pick up their checks. “We started protesting outside the bank, saying the government is delaying our payment from the CIA,” recalls Alvarez. “We made people understand how silly our government can be, not by confronting them, but by making fun of them. And we were able to do it because we were students.”

As the date for the referendum approached, students say that the security forces became more aggressive. Students and their families started receiving death threats. Students were being beaten up at rallies by thugs while the police stood nearby. And individual student leaders began to come under incredible amounts of pressure. None more so than Yon Goicoechea.

In 2007, while Goicoechea was helping to lead the student movement, his own family was in crisis. Earlier that year his father had gone on trial for murder. His father and his family claimed the killing was in self-defense. Regardless of the circumstances, having Goicoechea’s father in prison and on trial gave the regime leverage.
One day the Venezuelan vice president, Jorge Rodríguez, had his bodyguards pick up Goicoechea as he walked down the street. Rodríguez wanted to make a deal. “The vice president of the republic said that he would get my father out of jail if I stopped the protests. I didn’t accept
that, and my father is still in jail. We have consequences. We sacrifice things. It wasn’t easy.”

I asked Goicoechea to explain. “Did the vice president want you to quit the student movement or undermine it?”

“If the vice president had told me if I quit, my father would be out of jail, I would have quit,” replied Goicoechea, with no hesitation. “What I couldn’t do was to stop something that was bigger than me and that I was responsible for. I have consequences and I pay daily.” After Goicoechea refused the vice president’s offer, the charges against his father were changed in order to raise his possible prison sentence. Instead of six years, his father was sentenced to twenty years. After a few moments, Goicoechea says quietly, “They intimidate and they play hard.”

Ultimately, whether the constitutional referendum succeeded would be a question of numbers. In the closing days of their campaign, the students believed they needed to show their fellow Venezuelans that they had enough support to win. They decided they wanted to have their closing rally on Bolívar Avenue, in the heart of Caracas. The avenue isn’t necessarily the largest public space in the country, but it is historically associated with large, important political rallies. It was also commonly said that President Chávez was the only person who could fill Bolívar Avenue. That made it highly appealing to the students. But the Ministry of Interior, which needed to approve their request to hold the rally there, understood the avenue’s symbolic value, too. It repeatedly denied the students’ request, telling them they could have any place besides Bolívar Avenue. The students replied by saying they would accept any day and time the ministry chose, as long as it was that avenue. The Ministry of Interior then gave the students Thursday, November 29, at 2:30 p.m., three days before the December 2 referendum vote. “They gave us a horrible day for protest”—many of their possible supporters would have to leave work and fight the midday traffic jams to make it—“but we put all our resources—physical, capital, human—into filling up Bolívar Avenue, and we managed to do so,” recalls Barrios.
By most estimates, more than 150,000 Venezuelans were there that day. And the next day, Chávez held his own rally, and he too filled the avenue. “The difference is, he is the president, we are university students,” says Barrios. “A lot of people left thinking,
‘These kids are serious. I mean, we actually have a shot at winning this.’ ”

On Sunday, December 2, Venezuelans came out to vote on the referendum. Neither side knew if it had the votes to win. The bluffing began almost right away.

Yon Goicoechea got a phone call from a Chavista student leader at noon. He said he needed to meet with Goicoechea and it was important. “We got together in a public place, and there was a very high functionary of the secret police there,” recalls Goicoechea. “And the high functionary of the secret police told me that they had the information that they had won. He offered all the resources that I need—whatever that means—to avoid bloodshed in Venezuela. Of course, the way to avoid it was to not go to the streets.” After using his father’s fate to threaten Goicoechea, the regime was now resorting to bribery. Goicoechea simply needed to convince his fellow student leaders not to protest the outcome of the election.

Goicoechea knew that the regime didn’t actually know if it had won or not. It was only midday, and people were still voting. But he could just as easily bluff. So he told the officer of the secret police that they had information that the students had won. “If we win, we will go to the streets and defend it,” Goicoechea replied. “And if you want to avoid bloodshed, that is your responsibility because you are the national security.”

The students had no illusions about what it would take to triumph on December 2, 2007. Goicoechea told me that there are two things you must have if you want to win an election in Venezuela. “You have to win, and you have to have the army. If one of those elements fails, you lose. Because the army won’t defend you if you lose, and if you win, and the army does not defend you, you also lose.”

It wasn’t that the military needed to support your goals or your political project. Rather, it needed to see the costs of overturning an election as too great to pursue. “One thing is understanding how the military works, especially in countries like Venezuela,” says Barrios. “If there is a degree of institutionalism still alive in the military, they
would take the decision that requires less use of force. So we wanted to create a credible threat, saying that if you don’t recognize the official result, you’re going to have to use an incredible amount of force.”

Throughout the day information coming into their headquarters was largely positive, but the students had no idea if they were winning. Even at its best, they believed any lead they might have remained within the margin of error. Nevertheless, they did nothing but project confidence. Around 7:00 p.m., Goicoechea, smiling from ear to ear, gave a press conference congratulating students and supporters for their work and saying that all that was left to do was defend the vote. The clear subtext was that they had won, and it was just a matter of being announced. His bravado was pure theater.
He had no idea if they were ahead or not.

By midnight, the National Electoral Council still had not reported a result. Among the student leaders, nerves were fraying. Goicoechea spoke to contacts in the military who said the generals had told Chávez he must accept the result, but the students increasingly imagined that the regime intended to steal the election. At roughly 1:00 a.m., Vice President Rodríguez called and spoke to Leopoldo López, a young leader of the political opposition, who had been supportive of the students’ campaign and was there with the movement’s leaders. According to Barrios, the vice president implied that the regime intended to change the election results and that the students had best not do anything about it in the interests of their own personal security. “And I remember Leopoldo answered him by saying that if you change the results of the election, you will find thousands of people in the streets, and you will find me and the university students at the head of those protests,” says Barrios. The election had come down to a high-stakes game of chicken.