Hugo Chávez passed away on March 5, 2013, following thirteen years, one month and three days as president of Venezuela. Photo: AFP
A decade following Hugo Chavez passed away and left Venezuela shocked, Tulio Hernandez —exiled in Colombia due to a threat of imprisonment Nicolas Maduro on the national radio network—reflects on what the departure of ‘El Comandante’ meant, the legacy he leaves in the region and tells us regarding three meetings he had with the politician, face to face: the first, as a nice and thin presidential candidate who exploded over the presence of a woman; the second, in which he saw a man with “an implacable, distrustful gaze”; and the last, when he did not want to repress a march once morest him, but later he did.
Hernández is a sociologist and university professor. Photo: Blog/Tulio Hernandez
“It began in a mass enthusiasm and ended in a funeral, his”
—Ten years following the death of Hugo Chávez, which coincides with the death of Josef Stalin, what is the mark that ‘El Comandante’ has left in Venezuela?
—Chavez, to say it with a visual image, was a Caribbean hurricane that led a political process that completely transformed the country. It was a political process, I like to say, that began with mass enthusiasm and ended in a funeral, his, that of democracy and, in general, of the country, because Chávez arrived and gave hope to a people and a country where politics produced disenchantment and where there was disaffection for the two parties that had created democracy. Chávez re-enchanted politics, he gave people hope, especially the poorest and the middle classes.
When he died, he left them alone. He had not completed any project and, if we review today’s results, his presence, like that of hurricanes, was devastating.
—Hugo Chávez talked a lot regarding the socialist model, the socialist industry, 21st century socialism, etc. So you think he didn’t implement a system himself?
—No, Hugo Chávez, more than a State of society project, what he had was a compendium of emotional ideas, (that is to say) a compendium of slogans that were never raised in black or white, with goals, precise objectives, on what was society going to be, for example. He said emotional things like: “We are going to turn Venezuela into a world oil power” and what they did was destroy PDVSA. “We are going to create industry and a socialist economy directed by the workers themselves” and all the companies that submitted to this scheme went bankrupt.
Today no one in Venezuela talks regarding socialism or equality anymore, so much so that some rulers like Freddy Bernal, in Táchira, say that the new heroes are the businessmen, who need foreign investment. There is a whole kind of wild capitalism, nothing close to a model of centralized or planned economy. The differences in salaries in Venezuela are abysmal. So, neither was a socialist project built in the, let’s say, more communist sense of the term in the Cuban sense. Nor (was there) a socialist society in terms, let’s call it, of European social democracy, in terms of Finland or Norway.
The three meetings with Hugo Chávez
—Do you think that, since Chávez’s death until now, in the middle of 2023, Venezuela is different?
-Yes and no. He has changed in disaffection for the Chavista project while he was a huge, messianic leader. Chávez generated passions like few other politicians in Latin America, like perhaps Evita or Perón himself in Argentina, phenomena of collective love like Hitler, Mussolini or Fidel himself. Once he disappears, Chavismo almost succumbs.
Chávez almost dies when oil prices begin to fall. So, all the economic disasters fell on Maduro, that is, everything that had already been woven sprouted from 2017. Not by chance, in that year, the largest migration from Venezuela began.
During the Chávez government, there was a lot of repression, but the number of political prisoners of torture or murders that were committed in the first years of Maduro was not reached. So, let’s say that the government scheme did change and it changed, basically, because they might no longer continue playing electoral and democracy.
—You have said that you were able to meet Hugo Chávez. Could you describe the encounter(s) you had? Who was really Hugo Chávez?
I had it at three different times. One when he was a candidate. I had to be one of the five interviewers who talked with the candidates for a television program called “Words for Venezuela.” I remember that there was a very beautiful woman who had told me that she wanted to meet Hugo Chávez. I told him: “Then come with me.” He entered where one is made up and, suddenly, Chávez enters doing phonetic exercises. We didn’t know each other or were friends or anything, but he says to me: “Hey, Patulio, how are you? You’re going to think I’m crazy, but since I talk a lot, I have to take care of my voice.”
He was a very nice guy and, by the way, he said something quite macho to me —not unusual in Venezuela or Latin America—: “Look, you’re not going to like this makeup thing, because it weakens you.” And all of a sudden he looks in the mirror, he sees this woman and he turns into a monster. He says: “What the fuck is this! They told me that only two people were here. Who is she?”. And I say sorry, she is accompanying me.
“Get this pod out of here, now,” he said. And when she left, he went back to being nice and making jokes. All of us who interviewed him had a certain weakness for his sympathy.
“A symptom of oblivion”
Why did Chávez react like this?
—Because he entered politics with the paranoia that they were going to kill him and, obviously, it was a paranoid personal structure and, also, because of its religious theme, that is, he spoke with the dead. He had done spiritualism and, when they read the letters at a very young age and he did not believe, they told him that he was going to die young. Ultimately, he died young. Obviously, he had a very big fear.
“And the other time you saw him?”
“The second encounter was with a shady man. He was in the Miraflores Palace already being elected president, preparing his government team. I had collaborated in the transition, what is called the liaison commissions between the previous government. Chávez was already a hard, tough man with an implacable and distrustful look like a kind of Superior Chief. He seems to have been in that power all his life. So, (Chávez) was two people or many people.
Later, I had a third when he called a group of intellectuals to talk regarding calling a referendum to approve the Constituent Assembly. That day, there was a protest movement in a state called Sucre. They had burned a governorate. I heard him talking to the governor telling him that he might not take the repressive forces out into the streets, that that was what the previous governments did and that, if he was a leader, he had to show his face, but if they killed him, it was because he was not a leader. At that time, he was starting his government and there were still no repressive acts. I was moved by the seriousness with which he said that, but in the few months or years we saw him carry out a frightful repression.
—How do you think Chávez will be remembered in posterity?
—I thought that (Chavez) was going to be marked a lot and was going to become what he wanted: on the altar of Latin American revolutionary heroes. But I have a suspicion that, first, Maduro was trying to get his own image of him. For this, the tutelary weight of Hugo Chávez must be suppressed as much as possible.
I think that, with the same speed that it entered and left Venezuelan history, it will be an image diluted in time. That is a hypothesis, but already today the fact that, in the celebration of the 10 years of his death, there are only two former presidents is already a symptom of oblivion.
