“Hugo Chávez was capable of generating love and, in the afternoon, ordering the death of a judge”: Tulio Hernández


The sound of the submachine guns did not let the Venezuelans sleep on February 4, 1992. A group of soldiers tried to seize power by force and give the president a coup Carlos Andres Perez. The failed attempt was led by a young Hugo Chavez, who, perhaps without knowing it, was changing the destiny of Venezuela forever. It was a military failure that became a political triumph after a brief speech in which he announced that “for now” they would not meet his objectives. And he did not lie: he was president of the country and became an indelible mark.

Tulio Hernandezpolitical scientist and university professor —exiled in Bogotá, Colombia—, spoke with La República about the 31 years since the erroneous coup, recounted his impressions after the meetings he had with Hugo Chavezanalyzed the years leading up to the so-called Bolivarian Revolution and offered a sincere testimony of the Venezuelan tragedy.

Tulio Hernández is a sociologist and writer. He was a university professor in Venezuela and Spain. He has been a consultant for Unesco, Unicef, and has given workshops on migration at the Gabo Foundation, Acnur, among others. Photo: Tulio Hernandez/Blog

—On February 4, 1992, led by Hugo Chávez, Army battalions intended to take the Miraflores Palace by force and remove Carlos Andrés Pérez (elected in 1988) from power. Many Venezuelans viewed this failed coup sympathetically, even justifying it. How do you remember this time?

—I am part of the first generation that grew up in democracy in Venezuela. My parents, my older brothers, all my grandparents lived through dictatorships, and I was convinced that this would never come back; and when I saw on television and heard the submachine guns, I began to cry. I had been raised with the belief that I would always live in a democracy and I said: Well, that’s it, the military are back.

I was a close friend of someone who later became President of the Republic and he told us an unforgettable phrase. I asked: Doctor Velásquez, what does this blow mean? And he, who was already 80 years old, told me: “Someone lifted the lid on hell, where four generations of Venezuelans, at the cost of sacrifices, murders, exiles and torture, had imprisoned. And he stared at us, and he said to us with pity: “How many decades will it take you to put those demons away again?”

So it was. I am a man who is turning 70 — I have endured this for 25 years — and I will probably die without seeing democracy again. I thought he was exaggerating, but he didn’t exaggerate. And that started on February 4, 1992.

—How would you describe Hugo Chávez?

—Hugo Chávez was an enormous leader, with a capacity for seduction and above all with a capacity for mimicry. For example, if he was in Moscow, he was a Leninist; if he was in La Paz, he was a Quechua indigenous woman; if he was at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, he was an art critic; if he was in Cusco, he played charango. He had a kind of pathological narcissism, but not crazy, but a well-managed narcissism, which he felt heir to Simón Bolívar. And, regarding that psychic force, he also remembers that he spoke with the dead, he was a spiritualist, he had the ability to communicate with the afterlife, he went from being a santero to being a Catholic; and he had this particular mix of adoration for Latin American revolutionary mythologies, Che, Fidel Castro, Manuel Marulanda and adoration for the military. So, he was a mixture that in a country and in a region so traumatized by the issue of the American empire and the Euro-Iberian colonization, well, he was an unbeatable leader, a seducer, but without any clear project.

I did an interview with the Venezuelan writer Alberto Barrera Tyszka, who wrote the first biography of Chávez while he was alive —which is called “Hugo Chávez without uniform”—, and he, at the end, told me: “Chávez was a compulsive liar and he did not I had no shame in being so.” And, probably, therein lay the charm of him, as Theodor Adorno says in an essay on fascist propaganda: Hitler was not adored by the masses despite his coarse rudeness and rudeness, they adored him precisely for that.

—Did you meet Hugo Chávez in person?

—I must say that I was relatively close in the first two months of government and, when I got to know him up close, I ran away scared because the nice, cheerful, loving man, when he was in private, was a man with a severe, cruel look, relentless, almost scary. He was capable of generating the greatest love and, in the afternoon, ordering the imprisonment and death of a judge who contradicted one of his orders.

—What was that Venezuela like at the end of the last century, without the influence of Hugo Chavez, without the Bolivarian Revolution?

—It is difficult to summarize, but it was a democratic Venezuela, which had lived, perhaps, the best 40 years of its history, which had reached levels of development, of a free and quality education system; that had overcome what in the 1930s was a rural, illiterate society, which had above all achieved a very impressive cultural development, but which, in the last two decades or in the last 15 years, had begun to regress and generate pockets of of poverty.

Society began to fracture between a group disenchanted with the democratic project and the return of the military leaders, embodied in Chávez. You have to remember that Democracy in Venezuela was an exception and, during our republican history, 160 years have been of military governments, including the three years —from 1945 to 1948— presided over by a civilian, but after a coup and a military junta.

So it was a society that entered a kind of great disappointment, desperately looking for a messiah, and found him, a leader, in the sense of Max Weber, charismatic, probably like few have been in Latin America. And suddenly the country went into some kind of collective hallucination and left, as they said in the 30s, after a man on horseback; And the Venezuela that we knew at that time was gradually disappearing, fracturing, filling with internal hatred and living the idea that it was going to be a revolution.

—From the melancholic side, what is your childhood, adolescent memory of the rich, oil-rich, prosperous Venezuela?

—My greatest memory is being the son of a very modest family in the interior and being able to study for free at the best university in the country. I paid more or less three dollars for each semester —the paper I used was more expensive—, having lived in a university that was full of the best Venezuelan painters, having witnessed the most important theater festivals, having read the best writers for almost a dollar because the State publishing house published what was just coming out in Spain, having witnessed how we received immigrants fleeing the dictatorships of the Southern Cone, having seen the emergence of extraordinary public health, and most importantly having seen how democracy ended, not only liberating and reconciling, but turning those who had gone to the guerrillas in the 1960s into ministers and heads of institutions. It was a country where dissidence was respected, the minority was respected so much that I, who was a man from the left of a party called the Socialism Movement, wrote every Sunday against the Government and, nevertheless, worked in a cultural institution of the State.

Are you still on the left?

“Well, yes and no. If the left is called being on the side of the interests of the poorest and most disadvantaged sectors, being open to changes and environmental, ethnic and gender identities, yes. But from the left in the Latin American sense, from the Marxist heirs of the Castroite totalitarian imaginary, from Nicaragua or from Maduro and not Chávez, they seem repulsive to me.

More today, after having lived in exile, having seen my friends dead, tortured in prisons, seeing 350 political prisoners at this moment, seeing how my students have been raped in prisons for going out to demonstrate, it seems more It is important to be on the right or on the left to have the defense of human rights and democratic freedoms as the only flag.

—So, quoting Vargas Llosa in “Conversation in the Cathedral”, at what point did Venezuela get screwed?

—It has always been screwed, that is, Venezuela was born worshiping a single man, Simón Bolívar, who was basically a military man, very brave, very liberating, but who created a feeling from which the country could never free itself: that a single man made homeland. That was repeated by the military, the dictators, Guzmán Blanco, Castro, Gómez, Pérez Jiménez and democracy did not know how to erase that cult. So, what I call the four horsemen of the Venezuelan Apocalypse: militarism, statism —a State that was superior to society—, rent-seeking, and a culture of contempt for the civil world.

Venezuela achieved a great democratic development in a very short time, thanks (in part) to the oil income, but that was not converted into consolidating a democratic culture, so the wealth ended up intoxicating it, it was not a source for a harmonious development when it had the resources.

(In Latin America) today, more than 20 years after the new century, we are facing the worst setback to authoritarian models or deep governance crises, such as the activity in Peru.

Source-larepublica.pe