Charming Chavez gives ‘media terrorists’ a closer look
Note to Readers: Buffalo News Editor Margaret Sullivan spent last week in Venezuela as part of a fact-finding delegation from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Margaret Sullivan / Letter from Venezuela
Updated: 05/18/08 6:33 AM
CARACAS, Venezuela — Some call him a tyrannical dictator, the “Venezuelan strongman” who is destroying the honorable history of democracy here.
But Hugo Chavez, who vehemently denies all of that, knows how to call names right back at his accusers.
The U. S. editorialists who say such things?
They are “media terrorists,” part of a media dictatorship.
President Bush?
Chavez has branded him a killer and a madman, and, famously, in a speech last fall at the United Nations, likened him to the devil.
Americans with their gas-guzzling habits?
“They are polluting the world!”
But when Chavez walks out onto the stage at his presidential palace here to face the international media Thursday, he has a friendly look about him.
His gait is ambling and he nods amiably to the crowd as cameras click furiously and reporters come to their feet.
Built square and close to the ground, wearing a green military- style jacket over a red T-shirt, he is two hours late starting the news conference. On this day, new reports have affirmed earlier charges that the Chavez government helped terrorist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.
So the democratic world is even more suspicious than usual of Chavez today. The United States — whose consumers buy half of all Venezuelan exports, and which gets 15 percent of all its crude oil from Venezuela — could decide that economic sanctions are in order for a state that supports terrorism. (But two can play that game: Venezuela, which has the world’s richest oil reserves, could decide to leave America’s SUV culture high and dry.)
Chavez’s answer to the criticism is a time-tested one: Attack the messenger.
In this case, that means going after the media terrorists and Interpol, the well-respected international police force that has just concluded its investigation into laptops captured in March when the Colombian army took over a FARC base in Ecuador, slaying guerrilla boss Raul Reyes.
“This is a show!” he charges with a sneer. “A show organized by clowns!”
The charges are ridiculous and the investigation a sham, he claims.
“They do not deserve a single serious comment,” he says, yet continues his rant for an hour.
He even puts on a show himself, coming down from the stage and into the crowd to demonstrate by elaborate pantomime how a corrupt policeman can plant evidence and calling a top Interpol official, variously, a “gringo cop,” “a bandit,” and “a thug.”
Later, in an informal (and possibly impromptu) 90-minute private session with visiting editors from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Chavez switches out of attack mode and into his charm offensive.
With hands folded over his chest as if in prayer, he asks the editors to deliver a message to their readers:
“Tell them to pardon me. I beg for forgiveness if I have hurt any feelings back in the States.”
Any of his harsh words, he says, “do not refer to the citizenry. I refer to the elite, the elite governing the United States.”
He finds something funny or personal to say to each editor and then, like the Arabian queen who kept herself alive through her thousand and one stories, he turns himself into a Scheherazade in battle fatigues as he sips coffee and spins one tale after another.
He speaks of his political career and his friendships with world leaders — how he once, on a challenge, fielded a Venezuelan baseball team against Fidel Castro, with the Cuban leader bringing in ringers disguised as the halt and the lame.
To hear Chavez tell it, Castro’s ringer-pitcher turned out to be none other than Jose Contreras, the Cuban good enough to later play for the New York Yankees.
Asked whom he favors in the American presidential race, especially given his own blistering criticism of America’s invasion of Iraq and the candidates’ wide-flung views on that subject, he plays it coy.
“It would be a lie if I said I had no preferences,” he says with a shrug. “But . . . I don’t want to say anything that could hurt anybody.”
This may sound like a nod for Barack Obama, but more cynical listeners would call that conclusion naive.
(“Obviously, he really wants McCain — the closest thing to Bush, so he has someone to hate,” one veteran Latin American correspondent says later.)
In answer to another editor’s question, he spends a riveting 20 minutes telling the story of his near death in the 2002 military coup attempt against his government.
(Chavez was elected in 1998, and re-elected in 2002 and 2006, always by wide margins.)
He can wax poetic, keeping an audience spellbound. Among his lavish natural assets as a politician, the 53-year-old Chavez owns the storyteller’s gift.
“A single star was in the horizon,” he recalls, as he prepared to face his death, “and I thought of Che Guevara.”
In the distance, “I saw the platoon that was coming to kill me.”
But, amidst the chaos and confusion of the moment, a soldier with the coup quietly asked him if he still held his office.
“Did you resign?”
“No, I’m still the president,” he replied. And that, somehow, made all the difference.
“In that bit of a second, the leader of this group says, in a strong voice, ‘If you kill this man, we will all die tonight.’ ”
The tide had turned, Chavez says, by the grace of God. He had survived what seemed like certain death.
“It was like a miracle,” he says, with wonder in his voice, reaching into his pocket for the small crucifix he held that night. “It was a miracle.”
And at this, he slaps his knees and stands up. Consorting with American editors is all well and good, but he must be off now — to the summit meeting in Lima. It’s after 9 p. m. and his trip will take several hours.
First thing the next morning, Venezuelan television already is showing not only Thursday afternoon’s news conference but his latest hard-charging remarks to the media in Lima.
For Hugo Chavez, there is always more, much more, to say.
Note to Readers: Buffalo News Editor Margaret Sullivan spent last week in Venezuela as part of a fact-finding delegation from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Margaret Sullivan / Letter from Venezuela
Updated: 05/18/08 6:33 AM
CARACAS, Venezuela — Some call him a tyrannical dictator, the “Venezuelan strongman” who is destroying the honorable history of democracy here.
But Hugo Chavez, who vehemently denies all of that, knows how to call names right back at his accusers.
The U. S. editorialists who say such things?
They are “media terrorists,” part of a media dictatorship.
President Bush?
Chavez has branded him a killer and a madman, and, famously, in a speech last fall at the United Nations, likened him to the devil.
Americans with their gas-guzzling habits?
“They are polluting the world!”
But when Chavez walks out onto the stage at his presidential palace here to face the international media Thursday, he has a friendly look about him.
His gait is ambling and he nods amiably to the crowd as cameras click furiously and reporters come to their feet.
Built square and close to the ground, wearing a green military- style jacket over a red T-shirt, he is two hours late starting the news conference. On this day, new reports have affirmed earlier charges that the Chavez government helped terrorist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.
So the democratic world is even more suspicious than usual of Chavez today. The United States — whose consumers buy half of all Venezuelan exports, and which gets 15 percent of all its crude oil from Venezuela — could decide that economic sanctions are in order for a state that supports terrorism. (But two can play that game: Venezuela, which has the world’s richest oil reserves, could decide to leave America’s SUV culture high and dry.)
Chavez’s answer to the criticism is a time-tested one: Attack the messenger.
In this case, that means going after the media terrorists and Interpol, the well-respected international police force that has just concluded its investigation into laptops captured in March when the Colombian army took over a FARC base in Ecuador, slaying guerrilla boss Raul Reyes.
“This is a show!” he charges with a sneer. “A show organized by clowns!”
The charges are ridiculous and the investigation a sham, he claims.
“They do not deserve a single serious comment,” he says, yet continues his rant for an hour.
He even puts on a show himself, coming down from the stage and into the crowd to demonstrate by elaborate pantomime how a corrupt policeman can plant evidence and calling a top Interpol official, variously, a “gringo cop,” “a bandit,” and “a thug.”
Later, in an informal (and possibly impromptu) 90-minute private session with visiting editors from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Chavez switches out of attack mode and into his charm offensive.
With hands folded over his chest as if in prayer, he asks the editors to deliver a message to their readers:
“Tell them to pardon me. I beg for forgiveness if I have hurt any feelings back in the States.”
Any of his harsh words, he says, “do not refer to the citizenry. I refer to the elite, the elite governing the United States.”
He finds something funny or personal to say to each editor and then, like the Arabian queen who kept herself alive through her thousand and one stories, he turns himself into a Scheherazade in battle fatigues as he sips coffee and spins one tale after another.
He speaks of his political career and his friendships with world leaders — how he once, on a challenge, fielded a Venezuelan baseball team against Fidel Castro, with the Cuban leader bringing in ringers disguised as the halt and the lame.
To hear Chavez tell it, Castro’s ringer-pitcher turned out to be none other than Jose Contreras, the Cuban good enough to later play for the New York Yankees.
Asked whom he favors in the American presidential race, especially given his own blistering criticism of America’s invasion of Iraq and the candidates’ wide-flung views on that subject, he plays it coy.
“It would be a lie if I said I had no preferences,” he says with a shrug. “But . . . I don’t want to say anything that could hurt anybody.”
This may sound like a nod for Barack Obama, but more cynical listeners would call that conclusion naive.
(“Obviously, he really wants McCain — the closest thing to Bush, so he has someone to hate,” one veteran Latin American correspondent says later.)
In answer to another editor’s question, he spends a riveting 20 minutes telling the story of his near death in the 2002 military coup attempt against his government.
(Chavez was elected in 1998, and re-elected in 2002 and 2006, always by wide margins.)
He can wax poetic, keeping an audience spellbound. Among his lavish natural assets as a politician, the 53-year-old Chavez owns the storyteller’s gift.
“A single star was in the horizon,” he recalls, as he prepared to face his death, “and I thought of Che Guevara.”
In the distance, “I saw the platoon that was coming to kill me.”
But, amidst the chaos and confusion of the moment, a soldier with the coup quietly asked him if he still held his office.
“Did you resign?”
“No, I’m still the president,” he replied. And that, somehow, made all the difference.
“In that bit of a second, the leader of this group says, in a strong voice, ‘If you kill this man, we will all die tonight.’ ”
The tide had turned, Chavez says, by the grace of God. He had survived what seemed like certain death.
“It was like a miracle,” he says, with wonder in his voice, reaching into his pocket for the small crucifix he held that night. “It was a miracle.”
And at this, he slaps his knees and stands up. Consorting with American editors is all well and good, but he must be off now — to the summit meeting in Lima. It’s after 9 p. m. and his trip will take several hours.
First thing the next morning, Venezuelan television already is showing not only Thursday afternoon’s news conference but his latest hard-charging remarks to the media in Lima.
For Hugo Chavez, there is always more, much more, to say.