Comandante Quotes

“The perpetually indignant elites inhabited a self-contained echo chamber of boardrooms, golf clubs, dinner parties and private media. They thought they were Venezuela. They could not see how their hysterics repelled and radicalised less-privileged compatriots. Thus they kept lunging and, in election after election, would keep losing.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“Chávez’s blinkeredness extended to foreign affairs. Once he was a hero to Arabs for denouncing Israel and the United States, his name chanted by ecstatic crowds across the Middle East. But when those same Arabs rose up in 2011, the comandante did not hail popular revolts against oppression and stagnation or even claim to have inspired them. Instead he accused the rebels of being Western-backed terrorists and defended despotic cronies like Gadhafi and Assad.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“The revolution inherited grave social problems and made them worse. In 1998, the year before Chávez took office, there were forty-five hundred murders, a grim per capita rate on par with much of Latin America. A decade later it had tripled to more than seventeen thousand per year, making Venezuela more dangerous than Iraq, and Caracas one of the deadliest cities on earth. Eight times more murderous, it was calculated, than Bogotá, Colombia’s capital. With less than 1 percent of cases ever solved, it was, all things considered, a good place to commit murder. Kidnappings, previously a rarity, became an industry with an estimated seven thousand abductions per year. To allay their terror, the rich and the middle class invested in bodyguards and armored cars, or emigrated, but most of the killing and dying was done by gangs—by some estimates, there were more than eighteen thousand—in slums fighting for drugs, turf, women, and prestige.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“José Daniel, who physically resembles Richard, was by common consent exceptionally bright and, depending on how you look at it, incredibly lucky or unlucky. Shot fourteen times during an ambush, he survived and hobbled out of the hospital, one-eyed, and hunted down his assailants. “One at a time,” said Richard, awed. Caught and jailed, in prison he was stabbed thirteen times and again survived, fueling rumors he made a pact with the devil for immortality. Belief in Santeria, a voodoo-tinged African-Caribbean import, was widespread, especially among gangsters who prayed to santos malandros, holy thugs, for success and survival. Who else, after all, could they turn to? Many of El Cementerio’s mothers dealt drugs, as did the head of the neighborhood association, who had a sideline renting pistols. The state was largely absent save for police, and they were brutal and corrupt, selling bullets, extorting store owners, moonlighting as kidnappers, auctioning prisoners for execution. Police killed between five hundred and a thousand people per year, mostly young men in slums, and were very seldom charged. Officers accidentally shot dead the Nuñez boys’ grandmother while chasing a suspect through their home. Which returns”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“Rosenhead did not speak Spanish and worked through bilingual officials from the Planning Ministry. Over the years he wrote dozens of reports on multiple topics—energy, industry, transport, finance, housing. Once, he said, he was given two days to write six reports on six different subjects. He dutifully churned them all out and submitted them. And then . . . nothing. He asked his minders about the fate of the reports. They shrugged. He asked about the president’s plan to integrate decision making across state agencies. Blank looks. He asked about his transport recommendations. Silence. He asked for responses to his studies on infrastructure and finance. There weren’t any. When Rosenhead challenged Giordani over the information vacuum, his friend smiled enigmatically and said such was a consultant’s fate. “No feedback, none at all,” said Rosenhead. “Quite extraordinary. This is the only place where this happens.” The professor said he had heard rumors the country’s infrastructure was in trouble. “I get the impression Chávez has applied the concepts of operational research in ways I would not.” He paused and sipped his rum. “Maybe if it was a more organized country, operational research would work here.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“Some never got started. With much fanfare Chávez announced Venezuela would build thermonuclear plants with Russian help. “The world needs to know this, and nothing is going to stop us. We’re free, we’re sovereign, we’re independent,” he said in 2010. For strictly peaceful energy generation, he added, and underlined the point by inviting survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Venezuela. Foreign media took it seriously, producing froth in Washington. Chávez with nukes! In reality, Venezuela’s scientific establishment was hollowed, the once prestigious Institute for Scientific Research a husk. Physicists were emigrating, and the country’s only reactor, a small research facility, had closed from neglect. After a tsunami wrecked Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in March 2011, Chávez closed the curtain on his atomic theater, solemnly halting development for safety reasons and urging other countries to follow his lead in protecting humanity. “It is something extremely risky and dangerous for the whole world.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“Guayana’s decay was replicated across the economy. Venezuela had too much money to collapse, but it peeled, chipped, and flaked into moneyed dysfunction. It was the fate of a system led by a masterful politician who happened to be a disastrous manager.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“He took his spiel about capitalism’s destructiveness, a favorite leitmotif, to a climate summit in Copenhagen. “What we are experiencing on this planet is an imperial dictatorship, and from here we continue denouncing it. Down with imperial dictatorship!” The dignitaries applauded and cheered. “The rich are destroying the planet. Do they think they can go to another when they destroy this one? Do they have plans to go to another planet? So far there is none on the horizon of the galaxy.” No matter that Venezuela lived on selling oil to the Yankees, or that Chávez’s subsidies made its gasoline the world’s cheapest, he got a standing ovation.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“Chávez was radicalized by the private sector’s repeated betrayals . . . He came to understand socialism as political socialism. He started talking about the new man and creating a new society.” He shook his head. “It was a historic opportunity that was wasted. This is all Chávez’s fault. He doesn’t understand economics.” One never heard a senior Chavista so bluntly criticize the comandante. Sansó was just getting warmed up. “It’s a pity no one took twenty minutes to explain macroeconomics to him with a pen and paper. Chávez doesn’t know how to manage. As a manager he’s a disaster. I’m fed up with Chávez . . . I’m not a Chávez fan.” Coming from a member of the revolution’s economic elite, this was heresy.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“On rare occasions the correct response was not obvious, sowing panic. In a speech to mark World Water Day in 2011, the comandante said capitalism may have killed life on Mars. “I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet.” Some in the audience tittered, assuming it was a joke, then froze when they saw neighbors turned to stone. To these audience veterans it was unclear if it was a joke, so they adopted poker faces, pending clarification. It never came; the comandante moved on to other topics.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“The previous day’s protest march had become a coup d’état. Years later a university professor who had marched against Chávez confessed the moment’s sweet guilt. “In our souls we knew it was wrong. We were taking a shortcut, playing rough. But you must understand. We hated Chávez so much we couldn’t help it; we couldn’t stand it anymore. It was like a scab you’re not supposed to scratch. We scratched and scratched until it bled. We won, or thought we had won. But then we made a terrible mistake. We picked that fucking dwarf.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

“The quests abandoned, Venezuela slumbered for two centuries, a coffee- and cacao-exporting backwater of Spain’s American empire. By the late eighteenth century, with revolution shaking France and North America, Venezuela grew restive. Criollo elites, the landowning descendants of Spanish settlers, wanted to be rid of Madrid’s regulations and taxes; mulatto artisans and merchants yearned for better land and jobs; at the bottom of the pyramid black slaves demanded freedom, and Indians wished just to be left alone. Bolívar’s wars ousted the Spanish and delivered independence, but his dream of a South America united into a single, enlightened country evaporated. Republics seceded, and caudillos, regional strongmen, carved personal fiefdoms that perpetuated colonial inequalities. Bolívar died in 1830, broken and disillusioned. “America is ungovernable. Those who serve the revolution plow the sea.”
― Rory Carroll, Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela