Hugo! by Bart Jones

Author:Bart Jones [Jones, Bart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58642-169-4
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2007-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

Rather than petering out, the mudslinging got worse. Urdaneta’s accusations against Miquilena included charges that he was a shareholder in a printing company that won a noncompetitive contract from the National Electoral Council to print one million copies of Venezuela’s new constitution. He also claimed Miquilena helped a friend win insurance contracts with eleven different state agencies, and that Miquilena pressured him to get the DISIP to sign one, too.

Miquilena fired back. He claimed Urdaneta was building an eight-bedroom, four-level chalet in an exclusive district of Caracas with slush funds taken from the DISIP before he was fired. Eventually, the attorney general opened investigations against both men. In the end, neither was convicted.

As the mudslinging intensified, Chávez’s three former military comrades decided the president was not going to “rectify” and that they would break definitively with him — at least for now, since politics in Venezuela was a funny game of constantly revolving enemies and allies. On March 10 they held another press conference in the city of Maracay. They were joined by other rebels from the 1992 coup attempts, including retired General Francisco Visconti Osorio and Captain Gerardo Márquez. William Izarra, the air force pilot who studied at Harvard and founded the rebel cell ARMA, also came.

The former soldiers released a “Declaration of Maracay” criticizing Chávez’s government. They pledged to fight corruption, bureaucracy, and demagoguery, and curb attempts to politicize the military. They vowed to protect private property and decentralize power. They said their “sea of happiness” would be built here in Venezuela, and not be modeled after Castro’s Cuba.

Then Arias dropped another bombshell: He would run for president against Chávez. The new constitution had reset the clock on all public offices, requiring elected officials to revalídate their term in office in a nationwide “mega election” scheduled for late May. In all, sixty-two hundred public posts from president to local mayor were to be decided. Arias issued a blistering attack on the man who was once his soul brother, was now his opponent, and would later become his ally again. He accused him of demagoguery, of getting in bed with the corrupt elites, of encouraging poor people to rob instead of work. He warned that Venezuela could become another Cuba.

We do not believe we rebelled or suffered deaths and injuries so that a person could disguise himself in Fidel Castro’s shirt, and we want to say it clearly. We respect Fidel, but on his island. We can negotiate with Fidel and with the Cubans, respecting their revolution, but our revolution we will construct here, without advice from abroad … No one can give us an example from that sea of happiness … We don’t believe in authoritarianism. We don’t believe that you can repeat in Venezuela that tendency to concentrate power and remain in power. No revolution can be tied to a single person. That has been the dilemma, friends, what to do about this. The president doesn’t listen.

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