The small, hot town of Barinas stands beneath the final range of the Andes, the gateway to the great plains of the Orinoco basin. I came here on the bus from Caracas, an eight-hour journey on a good road along the foot of the hills, through Maracay and Carabobo and Acarígua. Here begins the vast expanse of the llanos, the low-lying and marshy cattle lands of the centre-south of the country where innumerable rivers make their way down from the Andes to the Orinoco. The llanos stretch down to the Colombian frontier and beyond, and eventually reach the tributaries of the Amazon in Brazil.
Barinas spreads out in extensive fashion from its crowded bus station, mostly with single-storey buildings, and I put up at a small hotel in the Plaza Zamora, beside the San Domingo river. The name of the square recalls Ezequiel Zamora, the revolutionary leader of the federal forces in the 1850s, who won a great victory in 1859 not far from here, at the battle of Santa Inés. Zamora has long been one of the heroes from whom President Chávez draws his inspiration. The llanos were the scene of many of the other fratricidal battles of the nineteenth century, and in these latitudes Simón Bolívar gathered the plainsmen together for his spirited and successful attack on the Spanish forces in Colombia in 1819.
This is provincial Latin America at its most appealing, only eight hours from the capital city by bus, but light years away by most other measurements. ‘There’s little to do or see here,’ says the guidebook, and that’s how it should be. I soon discover an open-air restaurant serving barbecued chicken and yucca, and the regional beer from Maracaibo. The walls are covered with utopian murals in lurid colours, with exotic birds flying out of the forest and over a great expanse of water, and the evocative songs of the llaneros pour out from an ancient juke-box.
Yet modernity is not altogether absent. Behind the immense statue of Bolívar in the central square stands a gigantic communications mast, tucked in behind the state governor’s relatively humble palace. The statue was designed to command all it surveys from a great height, but was wholly dwarfed by this essential element of the contemporary world. Even my hotel, appropriately called the Hotel Internacional, receives several dozen television programmes plucked from the air, only four of them being generated in Venezuela. The disparity between the respect accorded to the historical figure of Bolívar, and the reality of a twenty-first-century world with technological trappings that were unimaginable two centuries ago, is one of the reasons why some educated Venezuelans still have doubts about the course on which President Chávez has embarked. Invoking the thoughts and ambitions of Bolívar today can seem rather, well, quaint.
Barinas is the home state of the president; his father has been the governor here since November 1998, a supporter of his son’s political movement. Chávez the president was actually born a few miles away, in the village of Sabaneta, but he came to school in Barinas and was stationed here for some years in the army. It seemed an appropriate place to start.
Chávez was born on July 28, 1954. His parents, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez and Elena Frias, were both schoolteachers, but they took an active part in political life. His father had long been involved in the educational politics of the state, being enrolled at one stage in the social-Christian party, Copei. Politics seems to run in the blood, for the president’s elder brother, Adán Chávez, a professor at the university of Mérida, was a member of the Constitutional Assembly in 1999. The president’s second wife, Marisabel Rodríguez, was also a member of this Assembly.
Chávez was first married to Nancy Colmenares, a girl from Barinas, and the couple had a boy, Huguito, and two girls, Rosa Virginia and María Gabriela, who were university students during his first years as President. With Marisabel, who already had a son, Raúl, he has a daughter: Rosa-Inés. One significant characteristic of Latin American political life is the family, almost tribal, relationships that often exist at the top. Adán Chávez was to become minister in charge of agrarian reform and then ambassador to Havana.
Recent history still lies close to the surface in this region, and the Chávez family is itself the heir to some of the rebellious traditions of the nineteenth century. The great-grandfather of Chávez’s father was the guerrilla chief Colonel Pedro Pérez Pérez. Ezequiel Zamora summoned this Colonel Pérez to join his Sovereign Army of the People in the 1840s and to fight with them against the landed oligarchy. The son of Colonel Pérez, in turn, was another legendary figure, General Pedro Pérez Delgado, known as Maisanta, who rebelled in 1914 against the dictatorship of General Juan Vicente Gómez. At the turn of the twentieth century, Maisanta had hitched his star to the fortunes of General Cipriano Castro and had settled in the llanos as Castro’s man in Sabaneta. He married a local woman, Claudina Infante, and with her, he had two daughters. One of them, Rosa, was the grandmother of Hugo Chávez.
Maisanta subsequently organised a guerrilla movement against Gómez in the llanos, but he was captured and imprisoned. His lands were confiscated and he died in prison, but his son continued the struggle. Chávez was told stories by his grandmother of how soldiers had arrived at their farm with machetes, to slaughter the peasants and to burn down all the barns and buildings. He was also told, such were the enduring political hatreds of the region, that Maisanta was an assassin, best forgotten. Only later, when an adult, did Chávez understand that his great-grandfather would be better described as a freedom fighter.
This local and personal history had a considerable impact on the youthful Hugo, and he was to ponder it again in later years when stationed as a young officer in Barinas and at other points in the llanos. Maisanta and Ezequiel Zamora, as archetypal soldier-revolutionaries, have remained, alongside Bolívar, as his principal heroes to this day.