When you walk through Caracas you can't shake the feeling of being watched.
Hugo Chávez's look, drawn in a black line that anyone instantly recognizes, is stamped on buildings throughout the city.
The commander looks omnipresent, vigilant.
Ten years after his death from cancer at 59, the messianic leader who connected with millions of poor Venezuelans has become an icon.
From the grave he remains the most valued leader in Venezuela.
No living politician, neither Chavista nor opponent, still overshadows his figure.
Days before assuming his inauguration in February 1999, the president-elect and Gabriel García Márquez shared a plane flight.
Upon going down, the Colombian Nobel Prize winner would write: “I was shaken by the inspiration that I had traveled and conversed at ease with two opposite men.
One to whom inveterate luck offered him the chance to save the country from him.
And the other, an illusionist, who could go down in history as just another despot”.
Mural with the image of former President Hugo Chávez in the streets of Caracas. Ariana Cubillos (ap)
Chávez could have been both, but above all he was a leader loved by his people.
On March 5, 2013, when a tearful Nicolás Maduro announced his death, thousands of people around the world thought that Chavismo would not survive without him.
It was difficult to see in that image of devastated ministers, considered subordinates, enough strength to maintain themselves over time and defeat an always disoriented opposition over and over again.
Maduro, a plumber of the commander's revolution and his right-hand man to solve problems, succeeded him because Chávez wanted it that way.
And there it is a decade later.
The dead commander has a 56% positive assessment compared to 22 for his successor, according to Datanálisis.
The director of that polling company, Luis Vicente León, maintains that the president died at the peak of his popularity and his image was fully frozen, like that of Marilyn Monroe or James Dean.
First the country was known for oil, then for the Miss Universe pageant, and now it is for Hugo Chávez.
When he came to power, he was like a bartender who mixed the perfect cocktail.
The two ingredients of it were the money left by the largest oil and gas reserves in the world and the poor who lived in favelas in what was then known as the Miami of Latin America.
There was too much of both and that was the key to his success.
Venezuela had lived pending technical and infrastructure modernization more than social distribution or poverty.
Chavez turned it around.
Rafael Correa, former president of Ecuador and a contemporary of the commander, recalls from his perspective that "with Chávez, equity in Venezuela improved a lot, oil finally went to Venezuelans and money stopped going to the condominiums of the oligarchy
in Florida".
Chávez inaugurated a new model of political communication, long before the social networks were born.
Since his program, Hello, President, every Sunday he spoke for hours with the people.
He even made them believe that they had in their hands the appointments of the Government, that he took to the competition once he decided them so that his people would give him their endorsement during his program.
They always gave it to him.
Actually no one but him chose anything, but the feeling was the opposite.
The neglected of an imperfect democracy felt with the former president the creators of another imperfect democracy, but his after all.
The reasons why a system that arrived to liberate the poor is still alive a decade later despite scandalous poverty levels, a massive exodus of nationals fleeing the perpetual crisis, and an anti-democratic drift that Chávez began and has continued deepened his successor are matter of couch of psychologist.
But there are some keys that help to understand why the myth continues to overcome reality.
A stencil of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in Caracas, (Venezuela). Ariana Cubillos (AP)
Chavismo, explains the political scientist and writer Colette Capriles, is a complex movement, a coalition with its own interests that entered into a narrative of historical change made up of people who came from the old left or from more moderate lefts, but also from military sectors. and social discontent with the built democracy.
"Chavismo was for them a moment of historical change, Chávez made it possible, but he was older than him," she says.
The commander empowered a sector of the population, and with that he could not end the cancer of his leader.
He had his lowest moments, but he managed to redirect them.
When he dies, he has just won an election, his sick self rhetoric attracts those who had abandoned him for a sometimes erratic, caudillo, polarizing and demonizing policy of the business class.
Luis Vicente León maintains that the "brutal deterioration" into which the country entered after his death is not only the fault of Nicolás Maduro.
"It is the fault of Chávez's model and his revolution, the fundamental base -with which Maduro governed- came from before: expropriations, populism, public spending."
His successor had a much more difficult time financially.
The bonanza of the petrodollars quickly vanished, as did the companies that did not find possibilities to grow under the mace of Chavismo.
The internal and external polarization increased at the rate that the sanctions promoted from the United States did due to the authoritarian drift of the Government.
"Chávez was able to hide the weaknesses of the revolution better than Maduro," adds the director of Datanálisis.
The elections after the death of the commander, at the end of 2013, already showed that Maduro was not Chávez.
He did not have his grace, nor his charisma, but he sought to imitate him.
In a few months he lost much of his political capital and the opposition leader at the time, Henrique Capriles, followed on his heels at the polls.
He won by the minimum.
Since then, it was enough for Maduro to do badly politically and to increase the repression against dissenting voices.
The opposition read in those first results that victory was close, but the eternal divisions of the democratic forces and their weak leadership collided again and again with the machinery that Chávez had greased before he died.
Maduro managed to barely survive the first years of his term, with electoral setbacks and the ever-tightening yoke of sanctions.
The opposition never finished seizing the moment.
The strategy of the interim government of Juan Guaidó, which was born in 2019 with international endorsement and under promises of rapid change, stagnated in a kind of valley in which nothing ever happened.
In that time Maduro found his place.
He finally moved away from Chávez's shadow to become the protagonist.
In 2021 he took an economic turn by liberalizing prices, dollarizing the economy and giving a sense of economic openness.
Beyond the meager results, he gained some air.
"One of Chávez's wisest decisions was to have left Maduro, because many are unaware that one of his advantages is that he is a born negotiator," says former Colombian president Ernesto Samper.
The population that had filled the streets in 2017 and 2019 against the regime was already disenchanted with politics, many had left the country and those who stayed were focused on surviving.
The end of Chavismo that Guaidó and the opposition proclaimed, and that the United States would lead, gave way to a new strategy of the North American giant, which subtly left only the opposition leader, like the rest of the powers that had shaken his hand. .
The war in Ukraine and the energy crisis were the final push for the US to begin easing sanctions on the oil country, in the heat of Maduro's supposed opening, which for every step forward he announces, takes two back.
The opposition was left out of the game again and ended up disrupting the interim government, which was terminated in December 2022. Now, with presidential elections scheduled for 2024, the democratic forces are at the point where they have spent the longest time in this decade: trying to articulate a coalition, looking for a candidate and ironing out deepening differences.
What recent years have shown in Venezuela is that Chavismo is bigger than Maduro.
There are his detractors who continue to be Chavistas.
The fact that the president has a low approval rating does not mean that Chavismo is dead.
Several people consulted for this report point to a peronization of the figure of Chávez.
Former Colombian Foreign Minister María Ángela Holguín, who was at the former president's funeral and who was ambassador in Caracas, explains it this way: "It's like Peronism, they arrive and stay as images for the people, as idols or saviors."
In his last speech, Commander Hugo Chávez referred to himself in the third person: “Chávez is not just this human being, Chávez is a great collective.
Chávez is the heart of the people and the people are in the heart of Chávez”.
87 days later, he died.
He left clinging to a rosary, at that moment the icon was born.
A painting of President Hugo Chávez decorates the room of the Teresa Carreño Theater in Caracas (Venezuela). Matias Delacroix (AP)
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