‘Two Spies in Caracas’ conjures international intrigue in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela

Manuel Roig-Franzia / Washington Post

One surreal night in 2010, a team of forensic specialists under orders from Venezuela’s mercurial president, Hugo Chávez, lifted a coffin lid on live television.

Inside lay the remains of Simón Bolívar, the famed military leader and political icon who had freed vast stretches of South America from Spanish rule in the early 1800s. Chávez, who idolized the man known as El Libertador — The Liberator — had become fixated on proving a conspiracy theory that Bolívar had not died of tuberculosis, as had been widely accepted by historians, but rather had been poisoned by a confederacy of enemies that included Colombian aristocrats, the king of Spain and the president of the United States, Andrew Jackson.

The spectacle spooled out like something straight out of theatrical drama or, perhaps more appropriately, a cheesy movie: Despotic ruler sinks deeper into madness as his nation falls apart around him. Exhumes body of dead hero. Acts almost as if he’s the reincarnation of the great one. End scene.

With that kind of rich material, and so much more — the obligatory failed coup, the imprisonment, the comeback, the duped populace, the Marxism, the beret for chrissakes — Chávez screams out for a fictionalized rendering. Moisés Naím, who was Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry a decade before Chávez came to power and later served as executive director of the World Bank and as editor of Foreign Policy magazine, seems like the perfect candidate for the job.

Naím, also the best-selling author of “The End of Power” and a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, draws on his deep knowledge of Venezuela and years of observing Chávez in his debut novel, “Two Spies in Caracas.” The book is built on parallel story lines: Chávez’s rise to power and polarizing reign set alongside the adventures of two invented spies stationed in Caracas. Iván Rincón is an agent in G2, Cuba’s intelligence directorate, posing as a Dominican fashion entrepreneur. Cristina Garza is a CIA operative and formerly undocumented Mexican immigrant who earned legal status by joining the U.S. military and is now pretending to be a Mexican yoga studio and spa owner in the Venezuelan capital.

Rincón and Garza are taken by surprise when Chávez leads a failed coup attempt in 1992. Garza, who bears shrapnel scars on her leg and emotional wounds, from her deployment in the U.S. Marine invasion of Panama, craves a more exciting assignment from her CIA bosses than Venezuela.

“The consensus among our experts is that nothing’s ever going to happen there,” she tells her superior days before Chávez leads a rebel force in an attack on the capital.

Rincón and Garza are dispatched to Caracas to find out what the heck is going on, and to try to manipulate events on the ground to the advantage of their respective nations. They’re also tasked with identifying and eliminating each other.

In the years to come, the Cubans back in Havana and Rincón, in his guise as the Dominican Mauricio Bosco, indoctrinate Chávez in Cuban economic and political theory and support him by rigging vote-tallying computer systems. Garza, in her role as spa owner Eva López, gathers intel from her well-connected clients and stokes popular discontentment with the flamboyantly anti-American Chávez.

One of the appeals of historical fiction is that it can allow an author more latitude to explore a real-life figure’s motivations and actions, filling in the blanks that might be left in journalistic accounts and memoirs. But the Chávez readers meet here is essentially the one we know from the headlines. He pontificates about his love of the people while enacting disastrous policies that ruin the economy, allow corruption to flourish and crime to run rampant. He uses the platform of a kitschy radio and television program, “Aló Presidente” — “Hello Mr. President” — to spread propaganda and endear himself to the masses.

Readers are told “he had learned how to transform laughter into power,” an observation that anyone with a newspaper subscription and a passing interest in Latin America already knew.

At its best, “Two Spies” prompts us to contemplate the role of foreign powers in the mess that is modern Venezuela. Was Chávez being played by the Cubans or was he playing them? Might the United States have been able to anticipate his ascension if it had been paying more attention?

But to get there, a reader has to wade through a miasma of awkward phrasing in this clunky English translation by Daniel Hahn. The day “dawned full of rants of love.” Chávez “unleashed his leadership.” The crook’s brain was “prodigious.”

An episode in which Chávez is surrounded by adoring fans pleading for help is described this way: “They made every petition they could think of.”

Huh?

The most skilled writers of thrillers have a common talent: They write thrilling scenes. They keep our attention by describing places and action in detail, making us see, smell and feel the danger and emotion. But this sluggish thriller published by Amazon Crossing gives us flat summaries instead: “The mood turned aggressive.” The conversation was “awkward at first but gradually gained in intensity.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The pace picks up a bit as the book veers to a contrived ending that shifts the focus away from the lackluster portrayal of Chávez. Without giving away too much, there will be chases and betrayals.

“Two Spies” might have had a better chance of succeeding if it had been more about the spies we’d never met and less about the political leader we already knew.

Manuel Roig-Franzia, a feature writer in The Washington Post’s Style section, was bureau chief in Miami for The Post’s National staff and in Mexico City for the Post’s Foreign staff.