In my journalistic activity I have done countless interviews, but this is the first with a person with whom I have had close ties of friendship for I don’t know how many decades and, for this reason, I confess, it has not been easy for me to sit down and write it. The fear of exaggerations or of letting myself be carried away by pettiness was an obstacle to the dialogue that paved the way for this interview-profile with Beatrice Rangel.
I do it now, spurred on by her, because one day I asked her to read the draft of my book Out Loud with a critical spirit. Three days later she called me to tell me: “I liked it and I’m going to be your prologue.” His rejections of many requests of this type were numerous, but the exceptional gesture moved me and I cherish it with affection.
I met Beatrice Rangel when, as a reporter for The UniversalI visited the national house of Democratic Action almost daily, in the nostalgic era of leaders who carried out meaty debates. She was not a leader nor was she motivated by aspirations of that type, but she had strong Adeca ties of family origin: Domingo Alberto, her father, had been one of the founders and was head of the left wing that in 1960 gave rise to the Revolutionary Left Movement. His uncles Manuel and Wenceslao Mantilla had respectable careers and were top officials in social democratic governments.
With impeccable training in the best universities in the world, multilingual and friendly, Beatrice Rangel has never found it difficult to be irreverent; She discusses naturally even with outstanding international figures and is an unrepentant traveler. That’s why I’m not wrong when I say that she moves in politics like a fish in water, but unlike others, she is not encouraged by the limelight. Its reason for being is different.
He speaks fluently about Venezuelan and world matters; No topic is foreign to him, in addition to having an exceptional memory. She stays up to date through the main newspapers in the United States and Europe, she has contacts everywhere and nothing exempts her from making phone calls that would be impossible for anyone else. To name just two names, on the extensive list of his friends were the super-powerful Henry Kissinger and the exuberant writer Gabriel García Márquez.
For the first time she saw and talked with Carlos Andrés Pérez (CAP) at Uncle Manuel Mantilla’s birthday while she was still a teenager. As an adult, with her first postgraduate degree in Boston and divorced, she was working for the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (Conicit), when at an event at that institute she met one afternoon with the imminent winner of the 1988 electoral contest and showed him disinterest in participating in the coming government.
In a few weeks, on a trip back to the country after an international political commitment, a newspaper surprised her with the announcement that she would be one of President Pérez’s closest collaborators in his second government. This is how he arrived in Miraflores.
In the years leading up to the 1988 election campaign, CAP was vice-president of the Socialist International and Beatrice worked with him. At the suggestion of former German chancellor Willy Brandt, she had been promoted to the women’s undersecretary of the International. In that stage of intense learning, he established relationships with charismatic leaders from different countries and remained in permanent contact with that wise old man who was Gonzalo Barrios, president of AD.
As vice minister and then minister of the Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic, Beatrice helped CAP in fundamental efforts and witnessed events of special importance, such as a dialogue between President Carlos Andrés Pérez with the influential Minister of Foreign Affairs of the then Soviet Union, Eduard Shevardnadze, and later in another with the French president, François Mitterrand.
In the first meeting, which took place on September 29, 1989 in New York, on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly, Shevardnadze stated that “the alliance with Cuba has cost us billions and has only brought us headaches.” It has been the most expensive cooperation agreement of the USSR”…
CAP replied that a change in the international panorama would perhaps pave the way for the beginning of democracy in Cuba, and concluded by saying that the problem lay in the Galician stubbornness of Fidel Castro. To say goodbye, Shevardnadze said he was aware of CAP’s commitment to this opening, and that if it came to fruition, it would be of great value to the USSR.
Mikhail Gorbachev, at the time general secretary of the CPSU, accelerated the changes known as perestroika and glasnost, in a complicated process in which Shevardnadze’s role was crucial to confront the crisis unleashed by state centralism. Shevardnadze that day also astonished the Venezuelan president with a unique examination of Soviet-American relations: “As long as there are presidents like Reagan and George H. Bush in the United States, we will be calm,” because their clear visions of the world allow peaceful coexistence.
Unlike the date with the Soviet, Mitterrand’s had a strange and even disconcerting flavor. Looking at things after the fact, it is obvious that the intelligence services had informed the French president of Hugo Chávez’s conspiratorial plot, which is why one of his secretaries informed Beatrice of the special interest of the meeting with CAP.
After a hug and already installed in the comfortable seats of a small room at the UN, the prominent European got to the point with the question of “How are things going in Venezuela?”, which gave way to an explanation about the economic advances reflected in national and international statistics. “We are taking off and everything is under control,” CAP responded with its usual firmness.
In the CAP-Mitterrand relationship there was a good dose of closeness and warmth stimulated by the coincidence of both being members of social democratic parties and members of the SI, despite which the ancestral French coldness manifested itself in a couple of sentences: “Carlos Andrés, with those same figures I was the most hated man in France. I believe that the economic figures only tell half of the story. Think about it!”…
After that episode and other similar ones, Beatrice Rangel’s reflection is that Carlos Andrés Pérez never suspected that a treasonous attitude could be brewing in Acción Democratica against him and against democracy, the dire consequences of which we Venezuelans are still paying today.
Beatrice has had a life rich in the enormous variety of her experiences. At a dinner in honor of a former Japanese chancellor, Kissinger sat her next to Robert de Niro without her having the slightest idea who this man who was not very similar to the well-known movie star was, after which she was dying of laughter at the naivety she showed that night. The truth was that De Niro had as much fun as Beatrice, and it all ended with a certain amount of suspense.
To digest the unusual episode as God intended, I asked my friend for the details of what had a certain touch of a comedy film. De Niro’s intelligence and ease had led Beatrice to ask him if he was one of those legal professionals who move like Pedro around his house on Fifth Avenue in New York, to receive a response as natural as it was uncertain: “No, but I have impersonated lawyers”… After a few minutes, she probed him again with “Ah, I see, you are a doctor,” to hear again “No, I am not a doctor, but I have impersonated many of them.” I am an actor and my name is Robert De Niro”…
Overflowing with sympathy, De Niro grabbed Beatrice’s hand, looked her in the eyes and smilingly said: “I never thought I would meet someone uncontaminated (by the world of communications) and I just met him”… Well, I hope to have portrayed in these lines the Beatrice Rangel with whom I have had the honor of being friends for more than half my life. Cheers, Beatrice!
