On 12th April this year, the three-year rule of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez appeared to have come to an end. Rebel troops allied to civilian protestors demanded his resignation and took him to the remote island military base of La Orchila in the Caribbean. "It's Over!" shouted the headline in the conservative El Universal newspaper. Most US commentators and the international financial and petroleum markets were equally relieved. "With yesterday's resignation... Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator," declared a New York Times editorial. The IMF issued a statement offering "assistance" to Venezuela, despite the fact that the country has not had, or requested, an agreement with the fund for years. The morning after the coup, international oil prices fell by 6 per cent, their lowest level in five months, on hopes that Venezuela would now reverse Chávez's support for Opec's production-cutting agreements.
It was a squalid flight from power. The enduring images of the hours leading up to Chávez's removal were the scenes of civilian gunmen wearing the red berets of his paramilitary Bolivarian Circles, firing from an overpass near the presidential palace Miraflores on unarmed protestors below. At least 17 people were killed and 300 wounded, prompting the military to intervene and remove Chávez, ostensibly to prevent a bloodbath. In the hours following the coup, government officials were in hiding, under arrest or being dragged out of their homes by mobs.
Chávez, a former paratrooper who had assumed he had the military's support, went without much fuss. He did not consider emulating Chile's Salvador Allende, who committed suicide in the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power. Instead, videotapes released after the coup show that Chávez had given the order for "Plan Avila," a longstanding military scheme to crush civilian demonstrators. When his generals either refused to return his calls or prevaricated, his fate appeared to be sealed.
In contrast to neighbouring Colombia, life in Venezuela is more often farce than tragedy. So it proved. Two days later, Chávez was back on a wave of popular support. The middle-class demonstrators who precipitated his fall had been replaced by crowds from the shanty towns, demanding his reinstatement. Chávez's survival of the April coup was the result of both his cunning and a series of fantastic errors by his adversaries. On 12th April, Chávez had been removed, not only by the army, but by a popular movement that had brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, backed by trade unions which had brought the economy to a virtual standstill. The new president, business federation leader Pedro Carmona, was sworn in, surrounded by a gallery of faces from Venezuela's political, economic and military elite.
So what went wrong? First, Carmona, a figure with no legitimacy, said that he was annulling Venezuela's 1999 constitution, which had been widely supported in a referendum. Then generals from the centrist faction of the army began to disassociate themselves from the new regime, along with the trade unions. Appointments for key officials from the navy, also angered the more important army.
The new regime's treatment of Chávez himself was another blunder. On the night of 11th April, top military officers demanded Chávez's resignation. He said he would not resign, but would agree to "abandon his functions," a procedure that requires the approval of the national assembly, in which Chávez has a majority. Next day, the generals made another error. They refused to allow Chávez to leave the country, which he was then willing to do. And by refusing to sign a resignation letter, Chávez had placed the military in an awkward position. They were holding in custody the man who was still legally their commander-in-chief.
The key figure in all this was armed forces commander, Lucas Rincon whose true loyalties during the coup remain a mystery. First, Rincon refused to implement Plan Avila, saying that he needed "time to think about it," thus allowing the coup to take place. Early on Friday, he announced that Chávez had "resigned,'" which led, 90 minutes later, to Carmona being named president. A couple of days later, Rincon was once again at the side of a triumphant Chávez, apparently forgiven. "That part is still confusing to me," a dazed Carmona said later.
Meanwhile, there had been a wave of demonstrations demanding the return of the president, accompanied by rioting in Caracas's poorest slums, and key military units declared their support for Chávez. With the high command in disarray, the presidential guard, which had not been replaced, was able to re-take the palace. Even more fantastic was the ability of Chávez to communicate with troops inside Miraflores palace from his island prison, letting them know that he had not resigned. According to Chávez, a sympathetic corporal had offered to smuggle out a message to that effect to Chávez loyalists. "I put it at the bottom of a trash can to disguise it," said Chávez. By Saturday night, with the uprising effectively over and Carmona under house arrest, air force helicopters headed to La Orchila to pick up Chávez, who arrived in triumph at Miraflores in the early hours of Sunday morning. International supporters of the coup-notably Washington and Madrid-beat a retreat.
A clear account of what happened will probably never emerge. A truth commission set up by the national assembly has done little but muddy the water. Chávez supporters maintain that there were snipers operating from Caracas rooftops firing on both Chávez supporters and on demonstrators, a claim backed by the early press reports. The anti-Chávez camp point to Plan Avila as evidence that he was prepared to order a massacre of peaceful protestors.
In retrospect, it seems that at least three coups were taking place at once. One was led by right-wing officers linked to Carmona; another by a centrist faction of officers who were anti-Chávez but not willing to countenance a dictatorship; and yet another by former Chavistas who now saw Chávez as a liability. Chávez has great charismatic appeal, but he also has the ability to turn intimate friends into bitter enemies.
Hugo Chávez is what Venezuelans call a bachaco, a man of mixed race. He was born in 1954, the son of provincial schoolteachers. Accepted into the Venezuelan military academy in 1971, he graduated four years later as a second lieutenant and began a quick ascent through the ranks of the army. In 1982, he joined other young officers in forming the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement (MBR 200), named after Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century father of Venezuelan independence. Bolívar was a Latin American nationalist, deeply hostile to the US, who is now claimed by both left and right.
Venezuela became Latin America's most stable multi-party democracy after the overthrow of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958. The leading parties, the populist Acción Democrática and the Christian Democrat Copei, were notably free of ideological differences. They signed an agreement in 1958, the Punto Fijo pact, that guaranteed the exclusion of the small communist party and the peaceful alteration of the two parties in power. The country's main institutions were divided between them, as were the spoils from Venezuela's oil exports. In the late 1970s, while the rest of Latin America was struggling to emerge from military regimes and guerrilla warfare, Venezuela was enjoying a golden age.
But the price of stability was large-scale corruption. By the 1980s, a slump in world oil prices and the growing demands on the state meant that "Saudi Venezuela" began to look ragged. Caracas's slums-known as ranchos-surrounded the city on every side and riots were routine. Crime soared, feral children roamed the streets, the rich retreated to their bunkers. Venezuela did not suffer a military coup, but things became tense.
Chávez and the other young officers of the MBR 200 were nationalists angered by the corrupt two-party system. Their restlessness grew as Venezuela was shaken by economic crisis. In 1989, hundreds of people were killed in riots against the austerity measures taken by then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez. By 1992, Chávez and his co-conspirators were ready to make their move. In the early hours of 4th February, the MBR 200 took control of Venezuela's largest cities-Maracaibo, Valencia and Maracay-almost without firing a shot. But despite facing a regime that was virtually unprepared, Chávez's operations in Caracas failed.
Under arrest, Chávez was granted the first miraculous reprieve of his career. The army officials in charge of mopping-up operations, concerned to avoid further fighting, asked him to call for a surrender. He agreed and was allowed to make the appeal live on television in full uniform and without a script. In the 45 seconds that followed, Chávez was transformed from an obscure military plotter into Venezuela's most popular man. Responding to an "interior voice," he called for his troops to lay down their arms. "Good morning to all the people of Venezuela," he began. "This message is directed to our comrades in arms in the paratroop division and in the armoured division. Comrades, you have done well there. Here we have not been able-for now-to achieve our objectives. I congratulate you and I take responsibility for this Bolivarian military movement." The speech led to spontaneous acts of support for Chávez across the country. "For now" became the favourite catchphrase in Venezuela, a promise and threat of change.
Chávez served two years in Yare prison for his role in the coup. Despite attempts in congress to have him executed, many politicians strove to steal his clothing, including Rafael Caldera, the grand old man of the Christian Democrat party. On 27th November 1992, another coup attempt was made, this time led by senior navy and air force officials, in alliance with the incarcerated Chávez. Civilian supporters took control of a television station and broadcast a video of masked civilians (dubbed "the three stooges") whose calls for an uprising were punctuated by rhetoric from Chávez, recorded in his cell.
Within months, Pérez had been impeached and was under house arrest. Caldera won the 1993 presidential elections and his government declared an amnesty for the coup leaders, enabling Chávez's entry into civilian political life.
In 1996, I was taken to meet Chávez by retired Colonel Luis Alfonso Dávila-later both interior and foreign minister in Chávez's government. ?Dávila picked me up in a battered pick-up truck. On the seat was a .357 revolver. The Venezuelan secret service, he explained, was carrying out a campaign of harassment against Chávez and his supporters. Press reports at the time focused on Chávez's links with Fidel Castro (he had visited Cuba for the first time in 1994) and radical Venezuelan students. In the two years following his release from jail, he had not formed a civilian political party and was still surrounded by participants in the coup attempts. Opinion polls showed his support at just 6 to 7 per cent.
Chávez greeted me amiably, "What do you think of our Caracas women, Benjamin Hee hee!" He pointed to a nearby apartment from where secret policemen were apparently keeping tabs on us. Chávez suffered no doubts as to his popularity. Dismissing his standing in the polls, he said that if elections were held, he would win by a landslide. Nor had he ruled out the military option, if the establishment proved guilty of fraud. "I will become president and commander-in-chief by whatever means necessary," he said.
A few weeks later, on a walk-about in the Caracas shanty town of Petare, I began to appreciate that he was not bluffing. As Chávez walked through the mud passages, thousands of slum dwellers appeared, running to meet him. From 1997 until his victory in December 1998, Chávez demonstrated boundless charm and conspiratorial talent. He formed no coherent organisation that might impede his personal alliances with existing political forces. Chávez was his own campaign office. Armed (literally) with a case containing a semi-automatic, and accompanied by Dávila and two former lieutenants, Chávez moved between endless meetings with civilian supporters, businessmen and political parties, punctuated by incessant calls on his mobile phone. He would give potential collaborators a business card which read "Hugo Chávez, Comandante," and gave his number.
Meetings would be called in commercial offices or the homes of wealthy supporters. In keeping with Caracas habits (the result of the city's ferocious traffic jams) Chávez would appear several hours late or not at all. When he did show up, a lot of time was spent laughing and joking. Venezuelans are touchy-feely and Chávez often tried to get me in a headlock. "Are you with the IRA, Benjamin? Ha ha!"
The only link between the groups and individuals that made up "the movement" was Chávez himself and his mobile phone-wielding bodyguards. The comandante was besieged by conflicting demands for attention from the nationalists of the MBR 200, former left-wing activists, representatives of business and so on. Those who no longer fitted his plans dropped out of the loop.
By late 1997, Venezuela seemed close to an explosion like that of 1989. A slump in world oil prices was squeezing the government's budget, leading to strikes by public sector workers. Venezuela's infrastructure seemed to be collapsing, with roads vanishing in the rains and electricity blackouts. The ranchos seethed. Rumours of coups contended with endless corruption scandals. President Caldera's regime was unable to command a majority in parliament. Weak and increasingly inaudible, Caldera-at 84, the world's oldest head of state-was reported dead repeatedly throughout 1997 and 1998.
Chávez's elastic pragmatism, meanwhile, was taking him ever upwards in the polls. Growing sections of the electorate could see in his vague promises whatever they wanted. Chávez had begun to act as mediator and puppet master for a series of apparently irreconcilable political and economic interests. Established left-wing parties threw their weight behind Chávez, even as he acquired Jorge Pérez (a member of the Boulton group, one of Venezuela's family-run conglomerates) as economic adviser. One moment he would meet hard-left economists from Venezuela's Central University, the next it would be Argentine neo-fascist ideologue, Norberto Ceresole.
By polling day, it was hard to find anyone in Caracas who was not a Chavista. On 6th December 1998, the comandante became president with 56 per cent of the vote. Chávez's ideological eclecticism did not stop once he had been elected, finding expression in his weekly television and radio shows, Al?residente, in which he interlaces anecdotes with quotes from the Bible, Lincoln, Mao, Whitman and de Gaulle. Chávez's discourses, like those of Juan Perez are crafted to avoid committing himself to any one of the forces that sustain him in power.
Venezuela's economy is a petroleum monoculture to an extent unmatched outside the middle east. But, unlike most oil exporters, Venezuela's sales depend on one country-the US, from which it receives manufactured goods in return. Venezuela has spent billions of dollars building the largest refining and retail empire in the US, Citgo Petroleum, to ensure a secure outlet for its heavy crude oil. Sales to Europe and the far east are tiny.
Any Venezuelan government needs a high oil price to fund its enormous state sector-with 4m state employees out of a population of 23m, it has the highest ratio of public sector workers in the world. Chávez's rise to power was arguably a symptom of the fall in world oil prices in 1997 and 1998, which led to the near collapse of the Caldera regime. One of Chávez's first acts in power was to tell fellow Opec members, who had long reviled Venezuela as the organisation's most notorious quota buster, that the country would now comply with agreed cutbacks. Transforming Venezuela into a price hawk was one of the factors that pushed up world oil prices to around $30 per barrel, allowing some of the social spending which Chávez needed to survive in power.
Venezuela's new role in Opec allowed Chávez to play up to anti-US sentiment and project his independence, while doing nothing to end economic dependence on the US. Opec provides a fine opportunity for grandstanding and Chávez used it. In 2000, he hosted the first meeting of Opec leaders in Caracas and became the first foreign head of state to visit Saddam Hussein since 1991.
Despite rhetoric about the need for diversification, the state oil company, PDVSA, dominates the economy. Chávez's relations with PDVSA-a virtual state within a state-is his Achilles heel. During the 1990s, a new and younger PDVSA leadership was suspected of developing plans to privatise the company and leave Opec, relying on Venezuela's abundant reserves and its strategic position in the US refining sector to fight a price war against Saudi Arabia in the US. With the arrival of Chávez in 1998, that changed. Ali Rodriguez, oil expert, former guerrilla and member of the nationalist PPT party, was appointed first as oil minister and then as Opec secretary general. Agreements with the private sector were mostly respected, but many projects were frozen and private sector companies were pressured to cut production. Chávez found himself in a face-off with PDVSA management. He accused executives of trying to frustrate his policies, made heavy-handed attempts to place loyalists in key positions and tried to split the oil workers' unions. PDVSA headquarters become hostile and soon became a focus for the emerging middle-class opposition to his regime.
Having given way to several oil workers' strikes in the first three years of his administration, Chávez, on 25th February of this year, appointed a new board of directors at PDVSA. According to witnesses, he appeared at PDVSA's headquarters in the style of a baseball referee, blowing a whistle and shouting "you're out!" as he named each of the fired directors.
By April, PDVSA were staging daily protests demanding that the appointments be reversed. When Chávez responded with a hard line, a general strike was declared on 8th April. Chávez replied that he would use the army to run the oil industry and arrested refinery managers. The strike was extended, resulting in disruption of exports of crude oil and the demonstration that led to the April coup.
Under Carmona's short rule, the first measures announced were to restore the former PDVSA board and suspend subsidised oil exports to Cuba. PDVSA managers hinted that Venezuela might not continue to adhere to Opec production limits, sending oil prices sharply lower. Later, Chávez referred to April's events as "a coup against Opec."
In 1999, Chávez made the rounds of the US financial institutions. He even pitched the first ball at a baseball game in Shea Stadium. However, there was little communication between Venezuelan and US officials on the trip. Chávez and his collaborators had decided that they couldn't be blackmailed as they didn't need an agreement with the IMF; that there was little to say to the banks as the financial sector in Venezuela was insignificant; and that Venezuela's foreign policy was their own concern-therefore, they were going to have a good time.
One of the best moments of Chávez's New York stop was the traditional lunch with investors at the Waldorf. As expected, Citigroup's veteran Latin American kingmaker Bill Rhodes was seated next to Chávez. Through the lunch, Rhodes tried to monopolise Chávez, but he was having none of it. He chatted to others or with the waiters and waitresses (many of them Latinos)-with anyone but the man next to him. Rhodes's face was a mask of disbelief and offended arrogance. It was classic Chávez.
Perhaps the only constant in Chávez's ideology is his anti-Americanism (in keeping with Bol?ar). In little more than three years, he has turned down a US request to allow planes to overfly Venezuela in pursuit of drug traffickers, established close relations with Iraq, Iran and Libya, and expelled the US military mission in Caracas. Chávez regards Fidel Castro as a mentor and has ties to Colombian guerilla forces.
Under Clinton, the US accepted this with little complaint, suspecting that statements from Washington would make things worse. This changed when Bush appointed Otto Reich, a Cuban-American anti-communist and ex-ambassador to Venezuela, as assistant secretary of state. After Chávez refused to support the "war on terrorism," Reich set to work isolating him. In early February, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet, expressed "concern" over Venezuela. In March, Bush spoke in Lima with the presidents of the Andean Community of Nations. Chávez was not invited.
On the Friday that Carmona claimed power, Otto Reich summoned ambassadors from Latin America and the Caribbean to his Washington office. When they stated at the outset that they would not support a coup in Venezuela, Reich declared that Chávez had resigned and demanded that they support the new government. Few did. Latin America's regimes, including US allies Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, condemned the coup. Only Colombia, Peru and the right-wing government of El Salvador made friendly overtures to Carmona. The failure of the coup led to backtracking by the Bush administration and worsened its already dismal standing in Latin America. Chávez, meanwhile, is fast becoming a Latin American hero.
His politics remain hard to define. He has strengthened government control over the oil sector and raised public spending. On the other hand, he has been pragmatic over privatisation and financially orthodox. But anyone able to give the US a bloody nose and ignore the IMF will gain status south of the US border. Hostility towards the US has heightened, not diminished, since 11th September, which many Latin Americans greeted with glee.
When Chávez was led into the military base at Fuerte on 11th April, he was met by Francisco Arias-fellow coup leader in 1992, former prison cellmate, and one of the original 1982 Bolivarians. Now, Arias was there to persuade him to resign. Two years earlier, Arias, along with other former comrades of Chávez, had declared their break with the regime. Arias claimed that Chávez had become drunk with power and was surrounded with civilian opportunists. Behind the accusations was a power struggle between Chávez's leftist civilian advisers and nationalist military figures involved in the 1992 coups. Chávez backed the civilians despite evidence of corruption among their leaders.
It was Arias and his former comrades, not the traditional political parties, who would be Chávez's main rivals in the July 2000 presidential and congressional election. Chávez won the presidency with 59 per cent of the vote, stemming a revolt within his party. Yet the tendency to alienate his supporters had become a curse. Arias was a key player in creating a civilian-military consensus for the removal of Chávez in April. (And while the Chávez family kept a united front during the coup, Marisabel, the president's wife, announced afterwards that she was divorcing him.)
Through his three-year rule, Chávez has lived in a whirlwind of rallies, walkabouts, referendums and elections, reaffirming his status as Venezuela's friend and saviour. You can phone his radio show and ask him to fix your bike. If you can get close enough, you can pass him a note asking for help to find a job or to get an operation for a sick aunt. He has a staff to deal with the notes and, if you are lucky, someone will contact you. Chávez has said that he has a martyr complex. Against Castro's advice, he will not wear a bulletproof vest and walks around with little security.
Chávez is immersed in the 19th-century language of Bol?ar, but in his political style he is a post-modern showman. His big battles have been fought in the television studios, not on the streets or in the mountains. Perhaps Chávez feels the need for grand gestures, faced with the scale of his problems and the intense hostility of the Venezuelan elite. Or perhaps, like Bol?ar, he has privately concluded that Latin America "is ungovernable and whosoever works for revolution is ploughing the ocean."
The messy aftermath of the 12th April coup has done nothing to calm divisions within Venezuela's 80,000-strong military. The government has purged some 600 officers and many more fear they will be passed over by government supporters when promotions are made in July. Masked men have appeared, calling themselves the "April 11th movement" and promising "military action." Meanwhile, residents of middle-class Caracas areas such as Chacao and Las Mercedes are arming themselves, as panic over an invasion of Chávez supporters from the city's ranchos reaches fever pitch. Perhaps a violent confrontation is inevitable, and Chávez will, after all, enter the history books as a tragic rather than farcical figure.
