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HistoryPart I: Oil Transforms the Nation: 1917-1935 Part II: Riding the Whirlwind: 1935-1958 Part III: Hugo Chávez's failed coup of 1992 Venezuela TodayLitPol (weblog) |
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E-mailPart III: Hugo Chávez's failed coup of 1992
(The first public notice of Hugo Chávez Frías came in February 1992, when he led an attempted putsch against the president of Venezuela, who escaped by a whisker. Following is a previously unpublished article on those events and their background that I wrote later that year.)
Venezuela's Fragile Democracy
When, in the night of February 4, an armored personnel carrier lurched up the marble stairs and rammed the doors of the presidential palace in Caracas, palaces throughout the hemisphere felt the jolt. Venezuela, with 34 years of uninterrupted civilian rule and the highest per-capita income in Latin America, was thought to be the last place where democracy would be threatened by a military coup.
The doors and the government both survived-but only by a whisker. President Carlos Andrés Pérez, just back from diplomatic conferences in New York and Switzerland and still in his northern winter clothes, managed to escape the palace through a tunnel and reach a television station, whence he rallied loyal troops. The insurgents, about ten percent of the army's 120 battalions in four major cities, were finally subdued-at a cost of at least seventeen dead and 60 wounded on both sides, plus an unknown number of civilian casualties, including a child slain in her sleep by a stray bullet. But what was most ominous was that the populace on the whole seemed indifferent to the threat to their democratic institutions, and in random interviews reporters found many people who applauded the coup leaders.
Although rumors of an impending coup had been circulating for weeks, the government did not seem concerned. Institutional controls over the armed forces were supposed make a coup impossible, and besides, the economy was finally beginning to improve. Venezuela had just reported a 1991 economic growth rate of 9.2 percent, its highest in 27 years and the highest anywhere in Latin America-thanks largely to the Persian Gulf war, which boosted the price of the country's major export, petroleum. Inflation had been brought down from 81 percent in 1989 to 30.7 percent in 1991. However, citizens were still reeling from earlier economic "adjustments."
Faced with a $34.8 billion foreign debt and demands by the
International Monetary Fund for restructuring the economy, the
government has cut back on public spending, allowed the bolívar
to drop in value, and decreed or allowed drastic price increases.
Just weeks after Pérez's highly-publicized inauguration
in February 1989, his government's announcement of increases
of gasoline prices and bus fares-coming on top of rumors of further
inflation and hoarding by merchants-provoked an orgy of looting
which ended only after at least 300 deaths at the hands of troops
and police. Since then, price rises and spending cutbacks have
sparked student riots, a bitter teachers' strike, and even brief
general strikes by the usually pro-government Venezuelan Confederation
of Workers.
Last August, a presidential commission reported that "critical
poverty," the ability to buy no more than half the food
needed for a healthy diet, had increased from 11 percent in 1984
to 33 percent last year, and that real per capita income had
dropped 55 percent from 1984 to 1991. Over half the population
cannot afford more than one full meal a day.
Just before the attempted coup, polls reported that the president's approval rating had plummeted from 57 percent in favor (in the 1988 election) to 81 percent against-a finding that may have encouraged to group of lieutenant colonels who revolted to put in place, they said, "a different political model" to meet "individual and collective necessities." They called themselves "Bolivarianos," for the liberator Simón Bolívar, but they were really invoking a tradition of more recent vintage, one that was supposedly ended in 1958.
For nearly 130 years, military coups, known locally as "revolutions,"
were the normal way of changing governments in Venezuela-the
occasional civilian president served only at the pleasure of
the generals. Then, on January 23, 1958, opposition parties mobilized
their supporters in a general strike and mass demonstrations
against the dictator Gen. Marcos Pérez Jiménez
and, with the support of pro-democratic military officers, drove
him out of power and out of the country-and changed the rules
of the game.
Three of the parties-the Communists were not invited-then signed
an agreement (the "Punto Fijo Pact") that none of them
would incite the military to revolt, a major departure from tradition.
A new constitution was drawn up which clearly subordinated the
army to civil authority, providing, among other things: congressional
approval for promotions above the rank of lieutenant colonel;
handsome salaries and other privileges for those superior officers,
and their automatic retirement with comfortable pensions and
other benefits after 30 years-to remove both the incentive and
opportunity to revolt.
But the strongest guarantee against the return of military rule was the political mobilization of civilians, through trade unions, neighborhood councils and other mass organizations tied to the political parties. Industrial workers and small farmers were organized by Acción Democrática (AD), small businessmen and other middle-class Catholics by the Christian Democratic COPEI, and mostly white-collar workers by the Unión Repúblicana Democrática, with smaller parties contending for all these constituencies. The military leaders were made to understand that any attempted coup would be met by organized mass resistance.
Some leftist and nationalist officers did revolt again in 1962, and a very few joined with Communists and other revolutionaries in the guerrilla war of the 1960s and 1970s, seeking more radical changes on the Cuban model. But for most civilians and military personnel, the rewards for working within the system-and the heavy penalties for opposition-were too powerful to resist, and the guerrilla movement would soon dwindle to nothing.
Then, just as Carlos Andrés Pérez of Acción Democrática was about to take office for his first term as president (1974-79), OPEC (of which Venezuela is a founding member) raised prices of crude oil fourfold and Venezuela found itself with $6 billion of unanticipated income. Imagining that the bonanza would never end, government ministries and semi-autonomous firms borrowed heavily in short term loans so they could spend even faster. According to historian James Rudolph, "the Pérez administration spent more in five years than all other governments during the previous 143 years" since independence. Much of the money ended up in people's personal accounts or very wasteful projects.
The political effect of this was that citizens learned to turn toward the parties in power for jobs, community improvements, and other benefits, behaving more like clients than militants-in effect, the political mobilization of the early years was transformed into a vast, and increasingly cynical, patronage system.
The decline of petroleum prices after 1978 and the rise of interest rates on Venezuela's by now huge debt ended the years of the fatted cows. The bolívar plummeted, making imports-on which the country had become highly dependent-more expensive even as businesses were closing and unemployment increasing. But many Venezuelans, including those managing the national finances, were unwilling to give up their lavish life-styles, and "corruption" suddenly became a very hot issue-especially with a major financial scandal in the administration of Jaime Lusinchi (1983-88).
The economic decline has also eroded the living standards of higher-ranking officers and, more relevantly, widened the gap between them and the lieutenant colonels such as those who led the February 4 attack. But the insurgents were mostly inflamed by reports of corruption and high-living by the top civilian politicians, whom-according to their pamphlets-they proposed to execute for their crimes. And reporters had no trouble finding ordinary citizens, in slums, schools and offices, who said they wished they had. So disturbing were the reports of popular support that the government seized periodicals with pictures of the rebel chief, Lt. Col. Hugo Chávez Frías, and briefly imposed censorship on all news media.
"If someone tried to convoke a 'march for democracy,' it would be a fiasco. The popular sympathy was with the coup makers," declared the legislator and former guerrilla leader Teodoro Petkoff. The revered octogenarian writer Arturo Uslar Pietri has called corruption "the most serious problem confronting Venezuela today." According to Senator Oswaldo Alvarez Paz of AD, it "breeds a kind of tendency in people toward fraud, because the ordinary citizen, in order to get the most normal and simple things accomplished, has to pay a price, resort to a little scam," which is leading to a laxity in "the moral structures" of the country.
But "corruption" and its twin, "mismanagement," are not simply a matter of moral laxity. The system established in 1958 to guarantee civilian rule has evolved into a bureaucracy where innumerable functionaries can demonstrate their power by blocking the flow of resources, directing them to inefficient and even silly uses, or-in the worst cases-stealing them. The only power they need worry about is that concentrated in what Venezuelans call the "cogollo," the small group men who are the "topmost leaves" of the party and state, who may shade the lower branches but need pay little attention to complaints from the "roots."
"I look at the positive side" of the attempted coup, says Venezuela's ambassador to the United Nations, Diego Arria, who was in Caracas on that night, with the president at the television station.
"The Venezuelan economic system has undergone tremendous and substantial reforms; it took great courage to seek a path where the state would give up its guardianship, where it wouldn't play the decisive role. At bottom, toward a market economy But this same process hasn't happened in politics. Our political system is antiquated, it's maladapted. In short, the only good thing that will come out of this is, politics will not be business as usual."
What he hopes to see is further decentralization-a process begun in late 1989 when states were permitted to elect their own governors. At a minimum, he thinks, citizens should be permitted to vote for individual candidates for the senate and chamber, instead of for slates chosen and ranked by the cogollo of each party. And there should be a truly independent judiciary, instead of one that, as now, is beholden to the party leaders and unwilling or unable to convict them-even in the notorious Lusinchi administration scandal.
The country's economic problems, Arria believes, will be transitory, "because Venezuela is a relatively rich and small country." What must be confronted is the popular dissatisfaction "with our present political methods."
When the leader of the attempted coup, Lt. Col. Hugo Chávez Frías, formally surrendered, he did so on television-as appropriate for this country that has made telenovelas its best known export after petroleum. "Fellow soldiers!" he declared. "Lamentably, for now, our objectives have not been achieved in this capital city."
That "for now" caused a shudder among the press and politicians. The lack of popular reaction against the putschists may well embolden Chávez' comrades to try again. This is what makes it urgent for Venezuelan democracy to further democratize itself, because if it doesn't, nobody will be there then to defend it. (1992.11.29)
© Geoffrey Fox 1992. Geoffrey Fox is the author of The
Land and People of Venezuela and Welcome to My Contri
(short stories).