The Coup Against Chavez, April 11th 2002
When Hugo Chávez came to power through democratic election in 1998, the US government shook in its boots. Venezuela is a country that has some of the largest oil reserves in the world, and its proximity to the US made it a fantastic place from which to source its oil. PDVSA, the main Venezuelan oil company, was run by elite families from the start, with heavy US support. Furthermore, previous leadership had been lenient towards US oil companies that took root in the Venezuelan industry. Chávez changed all this. He fired the PDVSA leadership, nationalised the company, and expelled US companies from the territory.
His move to nationalise major businesses and infrastructure led to conflict of interest not only to the US government, but also to the old elites that owned most of the nationalised companies. Coincidentally (or not so coincidentally) these elites were also politicians that had influenced Venezuela's internal and foreign policies. Owning not only the means of production but also the lion's share of private media in the country, the nationalisations hit them hard, and left them with deep resentment. Under Chávez, inequality decreased, with wages and living conditions increasing for the working class. Yet GDP decreased. Why? The elite families suffered a significant drop in income. And as such, the opposition went on the warpath.
Now more than ever, the role of the opposition in Venezuelan politics, media and foreign policy is of paramount importance. Whenever Venezuela has been destabilised in the last 28 years, whether by coup attempt or by economic sabotage, the opposition was always there puppeteering from the shadows.
The Venezuelan opposition routinely portrays itself as a force for democracy in Venezuela, but nothing can be further from the truth. These politicians weaponise their influence over the media to present an image of the downtrodden and repressed underdog, that is battling a savage dictatorship, downplaying or downright disguising their role in the events unfolding. In the last year once again, opposition leader María Corina Machado gaslit her way through international politics into winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which she promptly dedicated to Trump, and the elected president Maduro was kidnapped and put on trial in the US under trumped up charges of drug trafficking.
Now, 24 years to the day after the first major destabilisation attempt against the Bolivarian Revolution and its government, let's take a look at the coup that started the tradition, the April 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez.
The Coup
As members of the old regime's elite implored Chávez to resign, threatening him with the military that was allegedly on their side, anti-government demonstrations erupted in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas on the 11th of April, 2002, and were quickly met with counterprotests of Chávez supporters. The opposition diverted its protesters towards the presidential palace Miraflores, where they did not have permission to demonstrate. In a country where firearms are common, shots were soon fired, with 19 killed and many more wounded during the day. The opposition leadership and the media loyal to them were quick to state that Chávez and his supporters were the ones responsible, going as far as claiming the perpetrators were Chavez's armed forces, pacifying the protesters. Several military officers took the opportunity to openly rebel.
As a result, the opposition with the help of these military officers broke into Miraflores and deposed Chávez, issuing a bomb threat. As a result of the threat, Chávez did not resist arrest and was removed from Miraflores. Opposition politicians then signed the Carmona Decree, a decree that stated their support for Pedro Carmona, officially called an interim president who in actuality acted as an autocrat for the 47 hours for which he was in power. Pedro Carmona, Chávez's replacement, was the Head of the Chamber of Commerce in Venezuela, and had maintained close relationships with the old elite, the majority involved in the business and oil sectors.
Carmona proceeded to abolish the Constitution, liquidate Congress, suspend the Supreme Court and fired all other officials that had been elected to be part of Chávez's government. They were replaced by opposition politicians appointed personally by Carmona, which drove rifts within the coup plotters that would later prove detrimental, with those sidelined in the appointments feeling let down. Chavista government officials went into hiding, as politicians, journalists, and activists were rounded up by Carmona. Some of those detained claim to have been tortured while under custody. Starting with state TV, media outlets not loyal to the opposition were raided and closed down, leaving on air private media that was openly affiliated with the opposition politicians, old elites and coup plotters (to put it jokingly, the venn diagram of these groups is a circle).
While private media portrayed Chávez as a tyrant that shot at peaceful protesters, they furthermore stated that no coup had taken place. Chávez had simply resigned as a result of his actions. Chavista government officials made attempts to contact the masses to counter these claims, however with the media outlets remaining being staunchly pro-opposition, their options were limited. In the meantime, Irish filmmakers that had come to Venezuela in 2001 to film a documentary about Chávez found themselves in Miraflores during the coup, and had been able to film the coup occurring in real time. The documentary, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" has now faded into obscurity, but to this day remains a valuable record of the coup.
Ultimately, as military presence in Caraces became overwhelming, rumours of the coup and of Carmona repealing the new Bolivarian Constitution spread. The streets flooded with Chavistas, who descended from all around Caracas and surrounding areas in protest of Chávez's removal. Compared to the 19 dead on April 11th, Carmona's forces killed 60 of the people that had come to protest his coup. Chávez, being himself a military man, had a hands-on approach when interacting with the soldiers in the Venezuelan Armed Forces, and was much more popular with the average soldier than he had been with certain officers. These soldiers became key, as with the backing of popular support they were able to retake the presidential palace. Chávez was quickly returned, and reinstated, remaining in power until his death in 2013.
The Role of Media
The media played a significant part in the coup from the beginning. Private media that is, as state media was closed down at the start by Carmona's forces. The private television networks that remained open spread the rhetoric that Chávez had been the one instigating violence through pacification of protesters, and he was the one that resigned. The coercion of the resignation, the arrest and subsequent removal of Chávez from Miraflores were things that the public was kept in the dark about. Simultaneously, print media came out with editorials praising Chávez's removal, with titles such Bye Hugo, Hugo's Death, and others blaming him for the deaths of the protesters. El Universal also published One Step Forward explaining how Chávez's removal is a sign that Venezuela is moving in the right direction. After the coup, the media outlets that participated in the coup faced repercussions, which later led to those same outlets claiming suppression of free speech; this contributed later to the dictatorship allegations levelled at Chávez by the opposition and Western governments.
The Role of the US
The US role in the coup is contested. The coup plotters after the fact said they acted with what they felt was US support for a common goal, which was to stop communism in Venezuela. Coup leaders such as Leopoldo López and Pedro Carmona were flown to Washington multiple times to meet with officials from the Bush administration leading up to the coup. Furthermore, NED and USAID were key in funding and training the groups involved, with NED in particular quadrupling funding to opposition groups in Venezuela in the year before the coup. The final nail in the coffin was an embassy document from March 5th that states that there are no doubts that a coup was being planned, as well as a cable from April 6th noting that several military factions were planning a coup "As early as this month". If the US did not have a hand in the coup itself, it definitely knew that a coup was imminent, and provided the funding and training that made it possible. We have here a clear example of the US government meddling in the leadership of another nation for their own gain.
In conclusion, what the media portrays as the truth of the matter has always been heavily flawed in favour of their own interests and the interests of their financial backers. This is true regardless of whether the media in question is Western media or local. The Venezuelan opposition, with US funding and support, has a long tradition of destabilising the country. The coup against Hugo Chávez could have succeeded had the public not shown up to support their president, and Venezuela could have become another success story in the US's long list of anti-communist interventionist campaigns. Yet the coup's fall was not a complete victory. It set the stage for the next attempts, and Chávez's response against the perpetrators and accomplices gave the opposition the opportunity to cry repression. Ultimately, the first domino fell, setting off a chain reaction that ultimately led to the kidnapping of president Maduro and the reversal of several of Chávez's socialist policies by the interim president Delcy Rodriguez
