Failed Coup Strikes a Chord for Venezuelans Angry With President : Discontent: His program of privatization, slashed subsidies and deregulation has led to reduced buying power and joblessness for many.

The young man’s head nearly touched the scorching tin roof of the cramped shack, one of thousands dotting this capital’s hillsides, as he tried to vent his frustration over a failed coup by the Venezuelan military.

He was angry, not because a small group of army officers made an assault Tuesday on the government of one of South America’s most stable democracies, but because they failed to achieve their initial goal, that of assassinating President Carlos Andres Perez.

“It’s a shame that they didn’t kill Perez,” said 22-year-old Javier, slapping at a fly riding on his bare back. “It would have made for at least one thief less in this country.”

A reporter heard such strong words against the president repeated again and again in the days after the attempted coup, which left 80 people dead. Many members of the middle and working classes said that they did not relish thoughts of another military dictatorship like that of Gen. Marcos Perez Jimenez, which fell in 1958. But they added that they would prefer almost anything to Perez and his government’s corruption and program of radical economic reforms.

That shared opinion indicates that Perez’s future is still in question despite the arrest of the military rebels, including 133 officers.

Though most Venezuelan politicians and major newspapers condemned the effort to kill the president, several said they understood how the rebellious officers were encouraged to act, partly by Venezuelans’ anger over economic hardship and official corruption.

Venezuela is just one of many nations in Latin America enduring such problems. Some were surprised by the coup attempt because in many ways this oil-rich country is performing better than its neighbors. Fueled by higher oil prices, its economy grew 9.2% last year, the highest rate in the Americas. Foreign investment has increased as the government has sold interests in bureaucracy-bloated enterprises such as CANTV, the national phone company.

But Venezuela’s gains have failed to trickle down to the majority of its citizens. Perez’s economic program of privatization, slashing import duties and subsidies, and deregulating industry has, instead, translated into reduced buying power and high joblessness for many Venezuelans.

Real per-capita income fell 55% between 1988 and 1991, nearly double the fall from 1980 to 1988, according to a report by a Venezuelan presidential commission. The report said that the number of Venezuelans living in critical poverty, defined as the inability to meet at least half of basic nutritional requirements, nearly tripled to 33% in 1991 from 11% in 1984.

The losses were made more poignant by memories of Venezuela’s once-high standard of living achieved through a welfare state and a populist political system that helped redistribute the country’s oil wealth in the 1960s and 1970s.

With at least 60 billion barrels in reserves, Venezuela is still the most petroleum-rich country outside the Middle East. But political payoffs and other corruption that once spread money among masses of party supporters and union members are increasingly confined to a narrow elite stratum of the population.

Since falling oil prices have cut the size of the pie, politicians and other people with power have decided to keep most pieces for themselves, said Ramon Escovar, the country’s attorney general.

Escovar has prosecuted about 600 cases, some of them involving millions of dollars of stolen government money, since Perez took office in 1989. But there are very few convictions, he said, because the president has refused to clean up a politicized judicial system, fire corrupt advisers and go after financial speculators in the private sector.

Venezuela’s rich still live lavishly even while people in the hillside slums, called ranchos, are having to cut back on milk for their children. According to a 1989 study by Morgan Guaranty Trust, wealthy Venezuelans held $89 billion--nearly three times the national debt--in accounts in the United States and Europe. Though some of that money has now come back, much of the repatriated capital is being used in financial speculation schemes rather than investment in industry, analysts say.

“Perez has opened the economy wide up, but he hasn’t adopted any of the measures needed to deal with the corruption caused by deregulation,” said Guido Zuleta, an economics professor at Caracas’ Simon Bolivar University. “There is still a feeling among the masses that they are being robbed.”

Perez has denied that there were any economic motivations for the attempted coup. The American ambassador to Venezuela, Michael Skol, agreed with the president’s portrayal of the coup plotters as a small group of “arrogant right-wing fanatics” with opinions far removed from the mainstream.

“From what these officers are saying, they give me the impression that economic complaints were not at the top of their list,” Skol said in an interview.

Yet after the attempt, Perez began pressing Congress to approve a $750-million social spending program. The administration is also seeking to raise the monthly minimum wage from the equivalent in local currency of about $100 to about $150.

In a bow to the military, Perez is reportedly planning to ask Congress for millions of dollars more to raise the salaries of mid-level officers.

Despite such concessions, Perez pledged Saturday to hold fast to his radical economic program.

“If the coup attempt had succeeded that would have been something terrible, because it would have turned back everything we have achieved,” Perez said in his first news conference since the military uprising.

Some fear the government will increasingly turn to repression to silence critics. Perez gave indications of moving in that direction in recent days as his security forces raided and searched several major newspapers and arrested a retired army general who had signed a statement blaming bad government for the coup attempt.

Father Dennis Cleary, an American Roman Catholic priest who has worked in Venezuela’s poorer neighborhoods for 16 years, said that Perez is committing a big mistake relying on such measures.

“The most significant thing about the coup attempt was that people did not take to the streets to support their president,” Cleary said, adding that Caracas and other cities could easily erupt in riots such as those of February, 1989, when the president first announced his economic program.

Up in a hillside rancho, Javier and his older brother, Tony, said that Perez would have been killed if the military had had the good sense to give guns to the people.

“The coup attempt was just another warning to Perez that he better change things or he’s going to get it,” said Tony, squatting in a sun-filled doorway. While expressing fear about such attitudes, many other Venezuelans say that Perez ignores them at his own peril and that of democracy in this country.