Rapid-Fire Coup Caught Chavez Foes Off Guard

The president bade farewell to his honor guard, young men armed with semiautomatic rifles who wept because Hugo Chavez was leaving, seemingly forever. The soldiers wanted to fight, to turn the Miraflores palace into a bunker against their enemies, but the president wouldn’t let them.

“Your lives are just beginning,” Chavez said, according to his later account.

At that moment on the night of April 11, it appeared that Chavez’s three-year reign as Venezuela’s strongman president was over. The country’s richest business leaders, its largest labor confederation, its top military men and its most influential media had all joined forces against him. They had Chavez cornered. And he knew it.

Most of the top leaders of the anti-Chavez alliance had talked, at one time or another, to representatives of the United States government. They had met with embassy officials, Pentagon analysts, military attaches and even trade representatives. The Venezuelans left those meetings encouraged. Although the Americans said they wouldn’t approve of a coup, it was clear the most powerful nation on Earth wanted Chavez out too.

Chavez left the palace and a short while later was in the custody of his generals and admirals. For months they had worked to drive him from office, but a surprising series of events--including the shooting of anti-Chavez protesters--had brought the president down so quickly that few of the movement’s leaders had a firm idea of what should happen next.

Interviews with opposition leaders and U.S. officials make clear that the campaign to oust Chavez was centered almost entirely in Caracas, the capital, among Venezuelans who had grown tired of the president’s heavy-handed rule. But key chapters also took place in Washington and in the Caracas offices of the U.S. military attache.

Slightly more than two days after he was driven from office, Hugo Chavez staged the most lightning-fast political resurrection in modern Latin American history. He triumphantly returned to Miraflores palace, embraced by his honor guard and by some of the thousands of people who had come to greet him.

“I knew there would be a reaction,” Chavez would tell reporters the day after his reinstatement. “What surprised me was the speed and efficiency of the response.”

U.S. Official Met With Anti-Chavez Forces

Chavez’s return was a vindication for his most devoted supporters, the poor of Caracas’ hillside slums, who see him as a symbol of hope despite his abundant quirks and flaws. It was also an embarrassment for the Bush administration and its point man in the region, a Cuban American who has never tried to hide his dislike for Chavez, Fidel Castro’s most ardent ally in the Western Hemisphere.

In the months before the coup, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Otto J. Reich met with several influential figures in Venezuela, the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter and a key U.S. supplier, according to American officials and dissidents in the country.

Reich met in February with a key figure in Chavez’s fall, Carlos Ortega, head of Venezuela’s largest labor confederation and the man who called a general strike that catalyzed the opposition.

“He said, ‘The United States is not going to recognize a de facto government, or a government that comes [to power] via a coup,’ ” Ortega recalled in an interview Saturday. “That was their position.”

Nevertheless, after the uprising put business leader Pedro Carmona in power April 12, the White House blamed Chavez for the crisis and gave tacit backing to Carmona’s government. Carmona swore himself in as president--without any apparent legal authority to do so--and dissolved a democratically elected legislature.

“The administration should have laid low for at least 48 hours,” said one Bush administration advisor. But its “glandular reaction,” the official said, “was too much to hold back.”

A Deluge of Rumors and Conspiracy Theories

In the days after Chavez’s return to power, Caracas was awash in rumors, all claiming to be the real story behind why the uprising succeeded and why it failed just as quickly.

The small band of reporters who cover the Venezuelan military exchanged stories about blond men, perhaps Americans, seen walking alongside the rebellious officers during the uprising (a story later dismissed by at least one leader of the coup).

There were rumors, too, about Cuban attempts to intervene in the crisis--later confirmed, to some extent, by Castro himself. (The Cuban leader said his government contacted the ambassadors of 21 countries in an attempt to get a plane to Venezuela to rescue Chavez.)

In Caracas, one journalist placed oil interests at the center of the coup and its most disastrous missteps, naming the 32-year-old scion of a Venezuelan oil family as its behind-the-scenes mastermind.

And finally, there was the most fantastic conspiracy theory of all: that Chavez, in a Machiavellian masterstroke, had somehow staged the coup and his own arrest to ferret out his opponents.

That rumor, like most of the others, did contain at least one small grain of truth: There is little doubt that Chavez himself, and his deep reservoirs of charisma and cunning, shaped the final outcome of the conflict.

All the conspiracy theories, however, gloss over a central, undeniable fact: that the struggle over Chavez’s presidency was really about the divisions in Venezuelan society, fissures of race and class that have only been heightened by the failed coup.

“The people wanted their loco back,” said a hotel bellman in central Caracas, beaming the day after Chavez returned. “They wanted to see him back on his horse, in the saddle. And there he is.”

From Coup Plotter to Coup Target

Hugo Chavez 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,” named for Simon Bolivar, the 19th century father of Venezuelan independence. The young officers were nationalists angered by the corrupt, two-party system that had dominated their country for generations.

Their restlessness only grew as Venezuela sank deep into an economic crisis. In 1989, hundreds of people were killed in a Caracas riot against the austerity measures taken by then-President Carlos Andres Perez. Three years later, Chavez led a military coup against Perez’s government.

Lt. Col. Chavez and his red-beret paratroopers traveled from their base in provincial Maracay and surrounded the presidential palace. But the coup quickly collapsed. Before surrendering, Chavez took to the airwaves, explained the reasons for his uprising and announced that he would give up the struggle against corruption only “for now.”

The speech helped make Chavez a cult hero to many Venezuelans. After two years in prison, he was freed and traveled the country making more speeches, then forged an alliance with leftist and other politicians. He was elected president in a landslide in 1998.

“He had all this popularity; he had the time to change things with people accepting whatever he said,” said Eric Ekvall, a political consultant here. “People really wanted a change from all the corruption.”

Once in power, Chavez proceeded to reshape Venezuelan political life. The constitution was rewritten and the country renamed “the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.” Elections were quickly held for a new, unicameral legislature, bringing a pro-Chavez majority to power. All the members of the new Supreme Court were selected by pro-Chavez legislators and officials.

But there was little serious economic reform. Despite a rhetoric that borrowed heavily from Marxist ideology, Chavez did not nationalize any businesses, or do much to better the lot of the overwhelming number of Venezuelans who are poor. When the country slid into a recession last year, Chavez slashed government spending, following the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund.

Venezuelans came to know Chavez for his repeated television appearances, monologues that could last for hours. He might launch an attack on an opposition journalist or the “oligarchs” who controlled the nation’s economy. Sometimes, he would make funny references to his family life. One Valentine’s Day, he looked into the camera and said to his wife, in a seductive voice, “Marisabel, you’re going to get yours tonight.”

Abroad, Chavez cast himself as an anti-imperialist. He sold oil to Cuba at bargain-basement prices and, in August 2000, became the first foreign head of state to travel to Iraq and meet with President Saddam Hussein since the Persian Gulf War. Some have accused him of offering support to guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.

None of this sat well with the generals and admirals who run Venezuela’s armed forces, many of whom trained in the United States and have friendships with American colleagues.

Berenice Gomez, who covers the military for the Caracas daily Ultimas Noticias, said military discontent with Chavez was obvious almost from the moment he took power.

“At first, they would just leak stories to us” about Chavez using military facilities for political purposes, and other minor scandals, Gomez said. They would complain about Chavez making their soldiers work on social projects such as road repair.

“The generals would say, ‘My job is to defend the fatherland. It isn’t to clean the streets,’ ” Gomez said.

By June 2001, the generals and admirals had begun to meet to consider how Chavez could be forced out of office, according to interviews with dissident officers.

“I realized I had to make a decision and act like a patriotic Venezuelan,” Rear Adm. Carlos Molina Tamayo said in an interview last week. Molina said he had come to believe Chavez was a “Communist.”

The efforts of the anti-Chavez generals and admirals quickly became known to U.S. officials.

“They [would] also come to us and say, ‘We don’t want your approval, we just want you to know,’ ” said one U.S. official. “Our policy has been, we don’t even want to know.”

About the same time, Chavez’s government was beginning to butt heads with Washington over the U.S. military mission that occupies a small building on the sprawling Fuerte Tiuna military base, Venezuela’s Pentagon.

In August, the Venezuelan armed forces announced that the mission would be shut down. The government said it needed the office space, but observers here took it as a clear sign that Chavez wanted to distance his generals from their American allies.

Discontent with Chavez was building among other groups as well. The middle-class intellectuals and professionals who had at first delighted in Chavez’s talk of restoring “national honor” watched in dismay as Chavez’s supporters formed “Bolivarian circles,” muscle groups that intimidated government opponents with threats of physical harm.

“For the last year or so, [Chavez] has essentially thumbed his nose at this growing opposition,” said Ekvall, the political consultant. “It has become increasingly clear to the opposition that he’s not going to change.”

Over the course of several months, U.S. officials met with representatives of nearly every sector of the growing anti-Chavez coalition, according to U.S. government sources.

Miguel Enrique Otero, executive director of the Caracas daily El Nacional and a Chavez opponent, had “informal conversations” with U.S. government officials in Washington in November. When the subject of Chavez’s ouster came up, “they always said it had to be constitutional,” he said.

But another Venezuelan leader who visited Washington for an official meeting said he concluded after talks with U.S. officials that the Americans would not necessarily punish the leaders of a government that overthrew Chavez.

This civic leader, who asked to remain unidentified, said he was struck by the fact that U.S. officials have publicly and repeatedly expressed their opposition to Chavez. The civic leader noticed that the new Bush administration team on Latin America included a number of Cuban Americans such as Otto Reich.

‘Careless’ Conversations With U.S. Officials

Some career officials in the U.S. government have told congressional aides that American officials in numerous agencies were talking to Venezuelan opposition figures--and that some of the conversations were “careless.” It was feared that they did not emphasize as strongly as they should have the U.S. opposition to a coup, the aides said.

One high-ranking Bush administration advisor added that he believed Washington did not do enough to discourage the idea that the U.S. would support an anti-Chavez coup.

By November, communications between U.S. officials and dissident officers had grown so frequent that then-U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Donna J. Hrinak took the unusual step of asking the American military attache to cease contacts with the dissidents, according to a report first published in the Washington Post and later confirmed by U.S. diplomats.

About the same time, Gen. Lucas Romero Rincon, the Venezuelan army chief of staff, was traveling to Washington where he met with a Pentagon policy aide and discussed the possibility of a change of government, U.S. officials said. Today, Rincon professes loyalty to Chavez.

A one-day national strike paralyzed the country on Dec. 10, and major protests swept the streets in January and February.

By then, with Venezuela’s economic crisis growing and Chavez’s approval rating plummeting to about 30%, the long-simmering resentment in the military had finally become public.

“President Chavez, for the good of the country and for the love of the armed forces, resign peacefully and take responsibility for your failure,” said Air Force Gen. Roman Gomez Ruiz, one of four officers who were the first to publicly air their criticism of Chavez.

Chavez made it clear that he would brook no dissent--he called the officers traitors, threw some into custody for a few days, and forced all to quit the armed forces.

Dispute at Oil Firm Galvanizes Chavez Foes

The dissident military leaders, and other opposition figures, increased their efforts to seek outside help.

“Several weeks before, a lot of these guys came to talk to Otto [Reich], asking what can the U.S. do,” the high-ranking Bush administration advisor said. “I believe Otto when he says he didn’t give them a green light [for a coup] and didn’t wink. But what he didn’t say was more important than what he did.”

Events in Venezuela began to move quickly, accelerated by a dispute at the government-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela. In February, Chavez fired company President Guaicaipuro Lameda, a retired general, and replaced him with a former Communist Party militant.

Lameda would soon join the long list of Venezuelan dissidents who spoke with U.S. officials.

The oil dispute proved to be the catalyst that united all the anti-Chavez forces. In protest against Chavez’s actions, officials and workers at the company launched a production slowdown.

Ortega, the labor leader, joined forces with Carmona, head of Venezuela’s largest business federation, to call an “indefinite general strike” in support of the oil workers.

On Thursday, April 11, the third day of the strike, about 200,000 people marched in Caracas, calling on Chavez to resign.

The march began peacefully but degenerated into violence, with protesters clashing with police. At some point, people near the front of the march decided to change the route and head for the presidential palace.

“I don’t think there was any intention of a coup,” Ortega said.

A block or so from the palace, as the marchers approached an overpass, shooting erupted. Snipers were spotted on rooftops. Video captured by a Venezuelan television crew shows a group of Chavez supporters standing on the overpass, opening fire with handguns.

In all, 15 people were killed. Chavez blocked TV coverage of the violence, but the “massacre,” as Chavez opponents soon called it, had already given the military high command the moral authority it needed to break with the president once and for all.

“If the armed forces hadn’t intervened, the massacre would have been worse,” Ortega said.

At the palace, Chavez sent his military chief of staff, Rincon, to talk with the military officers who had gathered at Fuerte Tiuna to demand his ouster. Rincon called back with “bad news.”

“They’re fighting among themselves,” Rincon said, according to Chavez’s later account. “And they insist that you resign.”

Chavez said he told Rincon by telephone that he would “abandon” his job as president. He then left the palace to negotiate the terms under which he would do so. Rincon took to the airwaves to announce a short while later that Chavez had resigned.

According to press reports here, one of the military leaders gathered at Fuerte Tiuna then called Carmona, the mild-mannered business leader, who was meeting with other opposition leaders at a Caracas television station.

Carmona quietly left the meeting without telling his allies what they would find out a few hours later--he was about to become Venezuela’s next president.

Military Refused to Let Chavez Leave Venezuela

Late Thursday and early Friday morning, the military leaders meeting with Chavez made the first of several missteps that would lead to Chavez’s return: They refused to allow the president to leave the country, his principal condition for submitting his resignation.

Hard-liners argued that Chavez should be prosecuted for the killings outside the palace, according to press reports here. But Chavez’s refusal to sign any resignation letter placed the military in an awkward position. They were holding in custody the man who was still, legally, their commander in chief.

“I told them there was no way I would sign the letter, no matter how much they pressured me,” Chavez would say later. “I told them I was a prisoner president.”

Over the next 48 hours, Chavez’s refusal to formally resign--as he had suggested Thursday he would do--would tear apart the coalition against him.

Carmona, the interim president, further divided the coalition with a series of controversial decrees, all drafted in private by a small circle of aides.

Interim Leader Was ‘Placed in a Trap’

According to columnist Patricia Poleo of the Caracas daily El Nuevo Pais, one man played a manipulative role in the decrees: Isaac Perez Recao, 32, whose family owns a controlling stake in the petrochemical company Venoco. The same company has also employed Carmona.

In Washington, too, there was concern. A close advisor to the Bush administration said it appeared that anti-Chavez hard-liners, including Perez Recao, were telling Carmona what to do. When the military realized this, the advisor added, “they looked at it and said, ‘We’ve lost control.’ ”

Inside Miraflores palace, several members of the anti-Chavez coalition felt they were being aced out of power by Carmona.

“The impression I had was of a group of people standing around this enormous cake, each one of them rubbing their hands,” said Miguel Angel Castillo, an attorney for one of the anti-Chavez military officers. “They were all wondering how big of a piece they were going to get.”

Carmona had named a government that included several members of the ultraconservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei but not key military and labor members of the coalition. Even worse, he had decreed the dissolution of the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and the dismissal of every mayor and governor.

“Carmona was really placed in a trap,” said Anibal Romero, a political science professor here. “He couldn’t leave the National Assembly in power and govern the country, because it was full of Chavez supporters. But if he dissolved it, he would be declared anti-democratic.”

In the eyes of many in Venezuela and abroad, the popular uprising against Chavez had given birth to a right-wing dictatorship. International condemnation--from the governments of Mexico, Argentina and other nations--was not long in coming.

On Saturday morning, April 13, recently appointed U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro met with Carmona. The State Department’s Reich had instructed Shapiro to “warn” Carmona that if he did not reinstate the National Assembly, “they would be in violation of their own constitution.”

But Carmona “chose not to accept what he called our suggestions,” a senior Bush administration official said.

U.S. Ambassador’s Remarks in Dispute

Carmona has a different version of the events. He told the Guardian of London newspaper that the U.S. ambassador offered no guidance on whether he should reinstate the legislature.

“He didn’t say yes or no,” Carmona said when asked if Shapiro had made such a statement. “It was just a normal conversation.”

As the U.S. ambassador left the palace, a crowd of Chavez supporters was beginning to gather outside. Members of Chavez’s family, and his deposed vice president, had been calling radio and television stations to say the president had not resigned.

By Saturday afternoon, a large crowd had also started to form outside Fuerte Tiuna, where it was rumored that Chavez was being held. Two tanks guarded the entrance. “Why did they organize this coup against the people?” asked Juan Manriquez, a bus driver. Multitudes of Chavez die-hards across Venezuela were asking the same question.

Caracas slum-dwellers took portraits of Chavez from their homes and carried them about the city, as if the images of their leader possessed the power to bring him back from political death.

“The rich are trying, again, to take away our hope,” Manriquez said.

Soon, looting and rioting broke out in several corners of Caracas, unrest that was almost completely ignored by the nation’s anti-Chavez television stations. Reports of fatalities ranged from nine to 30, including a policeman. Despite the news blackout, word spread of a major crack in the military’s support for the new government: The general in command of Chavez’s former paratroop unit declared himself in rebellion against Carmona.

Having gathered inside the presidential palace for a swearing-in ceremony, the men and women who were to be the country’s new Cabinet ministers fled in panic when a rumor spread that pro-Chavez planes were about to bomb the building. One of them left behind a presidential sash, ordered long ago from Spain and made with an adjustable strap, to fit any candidate.

Chavez fever soon spread through the high command. Within hours, “the prisoner president” was a free man, word of the events in Caracas having reached the soldiers and officers who were holding him captive at an island military compound--the last of five different sites where he had been held.

The president boarded a helicopter and returned triumphant to the Miraflores palace just after 3 a.m., Sunday, April 14, where he was embraced by many of the thousands massed outside.

Today, Venezuela remains convulsed by the events that began April 11. There are plans for a truth commission to sort out who ordered the shooting of the anti-Chavez protesters. Dozens of military officers and civilians, including Carmona, remain under arrest.

Labor leaders announced Saturday that they will go ahead with a massive May Day march that may once again bring thousands of anti-Chavez protesters to the center of Caracas.

“If we as Venezuelans don’t come together, then, sadly, painfully, inevitably we will travel down a path of a civil war,” said labor leader Ortega, who spent days on the run after the failed coup in the face of death threats. “And I believe that a great majority of Venezuelans don’t want this.”

*

Tobar and McDonnell reported from Caracas and Richter from Washington. Times staff writer Doyle McManus in Washington and special correspondent Christopher Toothaker in Caracas contributed to this report.

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Turning Points

1992: Lt. Col. Hugo Chavez joins military rebellion against President Carlos Andres Perez. It fails and Chavez is arrested.

1994: Chavez is released from custody. He launches a political movement opposed to the country’s two dominant political parties.

1998: Chavez is elected president.

Dec. 1999: Chavez and his backers write a new constitution. The nation is renamed “the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”

Dec. 2001: First one-day general strike of labor and business leaders against Chavez.

Feb. 8, 2002: High-ranking military officers publicly call on Chavez to resign.

Feb. 9: Gen. Guaicaipuro Lameda, head of state oil company, is replaced after criticizing Chavez.

March: Chavez threatens to send in troops against workers and executives at state oil company who are staging a production slowdown.

Tuesday, April 9: Labor and business leaders launch general strike against Chavez.

Thursday, April 11: Hundreds of thousands of people join march in support of general strike.

Thursday afternoon: Gunmen open fire on marchers, killing several people. Chavez orders private television stations off air.

Thursday evening: Top military officials denounce Chavez; he negotiates resignation.

Friday, April 12: Before dawn, Gen. Luis Rincon announces that Chavez has stepped down. Later that day, Chavez is in custody. Military and civilian leaders appoint business leader Pedro Carmona head of provisional government.

Saturday morning, April 13: U.S. ambassador meets with Carmona. Chavez’s vice president, Diosdado Cabello, in hiding, says in phone interviews that Chavez has not resigned.

Saturday afternoon: Pro-Chavez crowd surrounds presidential palace. Rioting breaks out in Caracas, the captial. Air force officer announces he will not back Carmona. Newly appointed ministers of Carmona government flee palace.

Saturday evening: Chavez supporters take over palace. Cabello is sworn in as interim president.

Sunday, April 14, 3 a.m.: Released by his military captors, Chavez retakes power.