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Chavez back...for now Abortive Venezuelan coup was made in the USA
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Chavez back...for now
Abortive Venezuelan coup was made in the USA
By Bill Vann
15 April 2002
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The abortive attempt to overthrow Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has all the
earmarks of a military coup made in the USA.
Chavez was reinstalled in the presidential palace April 14, two days after being
abducted by elements of the military and replaced by a “consultative junta” nominally
headed by the chief of the country’s big business association, Pedro Carmona
Estanga. How long Chavez will remain in power before his political enemies, backed
by Washington, make their next attempt remains to be seen.
Twice elected by the largest margins in the South American country’s history,
Chavez, himself a former paratrooper who led a failed coup attempt in 1992, was
removed from office in the midst of a general strike jointly organized by the country’s
business establishment and the corrupt, corporatist bureaucracy of the
Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV).
The Bush administration lost little time in hailing the coup. White House spokesman
Ari Fleisher predicted “the situation will be one of tranquility and democracy”
following
the seizure of power by military commanders. Washington’s reaction stood in sharp
contrast to that of Mexico and several other Latin American governments, which
denounced the coup as an illegal overthrow of an elected government.
The White House, together with the US media and the Venezuelan establishment,
justified the coup as a response to violent clashes that occurred during the general
strike and mass demonstration jointly organized by Venezuelan big business and the
union bureaucrats. Approximately 16 people were killed April 11 as pro- and anti-
government demonstrators clashed in the streets near the Miraflores presidential
palace.
Who started the shooting, and why, remains unclear. The march, which began in the
wealthier neighborhoods of Caracas’s east side, picked up strength as it approached
the palace, with an estimated 50,000 joining the protesters. Tens of thousands of
Chavez’s supporters, meanwhile, sought to block the demonstrators from reaching
their goal.
Several of the people killed were among those defending the palace, including the
driver of Chavez’s vice president, Diosdado Cabello.
Witnesses attributed the deaths to an exchange of fire between the Presidential
Guard and elements of the Metropolitan Police, loyal to Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña,
a Chavez opponent whom Washington has openly groomed to take on the president,
inviting him to meetings with the State Department and the International Monetary
Fund.
The Venezuelan establishment, senior military officials, the media and the US State
Department all seized on the deaths to proclaim that Chavez had ordered a
“massacre,” violating the constitution and justifying his ouster.
Calling the shooting of demonstrators an “assault” on society, General Efrian
Vazquez declared that the overthrow of Chavez was “not a coup.” He called it a
“position of solidarity with the entire Venezuelan people.”
Admiral Hector Ramirez, the chief of the Venezuelan navy, read a statement on the
CNN news network declaring: “We cannot accept a tyrant in the presidency. His
remaining threatens the country with disintegration. We direct military personnel of
all
ranks to join forces with us and make a new Venezuela a reality.”
Among those yelling the loudest about the shootings was Carlos Andres Perez, the
former president of the Democratic Action Party, together with his supporters, both
civilian and military. There is no small irony in this, given that the Perez government
was responsible for the bloody suppression of the so-called Caracazo, when troops
massacred at least 1,000 workers, youth and poor who came down from the
“cerros,” or hilltop shantytowns, and took to the streets of the Venezuelan capital in
1989 to protest against a drastic economic austerity plan demanded by the IMF.
Perez, who drowned the protest of Venezuela’s oppressed in blood, denounced
Chavez for using violence and accused him of “dividing the country between the rich
and the poor.”
How this division was to be corrected became clear during the 48 hours when
Chavez was held incommunicado on an island off the Venezuelan coast. The newly
installed military-backed regime of the businessmen’s leader Carmona moved swiftly
to wipe out any trace of the limited social reforms implemented by the Chavez
government since it was first elected in 1998—land reforms and the affirming of
universal rights to health care and education, for example. Assuming dictatorial
powers, Carmona dismissed Venezuela’s national legislature, sacked the country’s
Supreme Court, abolished its constitution and announced that he would fire
governors and municipal leaders as he saw fit.
Meanwhile, the same military that had expressed horror over the shootings at the
anti- Chavez demonstrations unleashed troops against people who took to the
streets in protests and looting, largely in the poorer, western part of the city. The
death toll among those demonstrating against the coup is still not known, but
observers in Caracas report dozens of bodies brought to local hospitals, and
hundreds of wounded.
At the same time, the junta launched a manhunt for Chavez supporters, both
government officials and left-nationalist activists who had formed “Bolivarian Defense
Committees” in recent months, as it became increasingly clear that a coup was likely.
Some took refuge in the Cuban embassy, which was quickly surrounded by a mob of
several hundred anti-Chavez activists. Electricity and water to the building were cut
off as the crowd, backed by security forces, threatened to storm it.
Carmona ordered officials dismissed by Chavez from the state oil company, PDVSA,
restored to their posts and sacked those whom the president appointed. The change
in management in this key sector of the economy was the issue that provoked the
strike organized jointly by the CTV bureaucracy and the business establishment.
Among those restored to their posts was General Guaicaipuro Lameda, one of the
first military officers to publicly denounce Chavez. Edgar Paredes, restored as
PDVSA’s manager of Supply, Refining and Commercialization, told the media, “Not
one barrel of petroleum will go to Cuba.” He was referring to the Chavez
government’s agreement to supply Havana with 53,000 barrels of crude oil daily
under a favorable payment plan.
Venezuela’s oil lies at the heart of these tumultuous events. Not only was
Washington anxious to cut off the supply of petroleum to the Castro regime, thereby
tightening its 40-year old economic blockade, it also wanted to sever the relations
that Chavez had established with OPEC, especially with those OPEC members
whom the US has sought to turn into international pariahs—Iraq, Iran and Libya.
Venezuela is the third-largest supplier of petroleum to the United States, accounting
for 15 percent of the US supply. It had played a substantial role in reinvigorating
OPEC in recent years, resulting in a rise in oil prices. Traditionally, the US relied
on
Venezuela to act as an OPEC quota-buster, helping to keep oil prices low.
Major US oil companies had also targeted Chavez as an enemy because of his
resistance to the privatization of the state-owned oil sector.
Finally, the Venezuelan president earned Washington’s wrath by refusing to allow the
over- flight of US warplanes used in the growing military intervention in neighboring
Colombia, and by denouncing the US bombing of Afghanistan.
The coup against Chavez had been long in preparation. Last November, the State
Department, Pentagon and National Security Agency held a joint conference to
discuss “the problem of Venezuela,” and shortly thereafter Washington announced
that it would “put Venezuela in diplomatic isolation.”
Pressure from the Bush administration was supplemented by an open destabilization
campaign by the IMF and the major banks and finance houses, which sounded dire
warnings that Venezuela’s economy was headed for disaster. For its part, the IMF
announced that it would be happy to provide new loans to a “transitional
government,” virtually calling for the overthrow of Chavez.
At the end of February, Washington sent a new ambassador to Colombia. Charles S.
Shapiro had served as the political officer at the US Embassy in El Salvador at the
height of the US- backed dirty war in that Central American country. The post is
frequently used as a diplomatic cover for the chief local operative of the CIA. At that
time the CIA was coordinating the activities of right-wing death squads that killed
thousands of Salvadorans during the country’s civil war.
Most recently, Shapiro was the director of the Office of Cuban Affairs, coordinating
US economic sanctions as well as political and military provocations against the
Castro regime.
The apparently successful coup against Chavez quickly unraveled in the face of
mass protests and the fact that the military’s unanimity was more apparent than real.
Key units balked at the overthrow and more joined them as Carmona announced his
sweeping measures.
Given that the senior commanders had justified overthrowing the president by
proclaiming they could not stomach firing on the people, unleashing a bloodbath
against popular demonstrations against the coup became somewhat problematic.
For his part, Chavez sounded a conciliatory note as he walked back into the
presidential palace. “I do not come with hate or rancor in my heart,” he said, while
appealing for calm.
In the end, the military is Chavez’s primary constituency. Twice the Venezuelan
people elected him—a manifestation of universal disgust with the corrupt parties of
the ruling elite, Democratic Action and the Christian Democratic COPEI, which had
alternated in power for four decades while 80 percent of the people remained in
poverty. But Chavez has rested heavily on sections of the armed forces to run his
government, and it will be the vote of the general staff that ultimately decides the
fate
of his regime.
While left-nationalists in Venezuela and in Latin America generally have sought to
lionize Chavez, presenting his “Bolivarian revolution” as a new road to liberation, the
limited social measures undertaken by the ex-paratrooper’s regime have done little
to ameliorate the desperate conditions facing the masses, or to pry loose the grip of
Venezuela’s oligarchies over the country’s wealth.
In the end, his populist demagogy, like his friendship with Fidel Castro, differs
little
from that of a long line of “left” military rulers—General J.J. Torres in Bolivia,
General
Velasco Alvarado in Peru, General Rodriguez Lara in Ecuador, or General Omar
Torrijos in Panama—all of whose regimes served only to disorient the masses of
workers and peasants and pave the way for right-wing and repressive regimes.
The history of US-backed military coups in Latin America is replete with false starts,
like this past weekend’s events in Caracas. An armed uprising that failed preceded
the September 1973 military coup that brought down the Popular Unity government
of Salvador Allende and inaugurated General Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror
against the Chilean working class. That abortive action, just like the recent move
against Chavez, showed how vulnerable the government was to a coup. It also
provided a dress rehearsal for a real confrontation with the masses and allowed the
principal figures in the military to determine which units could be relied upon and
which could not.
The crisis in Venezuela is not over, and the abortive coup is by no means an isolated
event. Despite having been discredited by the mass murder and torture carried out
by military dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, the
military has maintained immense power throughout the continent by virtue of its
control over the lion’s share of public sector budgets and because of the discrediting
of the bourgeois political parties. Any genuine settling of accounts with the crimes
committed by the Pinochets, Videlas and Banzers during the “dirty wars” against the
working class was prevented through a series of “punto final” laws that granted
blanket amnesties to the uniformed torturers and assassins.
Under conditions of immense social polarization, faced with the demands of the IMF
and the foreign banks for ever more drastic austerity measures, the unstable civilian
political superstructures in country after country are proving incapable of containing
the class struggle. In the last two years alone, nearly half of South America’s heads
of state have fallen by extra-constitutional means, including Fernando de la Rua in
Argentina, Jamil Mahuad in Ecuador and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori—all forced out in
the midst of intense economic and political crisis.
These social and class contradictions are joined by Washington’s increasing resort
to militarism to further the profit interests of the US-based multinationals that
operate
in Latin America. One prominent example is the Bush administration’s proposal to
turn what ostensibly began as a “war on drugs” in Colombia into an open
counterinsurgency campaign, linked to asserting tighter US control over US oil
companies’ pipelines and oilfields.
The events in Venezuela indicate that the past period of civilian rule in Latin America
will prove a historical interlude, giving way to a new eruption of revolution and
counterrevolution.
Copyright 1998-2002
World Socialist Web Site
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