Hugo! (48 page)

Despite the violence, the land reform program advanced. By
early 2005 the government had distributed 2.2 million hectares of
idle, state-owned property to 130,000 families. No private property
was expropriated — although a few controversial cases where that was
under study would later arise.
Peter Rosset, co-director of the Institute
for Food and Development Policy think tank in San Francisco and an
expert on land reform programs, singled out Venezuela's initiative as
highly unusual. "Venezuela right now has the only serious governmenta-dministered
land reform in Latin America," he said. "In the United
States, Chávez is often painted as a villain or crazy, but this land reform,
small and incipient as it is, shows that he is much more on the side of
the poor than other presidents in the region."

But as Chávez launched his land reform in November 2001, the opposition
was anything but enamored of it — or anything else he did. They
sensed he was weak, and wanted to go in for the kill. His government
suffered from a lack of experience in governing. Chávez had never held
an elected office before suddenly catapulting to the presidency. Many
of his ministers were newcomers to government, too. Sometimes they
came and went at a dizzying pace. One of the most important ones,
Luis Miquilena, was soon to join the ranks of the departed.

But Chávez's inner circle of advisers still included many of the
other civilian leftists and progressives he met while he was in prison.
Among them was the team of Central University of Venezuela professors
including Jorge Giordani, his planning minister, and Héctor
Navarro, his education minister.

Perhaps the most influential cabinet figure was to become José
Vicente Rangel, the former journalist who served as foreign minister,
defense minister, and eventually vice president. A former presidential
candidate for the leftist party MAS, Rangel shared Chávez's anti-imperialist
outlook, his commitment to overturning Venezuela's corrupt
order, and his desire for a more just society. More a socialist than
a communist, he had won widespread respect as a journalist for his
bare-knuckled reports exposing corruption. He was old enough to be
Chávez's father and turned into a mentor — along, of course, with
Chávez's main guide, Fidel Castro. With Chávez's three old military
comrades in arms now alienated from the administration, his civilian
brain trust took on greater importance: Although the strong-minded
president remained the towering figure, other military men hovered
nearby, and Castro was always just a phone call away.

Chávez was facing a mounting series of
protests and strikes — oil
workers, teachers, steel and aluminum workers, telephone company
employees, doctors and nurses, transportation workers. He had inherited
a staggering $21 billion debt to state workers alone for back wages
and pensions.
Oil prices, after soaring in 1999 and 2000, were on the
decline. By early December 2001 they dropped to $15.30 a barrel. The
2002 budget was based on a price of $18.50.

The attacks on Chávez went beyond legitimate concerns and
debates over his policies, veering into hysteria and a smear campaign.
Democratic Action leaders asked the Supreme Court to appoint a board
of psychiatrists to determine whether Chávez was suffering from "mental
incapacity" so he could be removed from office based on Article 233
of the new constitution. "He's a psychopath," declared AD's secretary
general
Rafael Marin. "Our psychiatrists have compared the psychiatric
profiles of people like Hitler, Mussolini, Idi Amin and Ecuadorean
President Abdalá Bucaram" — the latter of whom was ousted from
office in 1997 on grounds of mental incompetence. The media eagerly
picked up on the theme.
Newsweek
quoted Marin in its infamous article
titled, "Is Hugo Chávez Insane?"

With the demonization of Chávez in full tilt, the Venezuelan opposition
mobilized to attack him in a mass organized way for the first time.
On Monday, December 10, the same day Chávez presided over the ceremony
enacting his land reform law,
Fedecámaras, the nation's most
powerful business group, and the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers
(CTV), its largest union, called a twelve-hour general strike to protest
the forty-nine decrees. They didn't quite paralyze the country, but they
brought large swaths of it to a standstill, aided by business owners who
locked their doors. While shops in poor neighborhoods opened, much
of downtown Caracas and the city's affluent eastern sector were ghost
towns. Newspapers did not circulate. Schools, the stock exchange, malls,
factories, and banks closed. The Francisco Fajardo Highway, normally
packed during rush hour, was mostly empty.

The opposition was ecstatic. They convinced themselves that
Chávez's support had all but vanished. "It's a great success," declared
an ebullient Carlos Fernández, the first vice president of Fedecámaras.
"Everything is completely paralyzed." He claimed 90 percent of the
country shut down. Chávez refused to concede defeat. He rallied supporters
in the Plaza Caracas to celebrate the passage of the agrarian
reform law.

But the opposition had momentum. It was coalescing into a more
cohesive
protest movement. Chávez was at his weakest moment since
assuming the presidency. The conventional wisdom hammered home
by the opposition and the media was that his days were numbered. He
would leave office prematurely — one way or the other. Former COPEI
presidential candidate
Oswaldo álvarez Paz, among many others, was
already calling for military action. "There is no legal solution, so what
can we do?" he said. "In my opinion, military intervention is inevitable."
Euromoney
gushed that "no one in the country can imagine
Chávez staying on for the remainder of his presidential term." It all
sounded eerily reminiscent of the 1954 smoke-and-mirrors campaign
against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala or the 1973
campaign against
Salvador Allende in Chile.

The
St. Petersburg Times
noted that Chávez's new term was due to
expire in February 2007, but "analysts say there's no way he'll survive
that long. Various scenarios for his departure include discontent in the
military and mass civil unrest." The newspaper then quoted the writer
Alberto Garrido: "It all points to Chávez leaving power. How that happens
is daily less important."

The coup against Hugo Chávez began to unfold in early 2002. In
the space of three weeks in February, four ranking
military officials
including a general and a rear admiral publicly attacked the president
and called on him to resign. One labeled him a "tyrant." In one of the
most stunning denunciations,
Rear Admiral Carlos Molina Tamayo
appeared on television in full navy whites, medals across his chest, and
said that if Chávez didn't step down voluntarily, the courts and the legislature
should impeach him.

The officers had a litany of complaints. Chávez was alienating the
United States by cavorting with Colombian rebels and international
outcasts like Saddam Hussein. He was threatening free speech. He
was undermining democracy. He was
distorting the role of the armed
forces by sending soldiers to build schools and distribute food instead of
defending the country's borders.

Chávez and his allies saw other motives for the dissent. One rebel,
air force colonel
Pedro Soto, a former adviser to Carlos Andrés Pérez, had
been passed over for a promotion to general. A report in
The Washington
Post
later alleged that he and Molina Tamayo received $100,000 each
from
Miami bank accounts for denouncing Chávez. Molina Tamayo,
in fact, was already involved in talks with other officers to plot Chávez's
removal from office.

Two days before Soto's dramatic appearance on February 7,
Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed concern about Chávez's
"understanding of what the democratic system is all about . . . We have
not been happy with some of the comments he has made with respect
to the campaign against terrorism . . . And he drops in some of the
strangest countries to visit," Powell said in an apparent reference to Iraq,
Libya, and Cuba. "I'm not sure what inspiration he thinks he gets or
what benefits he gets for the Venezuelan people, dropping in and visiting
some of these despotic regimes."

The next day,
CIA director George Tenet added that he was "particularly
concerned" about events in Venezuela. He predicted the
"
crisis atmosphere is likely to worsen" at a time when Latin America is
becoming "increasingly volatile."

The comments by Powell and Tenet were front-page news in
Venezuela. US officials acknowledged opposition figures they met with
in
Washington, DC, and in Caracas were floating the idea of a coup.
Publicly the officials insisted they condemned the idea. But the opposition
interpreted the comments by Powell, Tenet, and others made in
private differently. As two analysts put it, "They were perceived as coordinated
signals. The opposition felt it had the green light to remove
Chávez from power."

Molina Tamayo certainly felt that way. "We felt we were acting
with US support," he later said. "We agree that we can't permit a communist
government here." Two days after he denounced Chávez, two
staff members of the
International Republican Institute, Michael Ferber
and Elizabeth Winger Echeverri, approached Molina Tamayo in the
Hotel Tamanaco. Their organization, one of four core institutions of
the National Endowment for Democracy, had its own office in Caracas.
The
IRI staffers wanted to talk about "human rights, democracy, their
operation in Washington," Molina Tamayo recalled.

Chávez was under pressure on other fronts. By late January his
closest political adviser, Luis Miquilena, resigned. Miquilena urged
Chávez to negotiate with business and labor leaders and revoke the forty-nine
decrees. Chávez believed there was no turning back. His government
had to make a radical break with the past. Before long Miquilena
was working with the opposition.

Amid a mounting series of street protests by the opposition, Chávez
also faced problems at PDVSA. In February he moved to cement the
plans outlined in his oil decree setting increased royalties, respecting
OPEC quotas, and guaranteeing Venezuela a 51 percent share in joint
ventures with foreign companies. He fired the man he had appointed
fifteen months earlier to run PDVSA,
Brigadier General Guaicaipuro
Lameda. He fired five of the seven members of the
PDVSA board of
directors, too.

Lameda and the old board wanted to continue the Caldera-era
apertura
or opening that called for increasing participation of foreign
oil companies and dramatically boosting production — from 3.3 million
barrels a day in 1997 to 6 million by 2006. Chávez disagreed. He
believed cutting production would raise prices and bring more revenue
to the country. He also believed the
apertura
crowd ultimately wanted
to privatize the company.

As he moved to take control of the company, Chávez lambasted PDVSA
directors for enjoying "obscene salaries that go beyond the imagination"
— pensions of $24,000 a month in a country where most Venezuelan
workers earned $180 a month. He complained of "luxurious chalets" in
the Andes "where they hold bacchanals and where the whisky runs."
Chávez wanted to divert the company's benefits to the majority poor.
"
PDVSA has long been the hen that lays the golden egg," said his foreign
minister, Luis Alfonso Davila. "But today it is eating more than half of
the eggs it is producing."

Chávez replaced Lameda with leftist economist
Gaston Parra, who
pledged to pursue Chávez's oil policy and launch a full investigation of
PDVSA's accounting practices. The new board of directors backed him.

The appointments set off a firestorm. PDVSA executives charged that
Chávez was "politicizing" a model company — undermining its cherished
independence from the government and destroying a decadeslong
tradition of promotions based on merit. By late February a series of
walkouts and work slowdowns began.

The protests were shocking in a country where PDVSA generally
operated like clockwork. To some people, the combination of heightened
tensions at the oil company, military dissidents denouncing the
president, and a media that demonized him at every turn was starting
to feel like the days before the
overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973.
Coup rumors swirled. Blood-red graffiti calling for Chávez's death
popped up on highway walls. Television stations ran nonstop talk programs
lambasting Chávez. Beautiful middle-class women in tight jeans
and blouses showed up at military bases and tossed panties at soldiers.
They implied the men were pansies for failing to stand up to Chávez,
and that it might be worth their time to try.

Turning up the verbal attacks, Caracas mayor Alfredo Peña, a
Chávez-ally-turned-foe, suggested that the president was possessed by
evil spirits. He called for the Catholic Church to perform an exorcism.
"He has demons in his body and is making a hell of everything," Peña
said. "The street is going to take Chávez out. He is an autocrat."

James Petras, a State University of New York at Albany professor who
lived in Chile in the early 1970s, thought he had seen the same scene
before. "The tactics used are very similar to those used in Chile," he
stated that March. "Civilians are used to create a feeling of chaos and a
false picture of Chávez as a dictator is established, then the military is
incited to make a coup for the sake of the country." Venezuela's hostile
media was also reminiscent of Chile's right-wing press during the precoup
period, putting out "poisonous stories questioning Chávez's sanity."

At least one branch of the US government shared Petras's belief that
a coup was brewing: the CIA. On March 11 it issued a top-secret
"Senior
Executive Intelligence Brief" to two hundred top-level US officials,
stating that "the military may move to overthrow him." By April 1 the
CIA said "reporting suggests that disgruntled officers within the military
are still planning a coup, possibly early this month."

Five days later a new brief was titled
"Venezuela: Conditions
Ripening for Coup Attempt." It stated that "dissident military factions,
including some disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical
junior officers, are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against
President Chávez, possibly as early as this month . . . The level of
detail in the reported plans [CENSORED] targets Chávez and 10 other
senior officials for arrest — lends credence to this information, but
military and civilian contacts note that neither group appears ready
to lead a successful coup and may bungle the attempt by moving too
quickly."

The April 6 brief then laid out how the coup might occur. "To
provoke military action, the plotters may try to exploit unrest stemming
from opposition demonstrations slated for later this month or
ongoing strikes at the state-owned oil company PDVSA." But it added
that "prospects for a successful coup at this point are limited. The
plotters lack the political cover to stage a coup, Chávez's core support
base among poor Venezuelans remains intact, and repeated warnings
that the US will not support any extra-constitutional moves to remove
Chávez probably have given pause to the plotters."

The plotters were lacking "the political cover to stage a coup."
They needed a convincing reason to show the world they were justified
in overthrowing a democratically elected president. Some were
working on
finding one. As the
CIA predicted, they would exploit the
unrest at
PDVSA and a strike opposition leaders were planning.

The day before the CIA issued its April 6 brief, the resistance to Chávez
at PDVSA shifted into a more radical phase. Executives and administrative
workers started to shut down the company. Thousands of white-collar
workers stayed home, closed gates to facilities, and slowed gasoline and
oil tanker deliveries. Two out of five main export terminals for crude oil
and refined products were paralyzed.

The next day, the mainly white-collar walkout continued, while
the nation's largest union, the CTV led by Carlos Ortega, announced a
twenty-four-hour
general strike to support the PDVSA protestors. The following
day, Sunday, April 7, the nation's largest chamber of commerce,
Fedecámaras led by
Pedro Carmona, said it was joining the strike, too.
It was a reprise of the December 10 work stoppage — management
and workers banding together. They had cemented their partnership
a month earlier with the blessing of the Catholic Church when they'd
signed a "governability pact" at the Andrés Bello Catholic University in
Caracas. Carmona and Ortega stood on a stage as the head of the Jesuit
university, the Reverend Luis Ugalde, raised their arms into the air as if
they'd both just won a boxing match.

The CTV and Fedecámaras set the strike date for Tuesday, April 9.

But Chávez swung back. That Sunday, April 7, he fired seven executives
who had led the monthlong protests and strikes at PDVSA, and
forced twelve others into retirement. Speaking on his weekly television
program, he pulled out a whistle, blew it, and, imitating a soccer referee,
declared, "Offsides!" Then he announced the firings. He warned
of a "subversive movement in neckties" trying to sabotage his government
and said, "It doesn't bother me if I have to throw the whole lot
of you out." He insisted that politics had been behind PDVSA appointments
for decades, and listed past company presidents who belonged
to the ruling parties of their eras. "PDVSA has always been managed
by a
political elite," he said. "The plan is to return the oil industry to
Venezuelans."

The CTV had a different interpretation of the dismissals. It
responded that Chávez's government had just "committed suicide."

That night Chávez convened his cabinet and military high command
to discuss how to respond to the strike. The government and military
already had a general plan in place to restore public order in moments of
chaos or conflict. Known as
Plan Avila, it called for the military to take
strategic points such as Miraflores presidential palace, Congress, and
the Supreme Court as a dissuasive show of force. That night, Chávez
asked the military commanders including the man in charge of
Plan
Avila, General Manuel Rosendo, if they were prepared to put it into
action if needed. They assured him they were.

The strike kicked off on Tuesday, April 9. Oil workers slowed production
at the crucial Paraguana plant. Newspapers refused to publish.
Television stations preempted regular programming and ran continuous
coverage of the strike. They canceled regular commercials and
ran their own hastily composed, anti-Chávez ads as free "public service
announcements." A string of politicians, businessmen, and analysts
spewed nonstop vitriolic attacks against Chávez. On the bottom
of the screen, some stations ran a slogan: NI UN PASO ATRAS — not one
step back.

Fedecámaras and the CTV declared the strike an outstanding success.
The government disputed their claim and contended that the strike
was mainly an owners' lockout not supported by most workers. Chávez
ordered a series of
cadenas
or mandatory transmissions on television to
give the government's version. They showed workers unloading fruit at
markets or walking in droves into office buildings.

That Tuesday night Ortega and Carmona announced they were
extending the strike another twenty-four hours. Protestors gathered at
PDVSA offices in Chuao, waving Venezuelan flags and chanting "Chávez
Out! Chávez Out!" On the other side of town, Chavistas gathered in
front of Miraflores for a counterprotest. Some camped out overnight to
protect the palace, even bringing tents.

The next day, April 10, the strike started to peter out. Many schools
resumed classes, more businesses opened, traffic increased. But the
television networks kept up their nonstop coverage. Chávez intervened
with
cadenas
to counterbalance the one-way reporting, but this time
the television networks split the screen, showing the president on one
side and scenes of the strike on the other. It was illegal — the president
had the right to convoke
cadenas
— but that didn't stop them.