Hugo! (57 page)

They landed without incident, though, and to their surprise one
of the first people they saw was a priest: Cardinal José Ignacio Velasco.
The archbishop of Caracas had come to La Orchila in a last-ditch effort
to persuade Chávez to sign the resignation letter. Another coup leader
was with him, Colonel Julio Rodríguez Salas. Chávez spent several
hours on the island with the archbishop. According to the president's
account, they sat on the beach together, prayed, looked at the stars, and
even held hands for a time. Chávez asked for forgiveness and spoke of
the need for all sectors of society to work together. He had no idea a
rescue team was on the way.

When Uzcátegui and the others arrived, Chávez was stunned. They
embraced. Many of the rescuers cried. The doctor examined Chávez to
make sure he was not injured. The lawyer read a prepared statement
declaring that with his relocation Chávez was once again legally the
president. Then the helicopters took off for Caracas. Chávez said little
during the flight. He was exhausted. His head was spinning. He needed
time to think.

As they entered the airspace over Caracas, he saw columns of smoke
rising out of Catia and other barrios. He asked what was going on. He was
worried the city was erupting the way Bogotá had in 1948 when the popular
political leader
Jorge Gaitán was assassinated, setting off bloody riots
that later led to a civil war that still raged. In Caracas, thousands of angry
Chávez supporters were looting stores, some of which were on fire.

Outside
Miraflores Palace the throng had stayed through the
night, waiting for Chávez. Word spread that he was in La Orchila, but
was coming back. When a light appeared in the night sky, the crowd
exploded with joy. As the helicopter hovered in the air and its spotlight
broke through the fog, it seemed like a surreal scene out of a Pink
Floyd concert. The crowd sang, "He's back! He's back!" People hugged
and cried and danced. The aircraft touched down at 2:45 A.M. Chávez
climbed out wearing a blue windbreaker and tennis sneakers. He looked
tired but elated. A throng of soldiers and allies swarmed around him
as he walked off the heliport landing pad and down a set of stairs that
led to the palace grounds, now packed with his supporters. He smiled
broadly and held his left fist in the air. The crowd went crazy. They
shouted. They sang. They prayed. Some fainted. They were delirious.
It was as if Chávez had risen from the dead. "Jesus rose on the third
day, and Chávez rose in two," one Caracas resident remarked. "They
thought they could kill him, but they could not."

An hour after he landed Chávez gave a nationally broadcast speech
from the palace. The country had seen three presidents in two days. For
forty-seven hours, millions of people did not know where Chávez was or
even if he was alive. "To God what is God's, to Caesar what is Caesar's,
and to the people what is the people's," were his first words. He was still
stunned by the turn of events, still trying to assimilate it all. He was
shaken, but confident. "I was certain, absolutely certain, that we would
return," Chávez said. "I just didn't think it would be so soon."

Within hours of Chávez's return to the presidency, the United States
was lecturing him. Appearing on NBC's Sunday morning news program
Meet the Press
, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice issued
a warning about respecting democratic norms. Remarkably, it was aimed
not at Carmona, but Chávez. "I hope that Hugo Chávez takes the message
that his people sent him that his own policies are not working for
the Venezuelan people," Rice said. "He needs to respect constitutional
processes . . . We do hope that Chávez recognizes that the whole world
is watching and that he takes advantage of this opportunity to right his
own ship, which has been moving, frankly, in the wrong direction for
quite a long time."

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer followed with comments of
his own. "The people of Venezuela have sent a clear message to President
Chávez that they want both democracy and reform," he said. "The
Chávez administration has an opportunity to respond to this message
by correcting its course and governing in a fully democratic manner."
President Bush weighed in four days later, admonishing Chávez for
interfering with Venezuela's "free press" when he cut off television transmissions
of the violence on April 11. "When things got hot in Venezuela,
he shut the press down," Bush said. "I've always believed in a free press. I
don't care how tough the questions are or, as significantly, how they editorialize
in their news stories. But nevertheless — because I respect the
press, and so should President Chávez."

The United States was almost alone in the world in all but openly
endorsing the coup. Yet Chávez initially was careful of accusing it of
any role in his ouster. Speaking to the nation on Monday, April 15, he
appeared to give the United States the benefit of the doubt regarding
their multiple accusations that he ordered the killings outside Miraflores
Palace and wrought his own downfall. "I think they were victims of misinformation,"
he said. His position shifted within a month, when he
told
The Washington Post
that "worrying details" were emerging that a
foreign hand may have played a role in the coup. The details consisted
mainly of radar detection of US ships, airplanes, and helicopters operating
in and over Venezuelan territory during the coup. As time passed
and relations deteriorated, Chávez openly accused the United States of
assisting in his overthrow. The United States dismissed the reports. It
said its military was off Venezuela's coast for routine exercises.

The public US bumbling of Chávez's overthrow provoked a storm
of criticism that ricocheted around a continent still leery of US intervention.
Many analysts blamed two of the old Iran-contra figures for
the policy debacle: Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams, head of Democracy,
Human Rights and International Organizations at the National Security
Council. Democratic senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut
quipped that Reich required "more adult supervision."

Reich shot back that the administration had nothing to regret.
"Apologies for what?" he said. The government's statements about
Chávez resigning and ordering the killing of marchers "reflected the
best information that we had at the time." At Dodd's request, the State
Department conducted an internal review of US government and
National Endowment for Democracy actions related to the coup. It
found that while the
NED, the Department of Defense, and other US
agencies provided assistance to organizations and individuals involved
in the coup, there was no evidence the support "directly contributed to
or was intended to contribute" to the the putsch.

While the State Department cleared itself of intentional wrongdoing,
it was not without casualties. By late November, Reich was forced
out of his position as the top official for Latin America. In a sudden job
reshuffling, he became a special adviser to Secretary of State Colin
Powell for Latin American affairs. Officials asked him to move out of
his spacious sixth-floor State Department office.

Back in April, less than a week after the coup,
The New York Times
had broken the story that the United States was pumping hundreds of
thousands of dollars into Venezuela through the National Endowment
for Democracy. It reported that in the year leading up to the coup, the
NED nearly quadrupled its funding in Venezuela, to $877,000. Some
of the money went to Carlos Ortega's CTV, the labor organization
whose protests helped lead to Chávez's ouster.

After the
Times
's article appeared, Long Island lawyer Eva Golinger
and Washington, DC, investigative reporter Jeremy Bigwood filed
Freedom of Information Act requests for thousands of documents
detailing the work of the NED, USAID, and other US agencies in
Venezuela. The requests revealed that much of the NED's money was
going to opposition groups, including some whose leaders backed the
coup or were named ministers in Carmona's cabinet. In the aftermath
of the putsch, the State Department also issued a special
$1 million
grant to the NED on top of its regular budget for Venezuela.

In August 2002, USAID opened an
Office of Transition Initiatives
in Caracas. The name itself suggested Venezuela needed to transition to
a new government, and that the US government was there to "help" the
transition. The announcement of a job opening for the OTI's Caracas
office sent out by USAID the same month as the coup said Venezuela's
president "had been slowly hijacking the machinery of government and
developing parallel non-democratic governance structures . . . Chávez
has demonstrated increasing disregard for democratic institutions and
intolerance for dissent."

By USAID's own description, the
OTIs were intended to be two-year
initiatives in conflict-prone zones. But four years later the OTI was
still operating in Venezuela. An examination by the Associated Press
and other news outlets revealed that USAID was pumping far more
money into Venezuela than the NED — some $26 million overseen
by OTI between 2002 and 2006. USAID refused to reveal where much
of the US taxpayers' money was going. It censored out many recipients'
names from documents released through
FOIA requests.

While the United States came out of the coup with its reputation battered
in Latin America, Chávez emerged stronger in many ways. Some
polls said his popularity rating jumped immediately by 10 percentage
points. To supporters, his survival and return to the presidency took on
mythic proportions. It was a story straight out of Hollywood.

Chávez took a
conciliatory approach after the coup. He toned down
his rhetoric, announced he was creating a
"national roundtable" to sit
down with opposition leaders, and shifted some of his more controversial
cabinet ministers to other posts. He replaced Gaston Parra as head of
PDVSA with Alí Rodríguez, Venezuela's OPEC representative, and reinstated
several of the PDVSA dissidents he had fired from the board of directors.

While some military officers were detained, most were released
eventually. Few spent significant time in jail. Carmona was placed
under house arrest, but slipped out of his luxury apartment in late May
and made his way to the Colombian embassy, where he sought political
asylum. Colombia
granted it, and Venezuela let him fly out of the
country on May 29, even though he was wanted by authorities.

Rear Admiral Carlos Molina Tamayo eventually sought political
asylum in El Salvador, a close US ally and the only country in Latin
America that recognized Carmona's regime. Other suspected coup participants
ended up in the United States:
Isaac Pérez Recao, a reputed
arms dealer and heir to a Venezuelan oil fortune who allegedly plotted
alongside Carmona, fled to South Florida, the press reported. His family
owned several homes in Key Biscayne, including a $2.4 million beachfront
penthouse where he was said to live with his wife.

Four high-ranking military officers including General Efraín
Vásquez Velasco and Vice Admiral Héctor Ramírez Pérez were charged
for their role in the coup. But on August 14 the Supreme Court dismissed
the charges by an eleven-to-eight vote, citing insufficient evidence.
Chávez accused the court of succumbing to the influence of the
opposition and denying the existence of the coup, but he accepted the
ruling. "It's a totally absurd decision," he said. "But it's a decision . . . we
have to swallow it like a fish with bones." He said the magistrates' names
would be "stained for the next five thousand years."

One official who did eventually end up in jail for four months was
Henrique Capriles Radonski, the mayor of Baruta who appeared at the
Cuban embassy the day of the mob attack. His jailing in 2004 turned
him into a cause célèbre for the opposition and much of the international
media. They contended that he was a political prisoner and had
gone to the embassy to try to calm the crowd. But to the government,
he did nothing to stop the outrageous assault even though he was the
highest-ranking local authority and in charge of public order.

Capriles's case was unusual. Most opposition leaders and military
rebels implicated in the coup went free — a sign that many in the
opposition interpreted as weakness on the government's part. Suspected
coup leaders were walking around town freely, entering and leaving
Fort Tiuna as they pleased and denouncing the president.

Hatred was in the air. "
Opposition leaders openly long for Chávez's
death," one journalist wrote in July. A
Los Angeles Times
reporter who
spent a week interviewing people in Venezuela wrote that
opponents
"used the following words to describe Chávez: Hitler, assassin, psychopath,
terrorist, messianic, Stalinist, communist, fascist, authoritarian,
country bumpkin and several other epithets not fit for breakfast
reading." A leading historian wrote a front-page article with the headline,
"It's OK to Kill a Leader Who's Not Following the Laws."

Chávez took the threats seriously. Long known for thrusting himself
into adoring crowds, he eliminated most public appearances for
months and kept his schedule secret until the last minute. When he did
go out, he took to wearing a bulletproof vest under his clothes. In late
June he installed ground-to-air missile batteries around Miraflores after
intelligence agencies uncovered reports of a possible aerial attack.

The elites' hatred of Chávez stemmed from a variety of factors,
including frustration, paranoia, classism, and a fear of being left out
of Chávez's project. All of it was reinforced by a twenty-four-hour-a-day
bombardment of
vitriolic anti-Chávez propaganda on television that
brainwashed a segment of the population and stoked something bordering
on mass hysteria.

Chávez was not a diplomatic politician and had a way of bullying
his opponents, whom he likened to enemies in a war. He insulted them
publicly and by name, belittling, humiliating, and depicting them
as worthless scum. For their part, the elites could not accept that an
uncouth country bumpkin type like Chávez whom they were more
accustomed to seeing in a tuxedo serving them at their clubs was now in
charge of them. On a larger scale his political program and his plan to
redistribute the country's oil wealth was a clear threat to their interests.

In the end, some believed the elites' visceral hatred of Chávez
stemmed from two basic things:
racism and loss of
power. While
Venezuela's moneyed classes denied it, racism was alive and well in
Venezuela. As former Catholic missionary and longtime Venezuela resident
Charles Hardy noted, there has been "prejudice in Venezuela for
ages, but no one talks about it. If they do, they deny it. There are no
well-known black commentators on Venezuela television. There have
been no black Miss Venezuelas. The major beer commercials present
an almost naked blond."

Chávez was the country's first dark-skinned president. His followers
largely shared his skin tone.

Chávez's rise represented the first time in the country's history that
the dark-skinned impoverished majority was seizing power. After decades,
even centuries, of running the country like their own personal hacienda,
the
elites' grip on the corruption-riddled and exploitative system was suddenly
undone. From the time Chávez took power, he demonstrated that
— to the surprise of many elites, who hoped to strike a bargain with him
— he wasn't going to play the typical populist game but rather was going
to truly shake up the system. The moneyed classes were trying everything
they could to get rid of him, and as they failed their frustration and
vitriol grew. As Hardy said, "An old and evil way of life is dying and those
who enjoyed it so abundantly are
fighting its death all the way."

He likened them to a person suffering a terminal disease and going
through the five stages of denial: anger, bargaining, depression, and
acceptance. Except they showed few signs of being anywhere near the
peaceful acceptance stage.

Many of the facts about the episode that brought the conflict to a head
— the April 11-14 coup — remained a mystery. No serious investigation
was conducted into the killings or the coup plot. Four of the Chavista
shooters on the bridge were arrested and held in jail for a year, but eventually
they were acquitted. The judge said there was no evidence they
had killed any of the marchers. By 2006 prosecutors charged and put on
trial several leaders of the Metropolitan Police whose officers allegedly
killed some of the
Chavistas. The trial lingered on into 2007.

While Chávez survived the coup, his marriage did not. Tensions
stemming from the political tumult, along with other conflicts within
their marriage, became too much for his wife, Marisabel. In early June,
less than two months after the coup, she announced that the presidential
couple was getting divorced. She cited a "contrast of personalities" as the
main reason, but added that she and her children were forced to flee the
presidential mansion three times because of political upheaval. "That's
no life for anyone," she said. Their marriage had lasted five years.