CHAPTER 5
Preparing the Uprising
TOWARD THE END OF THE 1980S, THE INDISPUTABLE LEADERS OF THE Bolivarian Revolutionary Army were Hugo Chávez and Francisco Arias, making decisions and planning their long-term strategy for their big day. Between 1986 and 1987, based on the “hammock thesis,” they decided to wait until the midway point of the next administration, which would begin in February 1989, before attempting a coup. According to this thesis, government administrations generally enjoy higher popularity ratings at the beginning and end of their terms, whereas the middle period tends to register a lull. This movement is visually represented by the curve of the hammock. Far more relevant, however, was the second reason that led them to hedge their bets on the long term: the fact that they, as officers, would have troops under their command by that time. Sometime between 1991 and 1992 the moment would be ripe for action.
In 1987, Hugo Chávez, having been promoted to the rank of major, was transferred to Caracas—specifically, to Miraflores Palace, as an aide to General Arnoldo Rodríguez Ochoa, secretary-general of the National Security and Defense Council. Once again, historical happenstance had a hand in his life story. There he was, at the epicenter of Venezuelan power, when, in December 1988, Carlos Andrés Pérez was reelected president, commanding 52.9 percent of the vote. CAP, as he is called by Venezuelans, was back, but the “Saudi Venezuela” of his first term was now in dire economic straits. Scarcely three weeks after an inauguration ceremony so extravagant that the press nicknamed it “the coronation,” the new head of state issued a package of economic adjustments that sparked massive social unrest. On February 27, 1989, public transportation fares went up, causing riots in Guarenas, half an hour away from Caracas. Suddenly the protest extended to the lower middle classes, who took to the streets in droves and vandalized storefronts. The flurry of rioting spread like wildfire, and in a few hours the capital of Venezuela was sacked and looted. A massive swarm of Caracas’s poorest residents pounced on the city, taking food, appliances, furniture, records, frying pans, and even cash registers. Pérez sent in the army to control the rioting and imposed a curfew the following day, but by then the death toll was already in the hundreds. Felipe Acosta, one of the four founding officers of the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army, was among the victims.
Hugo Chávez was lucky: he didn’t have to use his rifle during those dark days. He had left Caracas the day before the riots, having been diagnosed with chicken pox, and later stated that he had been at his home in Maracay with his wife, Nancy. According to Herma Marksman, however, she had been with Chávez that day in the country’s capital. No matter where he was, Chávez became convinced that el caracazo, as the incident came to be called, “sensitized many people in the military, especially the youngest ones, who experienced the horror up close,” and it served to “accelerate things considerably.” In the aftermath of the incident, a number of officers in the presidential guard who had been confidants of Pérez joined the conspiracy.
In some way this popular uprising led Chávez to believe that the time had come to take action. The firewood was no longer wet. Finally the conditions were there, as he might have written in his diary. Later on it became clear that neither military nor civil intelligence had been working very hard to infiltrate conspiracies, that the executive branch had not paid much attention to the matter.
An odd episode toward the end of 1988 served as a wake-up call: on “the night of the tanks,” as the incident came to be called, a column of armored vehicles emerged from Fort Tiuna, bound for the Ministry of the Interior. With the president out of the country, the stewardship of Venezuela had fallen to Interior Minister Simón Alberto Consalvi, who was sitting in his office at 7 P.M. when he received word that ten tanks had surrounded the city block and a squadron of soldiers had occupied the doors to the building. Consalvi was then told that the soldiers were under orders to guard him. Consalvi recalls, “I called Minister of Defense Italo del Valle Alliegro to tell him what was going on, and he told me, ‘Oh, Minister, you and your black comedy—for the first time in weeks I’m sitting here [at home] in my pajamas watching television.’” Consalvi convinced him that this was no joke and asked him to order the military officers to “withdraw and allow me to leave.” The defense minister obliged, and when the acting president met with the high command later on, the military officers offered no explanation for what had happened.
“Nothing was investigated…that republic was paradise on earth for conspirators,” Consalvi says. “No serious investigation was ever launched. Nothing serious and nothing not serious, either. As far as I understand it, Hugo Chávez was not involved in that affair. I never heard that. Maybe it served him in some way, as an example of how far you could take a conspiracy without suffering major consequences.” Chávez himself stated that he was interrogated about the incident but had had nothing to do with it. From that point on, however, the conspirators were under much closer watch.
By December 1989, the suspicions of certain generals were confirmed, and they duly identified the leaders of the former Bolivarian Revolutionary Army, which by then had been renamed the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement to reflect the civilian elements that had been incorporated into the organization. On December 6, the day of the regional elections, Hugo Chávez was removed from Miraflores Palace, taken into custody, and delivered to the Defense Ministry at Fort Tiuna, where he was greeted by his co-conspirators, Majors Jesús Urdaneta, Jesús M. Ortiz, and Yoel Acosta, among others. They were accused of conspiring to assassinate President Carlos Andrés Pérez and the entire military high command during their Christmas dinner. “Some fifteen of us, all majors, got arrested that day,” Chávez said.
An investigative council was subsequently convened to handle the case, but no charges were ever made due to lack of evidence. General Carlos Julio Peñaloza, commander general of the army, and Manuel Heinz Azpúrua, chief of the Directorate for Intelligence and Prevention Services, who were the bloodhounds behind the detentions and the investigation, did manage to have the officers in question transferred to various remote locations far away from one another. According to Chávez, General Fernando Ochoa Antich, the defense minister at the time, invited him to dinner on the very same day he was interrogated. For the three hours they were together, the general calmed Chávez down, reiterating that he believed in his innocence. “Ochoa said good-bye to me there and told me, ‘You can count on me, I told Peñaloza to send you to me, under my command.’ And that was what happened: they transferred me to the combat brigade in Maturín, which reported to Ochoa, who was the commander of all the brigades in the east.”
WHILE HUGO CHÁVEZ was in Maturín, he began to take the General Staff course via long distance, though he had a bit of a hard time with it.
“Commander Chávez failed military intelligence, a technical subject. He almost passed when he took the exam a second time, but he was not removed from the course, because that might have been perceived as a form of retaliation against him and a suspicion that he was conspiring [against the government],”1 Minister Ochoa commented on one occasion. Chávez, in fact, has declared in no uncertain terms that there was a conscious effort to fail him and thus thwart his military career. “They tried to kick me out of the General Staff course, hiding exams from me so that I would flunk out of the classes…. I passed, but just barely, at the bottom.”2 During those years Chávez also registered for a postgraduate course in political science at Simón Bolívar University, and following his sudden departure from Caracas he relocated to the university’s satellite branch in Maturín. One of his professors, Federico Welsch, remembers him as “just another student, one of the students in the top quarter, who maintained a good average in the courses he took. A student with a low profile, with no desire to dominate the discussions. Not at all…he had a hard time attending class because he was stationed in Maturín, but still he managed to get himself the education…. He was a hard worker, quiet.” Or so he pretended. He himself has acknowledged that the
postgraduate course “was very difficult because it was a matter of hiding my reading and my work through the classes I took; [we had to] pretend that we were working toward improving the armed forces.”3
According to his postgraduate thesis proposals, which he sent via Herma, Chávez said that he “was thinking about working on a thesis regarding political transitions, inspired by the Spanish transition, from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one,” according to Federico Welsch, whom the army major had selected as his tutor. His average hovered at around 4.5 out of a possible 5. In the end, however, Chávez did not go on to earn his postgraduate political science degree.
It was around the middle of 1991 when the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement began counting the days until the coup. During this time, Chávez began to put distance between himself and the civilians, in particular those from the Party for the Venezuelan Revolution. For several years he had continued to cultivate a very intense relationship with Douglas Bravo, unbeknownst to the majority of the conspiring officers, who did not wish to be connected in any way to the radical left. In fact, according to Herma Marksman, back in 1986 Francisco Arias had stated very clearly that he would join the movement only if they were kept out of the picture. “Douglas would come to my house, but I never told anyone because Hugo had asked me to keep quiet about it. I never told a single one of the officers, it was a kind of secret between me and Hugo. He said to me, ‘This cannot leave this room’…and when I moved to my apartment in El Paraíso, he [Douglas] would turn up in some kind of disguise…. Hugo was very worried that the other officers would find out.”
Chávez began to distance himself from the ex-guerrilla a few months before the insurrection. Bravo sensed that Chávez did not trust civilians and felt that this was why the coup, originally intended to be a civilian-military operative, turned out to be a purely military endeavor.
In 1991, Hugo Chávez was promoted to the rank of commander. “As we continued to receive our troop units, the Plan Ezequiel Zamora [for the coup] was put into action, with military and political missions, the project of the constitutional [assembly] as well as economic projects, and we were constantly thinking about who among us would be the ones to govern, etc.” According to the “hammock thesis,” the moment was ripe. The temperature had risen elsewhere, as well: Hugo Chávez was very, very angry. After finishing his General Staff course, he was given a second-rate administrative job at a supply post in the city of Cumaná in eastern Venezuela. As Chávez recalled, the news was like “a slap in the face.” But it wouldn’t last for long. The wheel of fortune spun, once again, in his favor. Two weeks later, as August 1991 neared, another commander who had been stationed in Maracay to head up a battalion of paratroopers asked to be relieved from duty. According to Chávez, Minister Ochoa decided to have Chávez fill the vacancy—despite the fact that as a commander with a specialty in armored vehicles, Chávez should have been leading a tank battalion, not a group of paratroopers. Chávez assumed the position, despite the fact that in June, just after being sworn in as defense minister, Ochoa had received a detailed report with names, places, and dates of Chávez’s conspiratorial undertakings. According to Iván Darío Jiménez, head of the armed forces’ Unified Command at the time, the major who drew up the report “was disregarded. And then, on top of it, he was forced to undergo a psychiatric exam.”4
The die had been cast. Hugo Chávez was now a commander. Starting August 28, he would be heading up a key battalion. The preparations gained momentum.
It wasn’t until the end of the year, however, that the chief conspirators gave some thought to the day after, to the Venezuela that would be theirs following the coup. In November, they turned to an intellectual who had been active in the Communist Youth, one of the founding members of the Party for the Venezuelan Revolution, and asked him to create a document that would outline the legal framework and the administrative structure of their regime. The intellectual in question was Kléber Ramírez Rojas, a civil engineer who had retired to a small plot of land in Los Andes when Francisco Arias persuaded him to join the movement in the middle of 1990. Later on, with Kléber Ramírez’s theses in mind, Chávez renamed his party the Movimiento V República—the Fifth Republic Movement—and whenever he would speak of the inaugural phase of his own administration he would refer to it as “the fifth republic.”
December was a feverish month of many a fruitless effort. A group of impatient captains threatened to stage an uprising of their own, with the support of the left-leaning Bandera Roja (Red Flag) party, if the commanders didn’t take action soon. This, in turn, prompted them to set dates and establish plans that they would end up scrapping at the last minute. First they thought they might take advantage of the annual parade on December 10 held in honor of the air force, to stop CAP in his tracks. Then they postponed it until the sixteenth and then, finally, they set Christmas as the target date. The situation was unbearably tense.
“I had to threaten several captains that I would tie them to a tree if they tried anything, and, of course, then I had to come to Caracas and get myself into Miraflores to speak with the battalions and to tell our officers that until they received a written order signed by me, along with a security code word, no action was to be taken,” recalls Chávez. “That December was a black one for us. We had the enemy right behind us, and serious internal problems that were threatening to split us apart. Rumors were flying everywhere, and people were saying that those of us at the top had backed out, that we had made a deal with the defense minister.”5
In addition to all this, Chávez had had a serious disagreement with someone who was to be a key figure in the uprising: his friend Jesús Urdaneta, an army commander who had participated relatively little in the preparatory meetings “because I just couldn’t stand those meetings, they went on for hours and hours, for so many years.” Urdaneta had told them, however, that when the moment arrived, he would tell them what he thought of the operative.
“When we were discussing the general plan of action, in November 1991, he had a serious problem with me because the two of us would be coming to Caracas, where there were fourteen objectives. He had assigned me twelve and given himself only two. I got annoyed and said I didn’t agree with the plan: ‘If there are twelve, then it should be six for you and six for me.’ He got very irritated and said to me, ‘How dare you come here, at this stage in the game, and tell me that you don’t agree with the plan?’ And I said, ‘Just because I did not help map out this plan does not mean that I don’t have the right to tell you that I disagree with something I think is poorly distributed. Plus, it is completely crazy, and I’m not going in with you. I won’t support you in that game. I’m not going!’ And I left, furious.”
Things went ahead as planned. On December 31, meetings were held in Caracas and Maracay. On January 1, Hugo Chávez met with Francisco Arias and Kléber Ramírez in Barquisimeto to talk details. Then he returned to Maracay to patch things up with Urdaneta. “He creeps up behind me and says, ‘Compañero, you were right,’ because when Chávez needs to swallow his pride, he does. ‘My plan was all wrong, I reformulated it. I’m leaving for Caracas with Chivito [Yoel Acosta]. I did a better job of distributing the work. Since you know Maracay, you stay here,’” Urdaneta recalls him saying. “He knew me very well, he knew that he would achieve more by behaving himself.”
During this period, Venezuela was not a happy country, nor did Carlos Andrés Pérez seem a particularly happy president. By November, his approval rating had sunk to 35 percent.6 The year ended with an inflation rate of 31 percent. And as the new one began, public transportation fares and telephone rates went up; the dwindling water supply sparked massive protests; the doctors’ and teachers’ strikes went on; and students staged riots at the Central University of Venezuela. The New York Times stated that the Venezuelan government was clearly not in the business of punishing corruption. Labor groups were demanding a 50 percent increase in the minimum wage, but the only publicly announced raise was for military
personnel, who received a 33 percent raise in salary.
January came to an end. There was no time to lose. Chávez knew that his superiors were planning to have him transferred far away, to the western town of El Guayabo, on the Colombian border, by February 15. “For that reason, I spoke to Arias and Urdaneta and laid it out for them: if we didn’t take action in the next fifteen days, it was over…Pérez was away. The Thursday before the week of February 4, we met one last time in Caracas, and they left it up to me to pick a date. That decision would depend on the day Pérez returned. We remained on alert from Thursday the thirtieth.”7
On Sunday, February 2, close to midnight, Chávez received a phone call from the palace. A contact informed him, in code, of the date and time that President Carlos Andrés Pérez would touch down in Caracas after his trip to Europe. The commander glanced at his watch. The countdown began.
CHAPTER 6
Stroke of Luck
IN REALITY, IT COULD HAVE HAPPENED TO ANYONE. UNWITTINGLY, HOWEVER, the Venezuelan voters had decided that it would happen to Carlos Andrés Pérez, when they elected him president in December 1988. Seventeen years had gone by since the president had placed the saber in the hands of the young official everyone called Goofy. Pérez was returning from the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland. Sixty-nine at the time, he was bone tired: two sleepless days followed by a grueling twelve-hour flight. As the aircraft taxied down the runway at the Simón Bolívar International Airport at Maiquetía, thirty minutes from Caracas, the one thing on his mind was getting home to La Casona and resting his head on his pillow.
It was 10:10 in the evening on Monday, February 3, 1992. As the plane touched down, Pérez was jolted out of his bleary-eyed haze when he saw General Fernando Ochoa waiting for him. “I always told Interior Minister Virgilio Ávila Vivas to be there [at the airport]. Whenever I returned from a trip, he was the one person I would see, so that he could update me on things. I was taken aback when I saw the defense minister. So I asked him, ‘What are you doing here?’ and he replied, ‘Well, I was in Maracaibo and I heard that you were on your way home, so I decided to stay and wait for you.’ For the moment, they didn’t say anything. Then, as I was getting into my car, Ochoa said to me, ‘President Pérez, around here people were saying that they weren’t going to let you land.’ But that it was just a rumor, you know. That was all they said to me.”
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