Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  Considered an old fox in the world of Venezuelan politics, Pérez was annoyed. Not alarmed. So he gave Ochoa an order: “I don’t like rumors involving the armed forces. Tomorrow at eight a.m. I will be waiting for you and the military commanders in Miraflores so that we can open an investigation.” That meeting never happened, nor did they need to intercept any rumors. Once he arrived home, the president dismissed the patrol cars with his bodyguards, dragged his feet up to his bedroom, put on his pajamas, and collapsed onto his bed.

  At that very moment, in Maracay, Hugo Chávez was wide awake, more awake than ever. And he was smoking. Chain-smoking. It was time to activate Operation Zamora. He himself had made the decision early that Monday morning. Zero hour would be midnight. His great night had only just begun. He had already issued the order for some 460 men,1 of the paratroopers’ battalion under his command, to board twenty rented buses that would take them to the state of Cojedes in the region of Los Llanos, where they were to embark on a training session—that, at least, was what the drivers and 440 recruits believed. Chávez acknowledged, “Of those men, only a very small group of officers knew what we were going to do that night, the troops didn’t know a thing.”2 In other words, their superiors had decided that these men would risk their lives for a political enterprise about which they knew nothing. The conspirators and their unwitting recruits left the Libertador Air Base at approximately eleven in the evening. Several minutes went by, and then, in a flash, Commander Chávez, riding in a vehicle ahead of the buses, surprised his driver by suddenly ordering him to take a detour toward Caracas. The driver objected, stating that it was not the route they had agreed upon. Chávez, firm and unblinking, told him that there were riots in the capital and that what he had just said was an order. They were to go to Caracas.

  His explanation was not terrifically far-fetched. According to the newspaper El Universal, a total of 120 protests and 46 strikes had taken place during the first three years of Pérez’s government. And only three days earlier, the police had threatened to intervene in response to the student riots at the Central University of Venezuela. President Pérez was sailing in choppy waters: 81 percent of the Venezuelan populace no longer had faith in him, and though 50 percent of all Venezuelans claimed to respect their president, 57 percent stated that they wanted a new government. Half of the population would repudiate a coup d’état, but a significant third would support one. Something was brewing. The possibility of a coup had, in fact, already been examined in a study conducted by the survey firm Mercanálisis, the results of which had been published on January 27. When asked, “Do you think that military officers would or would not participate in a coup?” 31 percent said yes, and 59 percent got it very wrong with a resounding “no.” Ten percent didn’t know what to think. Carlos Andrés Pérez likely fell into this last group.

  The president snored away in his bedroom inside La Casona. Then, ten minutes before midnight, he was jolted awake by a ringing phone, which he answered testily. Between yawns, he heard the word “coup” at the other end of the line, and he jumped with a start, instantly recognizing the sharp voice of Minister Ochoa: “There’s been an uprising at the Zulia garrison!” The president dressed so quickly that he didn’t even remove his pajamas before putting on his suit. Never a man to take refuge by fleeing, he was on his way to Miraflores in a matter of minutes, without bodyguards. On the way there, his car crossed paths with military vehicles being driven by conspirators, who never would have guessed that the man behind the wheel of the car hurtling down the highway was the president. It was 12:05 A.M. by the time Pérez made it through the palace gates. Right behind him was the chief of his personal security detail, Vice Admiral Iván Carratú. Inside Miraflores, Interior Minister Ávila Vivas and several aides-de-camp were already waiting for him. Minutes later, as he absorbed the first few reports, the siege began. Pérez’s pulse would not flicker if he had to use a machine gun, but his hands were ice cold.

  In the meantime, Hugo Chávez was just arriving at his destination: the Military History Museum at La Planicie, about a mile from Miraflores. Chávez claims he entered the museum at around 12:30 A.M. to lead the insurrection that would take place in Caracas. By that hour, the insurgents had already taken their positions at the following locations: Maracaibo, the capital of the oil-rich state of Zulia and the second largest city in the country; Valencia, the third largest city; and Maracay, a key location because of its military installations. Commander Chávez was unaware that CAP was already at Miraflores. According to the plan, by that hour, the coup’s most important human target was already to have been arrested at the Maiquetía airport or captured at La Casona. According to Chávez, “the operational plan Ezequiel Zamora was conceived on the basis of several principles of war. One of them was the element of surprise…. Surprise, tactics, mobility and a concentration of troops at nerve centers. That was the strategic plan.”3 The element of surprise, however, often works both ways. Chávez and the five men who stepped out of the car with him were received “with a spray of machine-gun fire that almost wiped us out right then and there,” he says. The leader of the coup then summoned his histrionic talents, assuring the military officers guarding the museum that they were reinforcements who had just been alerted of a possible riot. According to Chávez, his performance was convincing.

  At La Casona, a fierce battle raged with misinformed insurgents on one side, and agents from the Directorate for Intelligence and Prevention Services on the other. The president, by now, was long gone. The first lady, Blanca Rodríguez de Pérez, and one of her daughters, joined the forces attempting to repel the onslaught of the insurgents.4 At La Carlota airport, shots were fired in both directions. The air base, east of Caracas, had been taken by Commander Yoel Acosta Chirinos. The sound of cocked guns thundered in the ears of the people living in the vicinity, who slowly woke up to the realization that this was not just another night of garden-variety delinquency. Chávez then ordered two of his captains to launch the frontal attack on Miraflores, and one of them clumsily steered a Dragon tank up the palace stairs, intending to knock down the front door. The moment was captured on television, offering the Venezuelan people a truly absurd image to ponder. Was there really no other way to take down the palace? The insurgents had twelve tanks on their side. Inside the palace, Pérez knew he had to get out as soon as possible. But where would he go? That was when he said to himself: “I have to get on television to take control of this.” He and his advisers decided to broadcast on Venevisión, owned by the magnate Gustavo Cisneros.

  BY NOW BOTH THE insurgents and those loyal to the government had begun to count their first casualties of dead and wounded. Shortly before one in the morning, they reached the television station, in the neighborhood of Las Palmas.

  By 12:50 A.M., Chávez had telephoned Marksman. “All he said was ‘I’m nearby,’ and then he hung up.” Ten minutes later, he received a phone call from Acosta, who informed him that La Carlota was under control. At the museum in La Planicie, someone had turned on a television. Chávez, who had yet to unveil his plot to the world, sat waiting to see his face appear on the tiny screen, exhorting the people of Venezuela to join the uprising. That was part of the plan. A dozen or so troops had been ordered to take control of the television station and broadcast his proclamation, which he had recorded on videotape. As it turned out, his men had indeed commandeered the station but had been unable to transfer the video to U Matic format, a simple process they were not familiar with. In light of this glitch, they had no choice but to settle for the explanation of the station’s technical staff: it couldn’t be done. And so, just when Chávez least expected it, the face of Carlos Andrés Pérez, not his own, suddenly appeared on the screen. Overwrought, his hair a mess, the president of the nation announced that a group of “rogues” had attempted to overthrow the government and that the coup was doomed to fail.

  At the museum, all eyes turned to the commander. “That’s right. This is a coup and we have you surrounded,” Chávez
said, raising his voice several notches to intimidate the officers stationed at the museum. “Surrender your weapons, because if you don’t the massacre will start right here between you and us.”5 According to Chávez, a group of reinforcements arrived, allowing him to maintain control over the museum until almost 2 A.M. By then, however, the assault on Miraflores was already a disaster. President Pérez had made it to safety, and the government’s forces had effectively subdued the insurgents. Failure hung in the night air.

  By the time Pérez took to the airwaves, Commander Francisco Arias had already gained control of the military garrison at Maracaibo and had the governor of the state of Zulia in custody. Commanders Jesús Urdaneta and Jesús M. Ortiz were still fighting away in the Maracay-Valencia industrial axis, and in Caracas, Commander Acosta had seized control of La Carlota and arrested the head of the Venezuelan Air Force.6 Just before 3 A.M., Chávez made telephone contact with Ortiz, who asked, “Compadre, what about the media?”

  Chávez replied, “I’m waiting for them, too.” According to Chávez, that was when “the operational plan started to unravel. Incommunicado and surrounded, the people in Miraflores didn’t make it, but they achieved something I consider heroic.”7 He was referring, no doubt, to the desperate tank maneuver, carried out by two captains who would later be elected as state governors during the Chávez administration.8 In the capital—specifically Miraflores, the power base—Operation Zamora had not turned out as planned.

  By that time, the entire nation was glued to the television, witnessing a parade of overtired political leaders declare their support for the democratic regime. The coup attempt quickly made international headlines: George Bush, Sr., telephoned Pérez, and in another irony, Fidel Castro wrote a telegram filled with warmth and solidarity for his Venezuelan counterpart, claiming he was “overwhelmed with concern.” Among those who lost sleep that evening was Chávez’s mother, Elena, who learned of the coup from Cecilia, one of the Chávez family’s neighbors.

  “When that woman told me what had happened, this—” Elena Frías de Chávez said, her hands fluttering over her heart, “everything just fell apart. No, Cecilia, my son, my God!” She had last seen her son the previous Christmas. That night, her husband, Hugo de los Reyes, was sleeping in La Chavera, the family’s tiny farm outside Barinas. In a moment of desperation, Elena—who knew nothing of Hugo’s insurrectionist pretensions—woke up her son Narciso, the only one at home that night, and together they called Adán. Although Adán was fully apprised of the conspiracy, he focused on trying to calm his mother down: “Hugo’s not here, actually.” Why hadn’t he called? asked Elena. “He must be sleeping,” replied her eldest son.

  This distressed her even more, because they were unable to locate her daughter-in-law Nancy and her three grandchildren. So she planted herself in front of the TV set. President Pérez’s face, once again, appeared on the screen. “He said that it was the battalion of the red berets…. That was unbearable.”

  By now Elena, a woman who cries easily, was beyond consolation. “It was terrible, I kept on saying to myself, ‘Oh, no, will they kill him? Will they do that to me? Is my son already dead? Wounded? Oh, this is such torture!’”

  At around 4 A.M., her son, while not dead, was surely feeling quite lost. The assault on Miraflores had been repelled. The tank drivers, sidestepping the wounded and the dead, were now making their way to jail. The leader of the insurrection, however, continued to remain a mystery to the Venezuelan people. At that moment, Commander Hugo Chávez felt, as he himself later declared, like “a caged tiger. I didn’t know how to face it, what to do.” Communications had broken down, and neither the infantry, nor the reserves, nor the artillery cannons had taken the positions they should have. A rat, Chávez claimed, must have brought down the coup. It is known that a captain9 who was a member of the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement had alerted his superiors of the plot, although according to military reports, nothing ever came of this tip. “The information, initially obtained at around 1 P.M. on Monday, February 3, was incomplete and vague: when army intelligence and the Directorate for Military Intelligence evaluated it, they assumed that it was limited to a series of actions that would be carried out at the International Airport at Maiquetía, to detain the president of the republic.”10

  Commander Acosta later stated that they had confirmed the participation of “around twenty-seven commanders for the operational plan, and of that entire number, only five of us went out. The rumor that some captain had betrayed the movement broke a lot of hearts.” The main objective of Operation Zamora, according to Chávez at least, was to capture the president. A commando was to apprehend him when he arrived at Maiquetía and take him directly to the Military History Museum. If that didn’t work, their backup plan was to arrest him in one of the tunnels on the highway into Caracas. And if that didn’t work, they would make a third attempt at La Casona.

  “Various attempts were made to catch him, but Pérez was slippery,”11 Chávez has said. And what was the overall objective? “That was the idea, to create the power vacuum. We would be the ones to fill it.”12 Ironically, the same “power vacuum” thesis would be invoked ten years later by the men who attempted to overthrow the government of Hugo Chávez.

  The failure to capture the elusive chief commander demoralized Chávez. But that wasn’t the only thing that went wrong: “The surprise didn’t work, mobility was lost, the firepower fell, everything fell.”13 It seemed to be time to surrender, but Chávez’s show was still far from over. In fact, he hadn’t even gotten started.

  As dawn broke on February 4, Venezuela was a country of glassy eyes, the glassiest of which were likely those of President Pérez, who was back in his office at Miraflores Palace preparing to issue a third televised address assuring the country that the coup was a thing of the past. This was not true. For starters, the La Carlota air base was still in the hands of the insurgents, as were the garrisons in Maracaibo, Maracay, and Valencia. At his side were Minister Avila and General Ochoa, who already had spoken with Chávez over the phone and tried to get him to lay down his weapons. Ochoa had also sent Chávez a message in the early dawn with two emissaries: General Ramón Santeliz and Fernán Altuve, a civil engineer and former teacher at the military academy who is currently special commissioner at the Defense Ministry. Ochoa was not interested in negotiating with Arias. He knew that the head of the military revolt was Commander Hugo Chávez.

  Pérez had also considered bombing the museum at dawn. “I advised him against it because there were lot of people living in the area around La Planicie. And so he decided to have two F-16 planes fly overhead,” says Iván Carratú, who remained at the president’s side that morning.

  Still indignant, the former president of Venezuela recalls how he brought in the defense minister to direct the operations from Miraflores during the coup: “And at some point, Ochoa said to me, ‘Listen, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to talk to Chávez, to tell him to surrender and save us more trouble.’ I said to him, ‘All right, but who should speak with him?’ And he said, ‘Right here, we’ve got General Santeliz, he’s a friend of Chávez’s. We can send him.’ That was when I made the mistake of sending Santeliz out to get Chávez to surrender. Because the two of them struck a deal.”

  Santeliz went back to La Planicie with Altuve. They arrived at the Military History Museum shortly before 8 A.M.

  “Now I really am thinking seriously about surrendering,” Chávez told them. He asked them to guarantee that neither he nor his troops would be killed. Moreover, he refused to hand over his rifle because he was convinced that the men had been given orders to assassinate him. Santeliz not only agreed to his conditions but also granted an extra request during a mysterious lull in time: he promised Chávez that he and his “custodians” would leave the museum alone, in the general’s car, with Altuve behind the wheel. Almost two hours went by before they reached their destination, which was no more than fifteen minutes away. What did they do during all this time? Some say they de
stroyed documents and compromising evidence. Despite repeated denials of Santeliz’s involvement in the plot, Chávez does concede that “Santeliz and Altuve behaved very well.”14

  Neither Chávez nor Santeliz has ever offered a satisfactory explanation of this episode. A report issued some time later states that the rebel leader remained in the museum “until 7:45 A.M. of February 4, when he decided to surrender.”15 Chávez arrived at Fort Tiuna at 9:30 in the morning. According to General Iván Jiménez, at the time the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the lull was even longer. In an account published four years after the coup, Jiménez reproduced a telephone conversation between himself and Chávez at 7 A.M. Jiménez had given him an ultimatum: “Either you surrender, or the museum is going to be attacked [by the air force].”

  Chávez replied, “All right, General. I surrender.”

  “They brought me to Ochoa’s office,” continued Chávez, “[on the] fifth floor of the Defense Ministry, I handed over my rifle, I handed over my pistol, my hand grenades, my radio, and I sat down on a sofa and asked for some coffee.” He also requested cigarettes. “And I slowly got hold of myself. Surrendering is something worse than death. When I surrendered for my men, I told them I would have rather died. I mean, I fell to pieces, and I just kept on falling.”16 That is how Chávez, some eight months before he would win the presidential elections of 1998, recalled the moment of his surrender. Vice Admiral Elias Daniels, who received the defeated military officer because Ochoa was in Miraflores, remembers him as a disciplined man who behaved in classic military fashion. “He entered the office and, in a very respectful but firm tone of voice, saluted and then said to me, in these words, more or less, ‘My admiral, Commander Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías has come to lay down his weapons.’ He was aware of the mess he’d gotten himself into. I asked him where he was from, I asked him about his family, and then I said, ‘Would you like to speak to your mother?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I would appreciate that. Mamá, it’s Hugo,’ he said.” At the other end of the line Elena Frías de Chávez burst into sobs. Once Chávez hung up, Daniels asked him why he had done it. “And he said to me that it was because of how bad the situation was in the army, he talked about boots, military equipment, things like that…housing, clothes, machinery…. His discourse had absolutely no relation to the civilian world.” Even as Chávez surrendered, his fellow insurgents held tight to their positions at the La Carlota airport, Maracaibo, Valencia, and Maracay. As time passed, the high command began to learn who they were and how many: “There are 5 lieutenant colonels who are the visible heads of this movement, followed by 14 majors, 54 captains, 67 second lieutenants, 65 noncommissioned officers, 101 troop sergeants, and 2,056 enlisted soldiers.”17 In total there were 2,367 uniformed men18 representing ten different battalions, some 10 percent of the total number of battalions in the armed forces.