Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  “Well, I went running [after him], but he was already inside the car. I clung to the car door and wouldn’t let them close it. The kid that was riding in there with him said, ‘Ma’am, we’re leaving now.’ And I said, ‘No, I have to go with him,’ but the man said to me, ‘No, no. You can’t go.’ Then my son Adán, who was somewhere around there, heard from someone that I was holding on to the car, that I wouldn’t let go…. Hugo didn’t say anything. He didn’t speak to me. And I just stayed where I was, hanging on to that door, with that man trying to shut it, and me trying to open it to get inside. That was when Adán arrived and grabbed me and said, ‘Come on, Mamá.’ I felt as though they had ripped my heart and soul out of me.”

  AT AROUND 3:25 A.M., General Lucas Rincón suddenly appeared on television screens all across the country, to say, “The high military command condemns the appalling incidents that occurred yesterday in the nation’s capital. In light of these facts, the president of the republic has been asked to resign, and he has agreed to do so.” With this brief statement, Lucas Rincón would go down in Venezuelan history for prompting an extensive catalog of confusion regarding Chávez’s absence from the government. That moment was what gave rise to the theory of the “power vacuum,” which challenged the government’s theory of a conspiracy and a coup. A mysterious military negotiation, followed by an evasive resignation, was the crux of the mystery that unfolded during those few hours. The president acknowledged that he was prepared to fight but then, after evaluating the situation, desisted. At that point, a providential telephone call came in from Fidel Castro. Chávez confessed to him that he was facing “a major dilemma. It isn’t easy for someone, for the president of the republic, with a rifle at his side, a soldier, to hand over his weapon and agree to become a prisoner, because I agreed to become a prisoner…. I could have gone to another city, or at least I could have tried to with an armed column, or I could have gone to some other part of Caracas, armed, with some three hundred, five hundred men, [I could have] summoned the people, but that might have been the first step toward a civil war.”8

  Once the decision was made, the head of state and the military officers who had orchestrated the coup began negotiating. In all likelihood nobody was clear as to what was going on inside the military high command. Not even Chávez. And while an organized group had executed a plan to seize power, there was another group of military officers who never quite defined their position as the events unfolded. The best evidence of this tense ambiguity, and of the general befuddlement that followed, is the fact that General Lucas Rincón, the man who had refused to set Plan Avila into motion and publicly declared that Chávez had resigned, later reemerged as a faithful supporter of the president, who would go on to honor Avila with military decorations and appoint him minister of justice and the interior.

  ANOTHER SOURCE OF CONFUSION is the question of Chávez’s resignation. In retrospect, it almost seems like a word game. Monsignor Baltasar Porras, president of the Venezuelan Episcopal Conference, received a telephone call from the president at midnight the evening of the eleventh. The idea was that Porras might act as a kind of guarantor in the negotiation.

  “There is a huge debate regarding whether he resigned or not,” Porras explains. “He did not use the word ‘resign’ with me. He said, ‘After three hours and a lot of consultation, I have decided to relinquish my power, and I am willing to sign if you can guarantee that they will let me out of the country.’” Out of the country, in this case, meant Cuba. In a taped conversation from the period when he was in custody, Chávez told a colonel who was standing guard over him, “It’s time now, I need you to tell me where I am going. If not, I’m not leaving here.”

  The officer replied, “The plan is to take you to La Orchila [a militarized island in the Caribbean, some 80 miles from Caracas], because it is possible that you will then be transferred out of the country.”

  The president stated, “Well, if I go to Cuba, or wherever I decide to go, it cannot be something forced on me. Cuba is one of the possibilities I have been evaluating.”9 In fact, by early dawn of April 12, the Cuban government had contacted twenty-one different embassies to have Chávez transferred to the island.

  The issue of Chávez’s resignation was key because it would determine the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of the steps taken by the military and the provisional government that existed for a few short hours that day. The resignation, unsigned yet publicly announced, suddenly became a critical factor in the case. Thanks to this nuance, the Supreme Court of Justice ruled in favor of the “power vacuum” theory, and the military and civil conspirators involved in this case were absolved of all criminal responsibility.

  Chávez himself has used different versions of his own story. On several occasions, he has maintained that he surrendered to avoid a bloodbath. When interviewed by the journalist Miguel Bonasso of the Argentinian newspaper Página 12, however, he said that his decision to surrender to the insurgent military leaders was a strategic maneuver, because he wanted to shift the situation to his natural environment, among the military officers at Fort Tiuna. He then claimed that when he was face-to-face with the conspirators in the dawn hours of April 12, he categorically refused to surrender and in fact berated them, saying, “I am not going to sign that paper, it seems that you men don’t know who I am. I am not going to sign that…. You don’t seem to know what you’re doing; when the sun comes up in a little while, you are going to have to tell the country what it is that you are doing.”10 During this episode, one witness remembers the adversarial attitude of General Néstor González, who forced the head of state to remove his military uniform. This is yet another symbolic detail underscoring the military’s predominant role throughout this entire incident. Chávez, reduced to civilian garb, was stripped of the one kind of authority that could keep him in the presidency.

  In another bit of testimony, the president recognized that his decision to go to Fort Tiuna was almost inevitable, the logical conclusion of a man who had finally realized that he had lost almost all his military support. He gathered the aides who had stood by him and told them, “‘I am capable of resigning, but only if four conditions are met.’ The first was that everyone’s physical security had to be respected…the second was that the Constitution had to be respected—that is, if I were to resign it had to be before the National Assembly. The vice president would then assume the presidency of the republic until new elections were called. The third condition was that I had to be allowed to address the country in person. And the fourth: my staff had to be allowed to join me.”11

  Monsignor Porras says that Chávez refused to accept the first resignation speech that was handed to him for his signature: “He rejected it simply because it announced his resignation, and then he told them, so as to move things along, to put in [a passage stating] the dismissal of his cabinet ministers and of Diosdado Cabello as vice president, ‘because he isn’t good for that kind of thing.’ And so after that, the new version had to be written up.

  Chávez’s initial willingness to resign turned sour when he was not granted his demand to leave the country. He felt betrayed and feared for his life, as he no longer knew whom he could trust within the military circle. By the time the conspirators finally agreed to grant his request, a day and a half later, it was too late; the scales had already tipped back in favor of the president’s return to Miraflores.

  No letter bearing the resignation of Hugo Chávez Frías was ever signed by the president. There were many drafts, but the signing kept getting postponed for various reasons: at first because some of the conspiring military officers did not want to let Chávez out of the country and insisted he stand trial in Venezuela; then because the two sides were unable to reach a definitive agreement over the resigning president’s demands; then again when Chávez rejected one of the draft proposals; and yet again when he vowed that he would sign the document only when he was climbing onto the plane that would take him out of the country. After it was all over, in the kind
of narrative that is typical of the victorious, Chávez himself would tell yet another version of the story that did little to shed more light on the situation: “I never had any intention of resigning from my position because I was being pressured to do so. The only thing I considered was abandoning my position [of my own volition].”12 In any event, all the delays allowed Chávez to follow the very wise advice dispensed by José Vicente Rangel, the most skillful, shrewd political operator: “Hugo, don’t sign; then it will become a coup d’état.”

  Hugo Chávez had still not signed anything when, just before the sun rose on April 12, Pedro Carmona, president of the Venezuelan business association Fedecámaras, announced that he would be assuming the presidency of Venezuela, as the head of a transitional civilian-military government.

  Carmona’s news and the announcement of a new administration elicited mixed reactions from the populace. Some people celebrated it, some bemoaned it, and still others were too perplexed to know what to think. Some radical opponents of the Chávez government gathered together in front of the Cuban Embassy and staged acts of violence. Those sympathetic to Chávez also tried to mobilize and plan their reaction to this new circumstance.

  Carmona put his lawyers to work preparing his decree of self-proclamation and began to negotiate with various different sectors to put together a new governmental team. Using a cell phone lent to him by one of the soldiers guarding him, Chávez made several attempts to communicate with one of his daughters: “Listen, María, listen to me, call someone, call Fidel if you can…. Tell him I haven’t resigned, that I’m in custody and that they’re going to kill me but that I haven’t resigned.”13

  Monsignor Porras recalls Chávez during those hours as “a man who was without a doubt battered, reflexive…the only thing he did was recall a series of events from his childhood, of his life as a military officer at the various posts he had been assigned to…at times it seemed that he wanted to cry, and he would put his hands here [between his eyebrows] as if to keep the tears at bay, and then he would continue talking.”

  As all this was happening, the internal crisis in the armed forces was escalating quietly. General Baduel later admitted that nobody in the High Military Command seemed prepared to jump in and defend Chávez; little by little, however, as the conspirators’ project began to reveal its arbitrary and totalitarian side, some military forces began to reevaluate the situation.

  As all this was occurring, an administration that wasn’t yet an administration had begun to confront its first crises in Caracas. The military sector underwent an internal reshuffling, and General Efraín Vásquez, the army commander at the time, was a key figure in this process. Despite the fact that he had publicly disobeyed the president and refused to execute Plan Avila, it was Vásquez who called his generals and midlevel officers into a meeting, where they decided not to recognize the legitimacy of Carmona’s transition unless important changes were made to the Act of Constitution of the new administration. In the meantime, María Gabriela Chávez had done her duty, announcing to the world that her father was in custody but had not resigned.

  That same afternoon, Isaías Rodríguez, attorney general of the Republic, informed the media that a coup d’état had indeed taken place and that the Carmona government was unconstitutional. More and more people began pouring into the streets, calling for Chávez. At five-thirty in the afternoon, Pedro Carmona, completely blind to the reality of what had begun to happen, declared himself president of the Republic and read a series of decrees dissolving all the existing public authorities and removing the word “Bolivarian” from the name of the country.

  “The objective was very clear: to begin a very brief de facto period, respectful of citizens’ rights, so that we could call a first parliamentary election in ninety days—that is, in July 2002—and then, six months later, a presidential election, so as to hand over the presidency in January 2003,”14 assures Carmona, who neglected to make such relevant clarifications on the day of the coup. His book Mi testimonio ante la historia (My Testimony Before History) devotes many pages to justifying the legitimacy of his decrees, but most Venezuelans, even a significant number of Chávez’s opponents, felt it was an untenable political enterprise.

  Teodoro Petkoff feels that “the decree was absolutely fundamental in terms of effecting a change in the power dynamic within the armed forces; it was what caused the abrupt shift that reinstated Chávez in the government. And the attitude of the armed forces reveals very clearly that the [country’s] forty years of democratic life were not in vain: when it found itself in the throes of a coup d’état, [the military] perceived that the country was isolated internationally and that you couldn’t break out of a government that had been accused of all sorts of antidemocratic perversions with a dictatorial regime. The same people who accepted Chávez’s departure as a solution to the political crisis said, ‘Go get him.’ That decree was the inflection point. That was what broke the coup.”15

  ON APRIL 13 THE country awoke with an oddly fragile sensation. A strange premonition had permeated the collective consciousness of the nation. Support for the interim government began to dwindle. A few minor manifestations of support for the detained president were silenced. People began saying that a witch hunt had taken place, and in fact, a progovernment minister and congressman had been arrested and jailed in a maneuver that denied them due process and violated their human rights. The previous night, a flurry of meetings had taken place. Those loyal to the government finally managed to organize a popular reaction in defense of Chávez. Within the military a project had already begun to take shape, led by General Baduel and supported by Generals Jorge García Carneiro, commander of the Third Division, and Luis García Montoya, secretary of the National Defense Council. A Plan for the Restitution of the National Dignity was quickly drafted. Even left-wing leaders, political analysts, and intellectuals unsympathetic to Chávez made a point of distancing themselves from the political scheme that Carmona and his team had hatched. On that day, from an undisclosed location, Chávez’s wife, Marisabel Rodríguez, and Diosdado Cabello told CNN that the president had in fact not resigned. The delicate, uncertain circumstances became clearer and clearer to Pedro Carmona, who, by the end of that April 13, would go down in Venezuelan history as “Pedro the Brief.”

  In the early afternoon hours of that same day, General Efraín Vásquez went public with his decision not to support the Carmona government, and Carlos Alfonso Martínez, inspector general of the National Guard, endorsed him. Both generals felt that the new government had, very simply, broken the constitutional thread.

  At almost the same time, Chávez was shuttled to another military garrison in Turiamo Bay, off the coast of Aragua state, close to Caracas. The deposed president says he began to sense that his death might be imminent.

  “I said to myself: My moment has come, and I began to pray, reciting the Our Father with my crucifix,” he later confessed.16 He also stated that “Carmona gave orders to some admirals and generals that I was to be dead by morning but that they were to apply the fleeing fugitives’ law, so that it would look like an accident.”17 The source of this information, according to Chávez, was a waiter at Miraflores Palace who said he heard the order while serving coffee to the new employees of the recently established government. Pedro Carmona has categorically denied this, saying,

  Chávez has very irresponsibly begun to claim that on the twelfth, people were planning to assassinate him and moreover that Carmona had issued the order to kill him. This statement is untrue and paranoid, not only because that order never came from my mouth, nor would I have ever endorsed it, being a man of principle, but because it never once occurred to anyone to do such a ridiculous thing, even though many Venezuelans would have celebrated it…. If such a plan had existed, there were plenty of opportunities during which he could easily have been executed.18

  Chávez has insisted, however, that his transfer to the naval base at Turiamo was part of an assassination plot:

  When I
got out of the helicopter and I began to walk, I noticed there was a conflict among the military officers guarding me. Two of them were there to kill me, but the others, no, the others were constitutionalists. At the moment they are about to carry out the order, and I am standing there, one of these mercenaries turns me around and gets behind me and I am thinking: This man is going to give it to me in the back. I turn around and look him in the face: “Look at what you’re about to do,” I tell him, and at that moment a young officer jumps over to me and says, “If they kill my president, all of us are dead here.” That neutralized the two mercenaries and saved my life.19

  In a videotape of the deposed president in captivity at Turiamo, however, Chávez seems animated, chatting with his guards, even cracking a few jokes and waving hello when he realizes he is being filmed. At no point does he mention this assassination attempt, and at one point he even says, “These boys have treated me wonderfully since the minute I arrived, they are tremendous soldiers, human beings who have even shared some conversation with me.”20

  At Turiamo, the president wrote a brief proclamation on a slip of paper and then dropped it into a trash can, where it was later retrieved and used as proof of what was going on. On that piece of paper, Hugo Chávez wrote the following: “I, Hugo Chávez Frías, Venezuelan, president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, declare: I have not given up the legitimate power the nation gave me…forever!!!”21 Not even at those darkest moments did his communicative abilities fail him. Just like his “for now” of February 4, 1992, he quickly coined a phrase capable of inspiring the same feeling: “Forever!”