BY GREGORY WILPERT
CARACAS, April 12 — In the early morning hours, Venezuelan army generals arrested President Hugo Chavez. The orchestration of the coup was impeccable and, in all likelihood, planned a long time ago.
First of all, the military is saying that the main reason for the coup is what happened on April 11. "Civil society", as the opposition here refers to itself, organised a massive demonstration of perhaps 100,000-200,000 people to march to the headquarters of Venezuela's oil company, PDVSA, in defence of its fired management.
For the whole day prior to the march, all the private television stations broadcast advertisements for the demonstration, approximately once every 10 minutes.
It was a peaceful march, without government interference of any kind, even though the march illegally blocked Caracas' main artery of transportation for several hours.
Supposedly on the spur of the moment, the organisers decided to re-route the march to Miraflores, the president's office building, so as to confront a pro-government demonstration, which was called at the last minute. About 5000 Chavez-supporters had gathered there by the time the anti-government demonstrators arrived.
In between the two demonstrations were the city police, under the control of Alfredo Pena, the oppositional mayor of Caracas, and the National Guard, under control of the president. All sides claim that they were there peacefully and did not want to provoke anyone.
I arrived on the scene just when the opposition demonstration and the National Guard began fighting each other. Who started the fight, which involved mostly stone-throwing and the use of tear gas, is — as is so often the case in such situations — nearly impossible to tell.
A little later, shots were fired into the crowds and I clearly saw that there were three groups involved in the shooting — the city police, the Chavez supporters and snipers from buildings above. Again, who shot first has become a moot and probably impossible to resolve question.
At least 10 people were killed and nearly 100 wounded in this gun battle — almost all of them demonstrators.
One of the TV stations managed to film one of the three sides in this battle and broadcast the footage over and over again, making it look like the only ones shooting were Chavez supporters.
Over and over again, the TV stations showed the footage of the Chavez supporters and implied that they were shooting at an unarmed crowd. As it turns out, and as will probably never be reported by the media, most of the dead were Chavez supporters.
Also, as will probably never be told, the snipers were members of an extreme opposition party, known as Bandera Roja.
These last two facts, crucial as they are, will not be known because they do not fit with the new mythology, which is that Chavez armed and then ordered his supporters to shoot at the opposition demonstration. Perhaps my information is incorrect, but what is certain is that the local media here will never bother to investigate this information. And the international media will probably simply ape what the local media reports (which they are already doing).
Chavez's biggest and perhaps only mistake of the day, which provided the last remaining proof his opposition needed for his alleged anti-democratic credentials, was to order the black-out of the private television stations. They had been broadcasting the confrontations all afternoon and Chavez argued that these broadcasts were exacerbating the situation and should, in the name of public safety, be temporarily banned.
Now, all of "civil society", the media and the military are saying that Chavez had to go because he turned against his own people. Aside from this being a lie, what is conveniently forgotten are all of the achievements of the Chavez administration: a new democratic constitution, which broke the power monopoly of the two hopelessly corrupt and discredited main parties and put Venezuela at the forefront in terms of progressive constitutions; a fundamental land reform; financing of numerous progressive ecological community development projects; a crackdown on corruption; promotion of educational reform which schooled over 1 million children for the first time and doubled investment in education; regulation of the informal economy so as to reduce the insecurity of the poor; achievement of fairer price for oil exports through OPEC, which significantly increased government income; reduction of official unemployment from 18% to 13%; introduction of a large-scale micro-credit program for the poor and for women; reform of the tax system which dramatically reduced tax evasion and increased government revenue; lowering of infant mortality from 21% to 17%; tripling of participation in literacy courses.
Chavez's opposition, which primarily consisted of Venezuela's old guard in the media, the unions, big business, the Catholic Church and the traditionally conservative military, never cared about any of these achievements. Instead, they took advantage of their media monopoly to turn public opinion against Chavez and managed to turn his biggest liability, his autocratic and inflammatory style, against him.
At this point, it is impossible to know what will happen to Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution" — whether it will be completely abandoned and whether things will return to Venezuela's 40-year tradition of patronage, corruption, and rentierism for the rich. What one can say without a doubt, is that this coup shows once again that democracy in Latin America is a matter of ruling class preference, not a matter of law.
If the United States and the other "democratic" states actually practised what they preach, then they should not recognise this new government. Democrats around the world should pressure their governments to deny recognition to Venezuela's new military junta or any president it happens to choose.
According to the charter of the Organisation of American States (OAS), this would mean expelling Venezuela from the OAS, as a US State Department official recently threatened to do while Chavez was in office.
[Gregory Wilpert lives in Caracas, is a former US Fulbright scholar in Venezuela, and is currently doing independent research on the sociology of development.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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