“At first glance we may observe something rather surprising: the entire political system devised to govern the country after the February 4 coup was characterized by its authors as ‘democratic,’”5 states the philosopher and political analyst Alberto Arvelo Ramos. Upon reading the decrees, however, he came to the conclusion that “there are a vast number of Venezuelans who are not in agreement with the regime, who would nevertheless remain excluded if this project were to come to fruition.” Among others, anyone who had been a public employee during any of the previous administrations would be excluded. But what most shocked Arvelo Ramos, who had been active with the Communists in the 1960s, was the General Council’s plan to institute a Public Health Committee that was not intended, precisely, to establish Venezuelan public health policies. This seventh decree defined this committee as “the personification of the national public conscience.”6 According to Arvelo Ramos, it was created in the image and likeness of the similarly named committee that existed during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, and was intended to crush the opposition in the style of Lenin. The impression that emerged from all this, he says, was that the coup stagers intended to control civil society by placing military officers in jobs normally held by civilians.7
It was not until 1998, following the death of Kléber Ramírez at the age of sixty-one, that Hugo Chávez—a man known for moving nimbly through the terrain of ideological ambiguity—admitted to the existence of the decrees. Only then did he deem the documents fit for public perusal. He swore that “many of them would never have been enacted,”8 though he never specified which ones. Additionally, Ramírez himself stated that he had received the order to draw up the decrees during a meeting presided over by Chávez in November 1991 and that “the final draft was sent to commanders Chávez and Arias for their respective revision and approval.”9 Francisco Arias has indicated that the decrees “served as a reference” and has also said that they would have enacted decrees to terminate all existing political parties, establish tribunals to carry out swift trials for the corrupt, withdraw “a substantial number of generals,” and call for a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution when they felt that the conditions were favorable. Five civilians and four retired military officers would preside over the General Council of the Nation. The latter group, presumably, would not include any of the coup instigators. Regarding the civil candidates, Arias says that there was talk of possibly appointing the journalist and former presidential candidate José Vicente Rangel (who was vice president until January 2007), the Christian Democrat politician Abdón Vivas Terán, the Radical Cause leader Andrés Velásquez, and others. Moreover, and perhaps to keep from violating the old Spanish maxim “There is no such thing as a coup without the Church,” they discussed the possibility of having a clergyman among the group as well, specifically Monsignor Mario Moronta.
“It had been made clear that, had the movement succeeded, Hugo Chávez would be the commander of the Caracas battalion and Arias would be the head of the Casa Militar [the presidential guard],” says Pablo Medina, who agrees with Arias that the government council would have been composed of five civilians and four military retirees. It is difficult to imagine, however, that the leaders of the movement would have been willing to assume a supporting role in the new government, delegating their power after having pursued it so zealously for so many years. Arias in the presidential guard? Hugo Chávez in a second-rate job, in one of countless battalions?
Beyond the many unknowns regarding the true scope and objectives of February 4, one thing remains clear, as Arvelo Ramos points out: “the Present-day Chávez never stops identifying himself with the 1992 insurrectionist project.”10 In fact, the present head of state consistently commemorates the date of the coup, celebrating each anniversary as a triumph, the dawn of a new era. He has even officially declared it the “Day of National Dignity.”
EVEN FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, certain aspects of the February 4 uprising remain shrouded in mystery. One enigma is why, at the last minute, the civilian members of the movement—who had joined the group precisely to lend some balance to the insurrection—were suddenly shut out of what was ultimately an exclusively military operation. In the city of Valencia, a small group of students sparked some disturbances that were rapidly contained by the police. But in Caracas and Maracaibo, nobody took to the streets in defense of the coup.
“I had a truck filled with rifles that were supposed to be distributed among the civilians…there were certain people who knew the password ‘Páez-Patria’ for requesting weapons, but they never materialized. It’s not our fault alone, since there were people who knew and didn’t show up, having been alerted in time,”11 Hugo Chávez offered by way of explanation, years later.12
Some people, however, declare that the opposite was true. On the night of February 3, a group of four civilians waited in vain at a toll booth on the Maracay-Caracas highway. According to Pablo Medina, the person who didn’t turn up was Hugo Chávez. “A week earlier, in Maracay, he had promised to deliver us weapons for the uprising.” For no apparent reason, the commander ordered the buses to turn off the highway and onto the old road, breaking away from the convoy led by his co-conspirator Yoel Acosta, contrary to what they had planned.
Medina began to organize his troops and sent four men to the toll booth, among them Ali Rodríguez, a former guerrilla who was once foreign minister and is currently Venezuela’s ambassador in Cuba. The men got tired of waiting around. “Our people make contact with his people, and they refuse to receive them. And so I said, ‘This piece of shit doesn’t want to make contact.’ I just washed my hands of the whole thing. There was nothing I could do about it.”
Chávez himself has fueled this controversy. In the first interview he granted from prison, which appeared in the newspaper El Globo three weeks after his failed coup, he pointed out that “the origins of the movement are eminently military, though the intention was to put together a civilian-military junta with the best of the nation’s goodwill. During the actual military action itself…there was no civil participation.” At the time, people wondered if this was true or if he was simply trying to protect the civilians involved in the plot. Hugo Chávez has spoken about the idea of bringing civilians into his political enterprise in the following manner:
On several occasions we carried out tests, we invited civilian sectors to stage protests in certain towns in the interior, and then we would check their ability to summon, to mobilize people. The most strategic, essential idea was an idea I came up with, on a trip to Panama, where I saw two Dignity Battalions in action…. The idea consisted of forming battalions, or even organizational charts for squadrons, instruction manuals for combat battalions in certain towns…. We had to consider that those small civilian groups could and should act as the driving force behind a mass movement.13
Yet, at the last minute, he decided to exclude them from his attempt to gain control of the government. According to Douglas Bravo, “The idea was that civil society should have an active role in the revolutionary movement. That was exactly what Chávez didn’t want. Not at all, absolutely no way. Chávez had no interest in the participation of civil society, acting as a concrete force. Civil society could applaud him but not participate—that was an entirely different story…. He does not tolerate dissidence or different opinions.”14
According to Bravo, just days before February 4, a group of ex-guerrillas (among them Kléber Ramírez) met with Chávez and, when they asked him about the actions they would be carrying out on “D-Day,” the commander apparently said, “After we gain control of the government, we’ll call you.” These words belied an attitude that, Bravo has said, “is not a transitory, tactical stance. It is a political conception of life.”15 Herma Marksman also notes that, in reality, Hugo Chávez “didn’t trust civilians,” which does seem to explain why he left them hanging the day of the coup.
Another question that remains unclear, and that sparked perhaps more controversy and caused g
reater conflict between the coup instigators, was why Hugo Chávez did not leave the Military History Museum to aid the men fighting at Miraflores. It is a question that Chávez has never answered very convincingly, instead suggesting that the breakdown in radio communications thwarted his mobility. It remains a mystery. Captain Ronald Blanco, one of the men in charge of the attack, phoned Herma Marksman from the palace at around one in the morning on February 4 and asked her to phone his mother to tell her that he had been wounded, but not seriously.
Then he asked Herma, “What do you know about Commander Chávez? He knew he had to be here, too, and we’re out here all by ourselves, falling on our faces. Antonio Rojas [the other captain in charge of the operative] is wounded, and the commander is nowhere to be found.” Marksman still wonders what Hugo was doing at the museum. “I don’t know, he was supposed to get to Miraflores…it was all part of the plan.”
At least three different stories attempt to explain this sequence of events. According to one, Chávez was waiting for his men to bring President Pérez to the Military History Museum so that he could then leave for Miraflores secure in the knowledge that he had succeeded. Another theory maintains that he didn’t go to Miraflores because he thought his life would be in danger if he did. According to this second version, Ronald Blanco and Antonio Rojas were going to assassinate Chávez and Arias the day of the insurrection because they believed the two commanders had struck a deal with the generals and betrayed the conspiracy. The last theory, favored by Chávez’s enemies, suggests that he didn’t leave the museum because he was scared. We will probably never know which of these three versions comes closest to the reality of the situation.
The role of Defense Minister General Fernando Ochoa at the time of the coup is another 4F mystery. Today, former president Carlos Andrés Pérez seems convinced that his colleague was plotting against him. After the coup, Pérez not only kept Ochoa in his cabinet but went on to appoint him foreign minister. “This is what happened: in Venezuela there was a very bad situation in the Army. There were too many generals and admirals, and there just weren’t positions for all of them. This created a general state of insubordination in the armed forces. And they were very ambitious. Ochoa led one group. Every general had his group and they were all trying to figure out how to get it together to take over.” As all this was happening, the military intelligence service began to keep an eye on a group of generals, among them Ochoa, that was examining corruption inside the armed forces, a task that had generated criticism among their subordinates.
Some believe that a few days before the uprising, the defense minister procured an alliance with the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement. José Esteban Ruiz Guevara described the incident that led him to believe this. He had been driving out to Maracay with his friend Francisco Orta, another Barinas Communist like him, and Orta’s son Oscar, who was behind the wheel. “At the entrance to San Joaquín, a run-down little housing complex where Hugo lived, there is a kind of alleyway, and just as we arrived at around four in the morning, a car passed in front of us and someone lit a cigarette. There was a light on inside and I managed to make out the face of Minister Ochoa Antich. And I said to Francisco, ‘Look, that’s the minister right there.’” When they reached Hugo’s house, Hugo told them, “‘The minister just left. Now he’s suggesting we stage a takeover at the palace. With him [Ochoa] as president, Hugo in Defense, and I think José Vicente Rangel…’ ‘And what did you tell him?’ I asked him. ‘No, man, I told him to piss off!’ he said.” This story was confirmed by Oscar Orta, who also claims to have seen Minister Ochoa leaving Chávez’s house that night.
According to Alcides Rondón, Chávez’s former classmate and current vice minister for communications, General Ochoa knew all about the preparations for the coup. Ochoa has always denied this. Rondón, who worked at the Directorate for Military Intelligence, seems certain. “The night that Ochoa Antich assumed the position of defense minister, General Carlos Julio Peñaloza grabbed me to accompany an officer who was going to inform him about all the meetings they [the coup plotters] had held and all their plans. That officer brought in the exact list of the units that were going to participate in the revolt, and he handed it over. And the meeting with Ochoa Antich was in his apartment at that housing complex in front of Tamanaco [Las Mercedes]. You can say whatever you want, but I know the truth.”
Chávez has always denied that General Ochoa participated in the coup attempt. But from prison, the conspirators did have something to say to the French newspaper Le Monde.16 When asked if the defense minister had known of their plans, they replied:
Yes, he knew about it but he didn’t belong to the Bolivarian Movement, he had a movement that was parallel to ours. We managed to find out about his objectives after we got our men to infiltrate his meetings. They had conceived of a “Giraffe Plan” that consisted of allowing us to act, and they were apprised of our movements, they had identified our leaders as well as the day and time of our operation, and they didn’t do anything to stop it—on the contrary, some of our men thought that General Ochoa was the movement’s leader.
Rondón, who has said he was not in favor of the coup, has his own thesis about why Pérez and his team did not snuff it out, if in fact the uprising was a foregone conclusion that had been leaked to the government. In 1992, he had been posted as an operations officer at the U.N. mission in Western Sahara. On February 3, he received a phone call from his wife, at the headquarters in El Aaiún.
“She said to me, ‘I’m really worried, people from the Directorate for Intelligence called to tell me that the paratroopers are leaving for Caracas, that the coup is going ahead.’ I found out in Western Sahara—there is no way to convince me that the government didn’t know the coup was going to happen.” The officer is convinced that President Pérez “thought it would be a minor uprising that he would be able to control, that he would come out of it looking like a hero. He never thought that the movement would have the capacity to send him running out of Miraflores. I am one of those people who believe that it was a political maneuver of Carlos Andrés Pérez.”
Chávez’s own girlfriend, Herma Marksman, seems convinced that the outcome of the rebellion was affected by mistrust, intrigue, and hunger for power. “Today I think that 4F was doomed to fail. It had to fail, because nobody was playing clean.”
It is likely that on February 4, 1992, there were other conspiracies at work. It is not unlikely that other “model officers” were plotting to overthrow the president, and not just in response to the age-old Venezuelan tradition of the military controlling the civilian realm. The general feeling at the time was that democracy was in jeopardy. People had flatly rejected the country’s political elite. Had the coup succeeded, that last point would have been critical.
“Hugo had already considered all of that. He believed that the political parties had done a lot of damage to this country and that there was a need to momentarily suspend political parties,” says Marksman.
Of all this, one thing was made very clear: of the many coup plots purportedly in the works, only one was activated and made visible to the majority of the nation. Only the name of Hugo Chávez began to circulate among the populace. However, 4F would always be the project that cost him the most. In 1998, just before he crossed the threshold at Miraflores, someone asked him what he felt had been his greatest misfortune.
“Not achieving our objectives on February 4,” he replied.17
CHAPTER 8
“Bolívar and I”
THE FIRST STOP FOR THE COUP PLOTTERS, AFTER LEAVING THE MILITARY intelligence headquarters, was the Cuartel San Carlos, a prison located in an old building almost directly opposite the National Pantheon, the eternal resting spot of Simón Bolívar. Everything was in place for Hugo Chávez to become an icon. People spontaneously turned up at the jail to meet him and waited on long lines to visit him. Overnight, he had been anointed by the angel of popularity, and according to some it would transform him entirely. At first, it seemed a
novelty, a curiosity. Reporters traveled to meet the Chávez family, left cell phones in the prison to get the first few radio interviews, writing and publishing the typical articles that one might expect. But something happened: the lines of people waiting to see Chávez grew longer and longer. All kinds of people wanted to shake hands with the men behind the coup. Many impromptu visitors from the middle class wanted to meet Chávez. But he was also visited by social leaders, political figureheads, and left-wing intellectuals. Behind the prison bars, a real-life popular phenomenon was unfolding.
Herma Marksman remembers the early days of this period: “I was talking with the captains, and I was about to go over to him. When I caught sight of Hugo, he was leaning against a window, with about forty people on line, waiting, so that he would sign a little piece of paper. My daughter was with me. And I asked Francisco [Arias], ‘What is this all about? Are you aware of the mess we’re in? Or do you think it’s a laugh to drag out a bunch of tanks, knock down the door to Miraflores Palace, and then assume that everything’s fine? Instead of getting serious, looking for some kind of solution to this problem…. Hugo thinks he’s Rock Hudson, signing autographs!’”
Hugo Chavez Page 11