by Jon Beasley-Murray
April 13, 2002

So this is how one lives a modern coup d’état: watching television. Venezuela’s coup (and coup it is, make no mistake) took place in the media, fomented by the media, and with the media themselves the apparent object of both sides’ contention. But while South America’s longest-standing democracy was brought down in the confused glare of media spectacle, any attempt to turn this spectacle into narrative or analysis must also take into account, first, oil and, second, the general breakdown of Latin American political legitimacy, of which this coup has been just one (particularly bloody) symptom.

In Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, everyone has been watching television over the past few days: every restaurant, shop, and business has had a television on, showing almost constant news coverage, and diners and shoppers have been dividing their attention between what they are consuming and what they are seeing of developments in the ongoing crisis that came to a head last night with the overthrow of president Hugo Chávez.

For several months now, support for (now former) president Chávez’s once overwhelmingly popular regime has been in steady decline, in part as a result of a relentless assault by both the press and the television networks. In response, Chávez took to decreeing so-called "chains," in which he obliged all the networks to broadcast his own–often long and rambling–addresses to the nation. The media only redoubled its opposition, subverting the broadcasts by superposing text protesting against this "abuse" of press freedom, or for instance by splitting the screen between Chávez’s speech on the one side and images of anti-government demonstrations on the other. Moreover, through the media came more and more calls for the president’s resignation or, failing that, for the intervention of the military.

The military has now answered these calls. The trigger for the most recent convulsions has been (predictably enough) a battle for control of Venezuela’s oil. The country is the world’s fourth largest producer, and the third largest exporter of oil to the United States; the state oil company, PDVSA (the world’s largest oil company and Latin America’s largest company of any kind), is crucial to the economy as a whole, and among Chávez’s policies had been the attempt to rejuvenate OPEC and to run PDVSA according to national and political priorities rather than simply acceding to market demands. Two weeks ago, the president sacked several members of the company’s board of directors, replacing them with his own allies. The management immediately cried foul, initiating a production slowdown, and taking up a position at the vocal centre of anti-government protest. At the weekend, Chávez replaced more board members, and on Monday the union federation Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV) and the national chamber of commerce, FEDECAMERAS, allied with the oil industry’s management and joined to call a general strike for Tuesday 10th. While the opposition gathered to demonstrate around the headquarters of PDVSA, in Caracas’s opulent East Side, those loyal to the government congregated around the presidential palace in the more working class and dilapidated city centre. Tuesday night Chávez decreed another chain, declaring to the nation that the strike had been a failure; in response, the coalition of union, business, and oil management declared that the strike had been 100% successful (of course, the truth was somewhere in between) and announced, first, another day’s general strike and, then, the following day, that the strike would be indefinite.

The atmosphere in the city became palpably tenser. Opposition supporters, mainly from the middle and upper classes, drove through the city, the national flag and the black flag of opposition waving from the electric windows of their four-wheel drive vehicles, while a broader spectrum of opponents added to the cacophony by banging pots and pans from their windows (exchanging shouted insults with government supporters) either when Chávez appeared on television or, on those days when he was off the screen, at pre-arranged times in the evening. Encouraged by this show of support, anti-Chávez forces called for a march within the East Side for Thursday morning. On the day of the march, the two hundred thousand demonstrators then continued on beyond their stated destination, heading for the city centre and the core of the president’s power base. Undoubtedly this was a provocation (and almost certainly planned in advance), but at this point the two sides had become so polarised that confrontation was inevitable.

The final moments of Chávez’s regime began that afternoon as the president tried to take over the television networks literally as well as symbolically. At around 1:30pm he appeared on the airwaves, broadcasting from his office in the palace, declaring calm and that his government continued in control, well able to deal with the vociferous minority demanding his resignation. As the broadcast started, I was finishing lunch with friends at a restaurant; at all the tables there was a sudden silence, all present recognising that Venezuela’s crisis had entered its end-game. Over the next hour or so, as the president continued talking (sometimes chiding, sometimes patronising), one by one the terrestrial channels were taken off the air, leaving only the government station available to those who did not have cable. For some time, a surreal dialogue ensued, as the private channels (now visible only to cable subscribers) split their screens once more, showing mute and confused images of rioting taking place outside the palace, commenting upon these events with superimposed text, while Chávez spoke calmly from behind his desk while from off-screen aides periodically passed him notes updating him about and allowing him to respond to the images and text added by the television stations to the official discourse.

Then the chain broke and, for all intents and purposes, the game was up. The networks abandoned Chávez and dedicated themselves to the pictures (often repeated, often out of synch) of what had been happening in the city centre as the president’s discourse had dominated the airwaves. Confused and disorganised images of stone-throwing youths, the injured carried away on stretchers, Chávez loyalists apparently returning fire, the first dead bodies, troops and tanks mobilising, and various military officials making statements all marked a coup in progress. I was driven back to another friend’s house as darkness fell, and we as well as the few other road-users ran every red light in our way. As the night wore on, the government television screened old nature documentaries, and then went off the air completely as private channels regained their full broadcasting capabilities. Eventually the entire military high command declared themselves against the president. Grainy images of government jets leaving the darkened city centre airfield with all lights off strengthened rumours that the president might have fled, but then the different forces seemed to have hunkered down until, at 1:30 in the morning, the sound of pots and pans and fireworks greeted the news that Hugo Chávez was now in custody. But nobody went out into the street. We turned the television off.

It is only today that the coup’s fall-out is becoming clear, just as the choppy, confused television images are being re-written as linear, coherent newspaper narrative. Adherents of the former government are (in their entirety) being accused of perpetrating the massacre of at least thirteen unarmed protesters yesterday–when it is far from clear (and indeed, most unlikely) either that all the dead are protestors or that the protestors were all unarmed. With this justification, however, (and with the false notion that Chávez’s regime was characterised by repression) all traces of the past three years are rapidly being erased. It seems probable that Chávez’s democratising constitution will be revoked (it has already been utterly breached), and that the country will return to the constitution of 1961, and perhaps to the entrenched social inequalities of the 1960s and 1970s, too. Much of the opposition, united only in its rejection of Chávez, may find cause to regret the manner of the old regime’s passing, and the shape of the regime now in formation. At present, the "transitional" government (which has promised new elections "within a year") is the product of a pact between the military and business: the new president, Pedro Carmona, is the former head of the chamber of commerce, and in the televised announcement in which his new position was announced, he was flanked by the collected heads of the various armed services. Meanwhile, the police are conducting raids in the city centre, (democratically elected) provincial governors are being detained and stripped of power, and all those who sympathised with or worked for the former government face an uncertain future; some have already gone into hiding.

The previous regime had many faults: after an auspicious beginning (and 80% support in the polls), it failed to mobilise the mass of the people towards its stated aim of transforming what, for all its oil resources, is still a country with considerable poverty. The regime’s prospects (and the prospects for any social change) came to depend all too much on the figure of the president himself, at best a maverick, at worst authoritarian in style (and probably in fact quite incompetent), whose personal charisma would inevitably wane. As Chávez’s personalism allowed for no competition, when Chávez’s popularity declined, there were no alternatives left to those who believed in the generally progressive causes advanced (if intermittently) by his government. "Chavismo" itself came to create the political vacuum that has allowed the far right pact of arms and commerce now to take control.

At the same time, under Chávez, Venezuela constituted a dissident exception to the contemporary prevalence of a neoliberalism that has only accentuated the divide between rich and poor throughout Latin America. If Chávez was not the way forward, he was rather a throwback, a (somewhat hokey) mix both of the nineteenth-century liberators he revered–he went so far as to rename the country the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela," in honour of Simón Bolívar, the leader of the Latin American independence movement–and of early twentieth-century populists such as Argentina’s Juan Perón. Briefly, at least, Chávez seemed to demonstrate that other models were possible–and, in his attempts to make OPEC a force of third world producers allied against a global system heavily weighted in favour of first world consumers, that another form of globalisation might be imagined.

Now, however, Venezuela has rejoined the Latin American "mainstream." This mainstream is characterised by the almost complete breakdown of any semblance of a social pact. One sign of this breakdown is the perceived dramatic rise in delinquency or common crime–Caracas is a city in which cars abound with a surplus of security devices, the many high-rise residential buildings that characterise its urban growth all have guards, and people are weighed down by the number of keys required to operate lifts and open doors, gates, and pass through other protective cordons. Another sign of this breakdown is the withdrawal of any popular legitimation for political systems–the clamour in Peru, Argentina, and now Venezuela (among other countries) has been against politicians of any kind, all of whom are regarded as equally corrupt, equally inefficient, and equally inadequate to the needs and demands of the multitude. Venezuela’s coup is simply another sign of the disappearance of the former contract (however illusory that contract may have been) between people and nation. Hugo Chávez tried to reconstruct that contract by televisual means, but the medium itself (unsuited to such simple narratives) rebelled against him. The current regime lacks any legitimacy, however much it may have paraded invented rituals for the cameras, and will survive only through repression or apathy. But the multitude is waiting for other alternatives, and other possibilities.

Jon Beasley-Murray
University of Manchester
jon.beasley-murray@man.ac.uk
Caracas, 12th April 2002