This piece was published in the July/August 2002 issue of the NACLA Report.
So this is how a modern coup d’etat is overthrown: almost invisibly, at the margins of the media. Venezuela returned to democracy despite a self-imposed media blackout of astonishing proportions. A huge popular revolt against an illegitimate regime took place while the country’s middle class was watching soap operas and game shows; television networks took notice only in the very final moments, and, even then, only once they were absolutely forced to do so. Thereafter television could do no more than bear mute witness to a series of events almost without precedent in Latin America, and perhaps elsewhere, as a repressive regime, result of a pact between the military and business, was brought down less than 48 hours after its initial triumph. These events resist representation and have yet to be turned into narrative or analysis—the day after, the newspapers simply failed to appear—but they inspire thoughts of new forms of Latin American political legitimacy, of which this revolt may be just one particularly startling harbinger.
By the evening of Friday April 12, Caracas seemed to be returning to normal the day after the coup that had brought down the regime of President Hugo Chávez. Restaurants were full in traditional middle class nightspots, such as the nearby village of El Hatillo, with its picturesque colonial architecture and shops selling traditional handicrafts. Those who had banged on pots and pans for months and marched the previous day to protest against the government seemed to be breathing a sigh of relief that the whole process had been resolved so quickly and apparently so easily. “A Step in the Right Direction” was the banner headline on the front page of one major newspaper on Saturday, and the new president, Pedro Carmona, former head of the Venezuelan chamber of commerce, was beginning to name the members of his “transitional” government, while the first new policies were being announced. Control over the state oil company, PDVSA, the world’s largest oil company and Latin America’s largest company of any kind, had been central to the ongoing crisis that had led to the coup, and its head of production announced, to much applause, that “not one barrel of oil” would now be sent to Cuba. Not all was celebration, it is true: The television showed scenes of mourning for those who had died in the violent end to Thursday’s protest march, but the stations also eagerly covered live the police raids, breathless reporters in tow, hunting down the Chávez supporters allegedly responsible for these deaths.
Elsewhere, however, another story was afoot, the news circulating by word of mouth or cell phone. Early on Saturday afternoon, I received three phone calls in quick succession: one from somebody I was due to meet who called on his cell phone to say he was turning back as he had heard there were barricades in the streets and an uprising in a military base; another from a journalist who also cancelled an appointment, saying that a parachute regiment and a section of the air force had rebelled; a third from a friend who warned there was gunfire in the city center, and that a state of siege might soon be imposed. She added that none of this would appear on the television. I turned it on: indeed, not a sign. Other friends came by, full of similar rumors, and with word that people were gathering outside the national palace. Given the continued lack of news coverage, we decided to go out and take a look for ourselves.
Approaching the center of Caracas, we saw that crowds were indeed converging. But as we drove around, we saw almost no sign of any police or army on the streets. In the center itself, and at the site of Thursday’s disturbances, some improvised barricades had been constructed using piles of rubbish or burning tires, marking out the territory around the national palace itself. The demonstration was not large, but it was growing. We then headed towards the city’s opulent East Side, and came across a procession of people advancing along the road towards us, people clearly poorer and more racially mixed than the East Side’s usual inhabitants. They were chanting slogans in favor of Chávez, and carrying portraits of the deposed president. This march was headed towards the city center, as were a stream of buses apparently commandeered by other Chavistas. Neighborhood police were eyeing them carefully, but letting them pass. If this number of demonstrators was arriving from the eastern suburbs, then many more must be converging on the palace from the working class western part of the city. We doubled back and tracked the march from parallel streets, watching as the numbers grew, as passers-by were called to join in this unexpected protest.
Meanwhile, we were listening to the radio. Some reports were arriving of the crowds on the streets, but mainly we heard official pronouncements. First the army chief spoke, and we heard the signs of incipient splits among the forces behind the ruling junta: The army would continue to support interim president Carmona only if he reinstated Congress as well as the other democratically elected regional governors who had been unconstitutionally deposed the previous day. But, according to the constitution, if Congress were reinstated, and in the absence of the previous president and vice-president, the head of Congress should rightfully be next in line as head of state. Carmona himself was then interviewed, by CNN. He declared that the city was calm and under his control and he denied the interviewer’s suggestion that he had been forced to take refuge in any army base, downplayed any insubordination among sectors of the armed forces, only to announce that his next step might be to fire some of the military high command. Finally, the head of the National Guard pronounced that respect and recognition needed to be shown to those who had supported—and continued to support—the deposed president, Chávez. The pact between military and commerce was beginning to unravel. We decided to head home.
We turned on the television. Every Venezuelan commercial station was continuing with normal programming—and the state-owned channel had been off the air since Thursday’s coup. As we had access via cable to BBC World and Spanish-language CNN, however, we started to receive reports of disturbances in various parts of Caracas that morning, and some details about the parachute regiment’s refusal to surrender arms to the new regime. More cell phone calls assured us that the crowd outside the palace was still growing, and still peaceful. The BBC had a reporter in the crowd, and spoke of thousands of people gathered. Darkness fell, and still no word from any of the national networks. At one point CNN’s anchor pointedly asked its Caracas correspondent whether or not local television was covering this tense situation: No, he replied, despite these same channels’ protests over alleged censorship under the previous regime. Now the self-censorship of soap operas and light entertainment stood in the way of any representation of what was slowly emerging as a pro-Chávez multitude.
Indeed, the privately owned networks had previously protested loudly and bitterly about the former president’s policy of decreeing so-called cadenas (literally “networks,” but referring to Chávez’s public addresses themselves) in which he obliged all the networks to broadcast his own, often long and rambling, addresses to the nation. Now the networks had instituted their own cadena, the apparent diversity of variety shows masking a uniform silence about what was happening on the streets.
Then a development: Suddenly one channel broke its regular programming to show scenes of the street outside its own headquarters. A group of 30 to 40 young and mobile demonstrators, on motorcycles and scooters, were agitating outside the plate glass windows. Some rocks were thrown, some windows smashed and graffiti sprayed, and suddenly a new cadena formed as all the networks switched to the same image of demonstrators “attacking” the building. But the group moved on and the soap operas resumed. Until a similar group turned up at another channel’s headquarters, then another, then another. No more stones were thrown, but the demonstrations could now at least be glimpsed on television, in fragments, in a series of blurred images the cameras snatched through cracked windows and over balconies. A local pro-Chávez mayor who had been in hiding from the repression was briefly visible. But no camera teams ventured outside, and we still had little idea as to what was happening at the presidential palace.
We were switching rapidly between channels—to CNN and the BBC at the top of the hour, and then through the various commercial channels to try to see at least a partial view of the multitude that must now be on the streets. The international channels were showing footage shot during the day, of police repression of protests in the poorer neighborhoods—the footage was out there, but had not been screened on any local channels. At around 10:30 pm, on one of these sweeps through the channels, we saw a station that had been dark had now come back to life. A friend phoned almost immediately: “Are you watching channel eight?” Yes, we were. State television had, amazingly, come back onto the airwaves.
The people who had taken over the state television station were clearly improvising, desperately. The color balance and contrast of these studio images were all wrong, the cameras held by amateur hands, and only one microphone seemed to be working. Those behind the presenters’ desk were nervous, one fiddling compulsively with something on the desk, another shaking while holding the microphone, but there they were: a couple of journalists, a liberation theology priest, and a minister and a congressman from the previous regime. The minister spoke first, and fast. She gave a version of the violent end to Thursday’s march that absolutely differed from the narrative the media had put forward to justify the coup that had followed: The majority of the dead had been supporters of Chávez, not opposition protesters, and the snipers firing upon the crowds were members of police forces not under the regime’s control. Moreover, the former president had not resigned; he was being held against his will at a naval base on an island to the north. The current president, Carmona, was the illegitimate head of a de facto regime arising from a military coup. Thousands of people were on the streets outside the presidential palace demanding Chávez’s return. A counter-narrative was emerging.
The congressman appealed directly to the owners and managers of other television stations to portray what was happening in Caracas. No change on those other channels, however, most of which had returned to their regular programming. And then the state channel went off the air.
Over the next few hours, channel eight would go on and off the air several times. Each time the immediate fear was that it had been forcibly closed down again; each time, it turned out that technical problems were to blame as the channel was making do with a team unaccustomed to the equipment. Several times the channel attempted to show images from inside the presidential palace, but these were eventually successfully screened first on CNN: The “guard of honour” defending the palace was declaring its loyalty to Chávez. Later, around one AM, amid the confusion, we saw pictures of Chávez’s vice-president, Diosdado Cabello, inside the palace, being sworn in as president. Venezuela now had three presidents simultaneously: Hugo Chávez, Pedro Carmona, and Cabello. The situation was extremely confused, the majority of the channels were still transmitting none of this, and rumors reported on the BBC suggested that two of the three—Carmona as well as Chávez—were currently being detained by different sectors of the armed forces. But the balance of power had shifted to supporters of the previous regime. Only one question remained, posed by the thousands at the gates of the presidential palace and still besieging the private television stations: Would we see Chávez?
And so the apparently unthinkable happened. As the Armed Forces as well as the seat of power effectively passed back to the control of those loyal to the deposed regime, shortly before three AM Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, returned to the presidential palace, mobbed as soon as he left his helicopter by thousands of supporters in a state of near delirium. All the television stations were now running the images provided by channel eight—a new cadena had formed, as commercial television lapsed into a new form of stunned silence. The President returned to the office from which he had been broadcasting on Thursday afternoon, when he attempted to close down the private stations and as the coup was unfolding. This time, however, he was no longer alone behind his desk, but flanked by most of his ministers and in a room crowded with people, buzzing with excitement and emotion. We turned the television off.
Chávez once thought he depended upon television. He first came to prominence thanks to a televised impromptu speech to fellow rebels following the failure of his own coup attempt in 1992. This was the occasion on which he famously declared that the rebels’ goals had not, “for the time being,” been fulfilled, laying open the possibility of his return from the political wilderness. As president, he has consistently tried to use the mass media as a means of securing a direct, apparently personable and approachable, relationship with the Venezuelan people. He is one of the few world leaders with his own call-in show, in which for several hours a week he chats with members of the public live and on air. Television has worked for the President, and his attempts to monopolize the medium in the weeks leading up to the coup, and on April 11 itself, were in some senses merely an extension of this characteristic style. Hence it is a mistake to put too much emphasis on the fact that the particular owners of Venezuela’s commercial channels were set against the regime—though one of these, Gustavo Cisneros, is rumored to have bank-rolled the coup attempt. Rather, events in Venezuela have demonstrated the limits of televisual representation itself, and so of the “neopopulism” that makes the medium central to its form of governance.
Yet this neopopulism has failed, and even several weeks on, the fate of Chávez’s government, and indeed also of Chávez himself, remains uncertain. Support for, or at least acceptance of, what was once an overwhelmingly popular regime remains in decline, in part as a result of a relentless assault by both the press and the television networks, but also because it has so far failed to achieve its stated aim of transforming what, for all its oil resources, remains a country with considerable poverty. Chávez still has a large proportion of the middle classes firmly set against him, people who supported the coup; he must negotiate with them without at the same time betraying—and indeed while starting to fulfill—the desires of the multitude that overthrew it. The regime has been given a breathing space, but it could still be overthrown, by democratic means or otherwise, especially if it continues, as before the coup, to depend all too much on the figure of the president himself, whose personal charisma is already lost on the middle classes. As Chávez’s personalism allows for no competition, it leaves few alternatives to those who believe in the generally progressive causes advanced—if intermittently— by his government. “Chavismo” itself created the political vacuum that briefly allowed the far right pact of arms and commerce to take control.
In the event, however, the multitude came to fill that vacuum—silently at first and almost invisibly at the margins of the media. Though Chávez and Chavismo claim to represent that multitude, April’s insurrection should be the signal that the regime is in the end dependent upon, and constituted by, that multitude, and not upon any televisual accessibility. Chávez should not repeat the mistake—made both by the nineteenth-century liberators he reveres and the early twentieth-century populists he resembles—that he can serve as a substitute for that multitude, or that he can masquerade their agency as his own. For in the tumultuous 48 hours in which the president was detained, it became clear that “Chavismo without Chávez” has a power all of its own, apt to surprise any confused attempt at representation.
Thanks to that multitude, Venezuela continues to constitute a dissident exception to the contemporary prevalence of a neoliberalism that has only accentuated the divide between rich and poor throughout Latin America. It is not so much that Chávez himself demonstrates that other models are possible; the coup demonstrates that that model is, at best, in crisis. Rather, it is that the multitude suggests another possible, liberatory, side to the almost complete breakdown of any semblance of a social pact that characterizes the Latin American “mainstream.”
One sign of this breakdown is the withdrawal of any popular legitimation for political systems—the clamor in Peru, Argentina, and now Venezuela (among other countries) has been against politicians of any kind, all of whom are regarded as equally corrupt and equally inadequate to the needs and demands of the multitude. But the failure of any representation of April’s insurrection might also point towards a politics that is itself beyond representation, beyond a set of systematic substitutions of people for politicians.
Venezuela’s coup, and the revolt that overturned it, constitute another sign of the disappearance of the former contract—however illusory—that brought together people and nation. Hugo Chávez tried to reconstruct that contract by televisual means, but the medium itself rebelled against him, and it will continue to do so. The current regime has legitimacy, but this legitimacy does not come from a parade of invented rituals or fireside chats held in front of the cameras; it comes from the multitude’s constituent power.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jon Beasley-Murray is co-director of the MA in Latin American Cultural Studies program at the University of Manchester, England. He has published on Peronism, Sendero Luminoso, and Central American testimony, among other topics. He would like to thank particularly Luis Duno and Marnie Hylton for their hospitality during his brief but eventful stay in Caracas.
