On Monday, April 15, the day after his dramatic return to power, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez called for a “national dialogue.” He acknowledged the “large number of Venezuelans who were in disagreement with the government, and who would continue to demonstrate peacefully,” and he called for a lowering of the levels of confrontation in Venezuela [See “Coup and Countercoup: An Eyewitness Account,” this issue]. The current polarization, he said “is not positive. There has to be communication among the different sectors” of Venezuelan society.[1]
The day before, by contrast, in the full flush of victory, he went to the city of Maracay to deliver a fiery speech to a batallion of paratroopers—his most militant and consistent supporters throughout the previous days’ events—and rallied the troops with a stirring attack on the “oligarchs” who had attempted to bring down his revolutionary government.[2] The two speeches, the conciliatory reaching out to all Venezuelans and the “us-against-them” defense of the revolution, reflect the full spectrum of political sensibilities within Chavismo—both before and after the failed coup. The tensions between “moderates” and “hardliners” have been there since the beginning.
Chávez assumed the presidency of Venezuela in 1998 at the head of what he called a “Bolivarian Revolution.” The Revolution linked itself to the legacy of the ninteenth century South American liberator Simón Bolivar and promised to raise both material living standards and the dignity of the Venezuelan people. It was a nationalist response to the process of neoliberal globalization that was widening the gap between rich and poor—and North and South—as well as a “dignified” response to the corruption and inefficiency that had come to characterize Venezuela’s political class. The Bolivarian vision, however, was wide-reaching and left room for an array of positions and strategies. In the months leading up to the April 11 coup attempt, as Chávez’s presidency came under attack from several fronts, these differences produced tensions and confrontation within the Chavista movement.
The Bolivarian project evoked the memory of Bolívar the patriot, liberator and soldier. It rode on a wave of such popularity that it allowed Chávez, an ex-military officer and coup plotter, to win the presidency in a landslide vote; allowed the Chavistas to call a Constituent Assembly in 1999 to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution; and allowed Chávez to be re-elected to a six-year term in 2000. It also drew the wrath of all those savagely castigated by Chávez for being members of the old politics. From the beginning, it was a polarizing affair, displaying, in the words of Margarita López-Maya and Luis Lander, two NACLA writers sympathetic to the process, “a level of belligerence unprecedented in recent Venezuelan life.”[3]
In 2001, oil prices—the staple of Venezuela’s export earnings—precipitously fell; living standards stagnated; and with no credible plan for economic recovery in sight, Chávez’s once imposing popularity plummeted. Then, as the Bush administration became vocal about its dissatisfaction with his global independence—particularly his friendship with Fidel Castro and his cordial relations with his OPEC partners in Iran and Iraq—the domestic opposition to Chávez became increasingly emboldened and aggressive [See “Taking Note,” this issue]. The parties he defeated in 1998, Democratic Action (AD) and the Social Christian Copei, along with the Catholic Church, the national business chamber Fedecámaras, most of the media, and the AD-affiliated Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) all went on the anti-Chávez offensive.
On December 10, Fedecámaras, joined by the CTV, called a one-day general strike, and demonstrations demanding Chávez’s removal then became virtually a daily occurrence. To make matters worse, several military officers in the midst of much fanfare began publicly calling for Chávez to step down.
The degree to which the Bush administration played an active role in this political destabilization is still coming to light, but it is possible that Washington went well beyond the simple sending of signals to the emboldened opposition. On several occasions, under the apparent coordination of Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich, administration officials reportedly met with the opposition figures who were to become coup leaders.[4]
Disputes over how to respond to the challenges of an increasingly aggressive opposition deepened divisions between hardliners and moderates within Chávez’s own party, the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR). The moderates proposed dialogue and compromise. The hardliners called opposition leaders “conspirators” and favored responding to their protests with mobilizations of their own. The hardliners were reluctant to back down on any issue or to alienate the movement’s most zealous activists in order to avoid dampening the spirit of the government’s supporters.
Significantly, the Chavistas have never had a unified ideology or well-defined political program. When Chávez came to power in 1998, he challenged the privilege, corruption and inefficiency of the old regime—a regime that could no longer “deliver the goods” to the Venezuelan people. Chávez rose to power as national political institutions throughout Latin America were being rendered relatively ineffective by shifts in the global economy—except, perhaps, as mechanisms by which office holders might line their own pockets. In that context, while he always considered himself a man of the left, he rose on a regionwide tide of “anti-politics,” and the bearer of his anti-politics was the institution least sullied by the compromises of day-to-day politics—the Venezuelan military.
The “hard line” of the MVR is actually made up of two different currents, the military officers and the “leftists.” The divisions are long-standing. The military rebels led by Chávez who in 1982 founded the MVR’s precursor, the “Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement-200” (MBR-200), set out to forge a “civilian-military alliance.” Following Chávez’s aborted coup attempt in 1992, and especially after his amnesty by then-President Rafael Caldera and his release from prison in 1994, the tension between the military and civilian members of the MBR-200 manifested itself in day-to-day personal contact. Many of the group’s civilian activists had once belonged to leftist organizations that had faced the military in the guerrilla struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. They were intent on gaining the upper hand in the MBR-200 in order to minimize the influence of the officers, whom they distrusted for lacking clear political or economic objectives and whom they criticized for their arbitrary style.
A second rift in the MBR-200 emerged during those years. The civilians themselves were split between leftist and moderate wings; hence there developed a three-way tension among moderates, hard-line leftists and military officers. Some of the leftists favored electoral abstention, which was the group’s official line until April 1997 when the MBR-200 changed its name to the MVR and ran Chávez as candidate in the 1998 presidential elections. The moderates were particularly vociferous in pushing for participation in electoral politics. The moderate wing was led by a long-time activist named Luis Miquilena who had begun his political career as a Communist dissident leader in the early 1940s and who had subsequently become a successful businessman. As MVR’s finance secretary, Miquilena took advantage of his extensive business contacts to raise money for the 1998 campaign. After Chávez’s election, he became interior minister and, arguably, the most powerful of Chávez’s political lieutenants.
After Chávez assumed the presidency, differences between the leftists, who favored immediate radical social reforms, and the willing-to-compromise moderates quickly surfaced. In the 1999 Constituent Assembly, for instance, when the new “Bolivarian” constitution was drafted, the leftists successfully pushed provisions that restricted the role of the private sector in the social security system and the all-important oil industry, though they were blocked in their efforts to reduce the normal work week from 44 to 40 hours.
Once the new National Assembly was convened in August 2000, pro-Miquilena members of the Assembly entered into conflict with the leftists on a number of issues. Assembly member Alejandro Armas, an MVR moderate, drew up a semi-privatizing social security law that differed little from the neoliberal privatization scheme signed by Venezuela’s previous president, Rafael Caldera. MVR leftist trade unionists in the Assembly rejected Armas’ plan and drafted one of their own that allowed for private capital only as a voluntary complement to state-controlled pension funds. The leftists pointed out that Armas, a close friend of Miquilena, had heavily consulted representatives of financial interests to which he had strong ties. Unable to reach an agreement, the National Assembly has put off a final decision on the matter on various occasions.
Shortly after the approval of the new constitution in December 1999, the tension between the officers and civilians within the MVR unexpectedly came to the fore. Three of Chávez’s top military comrades from the 1992 uprising quit the MVR and one of them, Francisco Arias Cárdenas, announced his decision to run against Chávez in the presidential elections of 2000. The three military comandantes singled out “three political comandantes” as remnants of the old politics with whom they could no longer work. The three political comandantes were Miquilena, then-Foreign Minister José Vicente Rangel and then-Minister of Interior Relations Ignacio Arcaya, all members of the moderate wing of the movement.
Miquilena, Rangel and Arcaya, said the military men, were simply politicians who made deals with other politicians and thus thwarted the main goal of the Chavista movement of achieving a definitive break with the past. The schism was precipitated by the objections of the Arias Cárdenas group to Rangel’s allegations of human rights violations by the military in the aftermath of the 1999 flooding and looting on the Caribbean coast. In essence, Arias Cárdenas and his group (like the military current today) were political “purists” who ruled out granting concessions to adversaries—be they the concessions resulting from “normal” parliamentary deal-making, or concessions on basic issues like personal security—and at the same time they failed to define their positions on basic socio-economic issues.
The Chavista movement, which does not call itself “socialist,” has made little effort up until now to define long-term objectives. The military faction, which stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Chavista civilians during the days and nights of April 11-14, may at some point confront the leftist hardliners over the party’s stance on social and economic issues. Many military officers, for example, consider the proposal for a state-run social security system—a point of honor for the Chavista labor leaders—to be economically unrealistic.
At the same time, members of the military wing of the MVR have pushed legislation dealing with public security that runs counter to the spirit of open democracy and liberty embodied in the new constitution. Indeed, a hard line has been differently drawn by different people. For the leftist hardliners, it has meant unswerving defense of basic class issues such as their determination to include Venezuela’s working poor—including “informal”-sector workers—in the trade union movement, and their commitment to safeguard state-run social security. For the military hardliners it has meant, and may continue to mean, avoidance of negotiation with the politicians of the old political class—over anything.
The conflict between the hardliners and moderates came to a head in the final months of 2001. The moderates attempted to ward off the December 10 strike by making concessions to the opposition. Armas and other pro-Miquilena Assembly members offered to negotiate modifications in a set of 49 laws that the opposition claimed had been recently railroaded through the Assembly, including an agrarian reform and an oil law that prevents private control of any oil producing operation. In another stand that was designed to placate the opposition, Miquilena favored abandoning Venezuela’s neutral position on Colombia’s armed conflict by labeling the guerrillas of that nation “bandits.” Chávez, however, sided with the MVR hardliners, who in turn accused the moderates of acting in cahoots with the opposition. In January, the 83-year old Miquilena exited as minister of the interior and went into semi-retirement. On the day of the coup attempt he declared a definitive break with Chavismo, deploring the casualties allegedly perpetrated by armed Chavistas; he declared he could not support a government “stained in blood.”
Even before Miquilena’s definitive break, the MVR’s head of Doctrine and Formation, Aurora Morales, called him a “transitional figure.” According to her, “the first stage of the Chavista revolution required as party chief someone who knew the old system from within.” After three years in power, she said “the revolution needs to create its own leaders who have a clear vision of the new society.” Morales added that Miquilena was linked to business interests that want to take advantage of the blows delivered against traditional economic groups, but in no way represent a “progressive bourgeoisie.”[5]
The MVR’s hard line—both the officers and the “leftists”—claimed for many months that a “conspiracy” was afoot to topple the government. The hardliners cited secret documents attesting to an underground network that received millions of dollars in funds from abroad and was linked to the Cuban community in Miami as well as Colombian drug traffickers. The hardliners claimed that ex-President Carlos Andrés Pérez, now a Miami resident, who Chávez tried to overthrow in 1992, had played a key role from exile. In January, Chavista labor leader Nicolás Maduro revealed the content of a taped conversation between Pérez and CTV president Carlos Ortega in which Ortega reportedly tells Pérez: “We need your help here. We are trying by any means possible to gain control of the National Assembly.” Pérez allegedly responds by advising Ortega to work closely with Fedecámaras. In contrast to the hardliners, Miquilena and other moderates downplayed the existence of a plot and instead called for “comprehension” and “understanding” on the part of both sides. They felt that even if a conspiracy existed, it could best be confronted by open discussion and compromise. Now, in the wake of the failed coup, Chavista moderates continue to call for dialogue.
Early this year, Chávez named military officers to three top positions in the government: the vice-presidency, the interior ministry and the finance ministry, perhaps to better face the feared conspiracy and to assure military support and neutralize the anti-Chávez sectors in the armed forces. The mobilization of his people in response to the threats to his government (in the form of large anti-government demonstrations, an oil workers strike, etc.) became an imperative. Chávez undoubtedly feared that if he were too “conciliatory” with the opposition and sat down with its members to negotiate and make concessions, he would not be able to rely on this fervid support.
All this led to some strange conflicts. Two days after the World Trade Center attacks in New York, for example, a pro-Chávez barrio leader named Lina Ron led a group of protesters in Caracas in the burning of the U.S. flag. The terrorism of September 11 gave “Americans a taste of their own medicine,” she was quoted as saying. Chávez spokespeople repudiated Ron and pointed out that she had previously been expelled from the MVR due to breach of party discipline. In late February, Attorney General Isaías Rodríguez, formerly Chávez’s vice-president and a moderate, filed charges against Ron, leading to her arrest for having incited violence at a demonstration at Caracas’ Central University. A few days later, however, President Chávez surprisingly defended Ron, calling her “a social activist who deserves respect.”
Not all the hardliners justified Ron’s behavior, and Chávez himself stated that if she perpetrated violent acts she would have to pay the consequences. Nevertheless, the controversy had larger implications for both internal currents. For many hardliners, the defense of Ron became a kind of symbolic measure of one’s commitment to defend the Revolution. For the moderates it became a measure of where one drew the line to maintain a degree of civility in the politics of the Bolivarian Revolution.
The build-up of political tensions came at a difficult time for Hugo Chávez. Over the 12 months preceding the coup attempt, popular support and military backing had eroded and the MVR still lacked a solid organization. In addition, an important component of the original coalition of parties that brought Chávez to power, consisting of the main leadership of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) and the former president of the Homeland For All (PPT), had gone over to the intransigent opposition. In essence, Chávez needed to buy time in order to consolidate the process, but without dampening the zeal of the hard-core Chavistas who take to the streets each time the opposition mobilizes against the government, and who, indeed, saved his government in the days following the coup attempt.
Radicalization has led to much greater input of the members of the armed forces in decision-making. In that context, it is clear that coup leaders counted on the probablility that acute political conflict would lead to widespread disorder and force the government to employ repressive measures, giving them a convenient justification for overthrowing the government. It is to his great credit that during the coup attempt and its continuing aftermath, Chávez has avoided the use of repressive violence.
Chávez’s“Bolivarian Revolution” has been a polarizing process and Chávez himself has been a polarizing figure. At first he successfully positioned himself against the discredited political class. But now he is positioned against a much broader spectrum of forces, and the polarization has seeped into his own political movement. In the aftermath of the failed coup, the approach of the MVR moderates in favor of dialogue may lessen the polarization and permit the emergence of a middle ground of critical supporters and a “loyal opposition.” A lessening of the polarization might also give the Chavistas some breathing space to consolidate the Bolivarian movement and effectively govern Venezuela.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Steve Ellner is co-editor of Venezuelan Politics in the Chavez Era: Class, Polarization and Conflict, forthcoming from Lynne Rienner Publishers. Fred Rosen is NACLA’s director.
NOTES
1. “Hoy comienza diálogo nacional,” El Universal (Caracas), April 16, 2002, sección nacional y política, online.
2. “Paz o guerra,” Tal Cual (Caracas), April 15, 2002, portada, online.
3. Margarita López-Maya and Luis Lander, “Refounding the Republic: The Political Project of Chavismo,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. XXXIII, No. 6, May/June 2000. See this entire report for political and historical background to the Chávez presidency.
4. See, for example, “Bush Officials Met With Venezuelans Who Ousted Leader,” The New York Times, April 16, 2002.
5. Ellner interview with Aurora Morales, January 27, 2002, Caracas.
