Special Forces
Slum Dwellers Rescue Democracy
http://www.americas.org/News/Features/200205_Venezuela_Coup/20020501_index.htm
Residents of impoverished Caracas neighborhoods head downtown April 13 to demand the return of ousted President Hugo Chávez Frías. Overcoming a media blackout, their protest helped bring him back early the next morning. Photo: Diego Giudice of ARCHIVOLATINO.COM
BY STEVE ELLNER
IN CARACAS
When middle-class Venezuelans talk about people « coming down from the hills, » they mean slum dwellers overwhelming downtown Caracas. The poor people came down in 1989, setting off days of mass looting throughout the country and devastating President Carlos Andrés Pérez's government. They came down again April 13, dooming President Pedro Carmona Estanga's regime, which collapsed 36 hours after military officers installed it.
The restoration of Hugo Chávez Frías' elected government owes largely to poor people overrunning the presidential palace and even gathering outside Fort Tiuna, the capital's main military base. The slum dwellers expected the media to ignore their protest for constitutional order. Isolated from potential supporters in Venezuela and abroad, the protesters knew they risked a bloodbath.
Their lack of fear was merely the day's first surprise. Widespread speculation that Chávez had little backing within the military proved unfounded. In Maracay, a city 40 miles west of here, members of the air force - the armed service allegedly most hostile to Chávez - were among the first officers to seize military installations in his name. Carmona's fate was sealed when the military refused to fire on the slum dwellers, leaving the repression to the metropolitan police force. The police, controlled by Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña, killed dozens of Chávez supporters after the coup, according to Human Rights Watch, but proved unable to defend the new regime.
In another surprise, most Latin American governments refused to follow the U.S. lead in rationalizing Chávez's ouster. Even Peru's Alejandro Toledo, a staunch Chávez critic, questioned how a military takeover could be considered democratic.
ECONOMIC STAGNATION throughout the 1980s and 1990s, partly the result of depressed oil prices, ended the class fluidity that once characterized Venezuela. The extent to which the nation's poor resented their battering was visible in the 1989 looting, sparked by price hikes for gasoline and public transportation. Another expression of class-based animosity was a surge in crime, especially violent theft, in the 1990s.
Today, despite an oil industry that generates $30 billion a year, 80 percent of Venezuela's 24 million inhabitants are poor, according to government figures, and half of those are malnourished. Just 2 percent of the population controls 60 percent of the nation's land, and most rural Venezuelans own no acreage at all.
When Chávez won 56 percent of the presidential vote in a crowded field of candidates December 6, 1998, most of his support came from the country's marginalized population - street vendors, day laborers, domestic workers, owners of unregistered « microcompanies » and other people lacking steady employment. For the first time in decades, attitudes regarding a president varied sharply along class lines.
Leaders of business groups, organized labor and the nation's traditional political parties opposed nearly everything Chávez did. They complained when he became the first president since the outset of Venezuelan democracy in 1958 to exclude business representatives from cabinet posts, even to head the finance and development ministries. They criticized his amity with Fidel Castro. They fought his efforts to boost oil prices by strengthening the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
And they campaigned against a Chávez-backed constitution that an overwhelming majority of Venezuelan voters ratified December 15, 1999. The document's profit-limiting measures include job-security provisions, restrictions on the privatization of oil and social security, labor benefits for homemakers and the self-employed, and more generous severance payments. Albis Muñoz, president of the National Council of Trade and Services, called the constitution the mark of a « communist regime. »
Popular support for Chávez, nevertheless, remained strong. On July 30, 2000, his Patriotic Pole coalition won 99 seats in the 165-person National Assembly. By the end of his second year in office, he had added 1 million children to the nation's schools. He had increased economic growth. Infant mortality and unemployment had dropped, and literacy and minimum wages had increased.
But Chávez's popularity slipped last year as falling oil prices hurt the economy and as his government promulgated a package of 49 laws without opening a broad national discussion (see Days of Rage). The package didn't explicitly threaten middle-class Venezuelans, but many of them blamed Chávez's fiery rhetoric for stirring class resentment. A new agrarian reform law, for example, gave landowners two years to exploit idle plots, but Chávez seemed to be encouraging land occupations against large and small property owners, both rural and urban.
Augmenting middle-class unease were groups Chávez began setting up in neighborhoods across the country, naming them « Bolivarian Circles » after 19th century anticolonial leader Simón Bolívar. His opponents compared them to Cuba's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and said he was secretly arming them.
« We've lost the middle class, » Luis Miquilena said before resigning in January as interior minister, the government's second most powerful post. « Even though their numbers have shrunk with the economic crisis, they can't just be written off. »
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE for the Chávez government to avert the coup by formulating concrete concessions to neutralize the middle class and bring the opposition into a dialogue. But starting late last year, he sided openly with his movement's hard-liners, who blamed protests on an alleged conspiracy orchestrated from Miami by Pérez, the former president, whom Chávez attempted to overthrow as a paratrooper in 1992.
The main business group, Fedecámaras, and the largest labor organization, the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), united to organize one « general strike » December 10 and another that began April 9. Fedecámaras didn't accept a Chávez offer to talk. And the government refused to negotiate with the CTV leadership, which appeared to have won its October 25 election through fraud (the union's filings with the national electoral commission included signatures for only half of the alleged voters).
As far back as December, the largest traditional party, Democratic Action (AD), began proposing an opposition alliance that included the military. But the parties lacked credibility after ruling the country for decades in which corruption and economic contraction hurt most of the population. They played a secondary role in the protests.
The opposition to Chávez misleadingly called itself « civil society, » despite its support for a military coup and its middle- and upper-class composition. The street vendors defied the strike calls and opened for business. Most public employees and most workers in the steel, oil, electricity and transportation sectors showed up to work during the April strike. As the Mexican daily La Jornada put it, « Chávez was not overthrown by a general strike but a business lockout. »
Except for the state-run television station, the national media openly joined the opposition to Chávez. In the months before the coup, nearly all opinions expressed on radio and TV and in major newspapers were staunchly antigovernment. The media frequently provided platforms for Chávez opponents to call for a military coup.
Chávez's reaction had few parallels in Latin American history. He pledged not to use force or repression against the protesters. Instead he mobilized his own supporters each time the antigovernment forces called a march. The number of Chávez people on the street generally matched the number of protesters.
The government didn't interrupt television broadcasts until April 11, the third day of the strike, after a march on the presidential palace turned bloody. When military officers ousted Chávez that night, many stations reported he had dismissed his cabinet and resigned. The reports proved false.
The outcome of the crisis is important, and not just for the people « from the hills » here in Caracas. For decades, Venezuela and Costa Rica have been Latin America's most stable and democratic nations. Chávez's nationalist and popular reforms, and his criticism of unrestrained corporate globalization, make his government a touchstone for social justice and democracy in the rest of the Third World.
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