Hugo! (19 page)

Rising political tensions in
Haiti gave the rebels their first opening
to launch a coup against the hated Carlos Andrés Pérez. Rumors
were flying that right-wing military rebels might try to overthrow the
Caribbean island's newly installed leftist president, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide. Officials from the United States, France, and Venezuela discussed
sending troops to the island in a preventive show of force to try to
dissuade the rebels. Pérez, who fashioned himself a champion of Latin
American democracy, eagerly joined in the plan.

At the time, Chávez was in Cojedes state. Superiors summoned
him to Maracay. He feared they had discovered his plans to overthrow
the government again. Instead they told him to prepare to go to Haiti.
His assignment was to take the airport at Puerto Principe. His cohort
Acosta Chirinos would handle a nearby beachhead. They began preparing
for the assault. But Chávez had no intention of going to Haiti. If
he got the order to fly overseas, once in the air he would go to Caracas
instead. He and the others would launch a coup of their own and try to
capture the president. But Pérez's plan was never enacted. The order for
Chávez to depart never came.

The rebels kept hunting for openings. On December 10 they were
scheduled to take part in an air show in Maracay. The president and
military high command were to attend. It seemed like a good opportunity.
They could use the cover of preparing for the spectacle to prepare
for a coup instead. On the day of the show, they would leap out of their
airplanes, land on an open field, and storm the presidential reviewing
stand — kidnapping Pérez and the high command. Then they would
call on other barracks across the nation who didn't know about their
movement to rise up with them.

But as they prepared their plan, they faced problems. Communications
were difficult, since the intelligence services were on their
trail. They had to limit their contacts. They were also trying to convince
their allies in the air force to join them in the revolt. But the pilots
told them they didn't think they had enough support in the air force.
Another complication was that Arias Cárdenas was tied up with a trip to
Israel to buy replacement parts for missiles. Chávez told him to cancel
the trip, but after a heated argument Arias went anyway.

The rebels' never-easy relationship with some of their civilian
allies also was deteriorating. Some members of the Radical Cause
Party, afflicted by their own
internal divisions, had pulled out of the
conspiracy. Even more seriously, members of the radical leftist group
Bandera Roja, Red Flag, had infiltrated the Bolivarian movement. They
were urging two young captains, Ronald Blanco La Cruz and Antonio
Rojas Suárez, to launch the rebellion themselves since, according to
them, Chávez had betrayed the movement. By some reports, the captains
even flirted with killing Chávez and Francisco Arias Cárdenas.
He and Arias Cárdenas had to work vigorously to deter them from
launching the coup independently. At one point they drove Blanco La
Cruz and Rojas Suárez around Caracas for hours to dissuade them.

With the problems mounting, Chávez and his cohorts suspended
the December 10 plan. By the day of the show it appeared authorities
suspected something was afoot. They took extraordinary security measures,
sending F-16s soaring overhead for hours, encircling the base with
troops, and letting the public in for free. That assured a large crowd of
what were essentially human shields. "If we had launched that operation
there, a great number of people would have died," Chávez told an
interviewer — making the rebels cold-blooded murderers rather than
heroes trying to overthrow a corrupt political system. "December was a
black month for us. We had the enemy within and serious internal problems
that threatened to create a rupture."

Another plot targeted for December 16 also was put off. By now their
plans were hardly a secret in some circles. At the Central University of
Venezuela in Caracas, a hotbed of leftist activity, every week seemingly
brought a spate of fresh coup rumors — fed possibly by Bandera Roja or
state intelligence agents who had infiltrated Chávez's group. So many
hora ceros
— zero hours — came and went, it almost became a joke.
Some suspected Chávez had backed down and betrayed the movement.
Bandera Roja spread the word that he and Arias Cárdenas were sellouts
to the oligarchs and transnationals.

Even among many people on the street, coup rumors were swirling,
although almost no one had heard of a lieutenant colonel named Hugo
Chávez. "Everybody talks about it," a hot dog vendor in Caracas told
one reporter. The country was on edge. In late November the education
minister canceled classes nationwide at public schools and universities
for two days after violent student protests. Then he canceled them
indefinitely for weeks more. Pérez dismissed the unrest and scoffed at
the rumors of a coup. He called it "an offense to Venezuelan society" to
even mention the word.

While the rebels faced problems in December that prevented them
from launching a coup, they would also encounter problems if they did
not
act soon. With
military intelligence closing in on them, the chances
were growing daily that they would be detected and arrested. They had
another problem: Military superiors were sending some of the troops
led by Chávez and Acosta Chirinos all over the country on training missions.
The only time they would all be back in Maracay together was in
late January and early February. As 1991 drew to a close, Chávez knew
time was running out. He figured he had about a two-week window in
which to act.

One promising opportunity fell in the middle of it. Pérez was
heading to Davos, Switzerland, for a meeting of world leaders to discuss
economic issues. After he returned, the president, Ochoa, and other
high-ranking officers were scheduled to attend another air show on
Tuesday, February 4, at El Pao in Carabobo state. The units of Chávez
and Acosta Chirinos were to participate. Chávez figured they could
move troops and arms as if they were preparing for the event when in
reality they were preparing for a coup.

Chávez's conspiratorial group had expanded to the point that he
had contacts inside Miraflores Palace among the presidential honor
guard. They were going to leak word to him about Pérez's specific plans
for the trip to Switzerland — most importantly the date and time of his
return. The plan was to capture him at the airport.

In the last week of January, seeking a final psychological boost for
his rebellion, Chávez traveled to La Guaira on the Caribbean coast
near Caracas. He met with one of his old mentors, retired colonel
Hugo
Trejo, who had helped lead the 1958 civic-military rebellion that overthrew
the dictator Pérez Jiménez. Then, on Thursday, January 30,
Chávez met briefly with Arias Cárdenas and Urdaneta. The rebels
shifted into high alert, waiting for the final signal from Chávez.

The word came that weekend. Chávez's contacts informed him
that Pérez would be coming back from Switzerland on Monday night,
February 3. That Saturday, February 1, Chávez sent a messenger to
Maracaibo to inform Arias Cárdenas. Calling was too risky — their
telephones were probably tapped.

The following day, Sunday, Chávez met with two air force pilots
who were sympathetic to his movement,
Luis Reyes Reyes and
General
Francisco Visconti Osorio. It was a last-minute attempt to bring the air
force into the rebellion. Rendezvousing at about 9:45 P.M. at a gas station
on the Pan-American Highway outside Caracas, Chávez told them
the revolt was hours away. He explained that air support was crucial
to back up the troops on the ground. Reyes and Visconti wanted to
help, but told him they couldn't. The best they could offer was "active
neutrality" — seizing control of the Maracay air base and preventing
airplanes from taking off to attack the rebels. Visconti, who had been
active in the by-now-defunct conspiracy cell ARMA, wanted to delay the
insurrection altogether to allow them to build more support in the air
force. But Chávez said it was too late.

Two hours into the meeting, around midnight, he received a telephone
call confirming the president's arrival. Speaking in code, a
contact at Miraflores told him that "the uncle" — Pérez — would be
landing at Simón Bolívar International Airport on the Caribbean coast
near Caracas at 10:30 P.M. The phone call was the final piece needed to
trigger the revolt.

The rebels had a clear set of plans. A commando team was to go
to the airport, kidnap Pérez as he got off his airplane, throw him in a
truck, and whisk him to Caracas, where he would be turned over to
Chávez alive. If that failed, they had a Plan B: They would seize the
president inside a highway tunnel on his way back to Caracas, grabbing
him in the midst of a traffic jam they planned to provoke by setting a car
on fire. If Plans A and B fell through, there was Plan C: They would nab
him at Miraflores Palace or La Casona presidential residence, which
they planned to seize along with Fort Tiuna military headquarters in
the capital and other military bases across the country.

With the aid of civilian allies, they hoped to commandeer television
and radio stations and proclaim that they had overthrown Pérez.
They wanted to display the captured president on television and install
a civilian-military junta to temporarily guide the nation until they
could hold elections and write a new constitution. Pérez was to be put
on public trial for crimes against the state. They ranged from corruption
to mass poverty to the killings of protestors to the surrender of the
nation's riches to transnational companies as part of a "false" nationalization
of the oil industry.

Using radio equipment that would allow him to communicate with
rebels on land and in the air across the nation, Chávez would command
the operation Bolívar-like from a military museum on a hilltop overlooking
Miraflores Palace, where he hoped he and the other Bolivarians
soon would be installed, running the country themselves.

It was an audacious plan. Chávez knew part of the price was that
even though the orders were to
avoid violence as much as possible, some
of his brother soldiers — loyalists and rebels alike — would likely die.
In his mind, there was no choice. The country was in a state of ruin.
Radical, revolutionary action was required to break out of the misery
and oppression. It was a decision that would make his detractors question
his democratic credentials forever since, despite his flaws, Pérez
was a legitimately elected president. To them, Chávez would have the
blood of fellow Venezuelans on his hands.

But to the fiery lieutenant colonel, this was not a traditional coup
by stereotypical right-wing Latin American gorillas. It was an insurrection
by young,
progressive officers against an unjust, failed, and brutal
system. It had more in common with the leftist guerrilla uprisings
against repressive regimes in places such as El Salvador in the 1980s
than it did with coups by generals like Pinochet in Chile. Venezuela had
reached the tipping point. The Caracazo, the mass grave, the blatant
corruption, the mass poverty — it was all too much. The country held
up by officials in Washington as a "model democracy" was little more
than a closed system where a small circle of elites controlled everything,
leaving a few crumbs for the masses and violently repressing them when
they rebelled.

Chávez believed he was following in the footsteps not of Pinochet
and Somoza, but of Torrijos and Velasco, Bolívar and Zamora. Because
in Venezuela, very little had changed from the days of Pérez Jiménez or
even Juan Vicente Gómez dating back to 1908. As Chávez later put it:
Everything has basically remained the same; it's been the same
system of domination, with a different face — whether it's that of
General Gómez or of [former president] doctor Rafael Caldera.
Behind this figure, this
caudillo
, with a military beret or without
it, on horseback or in a Cadillac or a Mercedes-Benz, it's been the
same system — in economics and in politics — the same denial
of basic human rights and of the right of the people to determine
their own destiny.

Venezuela was suffering a terminal crisis, ruled by a dictatorship
dressed up in democratic clothing, a dictatorship that took a
people living on a sea of oil, with huge navigable rivers and millions
of acres of agricultural land, to abject poverty and limitless
political and moral corruption.

Arias Cárdenas, the former seminarian deeply influenced by
Vatican II,
liberation theology, and its "preferential option for the poor,"
harbored similar sentiments. Like
Camilo Torres, the Catholic-priest-turned-
guerrilla in neighboring Colombia in the 1960s, Arias saw the use
of force in certain extreme circumstances as a tool not for oppression but
for
liberation. It wouldn't be the first time in history. In the United States
rebels led by George Washington waged the Revolutionary War against
the British because of grievances such as "taxation without representation"
that paled in comparison with the mass killings of the Caracazo.

It was not a decision Arias came to lightly. He had long advocated
finding peaceful ways to provoke change in Venezuela.

On many occasions I thought we had to make a gesture. One time
I made a proposal to some colleagues. I told them, "Why don't we
go — a complete battalion or even two — and place our rifles at
the foot of the statue of the Liberator Simón Bolívar and demand
that the politicians take the situation of the country seriously, the
situation of poverty, the situation of corruption, the situation of
anarchy, the situation of an absence of true democracy." And they
looked at me and they said, "Yes, go ahead and do that, and they'll
take you to the fifteenth floor of the military hospital [for the
insane] and tell you you've gone nuts, and nothing will happen.
You have to act with force" . . . We are going to have deaths, but
they are necessary to make the changes happen.