Hugo! (50 page)

Thin lines of Metropolitan Police and National Guardsmen were
separating the two groups, who were now barely one hundred yards
apart at some points.

Tempers were at a fever pitch. Anti-Chávez demonstrators massed
near the Fermín Toro High School a few hundred yards below the
palace. They could see the high walls surrounding Miraflores.

Around the corner at El Calvario, the Metropolitan Police held back
the marchers for a few minutes. But then the protestors walked right
past them, knocking down some of the motorcycles and advancing up
a palm-tree-lined boulevard toward the palace. The police did nothing.
The protestors were led by Lameda and Molina Tamayo, who kept
calling on them to surge forward for a direct assault on the palace about
two hundred yards away. At the other end of the boulevard about fifteen
National Guardsmen held back a group of Chavistas. The National
Guard fired tear gas to keep the opposition marchers away. The demonstrators
fell back, kept trying to advance, and then fell back again as
they gagged on the gas. Molina Tamayo yelled to the crowd through a
megaphone, "We must get past the gas. The wind is blowing this way . .
. We have to run to the other side. Pass the message on — as soon as they
throw tear gas, move forward quickly. We must overcome the tear gas."

At about 2:30 P.M. the anger of some protestors at Fermín Toro spilled
over. They started throwing everything they could get their hands on
at the National Guardsmen and Chavistas a block away: bottles, rocks,
chairs, tubes, metal rods, mangoes, apples, plantains, watermelon rinds.
They broke off pieces of clay block from the high school and threw
them, too. The National Guardsmen tossed some of the objects back.
The marchers and the Chavistas exchanged insults.

Protestors were still pouring into the city center. Aristóteles
Aranguren was somewhere in the middle of the march. By the time
he approached Avenida Baralt he was surprised authorities were letting
them get so close to the palace. He thought the National Guard would
have stopped them at the Avenida Bolívar before they reached the city
center. Up ahead, tear gas clogged the narrow side streets. Recalling his
military training, Aranguren shouted for the crowd to get down on their
knees and crawl to avoid the gas. Some people covered their mouths
with vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs. Others turned around and ran.

Aranguren reached Avenida Baralt and stood in the middle of the
street wondering what to do next. Maybe he should turn back, too. As
he raced through his options in his mind, someone suddenly shouted,
"Watch out! Here come some guys on motorcycles!" Aranguren
thought it was the Bolivarian Circles coming to attack the marchers.
But when he saw them, they were actually Metropolitan Police. They
were speeding north up the street, pushing the crowd toward the overpass
and the Chavistas. Aranguren took off running toward Llaguno.

He'd barely gone a hundred yards when the anti-riot police tank
dubbed the Whale swung onto Avenida Baralt from a side street and
turned north toward the Chavistas. The first shot rang out. More followed.
Aranguren ducked behind the tank and watched in horror as a
group of men came running down the street carrying one of the first
victims. He was dressed in black. Some of his brains were spilling out of
a hole in his bloody head.

Aranguren took off running and saw a second victim on the ground
with a bullet to the head. He looked up at the buildings lining the block
and didn't see anything, but was convinced
snipers were taking people
out. The shots were coming from above. He sprinted south on Avenida
Baralt and yelled for the people to go back. "There are snipers!"

A couple of blocks away Henry Rodríguez was walking back with a
group of Chavistas from the Fermín Toro High School toward Miraflores.
He was passing the Casa de Espagueti — the house of spaghetti — on
a side street when he saw four men come running down the block carrying
a heavyset man with no shirt. He was limp. His chest was covered
with blood.

It was about 3:20 P.M. For the next few hours bullets rained down on
both opposition marchers and Chavistas
.
Puffs of smoke were coming
out of the windows of the Hotel Eden on Avenida Baralt. Red laser-like
lights flashed with the sounds of gunfire. Shots seemed to be coming
from other buildings, too, including the Hotel Ausonia across the
street from Miraflores and
La Nacional
government office on Baralt.
Aranguren watched as people scattered in all directions. They weren't
sure where to go, or where the shots were coming from. They seemed
to be coming from all over.

A photographer for the newspaper
2001
, Jorge Tortoza, was shot in the
head and later died. A bodyguard for Vice President Diosdado Cabello,
Tony Velásquez, was hit and gravely wounded. A protestor named
Malvina Pesate was shot in the head, but somehow survived. The attack
was caught on horrifying videotape as her head snapped forward and she
collapsed to the ground.
Yesenia Fuentes, a Chavista selling
empanadas
on
Llaguno Bridge, was hit in the face by a bullet. Like Fuentes, many
of the
victims had bullet wounds to the head or neck.

Back in the television studios, some newscasters initially were not
certain what was happening since they could not see the entire scene.
At 3:40 P.M., as one network showed Velásquez being carried away
toward Miraflores Palace, a newscaster said she thought he might have
fainted from the heat.

Five minutes later, as the situation on the streets was spinning out of
control, Chávez took to the airwaves. It was a last-ditch effort to appeal
for calm and head off what he believed was an insurrection. He called
a
cadena
, cutting off images of the scenes on the streets. The president
broadcast his message from the underground Salon Ayacucho
and apparently was unaware of the violence breaking out up above. He
spoke for about ninety minutes, pleading for peace and outlining the
accomplishments of his administration.

But half an hour into the speech the networks split the screens
in half again. They showed Chávez speaking on one side and the
mayhem outside on the other. They also disrupted the audio, making
it difficult to hear the president. An aide made hand signals to Chávez
to indicate what was happening. The angered president announced
he was ordering the government to jam the signals of the networks
because they were inciting an insurrection. The networks receive
licenses from the state to operate, he said, but "they can't use that right
to attack the state itself, to instigate violence or, knowing there is an
insurrectional plan, support it . . . This insurrectional plan has arrived
at an extreme, to craziness . . . to bring people, some Venezuelans
— even lied to — telling them that Chávez is already a prisoner, we
have to go to Miraflores . . . that we're going to throw him out with a
little push."

While the government cut off their transmissions, the networks
had a contingency plan. They started transmitting through satellites,
allowing anyone with a satellite dish to receive their broadcasts. To
them, a horrifying news event was unfolding, and they needed to
report it. They believed Chávez was trying to cover up the violence.
As he continued speaking, an army officer handed him slips of paper
with a list of the dead. Chávez was confused by it, but pushed on with
his speech as the split-screen television images showed the bloodshed
in the streets. He mentioned everything from his new program for
subsidized vehicles to the price of oil. "The situation isn't serious,"
he concluded. "The situation is under control." It was a bizarre statement.
The television screens showed the opposite. Chávez had committed
his biggest mistake of the day by ordering the networks off the
air and contradicting the reality of what was happening outside.

When he finished speaking at 5:15 P.M., the violence was so close to
the palace that bodyguards made him walk back to his office through
a tunnel instead of on the palace grounds. It was too dangerous to step
outside. Now he learned the full extent of the violence on the streets.
He made his way upstairs, slipped out of his suit and tie, and put on
his combat fatigues and red beret. Then he strapped a pistol to his leg
and grabbed an assault rifle. He believed the rebellion was entering
a second stage. Military rebels were going to attack the palace. He
called Brazilian president
Henrique Cardoso. It was his first call of the
day outside the country. He wanted the president of Venezuela's biggest
neighbor to know what was happening.

He called Rincón at Fort Tiuna and told him to come
to Miraflores
with the high command to analyze the situation. They took off in a helicopter
about 6:30 P.M. for the short ride. General Manuel Rosendo, who
had vanished when Chávez called him earlier in the day to implement
the Plan Avila, had reappeared and climbed aboard the helicopter. So
did García Carneiro and Defense Minister José Vicente Rangel. But
the head of the army,
General Efraín Vásquez Velasco, was nowhere
to be seen. Meanwhile, Chávez ordered one of Carneiro's underlings
at Fort Tiuna to send tanks. He needed protection. A few arrived, but
Vásquez Velasco later ordered them back to Fort Tiuna. He was no
longer with the president — he had joined the coup.

As Chávez scrambled to respond to the rapidly unfolding events, the
opposition moved quickly to take advantage of the violence. They
blamed it on him. They depicted Chávez as a cold-blooded killer who
ordered the repression to stop peaceful marchers from removing him
from office — and then tried to cover it up by yanking the networks off
the air. Lameda, Molina Tamayo, Carmona, Ortega, and other opposition
leaders had fled from central Caracas on motorcycles a few minutes
before the shooting began. Many
rendezvoused at Venevisión, the television
station owned by Gustavo Cisneros, who had been hosting the luncheon
for US ambassador Charles Shapiro that afternoon. At 5:20 P.M.,
five minutes after Chávez stopped speaking, Lameda and Tamayo went
on the air. "To all the armed forces, please do something," Tamayo said.
"This government is now illegitimate. Not one step back."

An hour later Carmona, a string of opposition leaders, and even
Chávez's former top adviser, Luis Miquilena, also started appearing and
denouncing the president for the killings. Around the same time, the
country was stunned when ten previously unknown high-ranking military
officers appeared on the screen and said they no longer recognized
Chávez as the chief of state. Dressed in his navy whites, Vice
Admiral Héctor Ramírez said, "We have decided to address the people
to announce we are removing our support for the government and the
authority of Hugo Rafael Chávez Frias and the military high command
for violating the main democratic principles and guarantees, and violating
the Venezuelans' human rights . . . The president of the Republic
has betrayed the trust of the people, he is massacring innocent people
with snipers. Just now more than six people were killed and dozens
wounded in Caracas."

The crowning blow came around 7:30 P.M.
Venevisión started
airing video that seemed to condemn Chávez beyond doubt. Earlier
that afternoon, the network had stationed a cameraman and a reporter
on the rooftop of a building on Avenida Urdaneta between
Llaguno
Bridge and Miraflores. They had a clear shot of the bridge, although
not of Avenida Baralt below it where some of the violence was taking
place. The Venevisión crew captured video of clearly identifiable
Chávez supporters dressed in red berets or MVR T-shirts poking their
heads from around a corner building at the side of the bridge and
firing pistols. The implication was clear: The Chavistas had killed the
marchers.

In one scene a man who turned out to be Chávez supporter and
municipal councilman Richard Penalver was shown crouching down
and peeking out from the corner of the building next to the overpass.
Then he extended his right arm and squeezed the trigger of the pistol
repeatedly. Standing behind him were a dozen Chavistas, including
one in a red beret and another holding a gun. It was an outrageous
scene: an elected official mowing down peaceful protestors.

Venevisión started playing that scene and others like it from
the bridge repeatedly, juxtaposed with separate footage of dead or
wounded protestors. A newscaster in the studio provided the interpretation
of what had happened. "Now pay attention," he said. "Look at
this man in the MVR T-shirt and the gray jacket, how he fires the gun,
how he empties it. This man has just fired against marchers who came
here peacefully, who are absolutely unarmed . . . They shoot the hundreds
of defenseless demonstrators again and again."

As the screen showed people carrying some of the victims toward
Miraflores, the newscaster added, "Here you can see those wounded
by bullets arriving at Miraflores. It appears they had foreseen this.
They had absolutely foreseen this because they had already set up a
small mobile hospital in Miraflores, where they were treating as you
have seen this afternoon those wounded by gunshot, victims of the
armed MVR supporters and the Bolivarian Circles."

The newscaster then accused the Chávez supporters of planning
an armed ambush against the marchers. While showing footage of
the Chavistas lying on the street by the overpass, behind a metal rail,
he said, "Look, here they are already in attack position. These are the
Bolivarian Circles, firing rockets to disorient and attempt to somehow
camouflage the action they are about to take with firearms."

It was a shocking piece of television journalism. The nation was
outraged. Even avid Chávez backers were disgusted and decided they
could no longer support a president who ordered his armed supporters
to massacre peaceful marchers. The video was so impressive and horrifying
that several months later the
Venevisión news team won the prestigious
King of Spain Journalism Award.