Hugo! (58 page)

Chávez was alone again, and more trouble was on the horizon.

In the early 1970s when the United States was trying to overthrow
President Salvador Allende,
Richard Nixon instructed the CIA to
"make the economy scream" in Chile. The idea was that by fomenting
economic chaos and
making the country "ungovernable,"
Allende
would be forced out of office — either by voters or by a military coup.
In
Venezuela the opposition pursued the same strategy after the April
putsch failed. They attacked the lifeblood of Venezuela's economy: the
oil industry.

On Monday, October 21, 2002, opposition leaders called yet
another national strike — the third in less than a year. Factories, stores,
and malls across the nation closed their doors, prompting traffic in
normally chaotic Caracas to slow to a trickle. Airlines canceled many
domestic flights for lack of passengers. Most newspapers refused to publish.
Television networks suspended regular programming and provided
wall-to-wall coverage of the shutdown. More than reporting on it, they
promoted it.

The walkout had a clear goal: getting Chávez to leave office. The
opposition proposed three ways out. He could resign, agree to early elections,
or permit a nonbinding referendum on his presidency. Opponents
believed that if he lost the referendum, he would be embarrassed into
resigning. Chávez wasn't interested in any of the options. He contended
that the constitution allowed for a binding
recall referendum halfway
through his term, which would be the following August. But that was
not acceptable to the opposition. Chávez had to go. Now.

The one-day strike, which did not affect the oil industry, was barely
over when a new protest erupted. The next day fourteen dissident military
officers
occupied a
plaza in the upscale Altamira neighborhood,
declared it
"Liberated Territory," and called for a
rebellion against
Chávez. They claimed they were not trying to provoke a coup but were
employing
Article 350 of the constitution, which allowed citizens to
rebel against a government they considered undemocratic. Many of the
officers had helped lead the April revolt and were cashiered by Chávez.
Leading them was General Enrique Medina, the former military
attaché at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington.

Medina and the other military rebels in the
Plaza Altamira became
instant heroes to the opposition. By the next afternoon, several thousand
people flocked to the plaza after work. More officers came, too.
By Friday, October 25, a total of one hundred had joined the protest.
Fedecámaras, the business chamber of commerce once led by
Pedro Carmona, announced its support for the officers. So did Carlos
Ortega's union, the CTV. The country's three leading opposition parties,
Democratic Action, Primera Justicia, and COPEI, also endorsed the
military dissidents.

The plaza turned into a twenty-four-hour-a-day symbol of resistance
to Chávez. People set up Coleman tents and slept there overnight.
A banner declared, WE ARE IN LIBERATED TERRITORY. A massive
balloon bore the Orwellian legend, THIS IS NOT A COUP. A large digital
time display marked the occupation to the second. Organizers erected a
stage that the military dissidents mounted to give speeches. In between,
cheerleaders and folk dancers kept the crowd worked up. It was like a
high school pep rally.

The throngs treated the officers like rock stars. Middle-aged women
crowded up to the stage and blew them kisses. Others screamed in
delight. "We have been having the most entertaining coup in the world
here for the past month," commented Vice Admiral Daniel Comisso
Urdaneta, one of four officers cleared by the Supreme Court in August
when it threw out the coup charges.

The dissident officers accused Chávez of turning the country into
a Cuba-style dictatorship. But this was a strange dictatorship. Military
rebels who overthrew a democratically elected president were out on
the streets free, wearing their uniforms and openly calling for rebellion
against him. Fidel Castro thought Chávez was crazy. "In what
country could there be a coup and then have all the perpetrators meet
in a plaza to spend fifty days agitating through the television networks,
proposing another coup?" he said. "Not in any country in the world."

General Medina, who showed up at the plaza still waving a general's
baton, believed the dissidents had "a lot of support in the barracks right
now. The United States now seems to understand the serious crisis in
this country, that a crazy eccentric is running it."

But Medina was wrong. The dissidents did not have a lot of support
in the barracks. After the coup, Chávez cleansed the
armed forces of
many of his enemies. He was also handling the plaza protest skillfully.
He ignored it. It continued for weeks but eventually fizzled, at the end
attracting mainly a handful of elderly ladies walking their dogs.

After the occupation of Plaza Altamira failed to dislodge Chávez, the opposition
moved to its next plan: another strike. It was to turn into the most
serious challenge to Chávez's presidency since the coup. It kicked off on
Monday, December 2, with mixed results. While most shops shuttered in
affluent eastern Caracas, many streets in downtown and western Caracas
bustled with pedestrians, and many stores opened. In the sprawling barrio
of Catia, life was near normal. Many business owners supported Chávez
or did not want to risk their livelihoods for somebody else's politics.

The next day the walkout lost momentum in some regions. Chávez
declared that "this strike, like all the others, has a hidden agenda:
another coup attempt." He insisted that the protestors would not "paralyze"
the crucial oil industry. But they were already trying. Strikers in
small boats attempted to block a navigation canal in Lake Maracaibo
that oil tankers used to export a million barrels of crude a day. The navy
chased the strikers away. PDVSA administrative employees and executives
also joined in the strike and started trying to shut down the industry,
although thousands of workers stayed on the job. In Caracas protestors
outside PDVSA offices clashed with National Guardsmen, who fired tear
gas to break up their demonstration. The conflict helped pump life into
the anti-Chávez protests.

Amid the clashes, the National Electoral Council produced what
might have been a solution to the conflict. It voted four-to-one to hold
a nonbinding national referendum on February 2 asking Venezuelans
whether Chávez should continue as president. Opposition leaders
decided to press on with the strike anyway. Against Chávez's wishes, the
council was approving one of the ways the opposition had proposed for
ending the crisis, but their leaders chose to ignore it.

On Wednesday the walkout seemed to further weaken, with more
stores opening. But thousands of protestors marched through Caracas
to the glitzy Melia Hotel, where they delivered a letter to
César Gaviria
asking for new elections. The former Colombian president was leading
an Organization of American States delegation trying to negotiate a settlement
to the conflict.

That evening the captain of a huge oil
tanker named the
Pilín
León
(for a Venezuelan beauty queen) stunned the nation. Appearing
on television, he announced he was joining the strike. He anchored the
eight-story-high ship and its 280,000 barrels of refined gasoline in the
middle of the Lake Maracaibo shipping channel and refused to move.
"This government is pushing us into a situation like Cuba," declared
the captain, Daniel Alfaro. The rest of PDVSA's thirteen-ship fleet quickly
followed suit, anchoring at sea or refusing to leave ports. Within days
another two dozen internationally owned tankers joined in.

Combined with the walkout by PDVSA management, the anchoring
of the ships threatened to paralyze Venezuela's oil industry. If that happened,
it would be hard for any Venezuelan president to survive. Oil
accounted for a third of Venezuela's $100 billion
gross domestic product,
half of government revenue, and 70 percent of exports. Moreover, if gasoline
dried up, transportation would come to a halt, provoking food
shortages. Without food, the hungry population would rise up to overthrow
any government — Bolivarian or not.

Inside Miraflores Palace, Chávez huddled with his ministers and
scrambled to find a solution to the crisis. They were caught off guard
by the captains' walkout — they had not anticipated it. Chávez called
the strike by the
Pilín León
's captain an "act of piracy" and warned of
military action if the crew did not return to work. "It's as if the doctor
who's supposed to be looking after your heart suddenly starts trying to
stop it," he said.

Alfaro and the other captains became the latest instant heroes to
the opposition. Hundreds of supporters gathered on the shoreline of
Lake Maracaibo with the
Pilín León
in sight. Others circled the vessel
with yachts, motorboats, canoes, and even kayaks to "protect" it if soldiers
tried to board. León herself, a Miss World 1981 who was now in her
forties, eventually made her way out to Lake Maracaibo to support the
strikers. The ship turned into an emblem of the opposition's resistance
against Chávez. Many of Venezuela's massive oil tankers were named
for some of the country's most cherished beauty queens, including Miss
Universe or Miss World winners Susana Duijm, Barbara Palacios, and
Maritza Sayalero.

Two days after Alfaro anchored his ship in Lake Maracaibo, another
shocking event galvanized the opposition to Chávez. At about 7:15 P.M.
on Friday, minutes after Carlos Ortega and Fedecámaras's new leader
Carlos Fernández announced on national television in their nightly
appearance that they were extending the walkout again, a gunman
opened fire on the crowd in
Plaza Altamira. He killed three people,
including an eighteen-year-old girl who'd just graduated from high
school, and injured twenty-eight as protestors hit the ground and the
military dissidents on the stage pulled out their guns.

The opposition immediately blamed Chávez for the
bloodshed,
although they had no proof. In the end, it turned out the gunman
was a deranged Portuguese taxi driver named Joao de Gouveia who
confessed to the shootings and did not bother fleeing the scene of the
crime. But the killings energized and radicalized the opposition movement.
Leaders extended the strike indefinitely, declared three days of
mourning, and said the only solution to the standoff now was Chávez's
immediate resignation.

The strike quickly succeeded in inflicting severe damage on the
oil industry. By Monday, December 9, PDVSA president
Ali Rodríguez
went on national television to announce that the industry was in serious
condition. "We are threatened with a national disaster," he said. The
country's two largest refineries, Paraguana and El Palito, were paralyzed.
Rodríguez warned that gasoline shortages and electricity blackouts
were imminent.

Panic was setting in. People rushed to supermarkets to stock up
on food and water. Motorists had to wait up to four hours at some service
stations for gasoline. Lines stretched as long as a mile. Waits of
twenty-four hours or more later became common, with lines as long as
three miles. Scarcities of drinking water and cash at automatic tellers
spread. Airlines canceled dozens of domestic flights. Striking banks
limited business to three hours a day. Eight of the Supreme Court's
twenty justices joined the walkout, too, restricting their work to urgent
cases only. It was the peak Christmas shopping season, yet many stores
and businesses were shut down. The
Democratic Coordinator, the
opposition umbrella group,
"canceled" Christmas. They instructed
Chávez opponents to sacrifice now so they could achieve the "final
victory" later. They adopted a slogan: "2002 Without Christmas, 2003
Without Chávez."

Protest marches became a nearly daily occurrence, at times
attracting hundreds of thousands of people. Each night at eight o'clock,
opposition supporters opened their windows and banged pots to call for
Chávez to resign. Even Chávez's former wife, Marisabel, joined in the
criticism. "President, please, in the name of your daughter, in the name
of your family, in the name of the country, listen to the people," she said
in a television interview as their daughter Rosinés sat beside her. She
had joined the critics who believed Chávez was too arrogant and all-knowing
to accept others' advice and seek compromise.

Television networks broadcast the rallies and strike activities nearly
nonstop. They canceled regular advertisements and ran pro-strike,
anti-Chávez spots around the clock. News talk shows featured one-sided
commentators. Even news anchors blasted Chávez. Each evening,
the networks broadcast rambling, triumphant updates by Ortega
and Fernández. The president of Gustavo Cisneros's Venevisión openly
acknowledged that the network hoped to see Chávez go. "We are united
with the strike,"
Victor Ferreres said.

With the oil industry grinding nearly to a standstill,
political analysts
believed Chávez faced "a nearly impossible situation,"
The New York
Times
reported. Few thought he could survive. Venezuela defaulted on
its international petroleum contracts, including those with its principal
customer, the United States. It was the first time since the discovery of oil
nearly a century earlier. Not even World War II, the Arab oil embargoes
of the 1970s, the 1989 Caracazo riots, or the 1992 coups had caused that.

The Venezuelan opposition thought Chávez would fall within a week
or two of the strike's commencement. PDVSA executives who walked off
the job left their offices intact, figuring they would be back shortly in
a nation no longer under Chávez's rule. They were willing to risk it all
because so much was at stake. PDVSA was the "hen that lays the golden
egg," as one of Chávez's ministers had put it. Control of it was crucial
to where the money — billions of dollars — went. For decades
the company had operated as an independent entity almost untouched
by government oversight. Its executives lived the high life, traveling to
the United States and Europe for vacations. They dictated company
policy. Many hoped to privatize the company, bringing huge profits to
themselves.