The Venezuelan coup attempts of 1992 were an abortive coup d'état led by Hugo Chávez in February 1992, and a second attempted coup in November 1992, directed by others. The coups were directed against the Carlos Andrés Pérez government. Despite its failure, the February coup attempt left a controversy that lasts to the present day, and rocketed Chávez to the national spotlight.
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Through Chavez's early life, Venezuela had enjoyed a period of economic and democratic stability that was remarkable in South America at the time, although torture, ill-treatment, extrajudicial killings, political disappearances and corruption were widespread; the stability was based on the massive foreign exchange earnings from oil sales. However, when Saudi Arabia and other oil producers significantly raised their production output, a glut ensued. Oil prices collapsed to historic lows, and Venezuelan oil earnings, and economic and social stability in general, were suddenly imperiled as per capita income fell to a fraction of its previous levels.[1]
Responding to this, in 1989 the Carlos Andrés Pérez administration enacted widely unpopular IMF-inspired structural adjustment programs. The programs' backers sought to restore fiscal stability to Venezuela's ailing economy by way of neoliberal policies, such as curtailing social spending and releasing longstanding price controls on many goods. These policies resulted in many hardships for Venezuela's poor majority, and their resultant discontent erupted in the violent 27 February 1989 Caracazo riots—the most violent and destructive in Venezuelan history.
Many conspirators were members in the 1970s of the Partido de la Revolución Venezolana created by former guerrilla fighter Douglas Bravo who conceived the strategy of infiltrating the Venezuelan Armed Forces to reach power.[2] Thus, plotting started more than ten years before Carlos Andrés Pérez was elected for the second time in 1988, and rested on a rejection of what was seen as a corrupt, clientelist establishment controlled (from 1958 to 1993) by two political parties, Democratic Action and COPEI, in a system known as puntofijismo.
The Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario 200 (MBR-200) was founded by lieutenant colonel Hugo Chávez Frías, who was later joined by Francisco Arias Cárdenas. They used the Venezuelan revolutionary hero Simón Bolívar as their group's symbol. Their main complaint was the corruption of Carlos Andrés Pérez as well as Venezuela's ongoing economic difficulties and social turmoil. In the view of these two men, the entire political system had to be changed in order for social change to occur.
After an extended period of popular dissatisfaction and economic decline under the neoliberal administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez,[1] Chávez made extensive preparations for a military-civilian coup d'état.[3] Initially planned for December, Chávez delayed the MBR-200 coup until the early twilight hours of 4 February 1992. On that date, five army units under Chávez's command barreled into urban Caracas with the mission of assaulting and overwhelming key military and communications installations throughout the city, including the Miraflores presidential palace, the defense ministry, La Carlota military airport, and the Military Museum. Chávez's ultimate goal was to intercept and take custody of Pérez before he returned to Miraflores from an overseas trip.
Chávez held the loyalty of some 10% of Venezuela's military forces;[4] still, numerous betrayals, defections, errors, and other unforeseen circumstances soon left Chávez and a small group of other rebels completely cut off in the Historical Museum, without any means of conveying orders to their network of spies and collaborators spread throughout Venezuela.[5] Worse, Chávez's allies were unable to broadcast their prerecorded tapes on the national airwaves in which Chávez planned to issue a general call for a mass civilian uprising against Pérez. As the coup unfolded, Pérez eluded capture, and fourteen soldiers were killed, and 50 soldiers and some 80 civilians injured, in the ensuing violence.[6] Nevertheless, rebel forces in other parts of Venezuela made swift advances and were ultimately able to take control of such large cities as Valencia, Maracaibo, and Maracay with the help of spontaneous civilian aid. Chávez's forces, however, had failed to take Caracas as he remained inside the Military Museum.[7]
Chávez soon gave himself up to the government. He was then allowed to appear on national television to call for all remaining rebel detachments in Venezuela to cease hostilities. When he did so, Chávez famously quipped on national television that he had only failed "por ahora"—"for now".[8]
| "Comrades: unfortunately, for the moment, the objectives that we had set for ourselves have not been achieved in the capital. That's to say that those of us here in Caracas have not been able to seize power. Where you are, you have performed well, but now is the time for a rethink; new possibilities will arise again, and the country will be able to move definitively towards a better future."[8] |
Chávez was immediately catapulted into the national spotlight, with many poor Venezuelans seeing him as a figure who had stood up against government corruption and kleptocracy.[8][9] Afterwards, Chávez was sent to Yare prison; meanwhile, Pérez, the coup's intended target, was impeached a year later.
On 27 November 1992 a second coup attempt was launched, led by officers from the air force and navy, including pilot Luis Reyes Reyes. The group had contacts with Chávez in jail, and had learned some lessons from the February coup's errors, including launching at 4.30am instead of midnight, and obtaining communications equipment to ensure they would not be stranded without. They took over the state-run channel eight (Venezolana de Televisión), in a bloody battle;[10] and broadcasted a video made in prison by the still incarcerated Hugo Chávez calling for a popular uprise. But the rebels failed to take over other media outlets e.g. Televen, allowing Perez once again to address the nation and declare that the rebellion had failed.[11] The group swiftly seized control of major air bases, and largely gained control of the skies. However by 9 am it was clear that there was little else going for the rebels, and after a minor pilot defection gave government forces the chance to shoot down a loyalist plane, the coup plotters began to bomb some targets. They fired at the Caracas headquarters of the DISIP political police, and dropped bombs on Miraflores.[12] Within hours, an attempt to free Chávez and his allies from jail had failed, and government forces had retaken most military bases. About 3pm the remaining rebels took off for Peru in two C-130s, although they made it only as far as Iquitos. In total, the November death toll reached 172, much higher than it had been in February.[13]
In the process of resisting the coup attempts, government agents were reported to have killed forty people, both civilians and surrendered rebels, either as extrajudicial executions, or through the use of disproportionate force.[14] Arbitrary detentions numbered in the hundreds, and continued for some time after the events, and involved student leaders and other civic leaders not connected with the coup attempts. In addition, freedom of expression was suspended for two months in the February case, and three weeks in the November case, and involved censorship of the media. A series of demonstrations in March/April calling for the resignation of President Carlos Andrés Pérez and the restoration of constitutional guarantees were met with state violence including indiscriminate police firing into crowds, with a total of 13 deaths.[14] A number of members of the press covering the protests were severely injured by police.[14]
Although participants in the February coup attempt were tried under the regular military justice system, in response to the November coup attempt the government created ad hoc courts based on the 1938 legal code of Eleazar López Contreras, drawn up twenty years before the transition to democracy. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled the courts unconstitutional, but not on the due process grounds for which they were criticised, but on the grounds that the President had neglected to suspend the relevant constitutional rights (right to a defence, right to be tried by one's natural judge).[15]
With Pérez's public image discredited by the unsuccessful neoliberal reforms and shattered by the coup attempts, other politicians began to challenge his authority, endangering the decades-old two-party puntofijismo system. The turmoil and failed coups were utilized by former president Rafael Caldera to comment on the gradual deterioration of Venezuelan democracy and the explosive conflation of poverty and corruption in the nation. Subsequent actions by intellectuals associated with Caldera resulted in Pérez's ousting from the presidency on 20 May 1993, on charges of corruption. Swift political maneuvering allowed Caldera to win the 1993 presidential election with a heterogeneous and non-traditional group of small independent political parties, named "National Convergence". As part of his campaign Caldera promised to pardon the coup plotters, and later did so, laying the basis for Hugo Chávez to participate in (and win) the 1998 presidential election.
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