The Coup: Chávez Falls

Episode 7  |  How was Hugo Chávez removed from power in 2002? 

On April 11, 2002, more than half a million Venezuelans marched through Caracas toward Miraflores Palace. By nightfall, people were dead in the streets—and Chávez had fallen. 

But the president's dramatic fall didn't come out of nowhere. 

In this episode, we trace the months of escalating confrontation that pushed Venezuela to the brink. As Chávez moved to impose his will on the institutions he did not control, both he and his opponents grew more radical, more organized, and more desperate. 

The pressure was building—and in April 2002... Venezuela exploded.

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Transcript

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Speaker 8 0:05

April 11th, 2002. It's an overcast morning in Caracas. The air pulses with anticipation. Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets, flooding the Venezuelan capital with a sea of bodies. Flashes of red, blue, and yellow, the colors of the Venezuelan flag, move through the crowd. The sharp blasts of whistles and the clatter of metal pans echo through the streets. But then the enormous mass of protesters is redirected. And soon the march takes on a life of its own, moving forward to Miraflores, to the seat of power, to Hugo Chavez. And from inside the presidential palace, the chants must have sounded like a distant thunder. By nightfall, horror and chaos would grip the country. Venezuelans would lie dead in the streets, and Hugo Chavez would fall. But to understand how Venezuela got to April 11, 2002, how a mass protest ended with dead bodies in the street and the president removed from power, we have to go back. Because for most of his first two years in office, Hugo Chavez was not an unpopular president. In fact, he was extraordinarily popular. When Chavez first came to power, most Venezuelans gave him the benefit of the doubt. They were tired of the old political parties, tired of a rotten democracy that had left millions behind, and Chavez offered them change. He promised to sweep away the old order and build a new Venezuela. And at first, many people believed him. But by the end of 2001, that honeymoon period was over. Chavez's approval rating hovered above thirty percent. The revolution had not delivered on its promises. Crime, poverty, unemployment, and inflation were still eating away at Venezuelans' lives. And as his popularity fell, Chavez only became more combative. For Chavez, every problem in Venezuela was part of the same political war. Crime was not just crime, it was the moral decay left behind by the old regime. Poverty was not just poverty. It was proof that the revolution had not yet defeated its enemies. In Chavez's narrative, the government's failures were never simply failures of policy. They were always the result of resistance. Resistance from the oligarchy, from the old parties, from the media, resistance from anyone who stood in the way of the revolution. And by 2001, that permanent state of confrontation had exhausted the country. But it's important to be precise here. Venezuela was not yet a dictatorship. There was no censorship in the traditional sense. Television channels still criticized the government, and radio hosts attacked Chavez openly. Journalists weren't being imprisoned for their work. But the atmosphere had changed. Chavez was not just criticizing the press. He had put a target on their backs, labeling the media an enemy of the revolution. He attacked journalists by name, and his supporters harassed and even threatened them. One newspaper called "Así es la noticia" was attacked with a Molotov cocktail bomb. Soon enough, Venezuela's major television and radio networks abandoned any pretense of neutrality. They weren't just covering the opposition to Chavez. They had become an active part of it. The airwaves filled with stories about government failures, anti-Chavez opinion programs, and comedy sketches mocking the president. Sometimes through openly classist and racist stereotypes, Chavez accused the media of conspiring against his revolution, and the media embraced its role as the revolution's enemy. So Chavez responded with one of his favorite weapons, the cadena. Under previous governments, cadenas had usually been reserved for major announcements or national emergencies. But Chávez turned them into a political weapon. He used them to override the hostile media environment, dominate the national conversation, and speak directly to the country. And that same logic of confrontation was spreading into every corner of Venezuelan society. Two of the most important organizations drawn into this confrontation were Fede camaras, Venezuela's largest business federation, and the CTV, the country's most powerful confederation of labor unions. These two organizations should have been enemies. Fede camaras represented big business, and the CTV represented organized labor. But by 2001, Chavez had united them against him. Both had been powerful under the old political system. Both had enjoyed access to the state, and both now felt excluded, attacked, and pushed aside by a president who saw them not as partners, but as remnants of the regime he was trying to destroy. Chavez tried to weaken both, and in both cases he failed. In late 2001, the Sete elected Carlos Ortega, a former oil union leader as its leader, defeating the pro-Chavist candidate. The government refused to recognize the result. That same year, the Chavez candidate backed to lead Fede Cámaras also lost. Instead, the organization elected Pedro Carmona, a soft-spoken businessman who would soon become one of the central figures of the crisis. So by the end of 2001, the lines were hardening. The media was against Chávez, the business federation was against Chávez, and the most powerful labor unions were against Chávez. And together, these forces began to give shape to an opposition movement that no longer depended on Venezuela's collapsed political parties. This was a loose coalition of institutions, interests, and fears, united less by a shared program than by a shared enemy, Chavez. And so the country was becoming more polarized, more volatile, pressure was building, and an explosion was on the horizon. Then, in November 2001, Chavez made the decision that lit the fire. He approved a package of 49 decree laws. And these weren't minor administrative reforms. These 49 laws involved a massive overhaul of some of the most sensitive areas of Venezuelan life: land, agriculture, fishing, banking, finance, criminal law, and the oil and gas industry. One year earlier, the National Assembly had granted Chavez special powers to legislate by decree until November of 2001. But by late 2001, Chavez's political position had weakened, and several members of his coalition had broken away. He no longer had the legislative support he once enjoyed. So if Chavez wanted to pass these reforms, he had to do it before his special powers expired. And that's exactly what he did. On November 13th, 2001, just one day before his decree powers were set to expire, Chavez approved the 49 laws by presidential decree. There was no parliamentary debate, there was no public consultation, none of that. He pushed everything through with the flick of a pen. Laws that had been drafted in secret were now pretended to reform the entire state. The process was so rushed that some of the laws were incomplete, others had to be reformed after the fact. But perhaps the most controversial measure was the land law, which allowed the state to take over agricultural land if it deemed it unused or unproductive. To Chavez and his supporters, these laws were the revolution in action, but to his opponents, this confirmed their worst fears. The president was not only bypassing the institutions he claimed to rebuild, he was ruling by decree, announcing forty-nine laws at the very last minute, hours before his special legislative powers were to expire. Millions were outraged. For Fedecamaras and the CTV, this was the breaking point. Chavez had no intention of withdrawing these laws, so they called a 12-hour national strike for December 10th, 2001, the day that the laws were set to take effect. Business and labor, two adversaries, now standing on the same side. Against the president, against Chavez. On Monday, December 10th, 2001, Caracas woke up to an eerie silence. The usual roar of traffic was gone. Empty streets, schools, and universities canceled classes. Until the very end, Chavez had tried to stop the strike. According to Pedro Carmona, who was president of Fede cámaras, the pressure reached him directly. Jose Vicente Rangel, Chavez's Minister of Defense, went to Carmona's home and urged him to suspend the strike. He warned that Chávez could become dangerous if cornered, and Carmona answered with disbelief. "Jose Vicente, what are you trying to say? That the wolf is coming for us? The wolf is already here." Having failed to stop the strike, the Chavez government now tried to drown it out, to hide the truth and redirect public opinion. All day, the airwaves were saturated with non-stop cadena broadcasts, displacing normal television and radio with mandatory government programming. And the goal was obvious: prevent images of empty streets, closed businesses, and a paralyzed capital from dominating the news. But the cadenas only made people angrier. In middle-class neighborhoods, residents responded with cacerolazos. They leaned out of their windows and stood on balconies, banging metal pots and pans whenever Chavez appeared on screen. On the day of the strike, Chavez appeared at La Carlota military base in Caracas, dressed in his full lieutenant colonel uniform. As military planes flew overhead, he launched into a furious speech. He threatened the strike organizers. He insisted that the strike had failed. But from the surrounding apartment buildings, the sound of the cacerolas began to rise. And when Chavez heard them, he challenged the residents to come face him. So they did. People came down from their apartments carrying pots and pans, walking right up to the fence of the military base. In the end, the strike didn't bring down the government, but it changed the political equation. Because for the first time, the opposition showed that it could paralyze the country, and soon that it could bring people into the streets. A few weeks later, on January 23rd, 2002, the opposition tested its strength again. This time Carlos Ortega and the CTV organized a massive march in Caracas. The turnout was enormous, hundreds of thousands filled the capital, proof that the opposition movement was growing. But Chavez refused to back down. He refused to repeal or even discuss the laws. Instead, he radicalized. Remember that Chavez didn't build his movement alone. He came to power with the help of several parties from the Venezuelan left, parties like Movimiento del Socialismo and Patria Para Todos, whose leaders helped him organize, campaign, and mobilize voters. But after the December strike and the January March, that alliance began to break down. The more moderate forces inside Chavez's coalition were increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of his government, and Chavez responded by pushing many of those moderates aside, reorganizing his cabinet and surrounding himself with hardline loyalists. And the cost of that decision was immediate. Some of the people who had helped build Chavez's movement began to break away. And the most important was Luis Miquilena. Miquilena was not just another official. He had been one of Chavez's closest advisors, a political mentor, the architect of his 1998 campaign, and the former president of the Constituent Assembly. He was also the bridge between Chavez and the more moderate wing of Chavismo. Behind the scenes, Miquilena helped manage the coalition and keep Chavez's congressional majority together. But after January 23rd, he resigned as Minister of the Interior. Miquilena had not turned on Chávez publicly, but his departure sent a clear message. The moderate phase of Chavismo was ending. The president was closing ranks, and the opposition was getting stronger. By early 2002, Venezuela was headed towards total rupture. And that rupture included the armed forces. Chavez had built his political identity around the military. His revolution was wrapped in military symbolism. But by February 2002, a slow drip of high-ranking military officers began publicly calling for the president to resign. But just a few months later, the Venezuelan military would turn on him. And then the crisis reached the most important institution in Venezuela, PDVSA. Petroleos de Venezuela, the state oil company. But PDVSA was not just another state company. It was the state company. This was the company that managed the country's most important resource. Oil. For decades, PDVSA had operated with an unusual level of independence. It was owned by the Venezuelan state, but it was not supposed to be controlled directly by politicians. Inside the company, there was a culture of professionalism, hierarchy, and meritocracy. PDVSA executives saw themselves as technocrats and engineers, oil professionals, people who identified much more with the international oil industry than with Venezuelan politics. But Chavez saw PDVSA as a state within a state, a company that belonged to the Venezuelan state, but was outside its control, his control. And for Chavez that was a real problem. Because without control of PDVSA, he didn't have full control over Venezuela's oil revenue, and without that oil revenue, the revolution had limits. So in February 2002, Chavez made his move. He appointed a new board of directors for PDVSA. This immediately set off alarm bells across the company. The issue was not simply that the president had appointed a new board, because Venezuelan presidents had always appointed PDVSA's leadership. The issue was who he had appointed. In the past, PDVSA presidents and board members were usually promoted from within the company. They were people with decades of experience in the oil industry. But Chavez's new appointees were seen as political loyalists, people with limited oil sector experience, but strong ideological loyalty to Chavez. And the new PDVSA president, Gastón Parra, made the government's intentions clear. He said, We will carry out the transformation of PDVSA, for which we have fought for so many years, in accordance with our ideological criteria and thought. To PDVSA workers, this sounded like a declaration of war. So senior PDVSA officials began speaking out, which was very unusual. PDVSA normally avoided open political confrontation. Its executives were bureaucrats and oil technocrats, not politicians. But now they believed that the company itself was under attack, so they took a stand. In March 2002, Chavez accused PDVSAB managers of behaving like oligarchs. He said that they had been indoctrinated by previous governments. He accused them of trying to sabotage the revolution and privatize the oil industry. PDVSA's workers responded with an open letter demanding respect for the company's independence. And almost overnight, PDVSA became the center of the national crisis. The opposition rushed to defend it. Fede camaras, the CTV, the media, civil society, not necessarily because they all cared deeply about the oil sector's meritocracy, but because they saw themselves reflected in PDVSA's confrontation with Chavez. At this point, a pattern had begun to emerge. Chavez identified an institution that he didn't control. He declared it illegitimate, accused it of serving the oligarchy, and then moved to take it over. PDVSA became the latest battlefield in the war between Chávez and his opponents. And then, on April 7, 2002, Chávez escalated the conflict in the most dramatic way possible. Two days before a new national strike was planned in support of PDVSA, Chávez went on television. Then he proceeded to fire them on air, blowing the whistle directly into the camera.

Speaker 6 19:26

Offside.

Speaker 8 19:40

Now, the complicated truth is that Chavez was not completely wrong about PDVSA. PDVSA was elitist. It was insular. It was resistant to political oversight. Its employees were often drawn from the middle and upper classes. Many had studied abroad, many spoke English, they had better salaries and benefits than most Venezuelans could ever imagine. And despite its reputation for meritocracy, there were real accusations of favoritism and nepotism inside the company. So yes, PDVSA was a logical target for Chavez. It symbolized the old Venezuela, elitist, powerful, and distant from the popular majority. But PDVSA was not a corrupt enclave of oligarchs. It was one of the most professional institutions in the country. It was well respected internationally, and it managed the industry that kept Venezuela alive. That was the contradiction. PDVSA was both things at once, an elite state within the state, and a pillar of national competence. But Chavez wanted to bring it under political control, his control. Soon the national strike organized by Fede camaras and the CTV in support of PDVSA took shape. It was supposed to last 24 hours, but once it began, events started moving faster than anyone could have controlled. The firing of PDVSA's senior officials on live television was a watershed moment. On April 9, 2002, the national strike officially began. And once again, the media became part of the battlefield. That day, the government launched cadena after cadena. Sixteen mandatory broadcasts in a single day, two every hour. The broadcasts showed interviews with workers who opposed the strike and images that made it seem like the country was functioning normally. Business as usual, nothing to see here. But the private channels wanted to show the empty streets, the closed businesses, the massive scale of the strike. So that evening, several television stations did something unprecedented. They split their screens. On one side, viewers saw the government's mandatory broadcast. On the other, they saw the station's own images of the strike. The government's audio remained on, but a banner appeared across the bottom of the screen. It read This is a violation of the telecommunications law. It was a direct act of defiance. The government was trying to control the airwaves, but the media refused to obey. The strike was originally supposed to last 24 hours, but on the evening of April 10th, the CTV and Fede cámaras raised the stakes. They extended the strike and called for the opposition to march the very next day, April 11th, 2002. Officially, the march would end at PDVSA's headquarters in eastern Caracas. That's what most protesters believed. But the night before, some opposition leaders had already discussed a much riskier plan. Once the crowd reached the destination, they would redirect the march west, toward Miraflores, toward Chavez. It was a gamble. Sending hundreds of thousands of protesters toward Miraflores meant sending the opposition directly into the heart of government power. But that decision was not a surprise to Chavez, because the government already knew about the plan. Government agents had infiltrated the opposition meeting. They knew that the march might be redirected. That information had reached officials several hours before the protest even began. So Chavez had time. He could have easily blocked the march, positioning National Guard units at key choke points throughout the city. But that's not what happened. Instead, Chavez prepared for confrontation. Thousands of his supporters were called to surround the Miraflores Palace, and behind the scenes, Chavez reached for another tool: Plan Ávila. Plan Ávila was a military contingency plan used to send troops into the streets during moments of extreme unrest. It was the very same plan that President Carlos Andrés Pérez had activated during the Caracazo in 1989, when soldiers opened fire on civilians and hundreds were killed. The memory of that massacre still haunted Venezuela, and that's what made Plan Ávila so dangerous. The army wasn't trained for crowd control. Soldiers were trained for war. They carried lethal weapons. They weren't equipped to manage a massive civilian protest in the middle of Caracas. Activating Plan Ávila meant putting the army on the street against the people, a bloodbath at the hands of the military. And on April 11th, as the crisis deepened, Chavez gave the order. April 11, 2002 was unlike any protest Venezuela had ever seen in its history. The organizers thought that if 150,000 people showed up, the march would be considered a success. But hundreds of thousands flooded the streets of Caracas. Some estimates placed the crowd at half a million people, others claimed it was one million. With only 12 hours' notice, the opposition had organized one of the largest demonstrations in Venezuelan history. And as the march moved through the city, it felt almost surreal. People ran into old friends they hadn't seen in years, former classmates, co-workers, neighbors, ex-lovers. Grandparents marched beside their grandchildren. People cheered when a group of nuns passed through the crowd. And then, word began to spread through the crowd, the march was going to Miraflores. And at that moment, something shifted. For many, the size of the march seemed to change what was possible. The bodies, the noise, the fury. It all created an undeniable feeling that the government would not survive the day. So the march moved west. But as the crowd advanced, some people noticed something strange. There were no serious roadblocks, no real barrier stopping the march from moving across the city. Even on short notice, the National Guard should have been able to block the route at several points before the protesters got anywhere near the palace. But the march kept moving, block after block, closer and closer to Miraflores. And near the palace, the situation was already explosive. Chavez's supporters had gathered outside the palace. Opposition protesters were moving towards the palace as well. And between them stood police officers and National Guardsmen, badly outnumbered, trying desperately to keep the two crowds apart. But there was too many people, too much anger and too little control. Skirmishes broke out, tear gas filled the air, loud bangs echoed through the streets. And then the shooting started. No one knows with certainty who fired the first shot. That question remains one of the central mysteries of that day. In the years that followed, each side blamed the other. But there were persistent reports of snipers shooting from nearby rooftops. But in that moment what mattered was not who fired the first shot, it was the panic that followed. People running and screaming as bodies fell around them. Just a few meters from the presidential palace, Venezuelans were dying in the streets. And inside Miraflores, Chavez was running out of options. He had tried to activate Plan Ávila, but the military refused to execute the order. Two generals were critical here, General Efraín Vázquez Velasco, the commander of the army, and General Manuel Rosendo, the head of the Unified Command. Both men were considered loyal to Chavez and the government. But when Chavez gave the order to activate Plan Ávila, they refused to carry it out. Rosendo reportedly turned off his phone, knowing that the order was coming. But once again, the television stations defied the president. They split their screens. On one side, Venezuelan saw Chavez speaking calmly on the cadena. On the other, live images from the massacre outside the palace. Foaming at the mouth, blood seeping onto the pavement only a few meters from where the president was broadcasting from. The contrast was devastating. For more than two hours, Chavez continued to speak as the violence continued. Every few minutes, an officer would enter the frame and hand him a note with updated information. Chavez would read it, pause, and then keep talking. For many watching at home, that image was impossible to forget. The president speaking in his most natural voice as Venezuelans died right outside the palace. By the end of the day, roughly 20 people had been killed and more than 100 were injured. They were dead and wounded on both sides. But politically, the damage to Chavez was insurmountable. Near the end of the broadcast, Chavez announced that he was taking the private television stations off the air for conspiring against the government. But by then it was too late. The country had already seen it all: the bodies, the horror, the blood on the pavement. By nightfall, the walls were collapsing around Chavez. Around 10 p.m., Luis Miquilena, the influential leader of the moderate wing of Chavismo, publicly condemned the government's actions and blamed Chávez for the violence. Politically, this was devastating, because Miquilena still had influence over moderate Chavistas in the National Assembly, on the Supreme Court, and across the political coalition that had brought Chavez to power. So when Miquilena broke with the president, it sent shockwaves through the political establishment. Then came the military. That night, the television station Venevisión aired dramatic footage captured by one of its news crews. The video showed Chavistas on the bridge near Miraflores firing guns toward the street below, where the opposition march had been concentrated. For a country still reeling from the violence it had just watched unfold in real time, that footage seemed to confirm the worst possible version of events: that the unarmed opposition protesters had been ambushed by armed Chavistas supporters. And the video played again, and again, and again, over and over, the private channels broadcasted the same images. Later, the story would become more complicated. Investigations and later accounts suggest that the footage didn't show the beginning of the shooting. By the time those images were captured, much of the opposition march had already dispersed. The men on the bridge were likely exchanging fire with police, not shooting into a defenseless crowd. But on the night of April 11th, nuance no longer mattered. The country had seen the images, and for the military that was enough. That night, the commander of the army, General Vasquez Velasco, went before the cameras and asked the Venezuelan people for forgiveness. "Mr. President," he said, "I was loyal to you to the end, but today's deaths cannot be tolerated." Then he called on the rest of the armed forces to disobey the president, and with that, Chavez's military support began to unravel. Officers who had hesitated now moved openly against him. The high command turned on him, and inside Miraflores, Chavez found himself isolated and out of options. He stared blankly at the revolver on his desk, chain smoking cigarettes as he weighed his options. Would he die for his cause or would he surrender? At one point, military officers reportedly threatened to bomb the presidential palace if Chavez refused to surrender. That's when Fidel Castro called him and urged Chavez not to immolate himself. And late that night, members of the Military High Command arrived at Miraflores to negotiate the terms of Chavez's resignation. President Chavez had lost. The man who had built his movement on confrontation had finally been consumed by it. For months he had refused to compromise, he had refused to negotiate. He had treated every institution that resisted him the media, the unions, the private sector, PDVSA, even parts of his own coalition, as enemies to be defeated. And now those enemies had converged. He had lost the streets, he had lost the military. And for the first time since 1998, Chavez's enemies could imagine a Venezuela without him. It looked like the Bolivarian Revolution was finally over. But it wasn't. Because the people who brought Chavez down were about to make a catastrophic mistake. And in that mistake, Chavez would find his way back from the ashes.