The Coup: From the Ashes

Episode 8  |  How did Hugo Chávez return to power after the 2002 coup?

In this episode, we follow the chaotic hours after Chávez was removed from power, the rise of Pedro Carmona’s short-lived interim government, the disastrous Carmona Decree, and the reversal that brought Chávez back to power less than 48 hours later. 

April 2002 would become one of the great founding myths of Chavismo. 

But the real story is more complicated. 

This is the story of how Hugo Chávez rose from the ashes. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

A few hours after night fell on April 11th, 2002, a helicopter headed towards Miraflores Palace. On board were members of the high command of the Venezuelan Armed Forces. They were flying to the Presidential Palace, where President Hugo Chavez was waiting. Venezuela was also waiting, suspended in uncertainty. That afternoon, hundreds of thousands had marched through Caracas towards Miraflores. By the end of the day, shooting and chaos had left people dead in the streets. Images of violence filled Venezuelan television screens, and inside the armed forces, the president's support had collapsed. Chavez had tried to send the military into the streets, but by nightfall, commanders were breaking ranks. Earlier that day, General Efraim Vázquez Velasco, the commander of the army, had publicly condemned the violence and withdrawn his support from the government. Other officers followed. Some no longer recognized Chavez as president, others were demanding his resignation. And now, as the night turned into early morning, members of the High Command arrived at Miraflores to brief the president on the crisis spreading through the military establishment. Inside the palace, the gravity of the situation became clear. One by one, the commanders explained what was happening. The rebellion was no longer outside the palace. It had reached the institution that Chavez needed most to survive. Two members of the High Command tendered their resignations right then and there, in the room, and Chavez understood what that meant. La vaina esta jolida entonces, he said. In other words, this thing is fed. At Fuertetiuna, the largest and most important military base in Caracas, officers in open rebellion began negotiating with Chavez, who was still inside Miraflores. Chavez tried to save himself. He offered to change course, to remove his ministers, replace the vice president, and open a dialogue with the opposition. But by then, the officers didn't want concessions. They wanted his resignation. They were willing, they said, to let him leave the country for Cuba with his family. So a resignation letter was drafted, though when the officers went to Miraflores for Chavez to sign it, he refused. He would only sign, he said, once his departure from the country was guaranteed. Across Venezuela, millions were glued to their television screens as unverified rumors spread, moving faster than facts. Chavez had resigned, Chavez had fled, Chavez had been arrested, Chavez was dead. Given these events, the President of the Republic was asked to resign from his post. Which he accepted. General Rincón then announced that the entire High Command was prepared to resign and submit itself to the new authorities. And with that, the Chavez era appeared to be over. Or so they thought. Across the country, Chavez's supporters mourned as his opponents celebrated a day that they thought would never come. Inside the military, officers who had hidden their opposition now celebrated openly. They jumped, hugged, shouted, and congratulated one another. But in that explosion of celebration, almost no one understood the most important fact of that night. The president they believed had been deposed had only accepted to resign, but he had refused to sign. Just before Chávez was presented with a resignation letter, his defense minister, Jose Vicente Rangel, had whispered a final piece of advice. Don't sign, Ugo. So it goes down as a coup. Now to understand what happened next, we need to be very clear about something. There were multiple conspiracies against Chavez. Not just one conspiracy, they were many. In the months before April 11th, as Chavez radicalized his government and pushed the country into deeper confrontation, several groups of officers inside the armed forces were already plotting against him. Some were acting out of fear, some out of ambition, some because they believed Chavez was destroying democracy, and others because they had never accepted him in the first place. The former U.S. military attache stationed at the American Embassy in Caracas later confirmed that by the summer of 2001, several groups of military officers had approached him to discuss their plans against Chavez. There were so many conspiracies, he said, that it was hard to keep track of who belonged to which group. And Chavez knew. By this point it was an open secret that officers were conspiring against the government. But Chavez believed he could manage it. He saw the plotting not only as a threat, but as an opportunity, a way of identifying his enemies inside the military. He never believed that they had the strength to overthrow him, and in a strange way, he was right. Because the officers who actually triggered the rupture on April 11th were not the hardline conspirators who had spent months plotting in the shadows. They were the generals who until that very day had been considered fiercely loyal to Chavez. The decisive break came when they refused the order to activate Blan Avila, to send the army into the streets against the protesters. That refusal fractured the chain of command. It opened a hole in the state. And only then, in the chaos, in the power vacuum, in the confusion of a government suddenly collapsing, did the more organized conspirators move to take control. They had not produced the crisis, but once it arrived, they seized it. And one of the most powerful figures hovering around this moment was Gustavo Cisneros. If that name sounds familiar, it should. Cisneros was one of Venezuela's richest men, the owner of Veneration, and a central figure in the media and business elite. He was also one of the men who only a few years earlier had helped Chavez during the 1998 presidential campaign. But by 2002, that relationship had completely collapsed. The same elite networks that had once helped Chavez come to power had underestimated him. And now they were trying to remove him. And Cisneros's role mattered because it revealed one of the deeper ironies of the April crisis. Some of the people now helping to bury Chavez were the very same people who had helped bring him to power. This was not just a military rebellion, it was also a revolt of the elites who had realized far too late that Chavez was not going to be their puppet. Chavez's ministers watched, singing the national anthem as the president was escorted out of the presidential palace. From there, he was taken to Fuerte Tuna military base, which was in a state of absolute chaos and disarray. The chain of command had broken down, and officers argued through the night about how to manage the transition, and more urgently, over what to do with Chavez. He hadn't signed a resignation, but he was still in the military's custody. And this was a big problem. Even Chavez understood that. At one point he reportedly told the officers around him, I'm less of a problem to you if you let me leave the country, and I will be a bigger problem to you if I remain. But you have the final word. And Chavez was right. Had they accepted his terms, Venezuelan history would have unfolded very differently. But a group of hardline officers insisted that Chavez should not be allowed to leave, that he should face trial for the events of the day. But the military couldn't reach a consensus on what to do with a deposed president. Would they let him leave, or would they force him to stay? And while Chavez sat in Fuerte Tuna, the rest of the state was beginning to empty out. By morning, much of the government had either resigned, disappeared, or gone into hiding. Pro-Chavez generals had offered their resignations, and even the president of the Supreme Court had stepped down to facilitate the transition. Every resignation added to the pressure. Because the generals who had forced Chavez from power now had a problem. They didn't have a government to replace him with. General Vasquez Velasco, the army commander who had broken with Chavez the day before, didn't want the military to rule the country. He wanted the burden of the transition to move quickly into civilian hands. It was in that vacuum, with the president detained, the cabinet scattered, and the Supreme Court president resigning, and the military chain of command in pieces, that the best organized faction moved first. And so a group of right-wing conspirators began to take control of the coup. And they had a candidate, Pedro Carmona, the president of Felegamaras, Venezuela's largest business federation. Carmona had helped lead the national strike against Chavez. He had become one of the most visible civilian faces of the opposition, and now, amid the chaos, he was presented as the man who could lead the transition. So with the state collapsing around him and with no clear plan for what came next, General Vasquez Velasco accepted Pedro Carmona would become the interim president of Venezuela. So why Pedro Carmona? Why was the president of Fede Cámara suddenly chosen to lead the country? And I want to be very clear here. I don't think that Carmona was one of the architects of the military conspiracy against Chávez. I think he became useful to the faction that took control of the coup. By April 2002, Carmona had become one of the most visible civilian faces of the opposition. Alongside Carlos Ortega, the head of the CTV, Venezuela's largest labor federation, Garmona had helped lead the civil society resistance to Chavez's increasingly authoritarian style of government. Together, Fede Camaras and the CTV had given the anti-Chawist movement something powerful, an alliance between business and labor. That mattered because it wasn't just a right-wing opposition movement. It wasn't just business leaders protecting their interests, it wasn't just old political parties trying to regain power or an economic elite looking to reclaim their influence. Don't get me wrong, those interests were definitely a part of it, but the opposition to Chavez was a much broader coalition than that, and Garmona, as one of the most recognizable faces, had become a symbol of that resistance. That's probably the reason he was selected to lead the transition. He was a civilian, he was respectable, he had public visibility, and to many opponents of Chávez he seemed like someone who could restore order without having the military rule directly. So by the morning of April twelfth, Venezuelans who had managed to sleep woke up to the news that Pedro Carmona would lead their interim government. But only a few hours later, that new interim government would commit a catastrophic mistake. The Carmona government collapsed almost as quickly as it appeared. The reason was simple the people in control of the transition misunderstood their own victory. They thought Chavez's fall gave them a mandate to dismantle everything that he had built, but it didn't. On the morning of April 12th, the halls of Miraflores overflowed with celebration. Opposition figures poured into the presidential palace, where loose papers from last night's chaos remained scattered across the floors. Some were opportunists who came to claim positions in the new government. Others simply came to witness what only hours earlier had seemed impossible. Hugo Chavez was gone. People applauded, cheered, embraced, and congratulated one another. Chavez's opponents believed that they had finally won, so Carmona was sworn in as interim president. He promised to restore the rule of law. It dissolved the Supreme Court. It removed the Attorney General, the Comptroller General, and all other public officials. It gave Carmona sweeping powers to remove elected governors and mayors. The decree created a state council made up of representatives from political parties, NGOs, and civil society. In practice, a body that was packed with Chawiz's opponents. It also announced that parliamentary elections would be held in 90 days, followed by presidential elections later on. And, in one of the most symbolic gestures of the day, the decree changed the country's official name back from Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the Republic of Venezuela. The combination of all of those measures shocked many Venezuelans. Because from a constitutional perspective, Carmona had no legal claim to the presidency. If Chavez had resigned, power should have passed to his vice president. If the vice president was unavailable, the National Assembly had to guide the transition. But Carmona was not the vice president. He had not even been elected. He had not been appointed through any constitutional mechanism. He was a private citizen placed in power by military officers and opposition figures in the middle of a political collapse. The legal justification for the decree rested on Article 350 of the Constitution. This is the article that allows citizens to reject regimes that violate democratic principles and human rights. But the problem was obvious, the Garmona decree itself violated the constitutional order that it claimed to defend, and that contradiction was devastating. Because whether Chavez's removal began as a military coup or a genuine crisis of presidential authority, Garamona's decree only made the situation far worse. It didn't restore democracy, it dissolved every institution in Venezuela. It didn't calm the country. It just confirmed that the new government intended to rule by decree. And the problem wasn't just legal, it was political. After the decree was read on national television, representatives from different civil society organizations were called forward to sign it. One by one they came up. But when the CTV was called, no one appeared. For many Venezuelans watching at home, this was the first sign that something was wrong. Where was the Cete? Where was Carlos Ortega? Without the Cetere, the new government no longer looked like a broad civil society coalition. It looked much more like a right-wing junta aligned with business interests. The alliance between Fede Camaras and the Cete, the alliance that had made the opposition movement seem broad, national, and legitimate, had fractured at the very moment of victory, and the alarm bells spread quickly. Legal experts within the opposition warned Garmona that the decree violated the Constitution. Cecilia Sosa, the former president of the Supreme Court, tried to explain that he had to follow a constitutional path. The United States also urged him to convene the National Assembly to formally certify Chavez's permanent absence. But Garmona refused. He was convinced that bringing back the Assembly would make the interim government look weak. He may have also feared that a legislature aligned with Chavez would take control of the transition and prolong the crisis. But by refusing to restore institutional order, he deepened the crisis of legitimacy from the very beginning. And internationally, the reaction was immediate. Latin American governments condemned the interruption of constitutional order. Argentina and Paraguay called the interim government illegitimate. Mexico refused to recognize it until elections were held. The Organization of American States convened an emergency session. Even governments that had initially welcomed the new government, including the U.S. and Colombia, joined the call for the restoration of democratic institutions in Venezuela. Within hours, the new government had alienated the labor unions, alarmed legal experts, unsettled foreign governments, and handed Chavez supporters the argument that they needed. And all of this rested on the most fragile foundation imaginable. Chávez had never signed. As Carmona's new government tried to consolidate power, the country began to spin out of control. On the streets, anti-Chavez mobs launched political witch hunts, searching for officials from the ousted government. Several Chavez-era officials were arrested. The Cuban embassy came under siege after rumors spread that Diosdado Cabello, Chavez's vice president, was hiding inside. Meanwhile, key institutional figures began saying publicly what Carmona's government desperately needed people not to hear. Chavez had not resigned. The president of the National Assembly said it, the Attorney General said it, but their statements were largely ignored by the Venezuelan media, which by now had aligned itself almost completely with the interim government. And by the night of April 12th, Carmona understood that things were beginning to fall apart. So he allegedly called the heads of the major television networks and explained how delicate the situation had become. The networks, who had long been targets of Chavez's rhetoric, understood what was at stake, and then they made one of the most consequential decisions of the crisis. They imposed an information blackout. The next day, as protests, riots, and looting spread across Caracas, Venezuelans turned on their televisions and found nothing. No live coverage of the uprising, no serious reporting on the military backlash, no explanation on the crisis now consuming the country. Instead, the networks played documentaries, cartoons, and telenovelas. At the precise moment when the Venezuelan people needed the most, the media abandoned their journalistic responsibility. And the irony was almost perfect, because in their desperation to sustain the interim government, the private media networks became exactly what Chowiz had accused them of all along. Political actors, tools of a right wing clique, not observers of the crisis, but participants in it. But as much as the media tried to hide the collapse, the collapse kept spreading. Garmona's sweeping decree had not only alienated civilians, labor leaders, and international observers, it had also alarmed key sectors of the armed forces. One of Garamona's most damaging decisions was appointing Vice Admiral Hector Ramirez Pérez as defense minister. Ramírez Perez was a Navy officer, but the Navy was not a decisive branch of the Venezuelan military. The army was. And the army was commanded by General Vázquez Velasco, the same officer who had played a critical role in forcing Chavez from power. Vazquez Velasco had every reason to expect a central role in the transition. But instead, Garmona sidelined him, and that decision raised a terrifying question inside the military. Who exactly controlled the troops? The active and retired officers appointed to Carmona's cabinet had political importance, but they didn't have operational command over soldiers in the streets or units in the barracks. So instead of restoring the chain of command, Carmona had made it even more fragile. And now the danger was not just that Chao's supporters would rebel, the danger was that the military itself would fracture again. Soon those concerns exploded into the open. Vasquez Velasco issued another public statement speaking on behalf of the military. He demanded the Carmona decree be revoked, he demanded the National Assembly be reconvened, and he called for an inclusive transitional government to be formed in accordance with the Constitution. The same army commander who had helped bring Chavez down was now turning against the government that had replaced him. Garmona tried to recover. He went on national television and announced that he would reconvene the National Assembly after all. But by then it was too late. By midday on April 13th, rumors began to circulate that the military forces loyal to Chavez were regrouping. Two officers would prove decisive. The first was General Garcia Carneiro, who commanded the Army Division at Fuertetiuna. The second was General Raúl Baluel, commander of the 43rd Paratrooper Brigade. And Baluel's position mattered enormously, because the 43rd Paratrooper Brigade was one of the best equipped and best trained units in the Venezuelan army. Once Baluel moved to support Chavez's return, the military equation changed. For Carmona's government to survive, the rest of the army would now have to be willing to confront the paratroopers directly. And no one wanted that. The tide had shifted. Much of the army had already been alienated by the Carmona decree. Officers who had turned against Chavez on April 11th were not necessarily willing to defend Carmona on April 13th, and they had even less appetite for a military confrontation with one of the most capable fighting forces in the country. Despite the information blackout imposed by the media, rumors of Chavez's return began to spread very quickly. Earlier that morning, Chavez had been moved from Fuertiuna to the Turiamo naval base. Later, he was taken to La Orchilla, a remote military base on an island north of Caracas. But from Turiamo, the captive president managed to send out a handwritten statement by facts with the help of a sympathetic soldier. It read, To the Venezuelan people and to whomever it may concern, I, Hugo Chavez Frias, Venezuelan, President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, declare, I have not resigned the legitimate power that the people gave me. Forever. Hugo Chavez Frias. The statement spread informally, but its meaning was explosive. Chavez had not resigned. The entire legal and political foundation of the Carmona government depended on the claim that Chavez had accepted his resignation. And then the story broke even wider. Marisabel Rodriguez, Chavez's wife at the time, confirmed in an interview with CNN that her husband had not resigned. International media picked it up, and inside Venezuela, the rumors became impossible to contain. Chavez might be coming back. As word spread, his supporters began gathering outside Mirafiola's palace. The crowd grew larger and larger, and the presidential honor guard responsible for protecting the palace turned against the interim government and took control of the building. It was another astonishing failure by Garmona. Neither he nor his defense minister had replaced the pro-Chavist troops guarding the palace, so when the interim government tried to project authority, the building at the center of Venezuelan power slipped from its hands. Garmona fled Miraflores, and around 7 p.m. he formally resigned. He had been president for less than 48 hours. As night fell over Caracas on April 13th, thousands of Chavez supporters gathered around Miraflores. Red berets, Chavez posters, and Venezuelan flags filled the crowd. At the gates of the palace, a 39-year-old National Assembly deputy named Nicolas Maduro addressed the protesters. At around three in the morning, the helicopter carrying Hugo Chavez appeared over the palace. The scene could have been pulled straight out of a Hollywood movie. Chavez's supporters stretched their arms towards the sky. Tears streamed down their cheeks. They jumped and screamed, shouting his name. Only a day earlier, Chavez had seemed gone forever. Now he had come back to Miraflores. Back to them. A Phoenix rising from the ashes. And that's how the story would be remembered. Chavez falls, the people rise up, Chavez returns. But before we conclude, I want to address what actually happened during that fateful April weekend. Because April 2002 would soon become one of the great founding myths of Chavismo. The story Chavez told was simple. The oligarchy had overthrown him, and the people rose up. The Venezuelan people, the true people, had brought him back to power. But that's not what had happened. Yes, Chavez's supporters had mobilized. Thousands of them had gathered around the palace. But they weren't the decisive actors in the crisis. At every stage of the April crisis, power moved through the armed forces. It was the military that broke the chain of command. It was the military that demanded Chavez's resignation. It was the military that moved him out of Miraflores. It was the military that had appointed and then removed Pedro Carmona from power. And it was the military that had brought Chavez back. The mass of Chavez supporters at the palace only gathered once news spread that the president would return. The people didn't bring Chavez back, soldiers did. The same military fracture that made his return possible was the one that removed Chávez from power in the first place. And Chavez learned from that mistake. From that point forward, he would make sure that the armed forces were not loyal to the Constitution or to the state, but to him, to Chavez. And so Hugo Chávez rose from the ashes. And Venezuela moved deeper into the fire.