The Final Battle

Episode 9 | How did Chávez take over Venezuela’s oil industry?

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After the failed coup of April 2002, Venezuela entered a new phase of confrontation. Chávez purged the military, the opposition occupied Plaza Altamira, and the battle moved to the heart of the Venezuelan state: PDVSA. 

This is the story of the national strike that was meant to bring Chávez down—and turned into his greatest victory.

Transcript

Speaker 0:04

Within two hours of his helicopter landing at Miraflores, Hugo Chavez was back on television. It was still before dawn on April 14, 2002. Outside the palace, thousands of supporters celebrated his return. Inside, the presidential palace still looked like it had been shaken by history. Behind Chavez hung the familiar symbols of his revolution, the Venezuelan flag, and a giant portrait of Simon Bolívar. Around him stood ministers and military officers, some in suits, others in camouflage fatigues and red berets. In front of him, microphones were scattered across the desk. Equipment was missing. Papers still littered the palace floors. This was not a normal presidential address. It looked more like an improvised command post. Then the decree restoring Chavez to power was read aloud. Two slow, heavy breaths amplified across the country. Then Chavez leaned forward and spoke. And to the people what belongs to the people. He was quoting the Bible, but giving the line his own political meaning. In Chavez's view, the people had been betrayed, the people had resisted, the people had defeated the coup, and the people had returned their leader to power. For a moment, it looked like April 2002 might force Chavez to change course. The coup had failed. Perhaps the government would open a real dialogue with the opposition. Perhaps Venezuela's institutions, damaged as they were, could still absorb this crisis. And in the first days of his return, there were signs of de-escalation. The Pedabeza board was changed, international mediators became involved. The Organization of American States, in particular, pushed for dialogue between the government and its opposition. But April 2002 didn't teach Venezuela's political actors to compromise. It taught them the opposite. That in order to win, their victory must be absolute. Chavez had come back to power, but his authority was still being questioned after the civilian deaths on April 11th. Now, Venezuelan politics was no longer a struggle over institutions. It became a struggle for total victory. But while Chavez projected reconciliation in public, inside the Venezuelan Armed Forces, something very different was happening. A purge began. In the months before April 2002, the military had become a maze of rumors and conspiracies. Chavez knew that there was discontent. He knew that officers were plotting, whispering, and debating whether to break with him. But until April, much of that opposition had remained hidden. The coup changed all of that. On April 11th and 12th, the officers who opposed Chavez finally revealed themselves. Some appeared on television, others openly backed the new government, others stayed silent, waiting to see who would win. And when Chavez returned to power after the coup, he now had something very valuable. Something he hadn't had before. A map of his enemies and his allies inside the armed forces. In that sense, the coup became a golden opportunity, a blessing in disguise. The military had been the decisive actor in Chavez's fall. The military had also been the decisive actor in his return. And Chavez understood the lesson very clearly. The armed forces could never again be allowed to threaten his government. The failed coup allowed Chavez to purge the military of two groups: those who identified with the growing opposition movement and the so-called institutionalists, officers who didn't necessarily support the coup, but who also refused to align themselves with his Bolivarian project. The purge was not only about removing coup plotters, it was also about removing officers who believed the military should remain above politics. More than 80 generals and admirals were removed. Dozens of mid-ranking officers were pushed into retirement, and a wave of new promotions went to officers who had proven their loyalty to Chavez even when they didn't meet the rank requirements. The result was a profound transformation of the Venezuelan armed forces. The post-coup purge changed the balance of power inside the military. But on the streets, the battle raged on. Venezuelan society was being ripped apart at the seams. Politics was no longer something Venezuelans discussed occasionally or at election time or when the news came on. Politics was everywhere, all the time. It entered homes, workplaces, family dinners, birthday parties, taxi rides, grocery lines. It was almost impossible to spend a few hours without thinking about Chavez, hearing about Chavez, arguing about Chávez. Every conversation seemed to bend in the same direction. Every disagreement carried the weight of something larger. And slowly, that resentment became personal. Lifelong friends stopped speaking. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters found themselves on opposite sides of a political divide that felt impossible to cross. Venezuela was not just polarized at the level of parties, marches, or television channels. It was polarized at the level of everyday life. Families were being pulled apart by a conflict that had become almost existential. By May 2002, weeks after the coup, the streets filled up again. Opposition marches demanded Chavez's departure, Chavistas marches celebrated his return. On the 11th of every month, the opposition marched to commemorate the day Chavez fell. Two days later, on the 13th, Chavistas marched to celebrate the day he came back. One side filling the streets to show its total rejection of the government, the other filling the streets to prove its unwavering loyalty to the president. And this went on for months as tensions grew larger and larger, both sides trying to prove their answer to the same question. Who controlled the streets? Because that was the unresolved question of April 2002. The opposition believed that the massive march on April 11th had revealed the true will of the Venezuelan people. Chavistas believed that the mobilization on April 13th had defeated the coup and restored the legitimate president. Each side claimed to represent democracy. Each side claimed to represent the people. And more importantly, each side believed that the other was their enemy. So the polarization that had produced the coup didn't disappear after Chavez returned. It only deepened. By October 2002, hardline sectors on both sides had shown little willingness to compromise. Both the government and the opposition relied on inflammatory rhetoric and confrontation, creating conditions that only led to more violence. And that's what made this moment so dangerous, because neither side was fully innocent. Some sectors of the opposition wanted Chavez gone and were willing to push past all legal and constitutional limits to make that happen. They had just watched a coup almost succeed, and for some of them the lesson was not that that strategy had been wrong, the lesson was that it had failed because it had not gone far enough. But Chavez did little to reduce tensions. Instead of rebuilding trust in the rule of law, his government moved to tighten control over the institutions that mattered most, especially the military. And the private media, which had already become openly anti-Chavez, continued to behave like political actors. Their coverage amplified opposition anger and gave space to insurrectional voices within the anti-Chavez movement. Chavez responded by escalating his own attacks on the media as enemies of the revolution. So by mid-2002, Venezuela was trapped in a cycle. The opposition radicalized because it believed Chavez was building a dictatorship. Chávez radicalized because he believed the opposition would do anything to overthrow him again. And each side used radicalism of the other to justify its own. In July 2002, opposition forces tried to consolidate by creating the Coordinadora Democrática, a broad coalition of political parties, unions, business groups, NGOs, and civil society organizations opposed to Chavez. It included for the Fedecamaras and the CTV, the same business and labor organizations that had led the strike before the coup. But the Coordinadora had a problem from the beginning. It was united against Chavez, but not around a single strategy. More than 40 organizations belonged to this coalition, but there was no single leader with the authority to command the movement. Rival figures competed for influence, different factions pushed for different paths. One current wanted escalation, more street pressure, more strikes, more mobilization, until Chavez was forced to resign. The other current wanted to wait until the midpoint of Chavez's term and then activate a recall referendum to remove him through the ballot box. Both strategies had logic behind them. The hardliners argued that Chavez would never accept an electoral defeat, that waiting for a referendum only gave him more time to consolidate power. The moderates argued that another attempt to force him out would be reckless, especially since Chavez had already begun restructuring the armed forces. Over the next few months, a series of events pushed the country closer to rupture. In June of 2002, Chavez appointed a new president for PDVSA, Ali Rodriguez Araque. The appointment sounded alarms across PDVSA's workforce. Because Rodriguez Araque was not an oil technocrat. He was a former Marxist guerrilla fighter from the 1960s and 1970s who later entered politics. Again, it was clear that Chavez was trying to impose political control over the state oil company. Two months later, in August, the Supreme Court made a ruling that flared hostilities. It found that the events of April 11th were classified as a power vacuum, not a military coup. This protected the high-ranking military officers who had turned on Chavez from prosecution. Outraged, Chavez called his supporters to the streets. What's coming now is a counter-attack by the people and the true institutions, he said. A revolutionary counter-attack. They're immoral, and I think we have to publish a book of their faces. By November, violence and deadly clashes between Chavez supporters and opponents were becoming more common. That month there was also a shootout between the National Guard and the Metropolitan Police. A force that was controlled by the mayor of Caracas, who was an opposition figure. Even the state security forces were being pulled into the country's political conflict. In response, Chavez intervened in the police force, putting it under the president's authority. And then in October of 2002, the military question returned to the center of the crisis. On October 22nd, 14 active and retired high-ranking military officers, led by General Enrique Medina Gomez, gathered in Plaza Altamira, a public square in eastern Caracas. They declared the square a liberated zone, publicly demanding Chávez's resignation and making a call to all other officers to join their rebellion. To the opposition, this move was momentous, a sign that important sectors of the military were once again turning on President Chavez. Immediately, Altamira became the symbolic capital of the opposition. As thousands of civilians gathered in the square to support the call for Chávez's resignation made by the generals in act of rebellion. Over the following weeks, more than a hundred officers joined the movement, turning Altamira into a strange hybrid, part protest camp, part military rebellion, part television spectacle. The private television networks broadcasted the square live, 24 hours a day, turning Plaza Altamira into something strange and dangerous, a contained insurrection performed live for the cameras. The officers gave speeches in uniform, surrounded by flags, cameras, and crowds that applauded them like rock stars. But there was a contradiction at the heart of Plaza Altamira. These officers openly defied the president, calling for his removal. They were encouraging military disobedience, but they didn't have the power to actually overthrow him. And instead of dispersing them, Chavez allowed the protest to continue. That decision allowed Chávez to point to the opposition and say, look, this is not a democratic movement. This is the same coup, still alive, still conspiring, still trying to finish what it had started in April. And for the opposition, Plaza Altamira became proof of the opposite, that even inside the armed forces, there were still patriots willing to take a stand against Chavez. So once again, both sides looked at the same event and saw completely different realities. And as the year moved toward December, the country was no longer simply polarized. It was preparing for another confrontation, the final battle. But the streets alone could not bring Chávez down. If the opposition wanted to force his resignation, it needed something stronger. It needed PDVSA. By late 2002, Caracas was living in a state of permanent confrontation. Almost every day, pro and anti-Chavez demonstrators clashed somewhere in the city. The streets were tense, the television screens were tense. The country was waiting for the next explosion. And by November, another national strike was coming. On November 21, 2002, the Coordinadora Democrática announced the strike. This time, there was only one demand. Chavez had to resign. So on December 2nd, 2002, they played their final card. The strike was supposed to last 24 hours. But when Chavez didn't resign, the organizers extended it. First by one day, then another, then another. What began as a one-day protest quickly became an open-ended national shutdown right in the middle of the Christmas season. And opposition leaders believed that they had found the pressure point. They believed that if commerce stopped, if the economy froze, Chavez would have no choice but to step down. But Chavez didn't fold. At Plaza Altamira, the opposition gathered day after day. Dissident military officers addressed the crowds, politicians came, artists, business leaders, television cameras. Altamira became the stage on which the opposition performed its resistance. But it also had become a symbol of how volatile the country had become. On December 6th, just four days into the strike, an attack in the midst of the opposition's fervor strengthened the movement's outrage at a critical point. A gunman opened fire on the crowd in Plaza Altamira. Three people were killed and many others wounded. The attack poured kerosene on the fire of Venezuela's polarization. Outrage against Chávez intensified as opponents blamed the president for yet another attack of violence, this time in the epicenter of the rebellion, Plaza Altamira. The shooting was a turning point, radicalizing each side even more. But the shooter was a Portuguese taxi driver with a history of mental illness. He never gave a clear political motive, and the evidence suggests that the attack was likely an isolated act, not an operation ordered by the government. Still, the effect was dramatic, because in a country already drowning in fear and hatred, almost no one believed in isolated incidents anymore. And as the anger deepened, the strike entered its most consequential phase. On December 4th, the crew of the oil tanker Pilin Leon, carrying 44 million liters of gasoline, declared themselves in open rebellion and anchored the vessel in the middle of the navigation channel linking Lake Maracaibo to the Caribbean Sea. This move severed the core artery of Venezuela's oil supply. It was a brilliant act of pressure, and an extraordinarily dangerous one. The tanker blocked the country's most important oil route. Other PDVSA tankers soon joined the stoppage. Tugboat operators refused to work. Managers and technical staff abandoned their posts. At the PDVSA headquarters in Caracas and across the refineries, PDVSA workers blocked the company's operating system. The PDVSA technicians in charge of the system joined the strike. But before they left, they modified the system's passwords. They encrypted key files. They disabled the remote control system that opened the valves and data streams. Pedevez had joined the strike. And that changed the game. Because in Venezuela, oil is the state's bloodstream. It's the resource that keeps the entire economy running. So when Pedevesa stopped, Venezuela stopped. The opposition had shut down the economic heart of the country, confident that Chávez would not hold out. But they were wrong. Chavez denounced the move as an act of sabotage against Venezuela's oil industry. Without the automated system, it was essentially impossible to load tankers and ensure exports. And in a narrow sense, he was right. This was sabotage. PDVSA's employees had deliberately blocked the industry because they believed shutting it down would force Chavez out. Within days, production collapsed. The country's daily exports, around 3 million barrels per day, dropped to practically zero. Venezuela, one of the world's major oil exporters, now confronted the possibility that it couldn't even supply itself. Inside the country, the consequences were immediate. Gas pumps ran dry, long lines formed outside service stations, and people spent days sleeping in their cars waiting for fuel. Shopping centers closed, sporting events were canceled, classes were suspended. Christmas came and went, and the country remained frozen. For poorer households, the crisis was even harsher. Cooking gas became scarce. Families burned wood, cardboard, and old furniture to prepare food. The strike was no longer a political confrontation. It had brought the entire country to a halt. It had paralyzed the economy. And that was a huge gamble. The opposition believed that if the country suffered enough, Chavez would fall. And yet, in Plaza Altamira, the opposition kept celebrating. On New Year's Eve, crowds gathered in the square as if they were welcoming not just a new year, but the imminent end of Chavez's government. It was surreal. An economy in shambles, families cooking with firewood, businesses collapsing, and middle-class crowds celebrating in the square because they believed victory was just days away. It wasn't. The conflict had become a war of attrition. Who could survive longer? Who would break first? The opposition had bet everything on the shutdown. And as December turned into January, as days turned into weeks, one thing became increasingly clear. Chavez was not going anywhere. But by the time the strike reached its second month, the country had reached its limit. Small businesses were going bankrupt, shortages continued, ordinary people were exhausted, and the opposition's central assumption that a never-ending strike would force Chavez to resign was beginning to collapse. The government began clawing the industry back piece by piece. It relied on retired oil workers, military officers with technical training, loyal employees who had refused to join the shutdown, and foreign specialists. Some of the work was risky and improvised. Systems that had been operated remotely now had to be handled manually. Valves had to be opened by hand. Facilities had to be restarted without the people who normally knew how to run them. At the same time, Chavez turned the political narrative against the strikers. These were no longer managers or technicians defending PDVSA' autonomy. They were saboteurs, traitors, a privileged caste willing to destroy the country. Rather than to accept the government's authority. And then the government began to break the strike in the place where it had started. On December 21st, the military boarded the Pilin Leon and took control of the tanker. National Guard vessels escorted it through Lake Maracaibo, reopening the channel that connected Venezuela's oil to the world. It was the first visible sign that the tide was turning. Chavez was using the state, the military, and the machinery of the government to take PDVSA back. Then, on January 23rd, 2003, the government filled the streets of Caracas with a massive pro-Chavez march. It was the anniversary of the fall of Venezuela's last military dictatorship in 1958. Now Chavez was claiming that democratic symbolism for himself. He was presenting himself as the defender of democracy, not a threat to it. For the opposition, this was another blow. The country was exhausted. Businesses were reopening, shortages wearing people down, and the resignation they expected never came. The strike lasted 63 days before fizzling out. By February of 2003, the government had regained full control of PDVSA. In the process, Chavez had fired some 18,000 employees, roughly 40% of the workforce. The strike had failed. After April 2002, it was not immediately clear who had won. Chavez had returned to power, but the opposition had shown that it could mobilize hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. It had shaken the government to its core, and for 48 hours it had watched Chavez fall. At first, Chavez seemed to retreat from the edge. He reinstated the PDVSA leadership, he spoke of reconciliation, he called for dialogue. But beneath the surface, he consolidated his control over the military. The coup had revealed who was with him, who was against him, and who couldn't be trusted. And in the months that followed, Chavez used that knowledge to purge the armed forces. That was the first consequence of April 2002. The opposition remained powerful, but it had lost its most important foothold inside the only institution that had actually forced Chavez from power. And something else had changed. Both sides believed that they had survived an existential threat. Chavez believed that the opposition would stop at nothing to overthrow him. The opposition believed Chavez would stop at nothing to impose his revolution. And both sides drew the same lesson. Next time, there could be no half-measures. The struggle would be all or nothing. And by then, Venezuela was no longer just politically divided. It was socially divided, emotionally divided, and even geographically divided. There were two Venezuelas growing further and further apart from each other. In the poorer barrios, Chávez was increasingly seen as the man of the people, the defender of those who had been excluded from the old system. In middle and upper class neighborhoods, he was seen as a threat to democracy and the future of the country. These are generalizations, of course. There were poor Venezuelans who opposed Chávez and middle-class Venezuelans who supported him. But polarization does not work through nuance. It works by turning society into opposing camps. And by 2002, those camps had begun to map themselves onto the cities. The barrios were seen as Chavista territory. Middle class neighborhoods like Altamira became opposition territory. And as the strike dragged on, fear became almost apocalyptic. Rumors spread that Chavez would send his supporters down from the hills to raid middle-class neighborhoods. Apartment buildings organized guard shifts. Residents watched the streets at night. Some carried unlicensed firearms, waiting for an attack that never came. But the fact that it never happened is almost beside the point. People believed it could happen. That was the country Venezuela had become. And it was in that atmosphere, a country divided by class, geography, and fear, that the opposition played its final card. PDVSA. They believed that the oil company could bring Chavez down, but they miscalculated. By the time the shutdown collapsed, the opposition was exhausted, divided, and discredited. Its strongest weapon had failed. Its assumption that economic paralysis would force Chavez to resign had been proven wrong. April 2002 had given Chavez the military, but the strike gave him the ultimate prize. PDVSA. Now Chavez controlled the armed forces, he controlled the institutions, and he controlled the oil wealth that made the Venezuelan state function. The national strike was supposed to be the opposition's final weapon against Chavez. Instead, it became Chávez's decisive victory over the old Venezuelan state. With PDVSA now under his command, the Bolivarian Revolution was no longer just rhetoric, ideology, or television performance. It finally had money. And with that money, Hugo Chávez could build the political machine that would transform Venezuela for years to come. And before you go, if this series has helped you understand Venezuela's story more clearly and you'd like to support the work behind it, I've just launched a Patreon. Every episode takes a lot of research, archival digging, writing, and editing. So if you want to help me build "The Guacamaya", you can join through the link in the description. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the project. And I'll see you next week.