by LAP Editor, Steve Ellner
Published in NACLA: Report on the Americas. Vol. 54, no. 1
On April 14, 2002, the folly of the abortive coup staged against the government of Hugo Chávez three days earlier was clear, but the depth of its long-lasting impact was not. The April 11 coup was a milestone event that shaped politics in Venezuela and the region for the next two decades. Most important, the coup and the events that immediately followed it set off polarization marked by the radicalization of the government and the opposition, which impacted not only national politics but also government policy on all fronts.
The year 2002 was thus a turning point in Venezuelan politics. How did the nation reach such a defining moment? In the initial period after gaining power, the Chavista movement, like Fidel Castro's Movimiento 26 de Julio in 1959, did not stand for thoroughgoing socioeconomic transformation, even though both movements originated in attempts to gain power using force. Castro in 1959 denied being a leftist, and Chávez embraced the “third way” doctrine that stood between pro-capitalist and pro-socialist.
In both cases, however, powerful adversaries viewed the movements as existential threats. In Cuba’s case, the Eisenhower administration took steps to overthrow Castro shortly after he came to power. And in Venezuela, the nation’s two main parties, Acción Democrática (AD) and Copei, joined forces in an eleventh-hour attempt to avoid Chávez’s triumph at the polls in 1998, while the business organization Fedecámaras staunchly opposed his candidacy. Shortly after his election, the Catholic hierarchy claimed that Chávez had earned the wrath of God. By 2002, Washington officials, who for the most part initially refrained from criticizing his government, questioned his democratic credentials and then, in effect, supported the April coup. These developments intensified the polarization that has plagued Venezuela ever since.
In our article “The Remarkable Fall and Rise of Hugo Chávez,” published in the July/August 2002 issue of the NACLA Report, NACLA director Fred Rosen and I showed how the radicalization of the opposition unfolded the day after the April 11 coup. The article defined two contrasting positions within the opposition that, despite changing political terrain, have continued to this day: a hardline, right-wing strategy that on April 12 decreed the elimination of democratic institutions, and a centrist strategy of working through existing institutions. The latter favored reaching an agreement with former Interior Minister Luis Miquilena and other disenchanted Chavistas to achieve regime change through the legislative branch and in a way that “broad sectors of the population would be represented,” we wrote.
We pointed out that the hardliners, guided by “a well-conceived plan” that gave them an advantage over the centrists, seized control of the government in what we called “nothing less than a coup within the coup.” Economic policy lay just beneath the surface. We noted that “as a member of the export-oriented business class, [provisional president Pedro Carmona] and his followers very likely wanted once and for all to remove all the obstacles to full-fledged, neoliberal formulas.” To do so required “a clean and violent break with the populist past.” In other words, to achieve pressing objectives, democratic principles had to be compromised.
Carmona was set on implementing a radical neoliberal program, sometimes referred to as the “shock treatment,” consisting of harsh and swiftly implemented austerity measures. He staffed his cabinet with members of the elite while excluding labor leaders of the AD-controlled Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), even though the CTV had made April 11 happen in the first place and its president, Carlos Ortega, was originally slated to head the provisional government, as Gregory Wilpert later noted in a piece for Venezuelaanalysis.
The absence of leaders of AD, the nation’s largest party, which had wholeheartedly supported the mobilizations against Chávez, was not by accident. Throughout the 1990s, a major faction within AD had opposed the shock treatment brand of neoliberalism, a position that partly explains the party’s decision to expel neoliberal ex-president Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1993.
The neoliberal radicals, however, attributed Venezuela’s backwardness to the allegedly left-wing populist tradition associated with AD, which they blamed for Chávez’s rise to power in 1998. On the eve of Chávez’s election, one prominent academic supporter of neoliberal reform, Aníbal Romero, ominously wrote in Latin American Research Review: “Venezuela is experiencing the agony of populism…and one cannot be sure of where it may lead.”
Fast forwarding to the Maduro years, the polarization between the Chavista government associated with socialism and an intransigent opposition remained intact, as did the high stakes of Venezuelan politics. Various features largely dating back to 2002 stand out.
Most important, a dominant radical faction of the opposition continues to overshadow a moderate one. The moderates, unlike the radicals, advocate electoral participation, favor recognizing the legitimacy of the nation's democratic institutions and the Maduro presidency, and oppose U.S.-imposed sanctions.
As in 2002, radicals—headed by self-proclaimed president Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López of the Voluntad Popular party—have had a distinct advantage over moderates, this time due to decisive support from Washington. The State Department demanded that the Maduro administration refrain from taking judicial action against Guaidó despite his numerous attempts to overthrow the government, and it influenced Maduro to privilege Voluntad Popular in the negotiations held in Mexico in 2021. In contrast, Washington placed sanctions on four important moderates including Bernabé Gutiérrez, a long-time AD politician.
Radicals under Carmona prevailed the day after the April 11 coup even though they did not necessarily represent a majority of the opposition. Similarly, hardliners have relied throughout the Maduro years on U.S. support to maintain the upper hand over the rest of the opposition, even as most Venezuelans opposed sanctions and Guaidó’s popularity precipitously declined over the course of 2019 and 2020.
Another overlap between 2002 and the current state of Venezuelan politics is the prospect of a revanchist wave should radical sectors of the opposition take power. The first day of Carmona’s two-day rule saw efforts to round up leading Chavistas as "Wanted: Dead or Alive" leaflets with prominent Chavista names circulated. Similarly, threats against Maduro supporters upped the stakes in the confrontation between him and Guaidó. In an indirect threat against Maduro supporters in the armed forces, the opposition-controlled National Assembly headed by Guaidó introduced a law in 2019 that granted “amnesty” to officers who supported regime change.
Blunders by opposition hardliners in 2002 repeated themselves over the next two decades, resulting in one fiasco after another. In April 2002 the opposition lacked a fallback plan. When sectors of the military, specifically among the high command, resisted the coup, the entire undertaking imploded. Similarly, as the prolonged general strike of 2002-2003 faltered and its regime change objective seemed lost, opposition leaders failed either to take stock or change strategy, instead letting the protest peter out. It was a pattern repeated in the months-long street protests known as La Salida (The Exit) in 2014 and later, during even more pitched protests against Maduro’s call for a Constituent National Assembly in 2017, as well as in numerous attempts at regime change undertaken by Guaidó beginning in January 2019.
The events of 2002 also affected Chavista leaders. Chávez reacted to the defection of his right-hand man and possible father figure Miquilena, and then the support of oil company personnel for the 2002-2003 general strike, by privileging political loyalty over competence and calling for unity at all costs. Hence Chávez’s oft-repeated slogan: "unity, unity and more unity." This type of learning experience—which political scientists call “political over-learning"—downgraded the importance of technical expertise, prompting frequent cabinet shuffles under both Chávez’s and then Maduro’s governments with little or no consideration of the professional training of incoming ministers.
The April coup also convinced Chávez and those closest to him of the need to prioritize social goals over economic ones to ensure the future support and mass mobilization of the popular sectors, so instrumental in defeating the coup. The government’s failure to put the accent mark on economic diversification to sever economic dependence invited criticism from across the political spectrum.
Another consequence of the 2002 events is that they exposed unreliable military officers as a result of their actions during the coup and general strike. Subsequently, loyal officers were privileged with promotions to higher ranks, particularly those involving troop command. The loyalty of the armed forces in the face of multiple efforts by the opposition and Washington to encourage rebellion has been a key factor in the Maduro government’s survival. Indeed, the U.S. strategy has backfired, as Washington failed to take into account the nationalist sentiment of military officers.
The overthrow of a president who in the previous three years had won two presidential elections with 56 and 60 percent of the vote—and went on to win again with 63 percent in 2006—proved a fatal move for the opposition. Refusing to recognize their error led to continuous insistence that the Chávez government was authoritarian and illegitimate, resulting in electoral boycotts and non-recognition of electoral results, even ones certified by international observers. As a consequence, the opposition time and again forfeited its presence on elected bodies at the national, state, and municipal levels.
The events of 2002 also locked Chavista leaders in a polarizing mindset of viewing Venezuelan politics as a faceoff between Chavistas and insurgent adversaries with little room for constructive criticism. As I discuss in a forthcoming article in Science and Society, the resultant sectarianism toward critical allies on the left led to the exit in 2020 of various parties from the governing coalition, including the nation’s oldest one, the Communist Party.
Ultimately, what revisiting the April 2002 events shows is an urgent need for both chavismo and its opponents to take a step backward and critically analyze both the coup and its legacies, intended and otherwise, and examine their lessons against 20 years of hindsight.
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Steve Ellner is an Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives and a retired professor of the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela. His latest books include his edited Latin American Extractivism: Dependency, Resource Nationalism and Resistance in Broad Perspective (2021).
To cite this article: Steve Ellner (2022) The April 2002 Coup Through Time, NACLA Report on the Americas, 54:1, 16-19, DOI: 10.1080/10714839.2022.2045097
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2022.2045097
