Reply #76: I donno, 'cause I'm readin' Richard Gott's book on Chavez.

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Here are some things I've read in the book.

The coup in '92 was inspired by the Caracazao riots in 1989 when, in Caracas alone, almost 2000 people were murdered by the government for protesting the new president's Washington Consensus neoliberal policies which he enacted to the great surprise of the people who elected him on a very different platform.

Perez was a second-time president. In the '70s he presided over an oil boom during which he nationalized the oil companies. In the 80s, the economy was not doing well for a variety of reasons relating to corruption, an absence of real democracy, and bad planning which destroyed the agriculture-based economy while focusing on oil and the cities. Perez was elected in 89 under the presumption that he would be the same guy who nationalized the oil industry in the 70s. While president-elect, he toured OPEC nations giving people hope that he'd revive Venezuela's participation in OPEC.

Perez, however, was an ideological blank-slate and was manipulated by the University of Chicago market fundamentalists he hired to advise him. Ten days into his presidency he brought on the neoliberal economic plan that was exactly the opposite of what people thought they were getting when they elected him.

The first part of the plan was to gradually double the cost of oil and the public bus fares. However, rather than gradually increasing fares and oil costs, they doubled the first day the policies were enacted. There were no organized radical revolutionary groups in Venezuela at the time. The guerrillas had disappeared in the 60s. However, much to the surprise of the secret police, poor people rose up in a chaotic, unplanned, and disorganized revolt against the government. It was repressed with violence.

At the time, Hugo Chavez was in the army. He had been a professor at the war college where he organized a group of the best and brightest into a revolutionary group, however, they were little more than a progressive reading group at the time. They were the most popular and talented professors in the army so, although the military police knew what they were talking about in their classrooms, they couldn't punish them. If they had, the whole army would have revolted. Instead, the army sent Chavez out to the farthest outpost from Caracas where he decided that he would implement some of his social theories. He used his military outpost progressively. His soldiers helped build infrastructure for the local people. He organized a community theater and he instituted a project to record the oral histories of the locals. (Needless to say, they still love him in that region.)

Somehow, his paperwork was lost and he ended up back in Caracas before 1989. He was getting a masters degree in political science and was assigned to the presidential palace at the time of the Caracazao. There were three key members of his study group. On the day of the Caracazao, Chavez was sick with a serious viral infection. One of the others was sent out to fight the rioters and he was shot. Today, many believe that the secret police shot him and believe Chavez would have been shot too had he gone out to suppress the riot. The third leader of the study group was assigned to a towerblock where he arrived with his unit to relieve another unit that was shooting indiscriminately at the impoverished residents. He gave a speech to his unit. He asked everyone who was a member of the country club to raise their hands. He asked everyone who lived in the rich parts of town to raise their hands. Nobody did. He told them to look at the people in the tower block. He said that those are our people. He said that nobody was going to shoot anyone. (Think of George C. Scott in Patton, but the opposite message.)

Before the Caracazao, Chavez's group had said that something like that was going to eventually happen. When it did, they were ashamed that they could harness the energies of the people to accomplish something good. They weren't prepared.

Chronologically, that's the point I've reached in the book. However, I do know from things briefly mentioned in earlier parts of the book that it was the Caracazao that encouraged Chavez's group to carry out the coup in 1992. When the coup failed in Caracas, Chavez was arrested and TV stations aired a statement by him which the authorities had hoped would convince the people supporting the revolution out in the countryside (where they were having more success than in Caracas) to give up. Chavez said that the revolution has failed, "for now" -- por ahora. "Por Ahora" captured the imagination of the people. It instantly became a slogan that gave people hope. They believed that soon they would have a government that was democratic and that cared about the misery they were experiencing and that in good times, would lay down the groundwork that would help more than just the rich (which was what went wrong when the rich 70s led to the miserable 80s). Chavez himself realized that those two words -- Por Ahora -- had more power with the people than all the guns in Venezuela, and although he always thought of the armed forces as a great tool for progressive change (partly proved correct by his project out in the countryside when he was banished from Caracas), he realized that the real revolution would come not through an armed revolution, but through winning the hearts and minds of the people through the political system.

Incidentally, it appears that the coup the following year, in 1993, against Perez was carried out not by Chavez's group, but by Parez's own party, Accion Democratica because they too were stunned by how brutal Perez's policies were and how out of character they were with what Venezuelans wanted for their country.

I'll keep you updated as I read more of this book. (BTW, notice how hating Bush was not a motivation for anything that Chavez was doing during those years.)