Venezuelan coup attempts of 1992
Encyclopedia
The Venezuelan coup attempts of 1992 were an abortive coup d'état
Coup d'état
A coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...

 led by Hugo Chávez
Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is the 56th and current President of Venezuela, having held that position since 1999. He was formerly the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when he became the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela...

 in February 1992, and a second attempted coup in November 1992, directed by others. The coups were directed against the Carlos Andrés Pérez
Carlos Andrés Pérez
Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez , also known as CAP and often referred to as El Gocho , was a Venezuelan politician, President of Venezuela from 1974 to 1979 and again from 1989 to 1993. His first presidency was known as the Saudi Venezuela due to its economic and social prosperity thanks to...

 government. Despite its failure, the February coup attempt left a controversy that lasts to the present day, and rocketed Chávez to the national spotlight.

Background

Through Chavez's early life, Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...

 had enjoyed a period of economic and democratic stability that was remarkable in South America at the time, although torture, ill-treatment, extrajudicial killings, political disappearances and corruption were widespread; the stability was based on the massive foreign exchange earnings from oil sales. However, when Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , commonly known in British English as Saudi Arabia and in Arabic as as-Sa‘ūdiyyah , is the largest state in Western Asia by land area, constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and the second-largest in the Arab World...

 and other oil producers significantly raised their production output, a glut ensued. Oil prices collapsed to historic lows, and Venezuelan oil earnings, and economic and social stability in general, were suddenly imperiled as per capita income
Per capita income
Per capita income or income per person is a measure of mean income within an economic aggregate, such as a country or city. It is calculated by taking a measure of all sources of income in the aggregate and dividing it by the total population...

 fell to a fraction of its previous levels.

Responding to this, in 1989 the Carlos Andrés Pérez
Carlos Andrés Pérez
Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez , also known as CAP and often referred to as El Gocho , was a Venezuelan politician, President of Venezuela from 1974 to 1979 and again from 1989 to 1993. His first presidency was known as the Saudi Venezuela due to its economic and social prosperity thanks to...

 administration enacted widely unpopular IMF
International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...

-inspired structural adjustment
Structural adjustment
Structural adjustments are the policies implemented by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in developing countries. These policy changes are conditions for getting new loans from the International Monetary Fund or World Bank, or for obtaining lower interest rates on existing loans...

 programs. The programs' backers sought to restore fiscal stability to Venezuela's ailing economy by way of neoliberal
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is a market-driven approach to economic and social policy based on neoclassical theories of economics that emphasizes the efficiency of private enterprise, liberalized trade and relatively open markets, and therefore seeks to maximize the role of the private sector in determining the...

 policies, such as curtailing social spending and releasing longstanding price controls
Incomes policy
Incomes policies in economics are economy-wide wage and price controls, most commonly instituted as a response to inflation, and usually below market level.Incomes policies have often been resorted to during wartime...

 on many goods. These policies resulted in many hardships for Venezuela's poor majority, and their resultant discontent erupted in the violent 27 February 1989 Caracazo
Caracazo
The Caracazo or sacudón is the name given to the wave of protests, riots and looting and ensuing massacre that occurred on 27 February 1989 in the Venezuelan capital Caracas and surrounding towns. The riots — the worst in Venezuelan history — resulted in a death toll of anywhere between...

 riots—the most violent and destructive in Venezuelan history.

Ideological origins

Many conspirators were members in the 1970s of the Partido de la Revolución Venezolana created by former guerrilla fighter Douglas Bravo
Douglas Bravo
Douglas Bravo is a former guerrilla fighter and Venezuelan politician.Bravo became a member of the Communist Party of Venezuela in 1946, only to be expelled from it in 1964....

 who conceived the strategy of infiltrating the Venezuelan Armed Forces to reach power. Thus, plotting started more than ten years before Carlos Andrés Pérez
Carlos Andrés Pérez
Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez , also known as CAP and often referred to as El Gocho , was a Venezuelan politician, President of Venezuela from 1974 to 1979 and again from 1989 to 1993. His first presidency was known as the Saudi Venezuela due to its economic and social prosperity thanks to...

 was elected for the second time in 1988, and rested on a rejection of what was seen as a corrupt, clientelist
Clientelism
Clientelism is a term used to describe a political system at the heart of which is an assyemtric relationship between groups of political actors described as patrons and clients...

 establishment controlled (from 1958 to 1993) by two political parties, Democratic Action
Democratic Action
Democratic Action is a centrist Venezuelan political party established in 1941. The party and its antecedents played an important role in the early years of Venezuelan democracy, and led the government during Venezuela's first democratic period...

 and COPEI
COPEI
Copei – Social Christian Party of Venezuela is a third way political party in Venezuela. The name stands for Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente...

, in a system known as puntofijismo.

MBR-200

The Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario 200
Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200
The Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 was the political and social movement that current Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez founded in 1982. It eventually planned and executed the February 4, 1992 attempted coup...

(MBR-200) was founded by lieutenant colonel Hugo Chávez Frías, who was later joined by Francisco Arias Cárdenas
Francisco Arias Cárdenas
Francisco Javier Arias Cárdenas is a Venezuelan politician and career military officer. He participated in Hugo Chávez' unsuccessful February 1992 coup attempt, being pardoned in 1994 by Rafael Caldera, along with the other conspirators...

. They used the Venezuelan revolutionary hero Simón Bolívar
Simón Bolívar
Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Yeiter, commonly known as Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military and political leader...

 as their group's symbol. Their main complaint was the corruption of Carlos Andrés Pérez as well as Venezuela's ongoing economic difficulties and social turmoil. In the view of these two men, the entire political system had to be changed in order for social change to occur.

Coup unfolds

After an extended period of popular dissatisfaction and economic decline under the neoliberal
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is a market-driven approach to economic and social policy based on neoclassical theories of economics that emphasizes the efficiency of private enterprise, liberalized trade and relatively open markets, and therefore seeks to maximize the role of the private sector in determining the...

 administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez, Chávez made extensive preparations for a military-civilian coup d'état
Coup d'état
A coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...

. Initially planned for December, Chávez delayed the MBR-200 coup until the early twilight hours of 4 February 1992. On that date, five army units under Chávez's command barreled into urban Caracas with the mission of assaulting and overwhelming key military and communications installations throughout the city, including the Miraflores presidential palace, the defense ministry, La Carlota military airport, and the Military Museum. Chávez's ultimate goal was to intercept and take custody of Pérez before he returned to Miraflores from an overseas trip.

Chávez held the loyalty of some 10% of Venezuela's military forces; still, numerous betrayals, defections, errors, and other unforeseen circumstances soon left Chávez and a small group of other rebels completely cut off in the Historical Museum, without any means of conveying orders to their network of spies and collaborators spread throughout Venezuela. Worse, Chávez's allies were unable to broadcast their prerecorded tapes on the national airwaves in which Chávez planned to issue a general call for a mass civilian uprising against Pérez. As the coup unfolded, Pérez eluded capture, and fourteen soldiers were killed, and 50 soldiers and some 80 civilians injured, in the ensuing violence. Nevertheless, rebel forces in other parts of Venezuela made swift advances and were ultimately able to take control of such large cities as Valencia, Maracaibo
Maracaibo
Maracaibo is a city and municipality located in northwestern Venezuela off the western coast of the Lake Maracaibo. It is the second-largest city in the country after the national capital Caracas and the capital of Zulia state...

, and Maracay
Maracay
Maracay is a city in north-central Venezuela, near the Caribbean coast, and is the capital and most important city of the state of Aragua. Most of it falls under the jurisdiction of the Girardot Municipality. The population as per the 2001 census was 750,000...

 with the help of spontaneous civilian aid. Chávez's forces, however, had failed to take Caracas as he remained inside the Military Museum.
Chávez soon gave himself up to the government. He was then allowed to appear on national television to call for all remaining rebel detachments in Venezuela to cease hostilities. When he did so, Chávez famously quipped on national television that he had only failed "por ahora"—"for now".
"Comrades: unfortunately, for the moment, the objectives that we had set for ourselves have not been achieved in the capital. That's to say that those of us here in Caracas have not been able to seize power. Where you are, you have performed well, but now is the time for a rethink; new possibilities will arise again, and the country will be able to move definitively towards a better future."


Chávez was immediately catapulted into the national spotlight, with many poor Venezuelans seeing him as a figure who had stood up against government corruption and kleptocracy
Kleptocracy
Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest...

. Afterwards, Chávez was sent to Yare prison; meanwhile, Pérez, the coup's intended target, was impeached a year later.

November 1992 coup attempt

On 27 November 1992 a second coup attempt was launched, led by officers from the air force and navy, including pilot Luis Reyes Reyes. The group had contacts with Chávez in jail, and had learned some lessons from the February coup's errors, including launching at 4.30am instead of midnight, and obtaining communications equipment to ensure they would not be stranded without. They took over the state-run channel eight (Venezolana de Televisión
Venezolana de Televisión
Corporación Venezolana de Televisión or VTV is a state-owned television network based in Caracas, Venezuela, which can be seen throughout the country on channel eight...

), in a bloody battle; and broadcasted a video made in prison by the still incarcerated Hugo Chávez calling for a popular uprise. But the rebels failed to take over other media outlets e.g. Televen, allowing Perez once again to address the nation and declare that the rebellion had failed. The group swiftly seized control of major air bases, and largely gained control of the skies. However by 9 am it was clear that there was little else going for the rebels, and after a minor pilot defection gave government forces the chance to shoot down a loyalist plane, the coup plotters began to bomb some targets. They fired at the Caracas headquarters of the DISIP political police, and dropped bombs on Miraflores. Within hours, an attempt to free Chávez and his allies from jail had failed, and government forces had retaken most military bases. About 3pm the remaining rebels took off for Peru in two C-130s, although they made it only as far as Iquitos
Iquitos
Iquitos is the largest city in the Peruvian rainforest, with a population of 370,962. It is the capital of Loreto Region and Maynas Province.Located on the Amazon River, it is only above sea level, although it is more than from the mouth of the Amazon at Belém on the Atlantic Ocean...

. In total, the November death toll reached 172, much higher than it had been in February.

Government response

In the process of resisting the coup attempts, government agents were reported to have killed forty people, both civilians and surrendered rebels, either as extrajudicial executions, or through the use of disproportionate force. Arbitrary detentions numbered in the hundreds, and continued for some time after the events, and involved student leaders and other civic leaders not connected with the coup attempts. In addition, freedom of expression was suspended for two months in the February case, and three weeks in the November case, and involved censorship of the media. A series of demonstrations in March/April calling for the resignation of President Carlos Andrés Pérez
Carlos Andrés Pérez
Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez , also known as CAP and often referred to as El Gocho , was a Venezuelan politician, President of Venezuela from 1974 to 1979 and again from 1989 to 1993. His first presidency was known as the Saudi Venezuela due to its economic and social prosperity thanks to...

 and the restoration of constitutional guarantees were met with state violence including indiscriminate police firing into crowds, with a total of 13 deaths. A number of members of the press covering the protests were severely injured by police.

Although participants in the February coup attempt were tried under the regular military justice system, in response to the November coup attempt the government created ad hoc courts based on the 1938 legal code of Eleazar López Contreras
Eleazar López Contreras
José Eleazar López Contreras was President of Venezuela . López was a general and one of Juan Vicente Gómez's collaborators.Eleazar López was the only child of Col. Manuel Maria López and Catalina Contreras...

, drawn up twenty years before the transition to democracy. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled the courts unconstitutional, but not on the due process
Due process
Due process is the legal code that the state must venerate all of the legal rights that are owed to a person under the principle. Due process balances the power of the state law of the land and thus protects individual persons from it...

 grounds for which they were criticised, but on the grounds that the President had neglected to suspend the relevant constitutional rights (right to a defence, right to be tried by one's natural judge).

Aftermath

With Pérez's public image discredited by the unsuccessful neoliberal reforms and shattered by the coup attempts, other politicians began to challenge his authority, endangering the decades-old two-party puntofijismo system. The turmoil and failed coups were utilized by former president Rafael Caldera
Rafael Caldera
Rafael Antonio Caldera Rodríguez was president of Venezuela from 1969 to 1974 and again from 1994 to 1999.Caldera taught sociology and law at various universities before entering politics. He was a founding member of COPEI, Venezuela's Christian Democratic party...

 to comment on the gradual deterioration of Venezuelan democracy and the explosive conflation of poverty and corruption in the nation. Subsequent actions by intellectuals associated with Caldera resulted in Pérez's ousting from the presidency on 20 May 1993, on charges of corruption. Swift political maneuvering allowed Caldera to win the 1993 presidential election
Venezuelan presidential election, 1993
General elections were held in Venezuela on 5 December 1993. The presidential elections were won by Rafael Caldera of National Convergence, who received 30.5% of the vote. Democratic Action remained the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate, which were elected on separate ballots for...

 with a heterogeneous and non-traditional group of small independent political parties, named "National Convergence
National Convergence
The National Convergence is a conservative/Christian democratic political party in Venezuela. It was founded in 1993 by former President of Venezuela Rafael Caldera, successfully gaining a second term in the Venezuelan presidential election, 1993. From 1995 to 2004 Eduardo Lapi held the...

". As part of his campaign Caldera promised to pardon the coup plotters, and later did so, laying the basis for Hugo Chávez
Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is the 56th and current President of Venezuela, having held that position since 1999. He was formerly the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when he became the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela...

 to participate in (and win) the 1998 presidential election
Venezuelan presidential election, 1998
In the Venezuelan presidential election of 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected to his first term as President of Venezuela with the largest percentage of the popular vote in four decades...

.
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