2002 Venezuelan coup attempt

Based on Wikipedia: 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt

Forty-Seven Hours

Hugo Chávez was president of Venezuela on the morning of April 11, 2002. By nightfall, he was a prisoner. Forty-seven hours later, he was president again.

In between, a businessman who had never held elected office declared himself interim president, dissolved the National Assembly, threw out the Supreme Court, and voided the constitution. Then the crowds came, the loyal soldiers moved, and the whole thing collapsed faster than it had begun.

The 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt stands as one of the strangest political reversals in modern Latin American history—a putsch that succeeded, then failed, then seemed never to have happened at all, except that everyone remembered it differently depending on which side they were on.

The Man Who Rewrote the Rules

To understand why Chávez's opponents tried to remove him by force, you need to understand what kind of leader he was. Chávez had won the presidency in 1998 as an outsider, a former military officer who had himself attempted a coup in 1992. That earlier effort failed, but his brief television appearance during his surrender made him famous. Six years later, Venezuelans elected him to fix a system many believed was rotten.

His first major act was rewriting the constitution. In December 1999, voters approved a new document that replaced Venezuela's old two-chamber legislature with a single National Assembly and expanded presidential powers. Chávez then won reelection in 2000 under these new rules.

What his critics saw next alarmed them.

The independent media, long accustomed to criticizing governments in Latin America, became the primary check on Chávez's power—because there weren't many others left. The Supreme Court, the legislature, the electoral authorities: Chávez's allies controlled them all.

Meanwhile, Chávez was building something that looked, to his opponents, disturbingly familiar. He created "Bolivarian Circles"—groups of loyal supporters organized at the neighborhood level. To his critics, these resembled the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution that Fidel Castro had established in Cuba. And the Cuba comparison kept growing sharper.

The Shadow of Havana

Nothing Chávez did frightened Venezuela's middle class, business community, and military establishment more than his embrace of Fidel Castro.

This was not abstract ideology. Venezuela's military had spent decades fighting Cuban-backed guerrilla movements. Officers had been trained to view Castro's expansionism as an existential threat. Now their commander-in-chief was welcoming Castro as a friend, making Venezuela Cuba's largest trading partner, and importing Cuban advisers.

The changes went deep. Venezuelan military and intelligence agencies were ordered to open their bases, files, and computer systems to their Cuban counterparts. Officers who had spent careers treating Cuba as the enemy were now expected to collaborate with Cuban military personnel. Many felt betrayed.

Even more controversial was Chávez's relationship with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC. This Marxist guerrilla group had been fighting the Colombian government for decades, funding itself through drug trafficking and kidnapping. Chávez ordered the Venezuelan military to help FARC establish camps on Venezuelan territory, provide ammunition, issue identification cards so guerrillas could move freely through the country, and even send members of the Bolivarian Circles to FARC camps for training.

For Venezuelan officers, this was asking them to assist the very forces they had been trained to destroy.

The Opposition Coalesces

The opposition to Chávez didn't spring up overnight. It grew in layers, like sediment.

First came the mothers. When they discovered that new textbooks in Venezuelan schools were actually Cuban books—filled with revolutionary propaganda and disguised with different covers—they began to protest. By the summer of 2001, their movement had grown to include labor unions, business groups, church organizations, and political parties from both the left and right.

What united them was fear. They believed Chávez was not just governing badly but systematically dismantling democracy, concentrating power in his own hands while claiming to represent "the people."

Chávez's communication style made reconciliation difficult. He was, by all accounts, a master of language—charismatic, funny, capable of speaking for hours without notes on his weekly television program, Aló Presidente. But he used this gift for polarization. He insulted opponents, calling them oligarchs, traitors, enemies of the poor. His rhetoric, critics said, "spawned hatred."

The business community was especially concerned. In late 2001, the National Assembly granted Chávez an "enabling law"—a legal mechanism that allowed him to pass legislation without legislative approval. The day before this special power expired, Chávez used it to decree forty-nine new laws.

The Forty-Nine Laws

These decrees marked a turning point.

Two laws in particular provoked fury. One tightened government control over Petróleos de Venezuela, usually called PDVSA—the state oil company that generated seventy percent of Venezuela's foreign revenue. The other was a land reform law that allowed the government to expropriate "idle" lands.

The government promised fair compensation at market rates. But the law was so vaguely worded that, in practice, the state could legally seize almost any property it wanted. While some land genuinely went to poor farmers, much of it became part of a patronage system rewarding Chávez's supporters.

For the opposition, this confirmed their worst fears. Chávez wasn't just a populist making noise. He was systematically building the infrastructure of authoritarianism.

On December 10, 2001, a national strike shut down ninety percent of the economy. It was the largest strike in Venezuelan history—bigger than the one that had helped end the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958.

The Whistle

In early April 2002, Chávez made his move against PDVSA.

On April 7, he fired the company's president, Brigadier-General Guaicaipuro Lameda Montero, and replaced him with a former Communist Party militant. Then, on his television program, Chávez fired five of the seven members of PDVSA's board of directors. He did it with theatrical contempt, mocking each worker by name and blowing a referee's whistle—as if he were ejecting players from a soccer match.

This performance unified the opposition as nothing else had. Carlos Ortega, head of the Confederation of Workers of Venezuela (the main trade union federation), and Pedro Carmona, head of Fedecámaras (the main business federation), jointly called for an indefinite general strike.

What the public didn't know was that the strike leaders had been meeting secretly with dissident military officers. They had decided the moment had come.

Years later, Chávez would admit that he had provoked this crisis deliberately. In a January 2004 speech before the National Assembly, he declared: "What happened with PDVSA was necessary. When I grabbed the whistle in an Aló Presidente and started to fire people, I was provoking the crisis."

Why would a president deliberately provoke a crisis that nearly ended his presidency? Perhaps he believed confrontation would expose his enemies and rally his supporters. Perhaps he underestimated how organized the opposition had become. Perhaps, as is often the case with leaders who have cheated death before, he believed he would always come out on top.

The March That Changed Direction

On April 9, the general strike began. Two days later, something between several hundred thousand and one million Venezuelans marched through Caracas in opposition to Chávez.

The march had a planned route and a planned endpoint. But when the crowd reached its destination, something shifted. The organizers—or perhaps just the momentum of the crowd—decided to continue toward the presidential palace, Miraflores.

This was where things turned deadly.

At Miraflores, Chávez's own supporters had gathered, including members of the Bolivarian Circles. When the opposition march arrived, the two groups confronted each other. Someone started shooting near the Llaguno Overpass.

By evening, nineteen people were dead.

Chávez ordered the implementation of Plan Ávila—a military contingency plan designed to protect the palace during a coup attempt by deploying emergency forces. But the military high command refused. They remembered what had happened the last time Plan Ávila was used.

The Ghost of 1989

In February 1989, the Venezuelan government had responded to urban riots—the Caracazo—with overwhelming military force. Soldiers fired into crowds. The official death toll was around three hundred, though human rights groups estimated the true number was far higher, perhaps in the thousands.

The Caracazo was a national trauma. It was also the event that had first propelled Hugo Chávez toward attempting his own coup in 1992. He had watched the military massacre civilians and concluded that the system was beyond reform.

Now, thirteen years later, the generals faced a choice. Implementing Plan Ávila would mean ordering soldiers to fire on Venezuelan civilians again. The military high command looked at the crowds, calculated the likely casualties, and said no.

They demanded Chávez resign instead.

The Forty-Seven Hours

What happened next remains disputed. Chávez's opponents say he resigned. Chávez and his supporters insist he never did—that he was illegally detained.

What is certain is that Chávez was arrested by military officers and taken from the palace. He asked to be allowed to leave for Cuba; this was denied. He was told he would face trial in a Venezuelan court.

With Chávez in custody, Pedro Carmona—the head of the business federation who had never held elected office—was declared interim president.

Then Carmona made his fatal mistake.

The Businessman Who Wanted Too Much

Pedro Carmona had a particular vision for Venezuela: undo everything Chávez had done. All of it. Immediately.

In his first hours as self-declared president, Carmona dissolved the National Assembly. He dismissed the Supreme Court. He declared the 1999 constitution void and pledged to return to the old system. He announced that new parliamentary elections would be held by December, followed by presidential elections in which he would not be a candidate.

This was too much, too fast, for almost everyone.

Even within the opposition, many were horrified. They had wanted Chávez out, not the entire constitutional order destroyed. The military officers who had backed the coup expected a transitional government that would restore order and hold elections—not a one-man dictatorship that made Chávez look restrained by comparison.

The poor neighborhoods that supported Chávez—and they were numerous—erupted in protest. Crowds surrounded the presidential palace. Chávez's supporters seized television stations. The military units that had remained loyal to Chávez, including the Presidential Guard, began to mobilize.

By the evening of April 13, less than forty-eight hours after Carmona had declared himself president, the coup was collapsing.

Carmona resigned that night. The Presidential Guard retook Miraflores without firing a shot. In the early hours of April 14, Hugo Chávez was flown back to Caracas by helicopter and restored to the presidency.

What It Meant

The forty-seven-hour coup became central to the mythology of both sides.

For Chávez, it was vindication. The people had risen up to restore their elected leader. The oligarchs and imperialists—he was certain the United States had supported the coup—had been defeated by the democratic will of the Venezuelan masses. He would spend the rest of his presidency referencing April 2002 as proof that his revolution had popular legitimacy.

For the opposition, the lesson was more complicated. They had tried force and failed. Some concluded that they needed to find democratic means to remove Chávez—which led to the recall referendum of 2004 (which Chávez won) and continued electoral efforts. Others concluded that the problem was execution, not strategy.

The United States government, which had quickly recognized the Carmona government, was embarrassed when it collapsed. A Central Intelligence Agency intelligence report from April 6—five days before the coup—had warned that plotters would try to exploit social unrest from upcoming opposition demonstrations to remove Chávez. The extent of American foreknowledge and involvement remains debated.

The Aftermath

Chávez returned to power but not to reconciliation. The coup attempt convinced him that his enemies would stop at nothing, that he could trust no one outside his inner circle, that the only way to protect his revolution was to consolidate control even further.

The opposition, despite its failure, did not disappear. In December 2002, it organized another general strike that lasted two months and devastated the economy, particularly the oil industry. Chávez responded by firing eighteen thousand PDVSA workers—essentially the entire professional class of the company.

Venezuela remained polarized, with each side convinced the other was an existential threat. Chávez won reelection in 2006 and 2012. He died of cancer in March 2013, having never lost an election but having also never truly defeated his opponents. They were still there, still organizing, still waiting.

His successor, Nicolás Maduro, inherited both Chávez's movement and his enemies. The economic collapse and political crisis that would engulf Venezuela in the following decade had roots that stretched back to April 2002—to the march that changed direction, the whistle that provoked a crisis, the businessman who wanted too much too fast, and the forty-seven hours when Venezuela had two presidents and, for a moment, no clear future at all.

The Deeper Pattern

The 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt fits a pattern that recurs throughout Latin American history: a charismatic leader who claims to speak for the poor against the elite, an opposition that mixes genuine democratic concern with class interest, a military that must choose sides, and foreign powers—particularly the United States—hovering in the background.

What made Venezuela different was oil. The country's vast petroleum reserves meant that whoever controlled PDVSA controlled enormous wealth. This raised the stakes for everyone. It also meant that Venezuela's internal conflicts were never purely internal. The world needed Venezuelan oil, and the world had opinions about who should manage it.

The coup also revealed something about the nature of political legitimacy in the twenty-first century. Carmona's attempt to rule by decree, dissolving every institution at once, collapsed not because of armed resistance but because no one—not the military, not the international community, not even most of the opposition—was willing to accept it. He had the palace but not the consent.

Chávez understood this. Whatever his flaws, he grasped that power in a media-saturated age requires performance, narrative, the appearance of popular support. He built his legitimacy on television, on rallies, on the constant cultivation of his base. When the crisis came, his supporters knew what to do: take to the streets, demand his return, make their loyalty visible.

The forty-seven hours of April 2002 were a stress test for Venezuelan democracy. Both sides failed it in different ways. Chávez's provocations, his concentration of power, his contempt for opposition had created the conditions for the coup. His opponents' willingness to bypass elections, their choice of an unelected businessman as leader, their immediate assault on every democratic institution—these ensured their failure.

What Venezuela needed was compromise, negotiation, the boring work of democratic politics. What it got was polarization so intense that each side saw the other as illegitimate. That polarization would only deepen in the years ahead, until it consumed the country entirely.