From: Jon Beasley-Murray <jon.beasley-murray@man.ac.uk>
http://www.art.man.ac.uk/spanish/jbm.html
http://www.art.man.ac.uk/lacs/
------
"The Coup *Will* be Televised: Hugo Chavez's Downfall and the Venezuelan
multitude"
by Jon Beasley-Murray
So this is how one lives a modern coup d'tat: watching television.
Venezuela's coup (and coup it is, make no mistake) took place in the
media, fomented by the media, and with the media themselves the apparent
object of both sides' contention. But while South America's
longest-standing democracy was brought down in the confused glare of media
spectacle, any attempt to turn this spectacle into narrative or analysis
must also take into account, first, oil and, second, the general breakdown
of Latin American political legitimacy, of which this coup has been just
one (particularly bloody) symptom.
In Caracas, Venezuela's capital, everyone has been watching television
over the past few days: every restaurant, shop, and business has had a
television on, showing almost constant news coverage, and diners and
shoppers have been dividing their attention between what they are
consuming and what they are seeing of developments in the ongoing crisis
that came to a head last night with the overthrow of president Hugo
Chavez.
For several months now, support for (now former) president Chavez's once
overwhelmingly popular regime has been in steady decline, in part as a
result of a relentless assault by both the press and the television
networks. In response, Chavez took to decreeing so-called "chains," in
which he obliged all the networks to broadcast his own--often long and
rambling--addresses to the nation. The media only redoubled its
opposition, subverting the broadcasts by superposing text protesting
against this "abuse" of press freedom, or for instance by splitting the
screen between Chavez's speech on the one side and images of
anti-government demonstrations on the other. Moreover, through the media
came more and more calls for the president's resignation or, failing that,
for the intervention of the military.
The military has now answered these calls. The trigger for the most
recent convulsions has been (predictably enough) a battle for control of
Venezuela's oil. The country is the world's fourth largest producer, and
the third largest exporter of oil to the United States; the state oil
company, PDVSA (the world's largest oil company and Latin America's
largest company of any kind), is crucial to the economy as a whole, and
among Chavez's policies had been the attempt to rejuvenate OPEC and to run
PDVSA according to national and political priorities rather than simply
acceding to market demands. Two weeks ago, the president sacked several
members of the company's board of directors, replacing them with his own
allies. The management immediately cried foul, initiating a production
slowdown, and taking up a position at the vocal centre of anti-government
protest. At the weekend, Chavez replaced more board members, and on
Monday the union federation Confederacion de Trabajadores de Venezuela
(CTV) and the national chamber of commerce, FEDECAMERAS, allied with the
oil industry's management and joined to call a general strike for Tuesday
10th. While the opposition gathered to demonstrate around the
headquarters of PDVSA, in Caracas's opulent East Side, those loyal to the
government congregated around the presidential palace in the more working
class and dilapidated city centre. Tuesday night Chavez decreed another
chain, declaring to the nation that the strike had been a failure; in
response, the coalition of union, business, and oil management declared
that the strike had been 100% successful (of course, the truth was
somewhere in between) and announced, first, another day's general strike
and, then, the following day, that the strike would be indefinite.
The atmosphere in the city became palpably tenser. Opposition supporters,
mainly from the middle and upper classes, drove through the city, the
national flag and the black flag of opposition waving from the electric
windows of their four-wheel drive vehicles, while a broader spectrum of
opponents added to the cacophony by banging pots and pans from their
windows (exchanging shouted insults with government supporters) either
when Chavez appeared on television or, on those days when he was off the
screen, at pre-arranged times in the evening. Encouraged by this show of
support, anti-Chavez forces called for a march within the East Side for
Thursday morning. On the day of the march, the two hundred thousand
demonstrators then continued on beyond their stated destination, heading
for the city centre and the core of the president's power base.
Undoubtedly this was a provocation (and almost certainly planned in
advance), but at this point the two sides had become so polarised that
confrontation was inevitable.
The final moments of Chavez's regime began that afternoon as the president
tried to take over the television networks literally as well as
symbolically. At around 1:30pm he appeared on the airwaves, broadcasting
from his office in the palace, declaring calm and that his government
continued in control, well able to deal with the vociferous minority
demanding his resignation. As the broadcast started, I was finishing
lunch with friends at a restaurant; at all the tables there was a sudden
silence, all present recognising that Venezuela's crisis had entered its
end-game. Over the next hour or so, as the president continued talking
(sometimes chiding, sometimes patronising), one by one the terrestrial
channels were taken off the air, leaving only the government station
available to those who did not have cable. For some time, a surreal
dialogue ensued, as the private channels (now visible only to cable
subscribers) split their screens once more, showing mute and confused
images of rioting taking place outside the palace, commenting upon these
events with superimposed text, while Chavez spoke calmly from behind his
desk while from off-screen aides periodically passed him notes updating
him about and allowing him to respond to the images and text added by the
television stations to the official discourse.
Then the chain broke and, for all intents and purposes, the game was up.
The networks abandoned Chavez and dedicated themselves to the pictures
(often repeated, often out of synch) of what had been happening in the
city centre as the president's discourse had dominated the airwaves.
Confused and disorganised images of stone-throwing youths, the injured
carried away on stretchers, Chavez loyalists apparently returning fire,
the first dead bodies, troops and tanks mobilising, and various military
officials making statements all marked a coup in progress. I was driven
back to another friend's house as darkness fell, and we as well as the few
other road-users ran every red light in our way. As the night wore on,
the government television screened old nature documentaries, and then went
off the air completely as private channels regained their full
broadcasting capabilities. Eventually the entire military high command
declared themselves against the president. Grainy images of government
jets leaving the darkened city centre airfield with all lights off
strengthened rumours that the president might have fled, but then the
different forces seemed to have hunkered down until, at 1:30 in the
morning, the sound of pots and pans and fireworks greeted the news that
Hugo Chavez was now in custody. But nobody went out into the street. We
turned the television off.
It is only today that the coup's fall-out is becoming clear, just as the
choppy, confused television images are being re-written as linear,
coherent newspaper narrative. Adherents of the former government are (in
their entirety) being accused of perpetrating the massacre of at least
thirteen unarmed protesters yesterday--when it is far from clear (and
indeed, most unlikely) either that all the dead are protestors or that the
protestors were all unarmed. With this justification, however, (and with
the false notion that Chavez's regime was characterised by repression) all
traces of the past three years are rapidly being erased. It seems
probable that Chavez's democratising constitution will be revoked (it has
already been utterly breached), and that the country will return to the
constitution of 1961, and perhaps to the entrenched social inequalities of
the 1960s and 1970s, too. Much of the opposition, united only in its
rejection of Chavez, may find cause to regret the manner of the old
regime's passing, and the shape of the regime now in formation. At
present, the "transitional" government (which has promised new elections
"within a year") is the product of a pact between the military and
business: the new president, Pedro Carmona, is the former head of the
chamber of commerce, and in the televised announcement in which his new
position was announced, he was flanked by the collected heads of the
various armed services. Meanwhile, the police are conducting raids in the
city centre, (democratically elected) provincial governors are being
detained and stripped of power, and all those who sympathised with or
worked for the former government face an uncertain future; some have
already gone into hiding.
The previous regime had many faults: after an auspicious beginning (and
80% support in the polls), it failed to mobilise the mass of the people
towards its stated aim of transforming what, for all its oil resources, is
still a country with considerable poverty. The regime's prospects (and
the prospects for any social change) came to depend all too much on the
figure of the president himself, at best a maverick, at worst
authoritarian in style (and probably in fact quite incompetent), whose
personal charisma would inevitably wane. As Chavez's personalism allowed
for no competition, when Chavez's popularity declined, there were no
alternatives left to those who believed in the generally progressive
causes advanced (if intermittently) by his government. "Chavismo" itself
came to create the political vacuum that has allowed the far right pact of
arms and commerce now to take control.
At the same time, under Chavez, Venezuela constituted a dissident
exception to the contemporary prevalence of a neoliberalism that has only
accentuated the divide between rich and poor throughout Latin America. If
Chavez was not the way forward, he was rather a throwback, a (somewhat
hokey) mix both of the nineteenth-century liberators he revered--he went
so far as to rename the country the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela," in
honour of Simon Bolivar, the leader of the Latin American independence
movement--and of early twentieth-century populists such as Argentina's
Juan Peron. Briefly, at least, Chavez seemed to demonstrate that other
models were possible--and, in his attempts to make OPEC a force of third
world producers allied against a global system heavily weighted in favour
of first world consumers, that another form of globalisation might be
imagined.
Now, however, Venezuela has rejoined the Latin American "mainstream."
This mainstream is characterised by the almost complete breakdown of any
semblance of a social pact. One sign of this breakdown is the perceived
dramatic rise in delinquency or common crime--Caracas is a city in which
cars abound with a surplus of security devices, the many high-rise
residential buildings that characterise its urban growth all have guards,
and people are weighed down by the number of keys required to operate
lifts and open doors, gates, and pass through other protective cordons.
Another sign of this breakdown is the withdrawal of any popular
legitimation for political systems--the clamour in Peru, Argentina, and
now Venezuela (among other countries) has been against politicians of any
kind, all of whom are regarded as equally corrupt, equally inefficient,
and equally inadequate to the needs and demands of the multitude.
Venezuela's coup is simply another sign of the disappearance of the former
contract (however illusory that contract may have been) between people and
nation. Hugo Chavez tried to reconstruct that contract by televisual
means, but the medium itself (unsuited to such simple narratives) rebelled
against him. The current regime lacks any legitimacy, however much it may
have paraded invented rituals for the cameras, and will survive only
through repression or apathy. But the multitude is waiting for other
alternatives, and other possibilities.
Jon Beasley-Murray
University of Manchester
jon.beasley-murray@man.ac.uk
Caracas, 12th April 2002
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