Dette er en veldig interessant minutt-til-minutt-skildring av
Chavez' tilbakekomst i Venezuela. Den gir ikke minst
en forståelse av den enorme makt TV har -- til å fordreie
eller fortie.
Trond Andresen
******************************************************
"The Revolution Will Not be Televised: Hugo Chavez's Return and the
Venezuelan multitude"
Jon Beasley-Murray
University of Manchester
jon.beasley-murray@man.ac.uk
Caracas, 14th April 2002
http://www.art.man.ac.uk/spanish/jbm.html
http://www.art.man.ac.uk/lacs/
So this is how a modern coup d'etat is overthrown: almost invisibly,
at the margins of the media. Venezuela's return to democracy (and
democracy it is, make no mistake) took place despite a self-imposed
media blackout of astonishing proportions. A huge popular revolt
against an illegitimate regime took place while the country's middle
class was watching soap operas and game shows; television networks
took notice only in the very final moments, and, even then, only once
they were absolutely forced to do so. Thereafter television could do
no more than bear mute witness to a series of events almost without
precedent in Latin America--and perhaps elsewhere--as a repressive
regime, result of a pact between the military and business, was
brought down less than forty-eight hours after its initial triumph.
These events resist representation and have yet to be turned into
narrative or analysis (the day after, the newspapers have simply
failed to appear), but they inspire thoughts of new forms of Latin
American political legitimacy, of which this revolt may be just one
(particularly startling) harbinger.
By Friday night, Caracas, Venezuela's capital, seemed to be returning
to normal the day after the coup that had brought down the
increasingly unpopular regime of president Hugo Chavez. In the middle
classes' traditional nightspots, such as the nearby village of El
Hatillo, with its picturesque colonial architecture and shops selling
traditional handicrafts, the many restaurants were full and lively.
Those who had banged on pots and pans over the past few months and
marched the previous day to protest against the government seemed to
be breathing a sigh of relief that the whole process had eventually
been resolved so quickly and apparently so easily. "A Step in the
Right Direction" was the banner headline on the front page of one
major newspaper on the Saturday, and the new president, Pedro Carmona
(former head of the Venezuelan chamber of commerce), was beginning to
name the members of his "transitional" government, while the first new
policies were being announced. Control over the state oil company,
PDVSA (the world's largest oil company and Latin America's largest
company of any kind), had been central to the ongoing crisis that had
led to the coup, and its head of production announced, to much
applause, that "not one barrel of oil" would now be sent to Cuba. Not
all was celebration, it is true: the television showed scenes of
mourning for the thirteen who had died in the violent end to
Thursday's protest march, but the stations also eagerly covered live
the police raids (breathless reporters in tow) hunting down the Chavez
supporters who were allegedly responsible for these deaths.
Elsewhere, however, another story was afoot, the news circulating
partially, by word of mouth or mobile phone. Early Saturday
afternoon, I received three phone calls in quick succession: one from
somebody due to come round to the place I was staying, who called on
his mobile to say he was turning back as he had heard there were
barricades in the streets and an uprising in a military base; another
from a journalist who also cancelled an appointment, and who said that
a parachute regiment and a section of the air force had rebelled; a
third from a friend who warned there were fire-fights in the city
centre, and that a state of siege might soon be imposed. My friend
added that none of this would appear on the television. I turned it
on: indeed, not a sign. Other friends came by, full of similar
rumours, and with word that people were gathering outside the national
palace. Given the continued lack of news coverage, we decided to go
out and take a look for ourselves.
Approaching the city centre, we saw that indeed crowds were
converging. But as we drove around, we saw almost no sign of any
police or army on the streets. In the centre itself, and at the site
of Thursday's disturbances, some improvised barricades had been put
up, constructed with piles of rubbish or with burning tyres, marking
out the territory around the national palace itself. The
demonstration was not large, but it was growing. We then headed
towards the city's opulent East Side, and came across a procession of
people advancing along the road towards us, people clearly poorer and
more racially mixed than the East Side's usual inhabitants. They were
chanting slogans in favour of Chavez, and carrying portraits of the
deposed president. This march was clearly headed towards the city
centre, as were a stream of buses apparently commandeered by other
chavistas. Neighbourhood police were eyeing them carefully, but
letting them pass. If this number of demonstrators were arriving from
the eastern suburbs, then many more must be converging on the palace
from the working class West. We doubled back and tracked the march
from parallel streets, watching as the numbers grew, as passers-by
were called to join in this unexpected protest.
Meanwhile, we were listening to the radio. Some reports were arriving
of the crowds on the streets, but mainly we heard official
pronouncements. First the army chief spoke, and we heard the signs of
incipient splits among the forces behind the ruling junta: the army
would continue to support interim president Carmona only if he
reinstated Congress as well as the other democratically elected
regional governors favourable to the previous regime who had been
(unconstitutionally) deposed the previous day. But if Congress were
reinstated then, according to the constitution, and in the absence of
the previous president and vice-president, the head of Congress should
rightfully be next in line as head of state. Then Carmona himself was
interviewed, by CNN. He declared that the situation in the city was
absolutely calm and under his control, denied that he had been forced
to take refuge in any army base (clearly CNN knew something we did
not), downplayed any insubordination among other sectors of the armed
forces, and announced that his next step might be to fire some of the
military high command. Finally, the head of the national guard then
pronounced that respect and recognition needed to be shown to those
who had supported--and continued to support--the deposed president,
Chavez. The pact between military and commerce was beginning to
unravel. We decided to head home.
We turned on the television. Every Venezuelan commercial station was
continuing with normal programming (and the state-owned channel had
been off the air since Thursday's coup). However, as we had access to
cable, from BBC World and CNN "en espanol" we started to receive
reports of disturbances in various parts of Caracas that morning, and
some details about the parachute regiment's refusal to surrender arms
to the new regime. More mobile phone calls assured us that the crowd
outside the palace was still growing, and still peaceful. The BBC had
a reporter in the crowd, and spoke of thousands of people gathered.
Darkness fell, and still no word from any of the national networks.
At one point the CNN anchor pointedly asked its Caracas correspondent
whether or not local television was covering this tense situation: no,
he replied, despite these same channels' protests over alleged
censorship under the previous regime. Now the self-censorship of soap
operas and light entertainment stood in the way of any representation
of what was slowly emerging as a pro-Chavez multitude.
Indeed, the private networks had previously protested loudly and
bitterly about the former president's policy of decreeing so-called
"chains," in which he obliged all the networks to broadcast his
own--often long and rambling--addresses to the nation. Now the
networks had instituted their own chain, the apparent diversity of
variety shows masquerading a uniform silence about what was happening
on the streets.
Then a development: suddenly one channel broke its regular programming
to show scenes of the street outside its own headquarters. A group of
thirty to forty young and mobile demonstrators, on motorcycles and
scooters, were agitating outside the plate glass windows. Some rocks
were thrown, some windows smashed and graffiti sprayed, and suddenly a
new chain was formed as all the networks switched to the same image of
demonstrators apparently "attacking" the building. But the group
moved on and the soap operas resumed. Until a similar group turned up
at another channel's headquarters, then another, then another. No
more stones were thrown, but the demonstrations could now at least be
glimpsed, in fragments (the channels splitting their screens into
three, and, as one of the images turned out to be an image of the
television screen itself, further still, into an endless regress of
fuzzy images snatched through cracked windows and over balconies). A
local pro-Chavez mayor who had been in hiding from the repression was
briefly visible, apparently calling for people to remain calm. But no
camera teams ventured outside, and we still had little idea as to what
was happening at the presidential palace.
We were switching rapidly between channels: to CNN and the BBC at the
top of the hour, and then through the various commercial channels to
try to see at least a partial view of the multitude that must now be
on the streets. The international channels were showing footage shot
during the day, of police repression of protests in the poorer
neighbourhoods--the footage was out there, but had not been screened
or discussed on any private channels. At around 10:30pm, on one of
these searches through the cable stations, we saw a channel that had
been dark had now come back to life. A friend phoned almost
immediately: "Are you watching channel eight?" Yes, we were. State
television had, amazingly, come back onto the airwaves.
The people who had taken over the state television station were
clearly improvising, desperately. The colour balance and contrast of
these studio images was all wrong, the cameras held by amateur hands,
and only one microphone seemed to be working. Those behind the
presenters' desk were nervous, one fiddling compulsively with
something on the desk, another shaking while holding the microphone,
but there they were: a couple of journalists, a "liberation theology"
priest, and a minister and a congressman from the previous regime.
The minister spoke first, and very fast. She gave a version of the
violent end to Thursday's march that differed absolutely from the
narrative the media had put forward to justify the coup that had
followed: the majority of the dead had been supporters of Chavez (not
opposition protesters), and the snipers firing upon the crowds were
members of police forces not under the regime's control. Moreover,
the former president had not resigned; he was being held against his
will at a naval base on an island to the north. The current
president, Carmona, was illegitimate head of a de facto regime that
was product of a military coup. Thousands of people were on the
streets outside the presidential palace demanding Chavez's return. A
counter-narrative was emerging.
The congressman appealed directly to the owners and managers of other
television stations to portray what was happening in Caracas. No
change on those other channels, however, most of which had returned to
their regular programming. And then the state channel went off the
air.
Over the next few hours, channel eight would go on and off the air
several times. Each time the immediate fear was that it had been
forcibly closed down again; each time, it turned out that technical
problems were to blame as the channel was making do with a team
unaccustomed to the equipment. Several times the channel attempted to
show images from inside the presidential palace, but these were
eventually successfully screened first on CNN: the "guard of honour"
defending the palace was declaring its loyalty to Chavez. Later,
around 1am, amid the confusion, we saw pictures of the vice-president,
Diosdado Cabello, inside the palace, being sworn in as president.
Venezuela now had three presidents simultaneously: Hugo Chavez, Pedro
Carmona, and Cabello. The situation was extremely confused, the
majority of the channels were still transmitting none of this, and
rumours reported on the BBC suggested that two of the three--Carmona
as well as Chavez--were currently being detained by different sectors
of the armed forces. But the balance of power seemed to have shifted
to supporters of the previous regime. The only question remaining,
the questioned posed by the thousands at the gates of the presidential
palace and still besieging the private television stations (by now
some had been forced to interview spokespeople from the crowd, while
at least one had simply switched to the feed provided by channel
eight), was: would we see Chavez?
And so the apparently unthinkable happened. As all the armed forces
as well as the seat of power effectively passed back to the control of
those loyal to the deposed regime, shortly before 3am, Hugo Chavez,
president of Venezuela, returned to the presidential palace, mobbed as
soon as he left his helicopter by the thousands of supporters who were
now in a state of near delirium. All the television stations were now
running the images provided by channel eight--a new chain had formed,
as commercial television lapsed into a new form of stunned silence.
The president returned to the office from which he had been
broadcasting on Thursday afternoon, when he attempted to close down
the private stations and as the coup was unfolding. This time,
however, he was no longer alone behind his desk, but flanked by most
of his ministers and in a room crowded with people, buzzing with
excitement and emotion. We turned the television off.
Today the fall-out from this revolt is far from clear, just as the
partial, confused television images have yet to be re-written as
linear, coherent newspaper narrative. What is becoming clearer are
the lineaments of the coup that the revolt overthrew--though even here
rumours abound, such as the notion that it had been planned for three
months, or about the extent of possible US involvement. If it had
been planned for three months, then it was badly planned over that
time: above all, those who led the coup were always uncertain as to
whether or not they wished to present the coup for what it was. Had
they decided to go through unashamedly with a coup d'etat (in, for
instance, the Pinochet style), they would have been more
thorough-going and widespread in their repression (though as it was,
more people were killed during the illegitimate regime's brief
existence than were killed in Thursday's demonstration, let alone by
Chavez's security forces over the past three years); they would have
detained more chavistas, rather than leaving key (former) ministers to
pay a part in the revolt (though as it was, they used extreme force in
raiding several ministers' homes, and detained, for instance, up to
sixty people at the country's largest university); and they would have
decisively secured the state television and no doubt imposed a state
of siege. Yet had they decided to preserve at least a facade of
legitimacy, they would have made some effort to extract some kind of
(written or televised) resignation from Chavez, would have not
dissolved the Congress, would have not detained and stripped of power
(democratically elected) provincial governors, and hence would not
have so utterly breached the constitution.
As it was, the pact between military and business that engineered the
coup was weak, and could survive only through repression or apathy.
But the military was split, and (especially) the front-line forces
unwilling to go through with repression--even while the business
component refused to negotiate with the other anti-Chavez sectors of
society, nominating a cabinet almost exclusively composed of figures
from the extreme right. More importantly still, the coup plotters were
surprised to discover that they were received not with apathy, but
with an extraordinary and near-spontaneous multitudinous insurrection.
The fate of Chavez's government, and indeed also of Chavez himself,
remains uncertain. Support for what was once an overwhelmingly
popular regime had been in steady decline, in part as a result of a
relentless assault by both the press and the television networks, but
also because it had so far failed to achieve its stated aim of
transforming what, for all its oil resources, is still a country with
considerable poverty. Now (despite an initial concession of reversing
the interventions in PDVSA that had triggered the most recent
convulsion), Chavez still has a large proportion of the middle classes
firmly set against him, people who supported the coup; he must
negotiate with them without at the same time betraying--and indeed
while starting to fulfil--the desires of the multitude that overthrew
it. The government has a golden opportunity--it is now more clearly
legitimate than at any time since its auspicious beginnings (when it
had 80% support in the polls), whereas the commercial media that so
fomented his downfall are patently in disgrace. Yet the government
could so easily blow that opportunity, especially if it continues (as
before the coup) 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 is
already lost on the middle classes. As Chavez's personalism allows
for no competition, it leaves few alternatives to those who believe in
the generally progressive causes advanced (if intermittently) by his
government. "Chavismo" itself came to create a political vacuum that
briefly allowed the far right pact of arms and commerce to take
control.
In the event, however, the multitude came to fill that political
vacuum--silently at first, almost invisibly, at the margins of the
media. Though Chavez (and chavismo) claims to represent that
multitude, yesterday's insurrection should be the signal that the
regime is in the end dependent upon (constituted by) that multitude.
Chavez should not repeat the mistake--made both by the
nineteenth-century liberators he reveres and the early w
twentieth-century populists he resembles--that he can serve as a
substitute for that multitude, or that he can masquerade their agency
as his own. For in the tumultuous forty-eight hours in which the
president was detained, it became clear that "chavismo without Chavez"
has a power all of its own, apt to surprise any confused attempt at
representation.
Thanks to that multitude, Venezuela continues to constitute a
dissident exception to the contemporary prevalence of a neoliberalism
that has only accentuated the divide between rich and poor throughout
Latin America. It is not so much, perhaps, that Chavez demonstrates
that other models are possible--though his unpredictable foreign
policy (embracing figures as diverse as Saddam Hussein and Fidel
Castro), as well as his more coherent attempts to make OPEC a force of
third world producers allied against a global system heavily weighted
in favour of first world consumers, do help to suggest that another
form of globalisation might be imagined. Rather, it is that the
multitude suggests another possible, liberatory, side to the almost
complete breakdown of any semblance of a social pact that
characterises the Latin American "mainstream."
One sign of this breakdown is the perceived dramatic rise in
delinquency or common crime--Caracas is a city that abounds with a
surplus of security devices (people are weighed down by the number of
keys required to operate lifts and open doors, gates, and pass through
other protective cordons) that regulate the middle class's comings and
goings in line with this fear of latent social disorder. But
yesterday's events suggest another side to this apparent disorder,
both on the one hand that it is a criminological demonisation of a
sector of society that (it is presumed) has to be systematically
cleansed from social spaces; and on the other that it is a glimpse of
a desire to go beyond such enclosures. The criminalisation of
mobility is a reaction to a force that no longer "knows its place."
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. But the breakdown of any representation of yesterday's
insurrection might also point towards a politics that is itself beyond
representation, beyond a set of systematic substitutions of people for
politicians.
Venezuela's coup, and the revolt that overturned it, constitute 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, and it will continue to do so. The current regime has
legitimacy, but this legitimacy does not come from paraded invented
rituals for the cameras; it comes from the multitude's constituent
power. And the multitude is also waiting for other alternatives, and
other possibilities.
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