Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (born July 28, 1954) has been the President of Venezuela since 1999. A former paratroop colonel, Chávez is a left-wing populist who has won the allegiance of Venezuela's impoverished majority. At the same time, however, his policies have met with increasing hostility from many among the middle and upper classes, culminating in a failed coup d'état in 2002 and a failed recall referendum in 2004.
Personal background
Chávez is the son of Hugo de los Reyes Chávez (a former regional director of education and a former member of the rightist Social Christian Party, who is the current governor of Barinas State), and Elena Frías de Chávez. Chávez has four children of his own: Rosa Virginia, María Gabriela, Hugo Rafael, and Rosinés. He was married twice and is currently separated from his second wife, Marisabel Rodríguez de Chávez.
He graduated from the Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences on July 5, 1975, after being awarded master's degrees in military sciences and engineering.
He continued his education by following a master's degree in political sciences at the Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, which he did not finish according to his university tutor and the head of the Political Science school.
An ex-paratrooper, Chávez came to prominence after heading a failed military coup on February 4, 1992. After spending two years in prison, he was pardoned by former President Rafael Caldera, and emerged as a politician, organizing a new political party called the Movement for the Fifth Republic.
Chávez won the presidential election on December 6, 1998, and again on July 30, 2000, by the largest percent of voters (56.2%) in four decades, running on an anti-corruption and anti-poverty platform, and condemning the two major parties that had dominated Venezuelan politics since 1958 (see: 1998 election results and 2000 election results).
All of the five major TV networks, and most major newspapers, oppose him, but a small minority of the media is said to still support him. Chávez claims the opposition media is controlled by the interests which oppose him, whereas the media accuse him of having intimidated journalists with his pronouncements and of sending gangs to threaten journalists with physical violence.
Chávez passed a set of 49 laws, approved by the National Assembly, in order to apply a left-leaning economic policy. The Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce (Fedecámaras) vehemently opposed these laws and decided to call for a general business strike on December 10, 2001.
Chávez was responsible for the replacement of the upper management of the Venezuelan national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), allegedly on grounds of mismanagement and corruption, but supporters of the PDVSA board call the action "politically motivated".
On January 15, 2004, Chávez presented to the Venezuelan National Assembly his version of the State of the Union. Since the opposition did not attend, he spoke only to members of his own party and sympathetic diplomatic representatives. (Hugo Chávez's speech can be found here: [1])
In one section of the speech, perhaps in the belief that what he was saying would not be published, he confessed to having generated the PDVSA crisis in order to destroy the existing organization.
Chávez has attracted opposition from the government of the United States through his oil export policies and his public friendship with Cuba. Chávez is a close friend of Fidel Castro; Venezuela is providing Cuba with 53,000 barrels (8,000 m³) of oil a day in exchange of the service of hundreds of physicians, teachers, and other professionals; this has allowed the revitalization of the Cuban economy and the improvement of health and literacy conditions in Venezuela.
He was also the first democratically-elected president to visit Iraqi President Saddam Hussein since the 1991 Gulf War, on August 11, 2000, and strongly opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Early presidency 1998 - 2000
Shortly after taking office on February 2, 1999, Chávez embarked on a series of sweeping changes to the Venezuelan government. He organized a series of referenda; the first authorized re-writing the Venezuelan constitution. The second selected delegates to a new Constitutional Assembly, distinct from his country's legislature, to do the re-writing. Chávez's initial widespread popularity allowed supporters to win 120 of the 131 assembly seats.
In August 1999, the assembly set up a "judicial emergency committee" with the power to remove judges without consulting any other branch of government. In the same month, the assembly declared a "legislative emergency." A seven-member committee was created to perform congressional functions, including law-making. The Constitutional Assembly prohibited the Congress from holding meetings of any sort. In a national radio address quoted in the New York Times, Chávez warned Venezuelans not to obey opposition officials, stating that "we can intervene in any police force in any municipality, because we are not going to permit any tumult or uproar. Order has arrived in Venezuela."
The new constitution, increasing the presidential term of office by one year, increasing the power of the president in general, and placing new government restrictions on the media, and was approved in a general referendum held in December 1999. Elections for the new, unicameral legislature were held in July 2000. During the same election, Chávez stood for re-election. Chávez supporters won roughly 60% of the seats in the new unicameral assembly. In November 2000, he backed a bill through the legislature allowing him to rule by decree for one year.
In December 2000 there was another set of elections. During elections for local officials, Chávez added a referendum on dissolving Venezuela's labor unions. Though it is unclear what authority was invoked, he attempted to consolidate all Venezuelan labor unions into a single, state-controlled Bolivarian Labor Force.
2002: Coup attempt against Chávez
Chávez was briefly deposed and arrested in a media-military coup d'état (in the words of the organizers of the coup) on April 12, 2002, which installed a businessman, Fedecámaras president Pedro Carmona, as interim president. This event generated a widespread uprising in support of Chávez that was repressed by the Metropolitan Police. The Presidential Guard retook the palace and the coup collapsed. Since Chávez was being held in a secret location, the presidency was assumed by vice president Diosdado Cabello until Chávez returned to the presidential palace.
On the day of the coup, it was initially announced by General-in-Chief Lucas Rincón Romero that Chávez had resigned; since Rincón remains close to Chávez and is now, in fact, the Secretary of Domestic Affairs, many Venezuelans argue that the resignation was real and that there was no coup. On the other hand, most of the rest of government representatives were trying to inform the country that the president had been kidnapped, which was resisted by the media.
The coup was publicly condemned by Latin American nations and international organizations. The United States, which had acknowledged the de facto government, did not condemn the coup until Chávez had been restored to power. U.S. government statements
An earlier protest by the military was made by two men, Air Force Colonel Pedro Vicente Soto and National Guard Captain Pedro Flores Rivero, who held a small rally to accuse the government of being non-democratic. The new Venezuelan Constitution (approved during the first Chávez administration) allows military personnel to carry out such political protests. They were sent home in uniform and placed under investigation by a joint civilian and military board.
On April 9, 2002, Venezuela's largest union federation, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), led by Carlos Ortega Carvajal (who was not present at Pedro Carmona's "inauguration" but greeted him the next morning at the Palace), called for a two-day general strike.
This may have been in response to Chávez's having forced the unions to hold new elections of the leadership amid fraud allegations. Chávez did not recognize the re-election of the union leadership. Chávez raised the national minimum wage by 20% in an attempt to call off the strike. Fedecámaras joined the strike and called on all of its affiliated businesses to close for 48 hours.
An estimated million people marched to the headquarters of Venezuela's oil company, PDVSA, in defense of its fired management. The organizers decided to re-route the march to Miraflores, the presidential palace, so as to confront pro-government demonstrators.
After violence erupted between demonstrators, the metropolitan police (controlled by the opposition) and national guard (controlled by Chávez), 17 people were killed and more than a hundred wounded, most of them Chávez supporters. Doctors who treated the wounded reported that almost all of them appeared to have been shot from above in a sniper-like fashion.
A television crew from Ireland (Radio Telifís Éireann) which happened to be recording a documentary about Chávez at the time (and which after the short coup was based in the presidential palace with members of both rival governments and their supporters) recorded images of the events that contradicted explanations given by anti-Chávez campaigners, by the opposition-controlled elements of the media, by the US State Department, and by President George W. Bush's official spokesman. The television crew released a documentary film called "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" detailing the events of the coup. However, the film omits important events, a summary of which can be read here: [2].
While briefly in power, Carmona announced several decrees. He:
- dissolved the National Assembly, promising elections by December
- pledged presidential elections within one year
- declared void the 1999 Constitution introduced under Chávez and approved by popular vote in a national referendum
- promised a return to the pre-1999 bicameral parliamentary system
- effective immediately, change the name of the nation to Republica de Venezuela
- repealed the 49 laws that gave the government greater control of the economy
- reinstated retired General Guaicaipuro Lameda as president of Petróleos de Venezuela.
- fired the Supreme Court judges, National Electoral Court, and the ombudsman.
All these measures cost Carmona much of his support within the middle and upper classes of Venezuela; some Venezuelans who were concerned that Chávez had authoritarian tendencies found these moves even more threatening.
Chávez himself has repeatedly stated that he believes that the Bush Administration and the CIA orchestrated the coup, and in an interview with Al Jazeera he accused the Israeli Mossad of complicity as well. In September 2003 he refused to travel to the United States to address the United Nations because he received intelligence information that the U.S. government had prepared an assassination attempt against him.
2002: Strike/lockout
For two months from December 2, 2002, the Chávez government was faced with a business strike, led by the oil industry management. As a consequence, Venezuela stopped exporting a daily average of 2,800,000 barrels (450,000 m³) of oil and derivatives and began to require the import of gasoline for internal use. Chávez combated the oil strike by progressively firing about 18,000 PDVSA employees. A court ruling has deemed the dismissal of these workers illegal and has ordered the immediate return of the entire group to their former posts. Nevertheless, Chávez, PDVSA's CEO Alí Rodríguez, and Minister of Mines Rafael Rodríguez have repeatedly expressed that such ruling will not be enforced.
2004: Reaction to Haiti situation
In response to the ouster of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004, allegedly with U.S. assistance, Chávez called U.S. President George W. Bush a pendejo ("prick") and threatened to cut off all oil exports to the United States if Washington took any more action against his country. [3]
2004: Movement to remove Chávez in a referendum
See also: Venezuelan recall referendum, 2004
In August 2003, opposition leaders began the process to recall Chávez by means of a constitutional referendum on his leadership (resource installed by Chávez himself for the first time in Venezuelan history). In September 2003, The Economist reported that the government used a "rapid reaction" squad to raid the offices of the National Electoral Council (CNE), the government body overseeing the petition drive. The magazine also reported that the government punished Venezuelan citizens for signing the petition.
The petition drive concluded and the opposition presented 3.2 million signatures. Eventually, the CNE rejected the petition by a vote of 3-0 with 2 members abstaining. They ruled that signatures collected before the mid-point of Chávez's term were not valid under Venezuelan law.
A second petition drive began, the drive currently in the news. Again, the opposition presented over 3 million signatures. After close examination, the CNE questioned the validity of individual signatures, saying that disputed signatures must be re-confirmed individually. The petitioners appealed to the Electoral Chamber of the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice, the Venezuelan Supreme Court. The court reinstated over 800,000 of the disputed signatures, bringing the total to 2.7 million — well above the 2.4 million needed to authorize the referendum. However, about a week later, the Constitutional chamber of the TSJ overturned the Electoral chamber's ruling alleging that the latter did not have jurisdiction for that ruling.
Again, the names of petition signers were posted publicly. The president of the Venezuelan Workers Confederation was quoted by the Associated Press as claiming that the government had begun firing petition signers from government ministries, the state oil company, the state water company, the Caracas Metro, and public hospitals and municipal governments controlled by Chávez's party. The Associated Press also quoted Venezuela's Health minister, Roger Capella, as justifying petition related layoffs by saying "all those who have signed to activate the recall referendum against President Chávez should be fired from the Health Ministry". He retracted these remarks several days later by saying that they were his own personal opinions and not a matter of public policy.
With Chávez's emergence, a social and economic revamping of Venezuela has begun to make its mark. Traditionally, lighter skinned groups have held economic and political sway over this oil-rich nation. Renaming Venezuela the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela", after "El Libertador" Simón Bolívar, Chávez has launched sweeping land and education reforms as a way of offsetting the balance between the country's elites and masses, the estimated 80% living in squalor. Soon after taking office, for instance, the president turned part of his presidential palace into a high school for "street kids", a move his critics claim was politically motivated. He has also implemented widespread immunization and food distribution programs for children, mostly nonexistent under previous Venezuelan presidencies. These programs have been criticized as inefficient and incomplete by opposition figures but are widely heralded and appreciated by Chávez backers. In addition, Chávez has required owners of vast, unused cropland to cede parcels to peasants for sustenance agriculture. Other wealthy businesses, who had not been required to pay taxes previously, are now required to do so. In the process, the country has become deeply polarized, as Chávez, a self-described "Robin Hood" has tried to level the playing field by re-engineering the status quo, namely, taking from the wealthy and giving to the poor.
Chávez's brand of government, what some have termed socialism, has caused dissent with some of the ones most threatened, the wealthy. Despite Hugo Chávez's solid support from the vast majority of Venezuelans — the poor and the dark-skinned (mestizos, of mixed racial origin), his opponents, many of European ancestry, are said to have financial as well as moral backing from the United States.
The recall vote was held on August 15, 2004. The day before the polling, former U.S. President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter, one of the top international election observers in Venezuela, expressed confidence that the vote would proceed in a calm and orderly fashion. "I might project results that will be much more satisfactory than they were in 2000 in Florida," said Carter. [4]
Record numbers of voters turned out, and polling hours had to be extended by at least eight hours. According to preliminary results issued by the National Electoral Council's (CNE) Francisco Carrasquero, almost 60 percent of voters supported Chávez's leadership by voting "No" in the recall referendum. [5] [6]
Carter and Secretary General of the Organization of American States César Gaviria, another top international observer, endorsed the results of Venezuela's recall referendum. Directing his remarks at opposition figures who have made claims of "widespread fraud" in the voting, Carter called on all Venezuelans to accept the results. "Now it's the responsibility of all Venezuelans to accept the results and work together for the future," said Carter. [7]
2004: Yet another coup in preparation?
In May 2004, Venezuelan state TV reported the capture of 126 Colombians accused of being paramilitaries, near properties belonging to Cuban exile Roberto Alonso, one of the leaders of the Venezuelan opposition group Bloque Democrático, and media magnate Gustavo Cisneros, a Cuban-Venezuelan Chávez opponent and one of the alleged architects of the 2002 coup. According to one of the detainees, they would have been offered 500,000 Colombian pesos to work on the farm, before being informed that they would have to prepare for an attack on a National Guard base, with the goal of stealing weapons to potentially arm a 3,000-strong militia. [8]
According to other detainees and the Colombian families of many of them, most of those arrested were apparently unemployed poor peasants, some from the Cúcuta area, many of whom had at some point in their lives done military service in Colombia and thus qualified as reservists. They'd have been promised to work in Venezuela but were later betrayed [9]. (whether as part of plan from the opposition or a setup by the official state, as some opposition figures have claimed. The situation is still unclear and under investigation in Venezuela). The families of 68 detainees announced to the Colombian press in June 2004 their intention of travelling to Venezuela to argue for their relatives freedom, claiming that they fell to a setup. [10]. Another relative told the Venezuelan opposition press that the prisoners were being mistreated while in captivity [11]. The official press reported a government denial of this claim.
The family of a Venezuelan National Guard Captain arrested and accused of being implicated in the supposed paramilitary plot likewise denounced in the opposition press the possibility of a political persecution against those that would not share the Venezuelan revolutionary process. He was said not to be recognized when he was presented to the Colombian detainees.[12].
Some women and underaged children were also included among those captured suspected paramilitaries. The latter were speedily repatriated to Colombia by Venezuelan authorities [13]. The alleged paramilitaries were caught wearing Venezuelan Army uniforms and apparently had a single gun in their possession in the immediate area. At least two (other sources speak of between three and five) suspected paramilitary commanders were also reported to be in custody.
Opposition critics of the official Venezuelan government's version also mention that an attack by such a small number of fighters against a strongly defended Venezuelan military position and/or eventually the palace of President Chávez would amount to certain failure and virtual suicide on the part of those carrying out the alleged operation. Supporters of the government's version point to the claim that the captured men would only be part of a vanguard of allegedly some 3,000 potential operatives that would have been later introduced into the country.
In June 2004, a Cuban Miami TV channel broadcasted a program featuring the Florida-based Comandos F4. Rodolfo Frometa, the Comandos F4 leader, said that his group was ready to carry out violent attacks against the Cuban government. Former Venezuelan army captain Eduardo García described the help he received from Comandos F4 to organize similar violent actions against the Chávez government. According to the TV program maker Randy Alonso, the US government would have recently earmarked $36 million to support such paramilitary groups. [14] U.S. officials and opposition figures in Venezuela have dismissed this claim.
Footnotes
1 The film crew's report, broadcast on RTÉ's True Lives series under the title Chávez: Inside the Coup, won the Best Information and Current Affairs Production and the Global Television Grand Prize at the Banff Television Festival in Alberta, Canada, on 11 June 2003, beating 82 international productions in 14 categories, chosen from an entry of 900 from 39 countries. The special has been broadcast world-wide, praised by politicians and the media, and led to a fundamental revision in public attitudes as to what really happened in before and during the coup. No US television channel has chosen to broadcast it, but it was aired in select theatres in the fall of 2003. (Where it is shown under the name "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised").
Although many feel the film is manipulative and deceptive (see the petition organized by Chávez's opposition [15]), another comprehensive documentary called "Puente Llaguno: Claves de una masacre" (Llaguno Bridge: clues of a massacre) supports with many factual data most of the claims contained in "the Revolution will not be televised". [16]