20 Years Since Coup Against Chávez in Venezuela—a 'Trial' that Served to Overthrow Governments in Other Countries

RT interviewed Venezuelan journalist and minister Ernesto Villegas, author of the book April, Inside The Coup.

20 years after the April 2002 coup against Venezuela’s then President Hugo Chávez, the same violent and desperate blueprint continues to be applied to overthrow governments both in Venezuela and around the world.

Similar attempts by former deputy Juan Guaidó, in 2019, were not very different. Guaidó, alongside the national and international elements that promoted the action against Chávez, wanted to depose President Nicolás Maduro on several occasions, using various plans that were neutralized by Venezuelan authorities.

The 2002 coup ended with Chávez returning to Miraflores hand in hand with the people, who spontaneously took to the streets to demand the return of their president. In addition, loyal soldiers carried out a rescue operation for the president, who had been taken to the island of Orchila, home to a naval base in the Venezuelan Caribbean.

Two decades later, it is appropriate to analyze the keys to that coup d’état, both for Venezuela and for other countries: the role of the media as political actors in the destabilization of governments, and the actions of other internal and external factors to achieve it.

To address this issue, RT interviewed the Venezuelan journalist and writer Ernesto Villegas, Minister for Culture and author of the book April, Inside The Coup, who reflected on the strategy employed 20 years ago, which seemingly continues today.

Villegas has held the posts of Minister for Communication and Information on two occasions, Minister of State for the Revolutionary Transformation of Greater Caracas, and Head of Government of the Capital District, among other responsibilities.

He has also worked in print, audiovisual, and radio media, and currently hosts the interview show Aquí Con Ernesto Villegas every Sunday.

RT: Was the coup in April 2002 more than a coup against a South American president?

EV: Yes, it was much more. What happened was a coup, but that was not all. In light of current world events, the experiment that began here 20 years ago is more evident. Just as Venezuela entered the 20th century late, due to the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, Hugo Chávez said that he entered the 21st century early with the first rebellion against neoliberalism on February 27, 1989, the military uprising on February 4, 1992, and the approval of the 1999 Constitution. All of this advanced the 20th century, and what took other peoples longer, we did earlier.

However, mechanisms that would later become fashionable were also started early, happening today with the supposedly legitimate exclusion of alternative voices and media showcases. The “zero Chavismo on screen” of 20 years ago has many family resemblances with the “zero Russian version of events on screen”—the cartelized action of the media abandoning its own ethical norms.

For the April 2002 coup, the private media trashed their own ethics manuals. Who can say that it is not the same thing that the newspaper El País has been doing?

In Venezuela we began to denounce the fascist behavior of sectors of the opposition early on, and we were dismissed as exaggerated, locked in the themes of the Cold War. And it turns out that the same fascism that we denounced started to show its teeth in other places.

The media’s abandonment of its mechanisms for validating the credibility of its content is also a common trait that spread to other places after the April coup.

The media machinery recognized itself, by its true controllers, as “machines” for the creation of moods in society, rather than information, seeking to create states of selective indignation regarding complex events that do not admit the slightest healthy, professional, journalistic doubt. Journalism becomes a hindrance because the ultimate goal is not the truth, but the creation of states of indignation that “legitimize” the overthrow of a government.

So that combination of cartelized media used as a weapon to create indignation, and situations involving human rights, which are mixed with “lawfare,” create a “monster” that we have to see walk for a longer time. We are seeing it today. In the end, the citizen is a prisoner of various mechanisms for manipulating emotions rather than reasons, and it is enough to see in social networks an unbridled consumption of disjointed, fragmented information—which does not admit analysis or contrast—of political agendas made on the basis of trending topics.

It happened to us on February 23, 2019. The narrative was established that Maduro had burned the humanitarian aid [that supposedly came to Venezuela from Colombia] and two weeks later the New York Times ended up admitting that the fire came from the Colombian side. It is seen that the media machinery gives the political agenda the chance to take root, to fulfill its mission, and what you could have reported at the time, you keep in reserve; you take a lot of time to investigate it.

This is what happened with the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Indignation, fear, dread, are tools for manipulating the masses. The exacerbated fear of Islamists, Blacks, Latinos, the Bolivarian circles [or colectivos] in Venezuela—it is the demonization of a sector of society, its silencing, the destruction of the potential for dialogue.

I have no doubt that a mechanism used in the overthrow of Dilma in Brazil was put into practice here. I interviewed her a few hours before she was overthrown. In the book I wrote [Golpe bajo/baixo] the signs of the Brazilian press prior to the overthrow were demonstrated. For example, a president inaugurating the Olympic Games—positive news—but the Olympic fire was shown in one shot and her in another. It was like a fire that burned her. Nothing escapes from the mechanism, everything is turned around.

RT: We were used to seeing coups announced by a military junta. In Venezuela this did not occur, and there was talk of a “power vacuum.”

EV: That is part of the experiment that was installed, and that is twinned with the so-called color revolutions. I have no doubt that the US has people sitting in a bureau thinking about how to retake or prolong its geopolitical control over areas of the world.

In May 2001, a group of military personnel from various nations, gathered in Madrid for the Second Joint Staff Course of the Higher School of the Armed Forces (ESFAS) of Spain, carried out a simulation exercise called Plan Balboa, based on a scenario of war in a group of countries which did not have names, but whose geographic coordinates corresponded to Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela.

Today, when it is increasingly clear that there is a geopolitical problem in the world, where even the territorial integrity of countries as we know them is in question, it is very striking that this is happening. And when I see that in Argentina they discovered a Puma Plan in which they are playing war games [against Venezuela], I have no doubt that it is the same Balboa Plan, which must correspond to a NATO work matrix in the US, regarding what can happen in this country. I am convinced, without having any proof, that this plan certainly was not limited to Argentina alone, it would surely have included the military of Lima Group countries.

The strategic scenario that imperialism has set out here is to control Venezuela by way of its dismemberment, hence the campaign against Venezuela, that is why Venezuela is a “bad word,” hence the promotion of separatist movements at the time. The world powers are interested in spaces with strategic potential or mineral resources, they are not interested in keeping us united but rather in controlling certain things and aiming at disintegration. That is why national cohesion is important. It is not a far-right nationalism, as occurs in other parts of the world, but it is defensive, and perfectly compatible with a grand national vision, with a commitment to the Patria Grande and the Bolivarian project [meaning Latin America].

RT: Was this coup an “instruction manual,” or the basis for other coups?

EV: It was a rehearsal and far from abandoning it, its promoters persist in trying to correct its mistakes and perfect it. Otherwise, the strike and oil sabotage, which in December 2002 and January 2003 were practically carried out by the same actors, cannot be explained.

RT: When Venezuela has warned about the similarities with other destabilizing mechanisms in the region, critics have said that they are “ghosts.” Is it so?

EV: Popular wisdom explains it: “He who is stung by a snake jumps when he sees a vine.” I remember the coup against Rafael Correa, in 2010. When I saw that some policemen were taking over the airport, I commented to an Ecuadorian colleague: “But what is this? This is a coup d’état,” to which he replies that it is a police protest. And I tell him: “Protest of police taking over an airport? That’s a coup, brother.”

We are alert. I do not want to go against any people in particular because it seems like chauvinism, but all that intense experience has put us on alert regarding the steps that unscrupulous factors are capable of taking. That is why it is not strange for us that they mounted The Green Square in Libya, and it would not seem strange to us that several things that we see about the war in Ukraine are staged, without ruling out the possibility that the war itself offers frightening images, because war is frightening, it is horrendous. However, it is not strange to imagine that there are powers with the capacity to create selective indignation and that they create fake news to manufacture emotional states.

RT: Did April 11 reverse global geopolitics, or is that an overambitious statement?

EV: We tend to value superlatives, but certainly the failure of the experiment in Venezuela had geopolitical consequences. The Venezuelan intellectual Luis Britto García says in his book Investigation Of Some Media Above All Suspicion: “the dead of Llaguno Bridge were the first victims of the invasion of Iraq.” That is, all the events of that part of the story are interconnected. If they had gotten away with it in Venezuela, developments would probably have been different in other parts of the world.

RT: There is talk that there was a “media coup” in Venezuela. Is that the case?

EV: I answer echoing a proposal: humanity needs to look at the experience that took place within the framework of UNESCO when it installed a commission of the highest level to study the communication phenomenon that resulted in the famous McBride Report (1980). We have proposed that UNESCO provide continuity to that work carried out 40 years ago, because the phenomenon that motivated it then is even more serious today. If at that time the monopoly over the media of the 20th century was worrisome, how can UNESCO and humanity not worry about the dictatorship of algorithms, of SEO positioning, of digital existence? The political, economic, and cultural picture is even more worrisome than it was in the 1980s.

Today nations should, beyond the war and their differences, find those who expose these mechanisms, who can study what happened in Venezuela in 2002, but also what is happening in Europe and Asia. Let us see the power of GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft). Today we talk about invisible powers, as the media tries to be, that determine the moods of millions of people to the second.

RT: In Venezuela, Chavismo usually says “every 11 has its 13” to talk about the popular backlash that demanded that Chávez finish his term after the coup. Is this another milestone?

EV: For our generation it certainly is. That had never happened before.

RT: Among the actors behind the 2002 coup, what was the weight of international factors?

EV: In the book Beyond The Genesis of April 11,’ by the right winger Robert Carmona-Borjas, in the prologue written by the then US Undersecretary for Hemispheric Affairs, Otto Reich, he recounts how he, through the then ambassador of the US in Venezuela, Charles Shapiro, contacted the self-proclaimed president Pedro Carmona to give him some instructions. The fact that Reich admits this reveals the conception that exists in the upper echelons of US power regarding what could happen in that government.

In another episode of that same meeting between Shapiro and Carmona, the Spanish ambassador participates, and it is documented that Carmona communicates with José María Aznar through the telephone of the Venezuelan opposition politician Eduardo Fernández.

The participation of US military elements in Venezuela is also documented—that they entered Fort Tiuna, that there were some military attaches at the Embassy during those hours, the presence of US ships, and an airplane, in Venezuelan territory.

There are also a number of declassified documents that I cite in the book where we can say that the US government at least knew.

RT: And those international factors went ahead with their purposes?

EV: Sure, because later they continued with the oil strike and sabotage. If we talk about international factors, there is also the government of Cuba , which was at the center of the events around the coup. The siege of the Cuban embassy, Chávez’s conversation with Fidel in those hours, the role played by Chávez’s daughter, María Gabriela, when she gave some statements through Radio Habana Cuba, when she said that her father had not resigned. That international flank is also interesting because it triggers April 13.

RT: And in the attempted coup of April 30, 2019, against Nicolás Maduro, by deputy Juan Guaidó, were the same international factors present?

EV: Years went by and we saw that on April 30 the Spanish Embassy participated, [where Leopoldo López stayed after being illegally released from house arrest], and all the endorsement of the US, which was more blatant. In April 2002 the methods were more cautious, that’s why I say it was a rehearsal.

RT: What are the lessons and consequences of April 11, 2002?

EV: If one of the lessons has to be chosen, it is that peoples always fight. They can be disillusioned, paralyzed, distracted, but in the end they always fight.

We lost our innocence regarding the media, even someone like me who studied journalism to work in it, and that brings mourning for a reporter. It is painful to come to that conclusion.

As for the consequences, the entire judicial process. The attorney general at that time, Luisa Ortega Díaz, was hearing cases of the coup afterwards. It would be worthwhile to make a fiscal and judicial evaluation of the status of all the open cases in order to close them. For example, the victims maintain that the prosecutors who were in charge of the proceedings, assigned by Ortega Díaz, ended up joining the coup and allegedly manipulated some of those proceedings. I am not aware of it, I cannot guarantee it.

We must be careful that class justice is imposed through the facts because amnesties have been decreed, Chávez himself did it, and the signatories of the Carmona decree [the document where all the established powers in the country were dissolved, and Carmona was proclaimed president without elections] and a good part of the cast that accompanied him—Leopoldo López himself, Henrique Capriles Radonski—were beneficiaries of amnesty. Of course, those who do not apply justice do not receive it. Somehow, a sector of the so-called masterminds benefited from a measure of grace. At this moment there are some imprisoned police officers, who have already served a number of years, and I am not advocating that a criminal go out on the street, I just think we have to check to see if we are not repeating the pattern of classist justice.

Featured image: Venezuelan Minister for Culture, Ernesto Villegas, author of the book April, Inside The Coup. Photo: Mariana Rodriguez.

(Actualidad RT) by Natalie Gomez

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/JRE/SL/EF