Submitted by amanitamuskaria on Thu, 23/08/2007 - 14:37.
Published: Thursday, August 23, 2007
Bylined to: VHeadline.com Reporters
Hugo Chavez Frias could have been killed if he hadn’t been home sick...
- Bart Jones' book will be in book stores September 4 ... you can ask your local book store to order it and/or you can get it now on the Internet. It's written for the general public, and is a good read ... while people love him or hate him, Chavez' life story is straight out of Hollywood.
In an exclusive preview of former Associated Press (AP) bureau chief Bart Jones' upcoming book "Hugo!: The Hugo Chavez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution," the now New York-based author recalls former Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez (CAP) envisioned himself ... like Hugo Chavez years later as the modern-day incarnation of Simon Bolivar, uniting Latin America and becoming the official spokesman for the Third World.
Imbued with a messianic sense of mission and an outsized ego, he (CAP) expected to make history in his second term by fulfilling Bolivar’s dream ... he prepared to assume the presidency again, and wanted to mark the day with a spectacle heralding his emergence as a full-fledged world leader and savior to Latin America. Critics dubbed it a “coronation.”
But, conspicuously absent from the festivities were any inhabitants of the mountainside shanty towns surrounding the capital, where like the rest of the country 80% of the population was mired in poverty.
Two weeks later, the country and the world found out...
Perez had been privately sending a message to the International Monetary Fund that Venezuela would comply with its stringent loan conditions as part of what was known as “The Washington Consensus” which called for reducing the government’s role in the economy, slashing state spending and subsidies, lifting price controls, reducing government bureaucracy, privatizing state-owned enterprises, opening economies to foreign investment, floating currency exchange rates in the free market, reducing trade tariffs and deregulating the economy ... an unfettered free market capitalism with little of the social safety net of European-style socialism.
On February 16, Perez announced the new paquete ... but he didn’t call it a “shock package.” Instead, he declared it part of El Gran Virage -- The Great Turnaround -- that would return Venezuela to prosperity. It was an orthodox IMF austerity package, along with specific measures aimed at Venezuela’s economic peculiarities: gasoline prices, among the cheapest in the world at 13 cents a gallon, were to double, followed by two more increases in subsequent years. The idea was to bring gas prices to world market levels. Badly out-of-touch with the masses, the political naivete was to cost the country dearly.
The package went into effect the weekend of February 25-26, as workers quietly changed the price signs at gas pumps around the country.
On Monday morning, February 27, the dam broke...
Many woke up at 4 a.m., left their hillside shacks by 5 a.m. and then stood on long lines for an hour or two to get a place on vehicles that were so packed passengers often hung out the doors or elbowed each other to get on. An unannounced doubling overnight was too much to take. Many people’s wallets and pocketbooks were empty because the twice-monthly payday was coming up that Tuesday.
The first signs of trouble broke out in Guarenas ... as dawn broke and commuters lined up at bus stops, they were hit with the 100% fare hikes. Shocked and outraged, they argued with drivers, tossed stones at the vehicles and took to the streets to protest. By 7:30 a.m. two cars were ablaze. About the same time, disturbances were erupting in downtown Caracas. One of the main traffic arteries of the capital was cut off. Nervous downtown store owners started lowering their iron gratings normally used at night to protect shop windows. Similar protests broke out across the country during the early rush hour, spreading to 19 cities in all: Valencia, Maracay, Maracaibo, Ciudad Guyana. In the port city of La Guaira, protests erupted before dawn and left the principal port paralyzed. In Catia La Mar, angry crowds set huge tires on fire and cut off traffic. By about 2 p.m., protestors descended on the capital’s main highway and blockaded it to stop traffic. The police fired shots into the air and restored some order.
By late afternoon in Caracas, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to walk miles to get home from their jobs as cars and buses burned in the streets ... Caracas descended into a state of almost complete anarchy, mass looting broke out.
Police largely stood by idly or assisted residents looting ... badly outnumbered, they figured it was better to let the crowds loot. Some police became looters, too. The orgy of pillaging virtually shut down the entire city and turned into an escape valve for the long pent-up anger of a massive underclass who for years watched impotently as a tiny class of elites grew ever wealthier and blue-collar workers struggled to put food on their tables. It was “the day the poor came down from the hills.”
The looting raged on the night of February 27 but it soon turned into a night of terror. The Interior Minister appealed for calm and declared that violence would not be tolerated. Perez declared martial law, suspending a raft of constitutional guarantees and imposing a curfew blaming the unrest on “subversive sectors” seeking to “take advantage of difficult times.” Perez ordered federal troops onto the streets to “restore order” and 9,000 more were being flown in to La Carlota ... it was a fatal decision.
Unknown to him, among the officers who would be sent out to command some of the troops were several leaders of Chavez’ Bolivarian conspiracy. Rumors started in many slums that other barrios were going to invade and steal their looted goods. Pistols, rifles, shotguns, even machine-guns and bazookas appeared on the streets ... others produced knives, clubs, sticks and machetes, Molotov cocktails.
Repression continued on a mass scale for the next three days, turning into the worst massacre in Venezuela in the 20th century. Soldiers and police operated without restraint since constitutional guarantees were suspended ... many people were killed in their own homes ... in what became known as the “Caracazo.”
Hugo Chavez had barely avoided being in the streets with the soldiers ... he was home sick, recovering from chicken pox ... he had been brought to Caracas to work in a national security office across the street from Miraflores. On Sunday, February 26, he went to see the palace’s doctor because he had a fever, was diagnosed with chicken pox and ordered to go home immediately because of the contagious disease. Chavez' illness effectively took him out of action at a time when he easily could have been ordered into the streets to help direct the repression.
Francisco Arias Cardenas was enraged and frustrated that he was caught unprepared by the spontaneous revolt ... the moment that he and Chavez led had lost a chance to stand side by side with the people in a civilian-military rebellion but resolved to keep the men under his command from firing indiscriminately on people who were “unarmed, hungry, long-punished and condemned to suffer the consequences of a package of economic measures that were unjust and perverse from every point of view.”
Arias was appalled at what he found in Catia, where some apartments were riddled with scores of bullet holes: "I also heard stories of the excesses committed by the political police, the Disip. Immediately I gathered my troops together and said "we all come from the shantytowns and the poor parishes ... the people who live here are like us, they are the people, our brothers ... that means that no one must fire without authorization. No one must shoot unless we are attacked."
The official death toll stood at 277, although Venezuelan human rights organizations eventually identified 399 victims by name. Others believed the real figure was far higher. The government denied the existence of a secret mass grave, and resisted efforts to investigate what happened during the Caracazo or punish those responsible.
In November 1990, human rights workers started a hunt and found black plastic garbage bags containing corpses ... many mutilated, with arms, legs and hands chopped off so they could fit in the bags. Others, young men, had their hands tied behind their backs and gunshot wounds to their heads, apparently executed by authorities. The painstaking search went on for a year, with new bodies regularly poking up in the dirt as the workers dug. Before the government shut down the investigation a year later, the teams found 68 bodies believed to be victims of the Caracazo.
For years after the Caracazo, Perez tried to downplay the horrors of the massacre insisting that less than 300 people were killed. The Caracazo left Venezuela traumatized, and its image as Latin America’s model democracy in tatters. Economic injustices and racial divisions lurking beneath the surface of the society for decades had suddenly surfaced in a violent and unavoidable way.
The Caracazo was a turning point in the history of Chavez’s Bolivarian conspiracy. It served to stiffen the rebels’ resolve to overturn a system they considered corrupt and evil, and provided a jumpstart to a movement that had fallen into one of its lulls. “For us it was a real trauma to fire at unarmed people who were robbing because they were hungry,” Arias Cardenas commented nearly seven years later.
When Chavez returned to his job at Miraflores Palace a few weeks after the Caracazo, he was stopped by palace guards who had an inkling he was involved in something and wanted to join in. “Look here, major,” one told Chavez. “Is it true about the Bolivarian Movement? We’d like to hear more about it, because we’re not prepared to go on killing people. It was a telling encounter, Chavez recalled: these were elite soldiers in charge of protecting the President and trusted by the government.
The uprising hit Chavez’ movement close to home for another reason: One of its founders was killed. In an unexplained incident, one of the four men who on December 17, 1982, took the famous oath creating Chavez’s Bolivarian organization, was shot dead while he was on duty in a slum in Caracas.
Chavez could have met the same fate if he hadn’t been home sick.
As they stood over their dead comrade’s body, seething with anger over his killing and the massacre of the Caracazo, they silently repeated the Bolivarian oath and swore to take action against the country’s sick government and society.
Venezuela’s facade of democracy had collapsed, and more upheaval was on the way.
