It was a hot, humid, stormy night in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, on October 26 1988 when two columns totalling 26 Dragon armoured vehicles of the army’s Ayala Battalion under the command of Maj José Solder Zambrano moved unimpeded from their base at Fort Tiuna to take up positions at the presidential residence at La Viñeta and at the ministry of the interior.
Though the deployment soon fell apart in confusion, it is possible that this incident, soon known as the tanktazo (tank attack), was in fact a dress rehearsal by military conspirators for a coup d’etat against Venezuela’s elected government. If it was a putch-in-draft, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the so-called tanquette (little tank) incident before Gen Augusto Pinochet’s notorious CIA-backed coup in Chile in 1973 against Salvador Allende’s elected government. In that instance, on June 29 1973, the Second Armoured Regiment, under the command of Col Roberto Souper, staged a military uprising, using several tanks, a tank carrier, and two trucks with 40 men each, and supported by the neo-fascist Homeland and Freedom militia, which tried to take the presidential La Moneda Palace.
Though it, like its successor in Caracas 15 years later, was a failure, the tanquette allowed coup plotters to assess government preparedness, and the willingness of the military to accept seditious leadership. The actual coup took place just more than two months later, installing Gen Augusto Pinochet Ugarte at the head of a military junta and effectively destroying democracy in Chile until 1990.
The military conspiracists in Venezuela responsible for the tanktazocentred on a subversive outfit, the Revolutionary Bolívarian Movement-200 (MBR-200), had been trained in the experiences of Latin America’s military caste, and so probably had an appreciation of the lesson of the Chilean tanquette.
The MBR had been founded as a tiny leftist study circle in 1982 by the Military Academy officer in charge of culture, Hugo Chávez Frias, adding the “200” to its name the next year in honour of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Simon Bolívar, the northern Latin American hero of liberation from the Spanish colonial yoke.
Though a wiser Bolívar in his dying days famously cautioned in Sisyphean terms that “all who have served the revolution have ploughed the sea”, that was precisely what MBR-200 set out to do — supposedly complete Bolívar’s revolution.
Chávez’s very first deployment as a young officer had been with a counter-insurgency unit suppressing Stalinist guerrillas in the mountains, yet he developed a romantic sympathy for the declining leftist rebel movements, by then long in the tooth.
Military rule is not Venezuela’s default alternative, but historically, its pole star. Unlike just about the entire rest of Latin America — which at least experienced the first two decades of the 20th century experimenting with parliamentary democracy before falling into dictatorship in the 1930s and 1940s as fascism dominated the zeitgeist — Venezuela had its very first experience of democracy only after World War 2, and that lasted barely three years.
Even that brief spring, in which the social democratic Democratic Action (AD, or adeca) party came to power in October 1945, had been enabled by the adherence of disaffected junior military officers who wanted greater constitutional reforms and who had created the Patriotic Military Union (UMP); putschism is thus even ingrained in the country’s democratic traditions.
The prize was, ultimately, control over Venezuela’s oil reserves, which promised to become the great driver of modernisation for the country’s economy and its society.
The petrostate’s skewed development
The first barrel of Venezuela’s thick, heavy crude oil, which seeped from the ground, had been sent to Spain by conquistadors in 1539 — though it would take the West’s hunger for tarmac for dictator Gen Juan Vicente Gómez to issue the first permits for modern exploitation of the resource from 1908, the year in which the first oil was struck in the Middle East.
Strangely, it was a consultant for South Africa’s Gold Fields, founded by Cecil John Rhodes in 1887, who suggested that geologist Ralph Arnold conduct the first survey of Venezuela’s oilfields, and this was soon done by Arnold. Initial finds were modest, but a gusher struck on Lake Maracaibo in 1922 provoked an oil rush and by 1928 Venezuela was the world’s largest oil exporter.
This generated a dramatic expansion of intrastructural assets, such as railways and ports, as well as an intensive public construction boom, yet Venezuelan society and politics did not keep pace with industrial and civic modernisation.
I recently translated from Spanish into English the text of Rodolfo Montes de Oca’s magisterial history of the Left and labour in Venezuela, and he details how, under the autocratic rule of Gen Gómez in 1908-35, workers had to organise clandestine unions under the guise of religious societies.
Though a Labour Confederation of Venezuela (CTV) was founded under Spanish anarcho-syndicalist influence in 1920, and in the western Venezuelan oilfields as well as the refineries of the offshore islands of the Netherlands Antilles the revolutionary syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) established a presence thanks to migrant Nicaraguan and Guatemalan roughnecks, both unions suffered severe repression.
The nascent student movement of the mid-1920s, really a cultural awakening, was crushed with harsh prison terms for participants (who would run a “Red Tent” ideological school behind bars), and the first comprehensive labour law, passed by the dictatorship in 1928, was reactionary and coercive.
The 1931 constitution explicitly stated that communists and anarchists were “traitors”, while a new public order act outlawed their activities as “nihilist or terrorist methods”. But in the same year, former student leader and Red Tent graduate Rómulo Betancourt established the Left Revolutionary Grouping (ARDI) in exile in Colombia (later to become the adeca party), demanding the overthrow of military-autocratic caudillismo (a system of political-social domination), which only intensified its repressive apparatus after Gómez died in 1935.
By the outbreak of World War 2, barely 11% of the population was educated and most lived in squalor: outside the civic administration, the military leadership, and the barons of the oil industry (which declined to the third-largest oil exporter by 1940) and its associated economy, Venezuela remained a backwater. This was the maldeveloped petrostate that Betancourt and his accedistas (AD members) inherited for their brief democratic experiment in 1945-48.
The rise of bolívarismo
From the 1960s to the 1980s, a range of former communist insurgent groups targeted not military dictatorship, but restored democracy under which Betancourt’s adeca party ruled in a durable pact with the conservative “social Christian” Copei party, that saw the rotation, along British lines, of the administration of a fresh oil boom (oil was nationalised in 1976 under the state firm PDVSA) between social democrat and conservative governments, with no gap allowed for socialists.
That long experience of military dictatorship, clandestine worker and political opposition organising, and of guerrilla warfare against democracy has irrevocably imprinted itself on Venezuelan politics and society.
In 1989, the adeca-copey elite adopted deeply unpopular structural adjustments under IMF auspices that led to rioting, the “Caracazo”, in which security forces killed at least 400 people. It was in this hot-house environment that Chávez’s MBR-200, with dissident factions of opposition parties, staged their first real coup attempt in 1992.
Though it failed and Chávez surrendered, the attempt made him a national figure, attracting sympathy from many poor communities devastated by the government’s austerity programme. In 1997, the MBR-200 changed tack to an electoral approach and — as the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), a Marxist, pro-fidelista, anti-Yanqui party — won the December 1998 elections at the head of a coalition, with Chávez assuming office the next February.
Chávez’s subsequent “Bolívarian Revolution”, which included soldiers being deployed to work on civil engineering projects, and the nationalisation of banks, telecommunications, agribusiness, mining, industry, power, transport, tourism and food production, saw the state take control of almost 70% of industries, horrifying liberals and conservatives at home and abroad.
Yet the government’s “missions”, funded by oil money, had a big effect on poverty as they expanded access to food through thousands of state-owned stores and soup kitchens, with tens of thousands of homes built for the poor, thousands of primary healthcare clinics built countrywide, and thousands of volunteers teaching the illiterate.
Venezuela’s most signifcant social upliftment experiment, it was copied in Bolivia by Evo Morales and in Ecuador by Rafael Correa as part of the “pink tide” then sweeping Latin America. It is largely for these advances that leftists as far afield as South Africa have hailed bolivarismthough it earned Venezuela the enmity of staunch capitalists on both sides of the political aisle in the US.
But the “revolution” deeply divided Venezuelan society and united a heterogeneous opposition horrified by what it saw as the “Cubanisation” of Venezuela. An attempted coup in April 2002 by the chamber of industry and commerce, the Fedecámaras, widely believed to have been plotted by the CIA, yet with the CTV union central, saw a military faction arrest Chávez, but ran out of steam and collapsed within days.
The decay of bolivarism
A reinstated Chávez began to turn increasingly towards collectives, essentially Bolívarian motorbike gangs operating in proletarian neighbourhoods, to ensure his security against possible threats from within the military posed by an anti-chávista faction, the Institutional Military Front.
Chávez’s overweening concentration on the oil industry dediversified the economy, and his firing of 18,000 industry technicians in 2003, after an almost three-month general strike precipitated by PDVSA management, stripped oil of most of its best expertise. Output began to waver between a high of 3.3-million barrels a day and a low of 2.5-million barrels a day, yet Chávez helped prop up the struggling economy of his fellow leftist regime in Cuba with a steady stream of oil and fuel.
The state armed collectives with automatic weapons and communications gear (they even replaced the municipal police in poor Caracas suburbs), while by March 2007, Chávez’s newly merged coalition, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), had extended its political control of communities by establishing about 19,500 state-funded communal councils.
Despite these shocks, which raised blood pressures in the US and the West, there was relative predictability until Chávez died of pelvic cancer in 2012. Nicolás Maduro Moros, a former bus driver turned Bolívarian union leader who had been trained for a year at a communist ideological school in Cuba, assumed the presidency the next year.
Maduro spent all his energy on countering the opposition by stealth and force, and while doing so, plunged the economy off the cliff. While some collectives did constructive work, most rapidly degenerated into drug-dealing and sheer gangsterism, though there is still no public evidence that Maduro himself benefited from drug cartel criminality as the US has claimed in court papers.
But Maduro’s coup de main was to cripple the national assembly legislature, which was two-thirds dominated by the opposition, when on March 29 2017 the chávista-dominated Supreme Tribunal of Justice assumed legislative powers, de facto suspending constitutional rule.
By 2018, 4,999 of the firms that had been nationalised under the “revolution” had been shut down, worsening an unemployment crisis, while the average monthly wage had fallen to $2. Even oil production had plummeted by four-fifths from 2.675-million barrels a day in 2013 to merely 0.544-million barrels a day by 2020.
Maduro’s cronies looted an estimated $300m out of the PDVSA. The irony for supporters, such as the ANC, of the regimes in Caracas and Havana is that it was Maduro himself who weakened Cuba amid its most severe energy crisis.
Likewise, land redistribution had supposedly been intended to transfer ownership into the hands of the peasantry, but by 2018 the government owned 80% of the land yet only produced 5% of the food, whereas two decades previously those lands fed 70% of the population.
Initially the percentage of those living under the poverty line fell from 49.4% in 1999 to 27.8% in 2010, but by 2018, with an inflation rate that hit a high of 65.374%, starvation stalked even the middle classes. About 7-million Venezuelans fled into exile to escape economic collapse and political repression.
Though there has been a marginal economic recovery since then, Maduro maintained his grip on power by ensuring the PSUV “won” patently rigged presidential elections in 2018, results that were flatly rejected by the Organisation of American States (OAS).
The kidnapping of Maduro and his wife on January 3 by US special forces to face drug cartel charges was illegal because a criminal indictment alone did not justify it, but Maduro was a dictator who ruled unconstitutionally for seven years via his control of the Bolívarian faction of the military, “revolutionary” institutions and armed street gangs about 200,000 strong.
This is the deeply divided state that Donald Trump wants to “run”, supposedly to settle US oil companies’ outstanding $18.5m compensation claims for nationalisation in 1976. Yet two decades and $5.8-trillion spent on boots on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq should have adequately demonstrated that despite all the hubris, the hyperpower is simply incapable of running another country.
