Coup vs. Vacuum of Power: Interview with Brian Nelson on 11-A

At this point, do you think that any hypothetical revelation about the crisis - be it a video, witness testimony, or some other evidence - could still make a major impact?

I feel very strongly that most of the evidence is already out there. It's really right in front of our faces. There are literally thousands of photographs of the violence on April 11th, as well as thousands more from April 12th and April 13th. There are also hundreds of hours of video footage and hundreds of pages of testimony, speeches, and newspaper articles. If you were to look at all of the evidence closely, I think the truth would be apparent to anyone.
Therefore, the confusion is NOT because there is insufficient evidence. No, the confusion comes from all of the political spin; the confusion comes from "wikiality"--that the majority of the press depicts this as a classic coup scenario, wherein Chávez was attacked by the military and did nothing to precipitate the crisis, which was not the case.

The problem of spin was something I knew would be a issue from the moment I began my research, which is why I alternated from pro- to anti-Chávez points of view. I also tried to go to the original source as much as I could. For example, I put extra weight on the material that was generated "in the moment" and put less and less weight on material produced after the coup, because--like ripples in a pond--the farther you got from the event, the more distorted things became. I also tried to speak to the people who were actually there and it was very important that I literally sat down with them--face-to-face--often multiple times. I did this for two reasons: 1. Often people don't tell you the truth (or at least the whole truth) the first time you meet them. 2. I really had to believe them (their testimony had to fit) for me to include their perspective in the book and that confidence required a face-to-face meeting.

I also sought out people who were not famous, but who had been there and had little motivation in spinning the events. The doctors and nurses at Vargas hospital, for example, were excellent sources. They had little incentive to lie or deceive, and they confirmed many critical pieces of the puzzle--such as the fact that the first round of gunshot victims were opposition marchers.

Therefore, I don't think we will have any dramatic epiphanies about the coup; however, I expect that there will likely be a tipping of the scales in one direction or another over time. For example, if the United States really does participate in a coup in Latin America, then that would tip the scale of "wikiality" in the government's favor. If the Chávez government continues to stifle free speech and commit human rights violations, then that will tip the scales in favor of the opposition's perspective.

As you yourself have written, the interpretation of the confrontation in El Silencio is frequently twisted and distorted by both government and opposition to serve political needs. What do you believe are the most commonly misunderstood aspects and most widespread myths? What are the most basic facts for an outsider to understand about the violence on Baralt Avenue and the Puente Llaguno?

Perhaps the most important misperception is that both the opposition marchers and the pro-Chávez supporters were equally violent. Yes, there were deaths and injuries on both sides, but not because the two groups each attacked the other.

This is where the timing of events becomes very important because the opposition march suffered most of its casualties at the beginning of the conflict, while the pro-Chávez supporters suffered heavy casualties at the end of the conflict--some two hours later. Why?

My research shows that the pro-Chávez gunmen initiated the violence as the march arrived near the palace at about 2:30 p.m. These first victims (Jesús Arellano, Jorge Tortoza, Malvina Pesate, et al.) were shot by gunmen on the street who were very close to marchers, perhaps as close as 20 meters, shooting Southward. Arellano--shot in the chest while looking North; Tortoza--shot behind the left ear while jogging East; Pesate--shot though the cheek while facing North. All three of these shootings were captured on video and it is clear that they were shot from the North. The killing of Jesús Arellano was actually captured on two films and in one of them we can see, about 20 meters up and across the street, a pro-Chávez gunmen taking aim in his direction.

In response to this first round of casualties, the Metropolitan Police--who were concentrated a block away on Eighth Street--came and tried to separate the two groups. However, the pro-Chávez crowd perceived this separation as an attack by the police; they thought the police were helping the march get through to the palace, so they turned their weapons increasingly on the police. Over the next hour and a half or so the distance between the march and the pro-Chávez crowd steadily increased to about 3 city blocks with the police in the middle. There was still a lot of firing, but the number of casualties was smaller. Still, more and more Chávez supporters were being shot as the police returned fire on the gunmen (and hit unarmed Chávez supporters mixed into the crowd, too).

A bit after 4:30 the gunfight between the police and pro-Chávez gunmen reached its apex and Luis Fernandez captured one side of it in his award-winning video. This is the time when the pro-Chávez side suffered most of its casualties. Indeed, my research shows that during this last 45 minutes of the violence the pro-Chávez side suffered all of their fatalities. The Metropolitan Police shot most of them--by this time the police had called in SWAT-type units with high caliber rifles to "neutralize" the gunmen. In a gunfight between poorly trained Chávez loyalists versus police sharp-shooters, the Chávez loyalists were tragically outgunned. The police hit gunmen, but they also hit pro-Chávez bystanders.

That is why there were dead on both sides. Not because both groups were shooting at each other, but because the police interceded to protect the marchers from the pro-Chávez gunmen. Given that the pro-Chávez side initiated the violence, the Chávez government's claim that it was the victim of an attack is considerably weakened. All of the videos, photographs and (most of the) testimony support this. There are dozens of pictures and several long videos of Chávez supporters using guns and rifles, there is no evidence of a single opposition marcher using a gun (the only weapon recorded was a boy with slingshot on 8th Street).

What's more, we now know that the government had been aware of the likelihood that a march might come to the palace for weeks and had created a plan for protecting it that included using the Bolivarian Circles (Chávez's militia groups) as a paramilitary force. This was openly discussed with Chávez during his cabinet meeting on April 7th.

The documentary film, The Revolution will not be Televised also had an important impact on distorting the truth. For many people--especially outside of Venezuela--this was their only source of information about the coup. The film is full of false and misleading information. For example, to explain the damning footage of the pro-Chávez gunmen shooting from Puente Llaguno toward the march, the filmmakers claimed that the street below (Baralt Avenue) was empty.

To "prove" this they took a shot from an amateur film taken very late in the afternoon when the fight was almost over, then cropped out the police trucks that were at the top of the frame. "What the networks didn't show was this shot in which it is clearly shown that the street below was empty," the film says. "The opposition march had not taken this route. They used the images of the people shooting to say that the chavistas had shot at the demonstrators and with that manipulation Chávez was blamed for the deaths."

The march, of course, had taken this route, something that is confirmed by hundreds of photographs, half a dozen newsreels, and thousands of eyewitnesses. Even the Venezuelan Justice Department confirms the killing of demonstrators on Baralt Avenue and Hugo Chávez himself acknowledges that the gunmen were firing on police. ("President Chávez complacido por decisión en caso Llaguno," El National, September 19, 2003.)

But because The Revolution will not be Televised was the only account of the coup available in English for many years, its (mis)interpretation of the facts became widely accepted. Curiously, the film does not try to explain what twenty-odd gunmen were doing firing into a street in the middle of Caracas.

You identify several critical junctures in the process of the events - at one point Chavez had openly given up, said he would resign, and was negotiating his terms of exit. Then, little by little, he began to discover disorganization of his ousters, and see an opportunity. From your research, what do you believe changed Chavez's mind to refuse to sign the resignation?

To answer this question we have to first understand why the military rebelled in the first place. And this, without a doubt, is the great irony of the coup: that Hugo Chávez--convinced that the military was about to rebel--issued an order that caused them to rebel.

On April 11th, when the huge march began to make its way to Chávez's palace, he assumed that it was part of a larger coup attempt; he assumed that his enemies in the military would use it as an excuse to oust him. Accordingly, Chávez ordered Plan Avila--that the army stop the march and impose order.

This order sent a shockwave through the military because all the generals knew that when Plan Avila was last implement in 1989 it had caused at least 800 civilian deaths. They also knew that using the army against civilians had been outlawed by the 1999 constitution. (After, the coup, in August 2002 the Inter-American Human Rights Commission ruled that Plan Avila violated human rights standards and had to be changed.)

One after the other, Hugo Chávez's top three generals refused to implement the plan. Generals Rincón, Rosendo, and Vásquez. All three of these men had been picked for their loyalty and had no plans to rebel (Rincón, in fact, remained in the Chávez government after the coup, and Rosendo helped Chávez negotiate with the dissident generals). Throughout the crisis, Chávez would continue to believe that the military had a plan, that it was all premeditated. Even after the violence was over he was convinced that the military was still about to attack him. So he sent General Rosendo to offer them a deal--he would resign if they would let him leave the country. It wasn't until after Chávez had turned himself over to them and he saw them all bickering about what to do with him--let him leave or make him stand trial--that he realized that they didn't have a coherent plan. That's when I think he decided that it was best not to resign because if he did then he would lose all of the legal privileges of being a head of state. Yes, the majority of generals wanted to get rid of him for ordering the illegal Plan Avila and for the bloodshed, and yes, some of the generals had been plotting a coup, but they didn't have a coherent plan on April 11th.

This is the moment when the real coup began. Up until this moment the generals had not broken the law, but by taking Chávez into custody and trying to deport him without trail or impeachment, and without a signed letter of resignation, broke the law. The military blundered further by allowing Pedro Carmona and his clique to step into the power vacuum. The next day Carmona trampled the constitution by dissolving most of the country's democratic institutions, which sparked riots and looting and a political backlash. Fearing that the cure to Chávez might be worse than Chávez himself, the military backpedaled and conceded power to Chávez's vice-president, who handed power back to Chávez.

In this regard, the ousting of Chávez resembles the ousting of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. There was a legitimate reason to prosecute or impeach the president, but the opposition did it all wrong, broke the law, and thereby lost its legitimacy.

In your book you mention the Chavez government's "multi-million dollar campaign to rewrite the history of the coup." (pp.255). In my experience, this has been successful, as government officials from Washington, Brasilia, Madrid, and Paris all talk about the "attempted coup of 2002." Where did these millions of dollars of this campaign get spent, and is it even appropriate to use the word "coup" to describe what happened?

I think the word "coup" does apply for the reasons I gave above. It was a coup, but only from the moment that the military and opposition leaders broke the law by taking Chavez into custody without following a legal precedent--which came after the violence perpetrated by the government.

Many people are aware of how much emphasis Chávez puts on PR from his weekly "Aló Presidente" to the six government channels that now come out of Venezuela. People tend to know less about how much is spent overseas, but estimates are that Chávez spent $300 million on PR directed at the United States last year (Informativovenezuela.com).

One big investment into spinning April 11th was a film called "Puente Llaguno: Keys to a Massacre." This is a propaganda film that was made with the support of both the Venezuelan and Cuban governments. It depicts only the Pro-Chávez side of the events and is full of factual mistakes and misleading images. The film is in English and is shown to college students and other tourists who visit Venezuela on the Global Exchange program--which is essentially a week-long guided tour of "Venezuelan socialism in action."

A student of mine went on the Global Exchange program and the video convinced her that Chávez had been the victim of a conspiracy and that all the dead and wounded were caused by the opposition. It was only when I showed her the photos of dozens of pro-Chávez gunmen and several videos (in the correct order) that she saw that things were not so simple.

The Silence and the Scorpion is populated by a cast of characters who would later become political prisoners, persecuted, or exiles, such as General Uson, Raul Baduel, Carlos Ortega, Otto Gebauer, and the Metropolitan Police commissioners. Yet the real crimes of the shootings were never investigated, the ordering of Plan Avila and the activation of the Circulos Bolivarianos to shoot at protestors never held accountable, and in fact almost all forensic evidence was destroyed by the state. How was this made possible from a legal perspective?

Hugo Chávez and his political coalition have a monopoly on power in Venezuela that is sometimes difficult for Americans to fathom. In fact, the checks and balances that we consider the cornerstone of the U.S. system no longer exist in Venezuela. The supreme court, the legislature, the justice department (fiscalia), the defender of the people, the election board, and virtually all of the judges and prosecutors are beholden to Chávez. This has been accomplished through a combination of legal and extralegal means. For example, the legislature remains almost entirely aligned with Chávez because they were popularly elected. If one were to look at the election results it would look as if Chávez's coalition was very popular. What many people don't know is that the opposition candidates boycotted the elections citing fraud in the Chávez-dominated election board.

In the case of the Supreme Court, Chávez's coalition named all of the 21 justices when the new constitution was ratified in 2000. After April 11th, 10 of the justices defected from Chávez's party, citing Chávez's role in the violence, while another justice began voting independently. For the next two years, Chávez simply ignored the court when it didn't rule in his favor, then in December 2004 he packed the court with 12 more justices to regain control.

The executive's control over both the courts and the justice department (both law and order) is particularly important because it means that the government can control not only the outcome of a trail, but also which cases go to trial in the first place.

Both tactics were used in the wake of April 11th. The justice department refused to open cases that might have exposed the government's complicity in human rights violations. For example, gunshot victims from the opposition like Malvina Pesate, Andrés Trujillo, and the family of Jhonnie Palencia all went to the justice department, but the justice department killed each of their cases by not assigning a prosecutor. The investigations were stillborn. Without a prosecutor, of course, there could be no trail.

The case against four of the Llaguno Overpass gunmen demonstrates the court's role in the government cover-up. Despite video and photographic evidence showing these four gunmen firing on police (with the opposition march several blocks behind), the men were given only minor weapons violations and quickly set free. (Dozens of other pro-Chávez gunmen who were also caught on film and video were never prosecuted or brought to trail.)

It should be noted that many individuals--police detectives, prosecutors, and judges--did pursue the truth and refused to be complicit with the cover-up. But they were summarily dismissed, transferred, or harassed, in some cases to the point where they feared for their lives (La Fuente and Meza, El acertijo de abril, 2003 P. 159-161). One judge, who was approached to preside over the Llaguno gunmen case refused because he felt he would be obligated to side with the government. He says he subsequently received so many threats from the government that he eventually took his family and fled the country.

After the temporary ouster of Hugo Chavez from Miraflores, you write that the media was tragically irresponsible in its refusal to give coverage to events during those two critical days. There were also observations of the media entering meetings with the interim government as though they were political participants rather than observers. How is it that impartiality and objectivity in media are so hard to come by in Venezuela?

That is a difficult question. In many ways the gap between the Chávez government's version of reality and the opposition media's version of reality perfectly epitomizes how polarized Venezuela has become. Is Hugo Chávez the country's savior or is he ruthless dictator? You only need to change the channel from a government station to an opposition station to see both "truths." These two camps have now been in a ten-year struggle that can only be described as a war--an increasingly bitter and personal war.

Somewhat ironically, many of the media outlets had vigorously supported Chávez during his run for president. But by the time of the coup both sides had clearly lost their objectivity. Chávez felt that the media was trying to sabotage his revolutionary project--and he was denouncing journalists and media executives by name on TV as well as trying to hold them accountable for "false news or news that is manipulated by the use of half truths" (Human Rights Watch "Venezuela: Caught in the Crossfire," 2003). Meanwhile the opposition media felt that the president was limiting their freedom of speech and reacted by emphasizing all things bad about his government and omitting the good.

During the coup, the biases became plain. When the interim government looked as if it might collapse and Chávez's party might regain control, the media owners met with interim-President Carmona and agreed to "move the country forward" (a euphemism for only showing pro-Carmona news and not showing the growing public demonstrations demanding Chávez's return).

While the media owners were working in tandem and some had even told their news crews not to go out on April 14th (the day the coup collapsed), it is important to remember that some individual reporters went out anyway--some at great personal risk--to cover Chávez's return. Their stories make up some of the most compelling chapters of "The Silence and the Scorpion."

In your epilogue you described yourself as a "devout chavista" when you arrived in Sept. 2002 to begin your book. Over the course of researching and writing the book, did this position change? How would you describe yourself now?

Yes, my position toward Chávez did change while I was doing my research and it was a change that forced me to do a great bit of soul-searching. I am a liberal democrat and had studied International Relations with an emphasis on Latin America in college; therefore, I agreed with most of Hugo Chávez's political platform--the need to redistribute wealth, the failure of neoliberalism, the importance of stamping out corruption.

But while there are many things that Hugo Chávez says that are worthy of applause, there is a huge gap between his words and his deeds.

The single most important thing that triggered my change was the realization that the government was using violence (and the threat of violence) as a political tool. For example, journalists who received death threats discovered that the calls were coming from government offices. In addition to the violence on April 11th, there have been 10 separate attacks on opposition rallies by government security forces and militias which have resulted in 213 wounded and 8 deaths. The government claims that these attacks are random, but this is clearly not the case as demonstrated by a December, 2002 incident when 21 TV and radio stations were simultaneously attacked throughout the country in a single night. The government also claims that it has no control over these militia groups. But I met with several militia members while doing my research and they confirmed that they were given insurgency training--sometimes in Cuba--and that it was funded by the government. One of the militia leaders--who was a member of a group responsible for part of the violence on April 11th--arranged for us to met in the presidential palace of Miraflores.

The lesson here is that the Chávez government is willing to violate the country's constitution in order to advance its political agenda. And what is that agenda? What is the "end" the government wants to achieve? It is Chávez's socialist revolutionary project, the Bolivarian Revolution.

The United States' use of torture during the Bush administration has sparked a debate in this country about whether "the ends justify the means." The debate being whether the U.S. can accomplish a just end (the saving of American lives) through unjust means (inhumane torture).
I agree with President Obama's statements (which echoed a famous speech by Martin Luther King Jr.) that, no, the ends should not justify the means. As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out: "We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree....destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends" (Washington, James, A Testament of Hope. The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper Collins, San Francisco. 253-258).

In Venezuela, however, Hugo Chávez and his government have embraced the concept that "the ends justify the means." The Chávez government feels that it needs to employ unjust means for the greater good of protecting the revolution. And this is a very, very dangerous move for any government to make, because once that decision is made--that there is a "greater good" to achieve--then any action becomes justifiable. Unfortunately, we can see this all too clearly in Venezuela today not just with regards to the use of violence, but to a host of other activities--the censorship of the media, the funneling of money and arms to the Colombian FARC, the weakening of the checks and balances of democracy, the barring of opposition candidates from office, the false prosecution of political adversaries, and the expropriation of property without compensation or recourse. All this is being justified as a "greater good" for Venezuela; a necessary part of a long revolution. In other words, the revolution is more important than the law, more important than democracy.

In conclusion, I would still be sympathetic to Hugo Chávez if he were indeed the social democrat he initially said he was; but he is not.