Hugo! (55 page)

After he took the oath of office, Carmona gave a short speech to
supporters
that was Kafkaesque given he had just installed a dictatorship.
"We must go about returning to the rule of law," he said. "Strongman
rule will be left behind."

Back
at Fort Tiuna, Chávez could hear the commotion of a small group
of his supporters gathering outside on the street and protesting his disappearance.
News was spreading by word of mouth, cell phone, and
alternative
media radio stations and Web sites that Chávez had not resigned
and was being held by the rebels in the military headquarters. Locked
in a room at the fort, he was watching the scene at Miraflores on television.
He was aghast. "I saw on the television Carmona's self-
swearingin,"
he recalled later. "I saw all that and I saw the faces that were in the
Salon Ayacucho and the shouts, 'Democracy! Democracy!' while they
were stabbing the Constitution."

The rebels decided to move him. As darkness fell, they transferred
him to a couple of different
buildings, and then took him outside and
ordered him to get into a helicopter. Chávez was apprehensive.

The idea began to grow, the idea I had in the morning of the possibility
of killing me, of an assassination. However, since I had
already given myself over, I think given myself over to God, like
someone who lets himself be taken by the current, I didn't ask
where we were going. Nothing. I got into the helicopter and we
took off. We passed over Caracas. I remember silently asking myself
where are they taking me. Could it be we are going to Maiquetia
[international airport]? They're taking me to Maiquetia, maybe
they are going to take me out of the country by force. I looked at
Caracas from above, but no, we continued west, along the coast.

On that flight, I had that sensation, that feeling, that I was being
taken toward my death . . . I had a cross in my hand. I was very
relaxed. I was ready to die.

The cross was the small blue one that his old military academy professor,
General Pérez Arcay, had given him as he left Miraflores Palace
to turn himself in. Now Chávez thought about his children, his wife, his
parents, his friends, and the Venezuelan people in general. It seemed
like an eternal flight. Eventually they landed at the remote naval base
of Turiamo near Puerto Cabello on the west coast.

He thought they might do it by shooting him and then claiming
he killed himself or tried to flee. He felt like
Che Guevara in the final
moments of his life, trapped in the forests of Bolivia. Turiamo was desolate
and dark. It seemed like good place to "eliminate" Chávez.

We arrived at Turiamo in a dark place by the sea. They took me to
a small house, I imagine a storage deposit, in semi-darkness. They
left me alone in the house, under guard but a few meters away,
five or ten meters from me, when I see a vehicle come up from
beyond the helicopter. They turn off the lights and get out. I hear
a noise in the darkness, and suddenly fifteen or twenty soldiers
appear in the dark lined up, dark figures, with weapons, of course.
I thought there they were going to "suicide" me. There was a lot of
tension among the officers and the troops.

Later an officer arrives and tells me, "OK, we are going to take
you to the presidential residence." . . . They put me in a truck, and
we go very slowly along a road. The helicopter takes off and the
soldiers are walking on both sides of the road. We stop once for a
few minutes, in a place where to me there was no reason to stop,
on the dark road. The officer gets out and talks with the others.

Chávez had noticed conflicts among some of the soldiers. He believed
some came with orders to kill him, while others wanted to stop it.

Two of them were there to kill me, but the others no, they were
constitutionalists. In the moment in which they were going to
carry out the order, I was standing up like this. One of those mercenaries
walked around me and stood behind. I think to myself,
"This one is going to give it to me in the back." I turn around and
look at him in the face. "Look at what you are going to do," I tell
him. And at that moment another young officer jumps to my side
and says, "If you kill the president here we'll all kill one another."
That neutralized those two mercenaries and saved my life.

The group continued on to the presidential residence on the base,
but no one could find the key. They had nothing prepared for Chávez,
not even a clean room. Finally they brought him to the nurses' station,
where they gave him a bed, a chair, a small table, and a bathroom. Most
of the nation still had no idea where he was. It was nearly twenty-four
hours after he was last seen walking into Fort Tiuna. The president was
missing.

Pedro Carmona showed at up Miraflores Palace early on the morning
of Saturday, April 13. It was to be his first full day as "president" after
swearing himself into office late Friday afternoon and eliminating
democracy. He planned to swear in his "cabinet" in the early afternoon.
His first visitor of the day was Charles Shapiro, the US ambassador to
Venezuela.

The two men along with the Spanish ambassador shared breakfast
together at about 9 A.M. By Shapiro's account, he urged Carmona
to restore the National Assembly and call elections as soon as possible.
Carmona didn't remember it that way. He said Shapiro never brought it
up. Whatever the case, the presence of the US ambassador in the presidential
palace a day after Carmona seized power was interpreted by
many as an endorsement.

After Shapiro finished his breakfast with Carmona, the country's
media moguls pulled onto the palace grounds in black limousines for
a
meeting with Carmona, who asked them to do everything they could
to support the regime. They included Venevisión's Gustavo Cisneros,
Radio Caracas Television's
Marcel Granier, Globovision's Alberto Ravell,
and
Televen's Omar Camero. The editors of two of the nation's leading
newspapers also came — Miguel Henrique Otero of
El Nacional
and
Andrés Mata of
El Universal
. Around the same time, other power elites
started arriving for the swearing-in. Bishop Baltazar Porras offered bear
hugs to friends. Archbishop Ignacio Velasco came, too.

In the United States, Carmona was winning the
support of newspaper
editorial pages across the country. They condoned the coup, blamed
Chávez for the massacre, and welcomed the "restoration" of democracy.
"With yesterday's resignation of President Hugo Chávez,"
The New York
Times
said, "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be
dictator." The newspaper called Chávez a "ruinous demagogue,"
avoided the word
coup
, and said the former paratrooper "stepped down
after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business
leader, Pedro Carmona." Venezuela, it added, needed a "leader with a
strong democratic mandate to clean up the mess."

Long Island's
Newsday
carried an editorial with the headline,
"Chávez's Ouster Is No Great Loss." The
Chicago Tribune
called him
an "elected strongman" and declared, "It's not every day that a democracy
benefits from the military's intervention to force out an elected
president."

Support flowed in from business, too. US-based BellSouth and its
Venezuelan affiliate, Telcel, took out a full-page ad in the Caracas daily
El Universal
offering customers free long-distance calls to celebrate
Venezuela's new "FREEDOM and the brilliant future that awaits us."

But that morning as Carmona prepared to formally install his
provisional
government, events outside the palace were shifting the balance
of political power. Word was spreading in the barrios that Chávez
had never resigned and was being held incommunicado against his
will. The protests outside Fort Tiuna on Friday night grew larger on
Saturday morning. They also spread to the streets near Miraflores presidential
palace. People streamed into the city center, carrying signs
that said, DONDE ESTA CHáVEZ? — where is Chávez? Others held large
photographs of the missing president. Opposition-controlled police
fired
tear gas canisters and rubber bullets. They also moved into barrios
throughout the capital, repressing protests and looting with real
bullets.

Hospitals overflowed with victims. One man,
Edgar Paredes, told
a US reporter, "They are gunning us down out there." Another pro-
Chávez demonstrator, Juana Chirinos, had tears streaming down her
face as she watched ambulance after ambulance pull in. "While we
bring in our dead one after the other," she said, "the rich people in the
east are having drinks and fanning themselves."

If the rich people fanning themselves turned on their televisions,
they would have had no idea of the protests and bloodshed
sweeping the barrios as people demanded Chávez's return. The
media's news blackout was running full force. As one the biggest stories
in Venezuela's modern history unfolded, they refused to report
on the groundswell demanding Chávez's return, the repression in the
streets, or even that the president was missing. Instead the television
networks showed cartoons, cooking shows, and Hollywood movies
like
Pretty Woman
.

The new regime sought to suffocate the one place people without
cable television or the
Internet could get news about the uprising — the
alternative media. Police raided and shut down community radio and
television stations that often operated out of people's houses and that
the Chávez government had encouraged as a small counterbalance to
the media giants.

The unrest over Chávez's disappearance was not only spreading in
the streets — it was growing in the barracks. General Raúl Isaías Baduel,
one of the founders of the MBR-200 and now the head of Chávez's old
paratrooper unit in Maracay, was trying to make his opposition to the
new regime public. No Venezuelan commercial media outlet would
interview him. So he drafted a manifesto declaring he would not support
Carmona's regime. He hoped it would somehow get out. Other
high-ranking military officers signed it, too. Meanwhile thousands of
pro-Chávez demonstrators gathered outside his paratrooper's regiment,
clamoring for Chávez to return.

Baduel got on the telephone with several
loyalist commanders,
including
Colonel Jesús Del Valle Morao Cardona, who was in charge
of the honor guard at
Miraflores Palace. After Carmona took over, the
troops along with other palace personnel continued fulfilling their
functions for the new regime. They served them coffee, and Morao's
honor guard band played the national anthem for the new head of state,
even though some cried as they did. Carmona and his cronies thought
the soldiers supported them. In reality they were waiting for a chance
to help overthrow him.

Morao Cardona's troops were stationed in barracks across the street
from Miraflores. They could enter the palace through tunnels. With
the crowds outside Miraflores growing, another loyalist officer called
Morao from Fort Tiuna. "Colonel, today is the 13th," he told Morao.
"It's now or never."

Morao responded, "Come here. I can't take this situation any more."

Morao called Baduel, who told him to go ahead with the plan to
recapture Miraflores and take Carmona prisoner. They believed they
had the support of most of the barracks in the country. The officers
who overthrew Chávez had high ranks, but almost no direct command
of troops.

Late that morning Morao's troops marched through the underground
tunnels and ran into the palace. The soldiers grabbed nearly
two dozen people — including Daniel Romero — who were in the
cabinet meeting room. Carmona, Molina Tamayo, Lameda, and others
escaped. The coup leaders made their way to Fort Tiuna to reunite
with other plotters. Cameras captured the humiliating scenes of well-coiffed
women from Venezuela's upper class running from the palace
in high heels as they fled the loyalist troops. They left behind whiskey,
champagne, and a presidential sash. It had an adjustable band, to fit
any size.

Not long after Carmona fled the palace, some of the military plotters
convoked a meeting in Fort Tiuna. Some lower-level officers were questioning
what was happening, since Chávez had not presented a resignation
letter and no one knew where he was. They had watched the
scenes of the violence on Avenida Baralt on Thursday and the television
commentaries blaming Chávez for the killings. But now some were
doubtful. They thought they'd been lied to about Chávez's resignation.
They were also angry about Carmona's dismantling of democratic institutions
and the dissolution of the constitution.

Some higher-ranking officers who had played important roles in the
revolt were dismayed, too. General Efraín Vásquez Velasco, the head of
the army, was one of them. Carmona had appointed him to nothing.

Chávez ally General Luis Jorge García Carneiro managed to get
into the meeting, which started about 1 P.M. It was a confusing scene.
Officers were yelling back and forth at one another. Outside, they could
hear the sounds of Chávez supporters shouting for the president and
banging sticks and pipes on a metal rail.

The officers agreed to draft a declaration recognizing Carmona
as head of state but demanding the restoration of the constitution and
the country's democratic institutions. Vásquez Velasco was to read it.
Before he did, García Carneiro grabbed the document while Vásquez
Velasco was talking to other officers, edited it, and crossed out the section
where they recognized Carmona as head of state. Amid the confusion,
Vásquez Velasco did not notice.

The Venezuelan media would not broadcast Vásquez Velasco's
statement, so he had to read it by telephone to CNN's studios in Atlanta.
It was a bombshell. The man who had made the dramatic pronouncement
against Chávez on April 11 saying he was "loyal until the end"
now was reversing himself. The coup was collapsing. Chávez's wife,
Marisabel, also spoke with CNN. She told the network her husband
had not resigned.