Hugo Chávez

The Por Ahora That Changed Everything

The moment that defined Hugo Chávez's public career was not a military victory or an electoral triumph — it was a defeat acknowledged on television. On 4 February 1992, the coup he had spent years planning collapsed within hours, its coordination failures and the government's decisive military response turning a planned seizure of power into a chaotic series of engagements across Venezuela that Chávez could not coordinate or control from his position in the Military History Museum in Caracas. He negotiated to surrender personally and was taken to television to call on the other coup columns to stand down and avoid further bloodshed. The address he gave was brief, calm, and contained the two words — "por ahora," for now — that transformed a failed military conspiracy into the beginning of a political career of extraordinary consequence.

The calculation behind those two words was deliberate. Chávez understood that accepting personal responsibility for the failure — telling his followers that the objectives he had set had not been achieved, not yet — was politically more effective than denial, deflection, or the kind of institutional passing of blame that Venezuelan political culture had made familiar. By saying "for now," he was telling the television audience watching from across Venezuela — particularly the audience in the poor barrios where the gap between oil wealth and daily poverty was most visible — that the project of structural change was alive, that someone had tried and failed but had not abandoned the attempt. The response across Venezuela's poor communities was not the reaction to a defeated conspirator but the reaction to an announcement: here is a man who tried to change things, who failed, and who has not given up. They remembered him for the two years he spent in prison, and when he was pardoned in 1994 and became free to engage in legal politics, his base was already there, waiting.

Oil, the Missions, and the Poor

Venezuela sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, a geological fact that has dominated Venezuelan political economy for a century and that shaped everything Chávez did in government. The question of who controls Venezuela's oil — PDVSA, the state oil company — and in whose interest it is managed is the central question of Venezuelan political economy, and Chávez's answer to it was unambiguous: the oil belonged to the Venezuelan people, and its revenues should be used for Venezuelan social development rather than for the enrichment of the existing elite and the satisfaction of the Washington Consensus economic orthodoxy. This position was not invented by Chávez — it was part of Venezuelan political culture going back to the nationalisation of oil in 1976 — but he pursued it with an energy and a directness that previous governments had not.

The social missions that the oil revenues funded were the most visible achievement of this approach and the most genuinely transformative in terms of the daily lives of Venezuela's poor. Infant mortality fell. Adult literacy rose. Access to primary health care expanded dramatically in communities that had never had consistent access to it. Poverty rates fell significantly in the first decade of the Chávez government by most standard measures. These improvements were real and their recipients knew they were real, which is why Chávez won re-election in 2006 with 63 per cent of the vote and in 2012 — already ill with the cancer that would kill him — with 55 per cent. His base in the barrios of Caracas and the rural interior was genuine, built on the experience of what the Bolivarian Revolution had actually delivered to people whose previous experience of Venezuelan democracy had been that it was a system run for other people's benefit.

The April 2002 Coup and What It Revealed

The forty-seven hours of April 2002 — when Chávez was removed from power, briefly replaced by Pedro Carmona, and then returned to the presidency by a combination of popular mobilisation and military loyalty — revealed the full landscape of Venezuelan politics under the Bolivarian Revolution. On one side: the business community, the traditional political parties, most of the private media, the middle and upper class, and the Bush administration, all of whom had concluded that Chávez represented a threat to their interests that justified extra-constitutional action. On the other side: the poorest communities of Caracas and other cities, who poured into the streets demanding Chávez's return, and the military officers who had remained loyal to the constitutional government and who moved to return him to the presidential palace.

The coup's failure was a turning point in the Bolivarian Revolution. Before April 2002, Chávez had operated with some degree of accommodation toward the business and media establishment — maintaining relationships, allowing critical media to function, avoiding direct confrontations with opposition-controlled institutions. After April 2002, and after the subsequent oil strike of 2002–2003 in which PDVSA's management attempted to strangle the economy into regime change, Chávez concluded that accommodation was impossible and moved to consolidate control over the institutions that had been turned against him: purging PDVSA's management, using the oil revenue more aggressively for the social missions, and accelerating the institutional changes that concentrated power in the executive. The political polarisation that characterised the remainder of his presidency — and that has continued under Maduro — was partly a consequence of the radicalisation that the coup attempt produced.

The Assessment: What Remains

The honest assessment of Hugo Chávez requires holding simultaneously two sets of facts that his supporters and critics each prefer to emphasise exclusively. The first set: real poverty reduction, real literacy gains, real health care provision to communities that had never had it, real electoral victories in elections that independent observers certified as free and fair, real regional solidarity through ALBA, real assertion of Venezuelan national sovereignty over its own resources. The second set: the concentration of executive power at the expense of independent institutions, the use of oil revenue in ways that created consumption dependencies rather than structural economic development, the relationship with authoritarian governments internationally, the suppression of political dissent that became increasingly pronounced in his later years, and the institutional deterioration that left Venezuela poorly prepared for the collapse of oil prices and the economic crisis that followed his death.

Both sets of facts are real. The difficulty of holding them simultaneously — the temptation to emphasise one and minimise the other in service of a predetermined conclusion — is the reason why Chávez remains the most globally divisive Latin American political figure of his generation. He was not a simple figure, and the Venezuela he governed was not a simple country. The poor of Venezuela had real reasons to support him. The independent journalists, judges, and political opponents who experienced the Bolivarian state's pressure and intimidation had real reasons to fear what he was building. The question of how to weigh these different experiences against each other is not merely a political question — it is a moral one, and it does not have a clean answer.

Also Profiled — Colombia, Venezuela & Bolivia