The Foreign Service Journal, May 2005

120,000 barrels of fuel oil a month to China. At present, Caracas sells about 60 percent of its output to the United States. In effect, American petrodol- lars are financing Chavez’s revolu- tion. On occasion, there is talk of Venezuela suspending oil exports to the United States for perceived U.S. misdeeds but analysts say that is unlikely because the American mar- ket is the only one that makes sense for Venezuela because of its size and easy geographic access. The 2002 Coup Attempt The events of April 2002 in Caracas were among the most dramatic in Latin America during the past half- century. Widespread anti-Chavez protests erupted on Thursday, April 11. Gunfire left at least 18 dead and many more wounded, although it was not clear how many casualties each side was responsible for. Dissident military leaders seized Chavez and took him to a military base near the coast. It was officially announced that Chavez had resigned and that Pedro Carmona, a businessman, had been named interim president. In a statement issued on April 12, the morning after Chavez was de- tained, the State Department said the president had resigned and, before doing so, fired his vice president and Cabinet. It asserted that his ouster was the result of his provocations, a reference to the violence that occurred during the demonstrations, and added that the new government was planning to hold elections in six months. The statement conspicuously failed to indicate any concern about the unconstitutional outcome. It was not until the evening of April 13, just hours before Chavez returned to power, that the United States con- demned the coup, joining other mem- bers of the Organization of American States in a strongly-worded resolution. Arturo Valenzuela, a top State Department aide during the Clinton administration, said he was appalled by the seeming U.S. acceptance of the coup. In an opinion piece written after Chavez was reinstated, Valen- zuela warned: “The United States now risks losing much of the consid- erable moral and political leadership it had rightly won over the last decade as the nations of the Americas sought to establish the fundamental principle that the problems of democracy are solved in democracy, not through resorting to unconstitutional means.” Privately, State Department offi- cials had been doubting Chavez’s commitment to democracy starting well before the events of April 2002. To these and other officials, his actions resurrected the old question of how to deal with an undemocratic leader who is elected democratically. Some would argue that removing him would be a subversion of democracy; others say that leaving him in power would lead to the same result. Based partly on the hemispheric Democrat- ic Charter, which took effect in September 2001, the official U.S. pol- icy was to support institutional status quo in Venezuela. But on that cli- mactic day in April 2002, there was a clear impression in Washington and in Latin American capitals that Chavez’s enemies had forced him out, the first unconstitutional change of govern- ment in a major hemispheric country in 26 years. This conclusion was reflected in the State Department statement of April 12. That impression was reinforced on that same day in a statement by George Folsom, the president of the pro-democracy International Repub- lican Institute. (The IRI is a govern- ment-funded GOP affiliate, with a Democratic counterpart, that seeks to promote democracy overseas through nonpartisan programs promoting voter education and other democratic building blocks.) Folsom hailed the efforts of the Venezuelan people to restore democracy to the country. He referred to Chavez not as “president” but as “lieutenant colonel,” his last rank before he was captured after leading the 1992 rebellion. Folsom further declared that the Venezuelan people “rose up to defend their democracy as a result of systematic repression by Chavez.” Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, which oversees the IRI, sent a letter to Folsom after Chavez’s reinstate- ment saying he was “greatly dis- turbed” by his comments. He said Chavez’s attempted removal through unconstitutional means “was under- standably seen by many democrats in the hemisphere as a blow to democra- cy in Venezuela.” The Carmona government, of course, was short-lived. Chavez’s sup- porters took to the streets to demand his return to office. Intimidated, the coup-makers backed off and, some- what miraculously, a chastened Chavez was back in power less than three days after his disappearance. Made in Washington? The U.S. role — or lack of it — in the coup attempt has been debated ever since. Washington denied any involvement and a State Department Inspector General’s report, complet- ed in July 2002, found “no evidence to suggest that the department or Embassy Caracas planned, participat- ed in or encouraged the overthrow of President Chavez.” Given the long history of American intervention in its hemispheric “back- yard” (e.g., Panama, the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Guatemala), Washington’s denials have been greet- ed with widespread skepticism. In recent years, though, the United States has acted decisively to defend elected governments faced with possi- ble ouster due to an internal uprising. It has helped preserve constitutional order in Guatemala and Ecuador, and 68 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 5