By Scott Wilson Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, December 21, 2002; Page A01
MARACAY, Venezuela -- As gasoline, food and patience run low in Venezuela's punishing 19-day-old national strike, President Hugo Chavez's most ardent political opponents have begun making private appeals to key military officers for help in toppling his four-year-old government, the officers said.
The discreet contacts with military officers, pressing them to intervene, represent a significant shift for civilian opposition leaders. Since the current strike began, they have called for the military to stand back and allow the political standoff to be settled through negotiations. And in public, that hasn't changed.
The private approaches to officers were apparently spurred by the failure of massive street demonstrations and a paralyzing oil strike to persuade the twice-elected Chavez to resign or accept early elections. With the threat of violence and food shortages rising, one high-ranking general said he has been offered "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to move against Chavez and bring an end to the crisis.
The appeals are likely to have little effect without a strong burst of fresh violence or more extreme economic chaos, according to active duty and dissident military officers, as well as political analysts here. Since April, when he was briefly ousted in a coup led by a group of generals and admirals, only to return a few days later, Chavez has purged nearly half the senior officer corps, placed longtime friends and allies in key combat and intelligence commands and spent more time with troops and in military academies explaining his political program.
"Those who came forward against him in April and expressed themselves as opponents have been retired, and that dealt with quite a few of them, some of whom were the true leaders of their respective branches," said Anibal Romero, a professor specializing in military affairs at Simon Bolivar University. "He has also done his homework on indoctrination. He has, it seems, been able to convince some younger officers that he is fighting for the poor, against corruption and the rest of what he proclaims."
In this garrison town 90 miles west of Caracas, the capital, those changes have solidified Chavez's grip on the army's Fourth Armored Division, the country's biggest and best-equipped combat unit. It was within this 12,000-member unit that a "counter-coup" emerged two days after Chavez was removed on April 11, raising the threat of troop-against-troop violence and collapsing the interim government put into place by the coup leaders.
Of the eight senior officers who led the counter-coup, two died days later in a helicopter accident. The remaining six have been named to such key posts as commander of the army, commander of the navy, director of military intelligence, the navy's inspector general and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Gen. Raul Baduel, a Tao-practicing paratrooper who was the first senior officer to declare himself against the coup, was named commander of the Fourth Armored Division.
Taken together, those appointments and other changes Chavez has made in smaller infantry and armored units critical to any coup have strengthened his hold over the military's most important elements as he strives to ride out this latest challenge to his rule.
In recent weeks, Baduel said he has received "hundreds of calls," including some from dissident generals and members of the civilian opposition, urging him to act. He said one dissident general called him before the strike began and said that "there would be many deaths" over the course of the protest.
"There have been calls, even propositions from a very high level of an economic nature, that at this point have reached hundreds of thousands of dollars, so that I, to put it elegantly, would intervene with the president so that the president understands he has to resolve the situation with his resignation," Baduel said in an interview, as Gregorian chants and incense smoke wafted through his office,
Reflecting the delicacy of the issue in a country still embarrassed by April's abortive coup, Carlos Fernandez, president of the country's largest business federation and a leader of the civilian opposition group known as the Democratic Coordinator, denied that anyone from the group had called Baduel, at least not with authorization. "We have approved nothing like this," Fernandez said. "We are not involved in that at all."
Chavez's grip on the military represents his most important defense against a future coup as Venezuela, after a year of intense political conflict, continues a slow descent into economic turmoil and street unrest. "I don't have big worries [about the military]," Chavez said in a recent interview, "but, yes, I have worries because of the psychological campaign" he says is being conducted against him by the opposition-controlled media.
Gasoline supplies are nearly exhausted because of the oil strike, and another protest march Friday brought hundreds of thousands into the streets of Caracas demanding the president's resignation. Nearly identical events preceded Chavez's ouster in April. A national strike, including a shutdown of the country's lifeblood oil industry, prompted a march on the presidential palace that ended with 19 people dead and Chavez's arrest.
At the time, the Bush administration signaled tacit endorsement of the coup, swiftly promising to work with a government put in place by the plotters. This time, U.S. officials, at least in public, have repeatedly voiced support for a constitutional solution. Pentagon officials have said they are telling counterparts in Caracas to stay in their barracks.
Economic distress is deeper today than in April, but this time the military has offered public support for the government and worked on the president's behalf.
Chavez has deployed 3,000 troops to restart the oil industry by protecting gas stations, escorting tanker trucks and retaking tanker ships whose crews have joined the strike. National guard troops have been deployed to disperse opposition protests, orders they have carried out swiftly. Gen. Julio Garcia Montoya, the army's commanding general and one of the officers who participated in the April counter-coup, this week called the strike an "aggression against the survival of the state in the camouflage of civic protest and legitimate political action." He also ordered every soldier to carry a copy of the constitution.
Chavez, a former officer, has had a complicated relationship with the 80,000-member armed forces, the institution he knows best and admires most. The son of teachers in the southern state of Barinas, Chavez chose the military for a free education. He attended the military academy at Fuerte Tiuna in Caracas, where he would be taken decades later following the coup, and fell in among a group of officers agitating for political change.
Those activities surfaced in February 1992 when Chavez, then a lieutenant colonel commanding a paratroop battalion here, participated in a failed coup against then-President Carlos Andres Perez. Although his former comrades in arms blame him for the failure, Chavez emerged as a political star, declaring brashly in a television appearance on his way to a two-year jail term that the coup attempt was meant as a blow against corruption that had crippled this country of 23 million people.
Promising a "social revolution" for Venezuela's poor majority on his election as president six years later, Chavez turned to the military for help in carrying out its most extreme elements. He chose like-minded generals and colonels for key civilian posts and put lower-ranking soldiers to work building public housing, supplying rural markets and working on country roads and bridges.
Those moves politicized the ranks, opening an ideological breach between the officer corps and the troops, who have humbler roots. The navy and the air force, the smallest military branches, are traditionally run by officers from the urban elite and were particularly divided. The primary leaders of the April coup emerged from those services, and today the merchant marine, a branch of the navy, is playing a key role in the protest by keeping Venezuela's fleet of oil tankers at anchor.
But Chavez has appointed two allies to the navy's most important jobs. In addition, analysts said, the command changes he has made in the army have minimized the importance of any lingering dissent within the smaller branches. Of the 600 senior and mid-level officers dismissed or left jobless by a round of promotions in July, most came from the army, which accounts for half the military's overall troop force.
Among those displaced were Gen. Enrique Medina Gomez, who was military attache in Washington at the time of the coup and now is the highest-ranking of 127 dissident officers occupying Plaza Francia in a wealthy eastern Caracas neighborhood. Medina said the dissident officers, including some of those who were implicated in the April coup, have "channels to the majority of units" in the armed forces.
"Right now the ranks are confused. They don't know how to act," Medina said. "But, of course, there are small groups that support Chavez at all levels. The president has radicalized the situation, though, and this could lead to conflict within days."
Chavez has also made changes lower in the ranks, where his own coup attempt emerged. He has named loyal officers to head the Ayala armored battalion and the Bolivar infantry battalion in Caracas, called "coup commands" because of the essential role they would play in any move against the presidential palace. Commanders picked by Chavez also head the army garrison in Maracaibo, a northwestern city at the heart of the oil industry, and the national guard garrison in Valencia.
Baduel, who was one class behind Chavez at the military academy, headed the 3,200-member 42nd Brigade of paratroops at the time of the April coup and helped organize the military operation that rescued Chavez from prison on the island of La Orchila. When he elevated Baduel, Chavez also named his secretary, Gen. Pedro Centeno, to command the former paratroop brigade.
But other important commands have not been remade to the same extent, including those in Carupano and Puerto Cabello.
And pressure has been mounting on the military to act. "Chavez knows from personal experience the military can never be trusted," Romero said. "He knows you never know."
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19793-2002Dec20.html> -- Yoshie
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