With Colonel Chávez behind bars after his ‘military intervention’ of February 1992, the coup attempt later the same year seemed almost like a coda to the first, though it was considerably more violent. On November 27, a second effort was made to capture President Pérez, and the Miraflores palace was bombed from the air. Heavy fighting took place, both in Caracas and in Maracay, and more than 170 people were killed.
The chief organiser of the coup was Admiral Hernán Grüber Odremán, assisted by air force General Francisco Visconti Osorio, a member of Chávez’s Bolivarian conspiracy whose planes had failed to take off in February. Both men were later to play a political role in the Chávez government in 1999, Grüber as the governor of Caracas, and Visconti as a member of the Constitutional Assembly.
Admiral Grüber was not a natural rebel. Born in Upata in 1940, he came from a long-established German immigrant family, farming land in the state of Bolívar once owned by the Franciscan missionaries of Caroní. He joined the navy in 1958, while his brother, Roberto, joined the army and eventually rose to be a general. Grüber took part in the suppression of the left-wing guerrillas in Lara and Anzoátegui in the 1960s, and subsequently was appointed to senior positions in frontier areas, notably on the Colombian border at Puerto Páez.
In the aftermath of the February coup, considerable discussion had taken place within the government and the armed forces about what might happen next. What was behind the conspiracy? How far had it spread? What measures could be taken to stop the rot?
In March, General Ochoa, the defence minister, summoned Admiral Grüber for a private discussion. They were joined by another senior naval officer, Admiral Luís Enrique Cabrera Aguirre. At issue was the continuing groundswell of discontent within the military. One particular grievance, high on the agenda, was the way in which junior and low-grade officers had been promoted to senior rank at the whim of civilian politicians, disregarding all established procedures.
A version of the meeting written up by Grüber was clearly designed to enlist sympathy for his cause. Yet it gives a chilling account of the extent of the dissatisfaction within the armed forces, and the outspoken way in which senior officers were prepared to voice their preoccupations to their indecisive political masters.
General Ochoa told the two admirals that he was concerned about the situation inside the armed forces. He perceived that it was ‘still very delicate’. He had heard ‘accounts of serious discontent among middleranking and junior officers’, he said, and he wanted to know what the two admirals thought was going on.
‘Look,’ replied Admiral Cabrera, ‘you must understand that the senior ranks have lost all credibility and trust. It’s that simple. The subalterns no longer believe in their generals and colonels.’
‘How can you be so certain?’ asked Ochoa. ‘Do you put them all in same camp?’
‘From generals and colonels who have all been promoted as a result of carrying the bags of some senator or other,’ replied Cabrera, ‘what can you expect?’
‘So what should be done?’ asked Ochoa, turning to Grüber.
‘You want me to tell you?’ Grüber replied pithily (and this of course is his own highly coloured account). ‘The entire high command should be asked to resign. They should be retired immediately, and replaced by officers with genuine military qualifications.’
‘But that would lead to chaos,’ objected Ochoa.
‘Look,’ Grüber went on, ‘the chaos will get worse as the military discontent accumulates. How is it possible that in the Soviet Union they could sack their defence minister and other high officials when a young German pilot landed his plane on Moscow’s Red Square, while in Venezuela the army commander still keeps his job after half his forces have taken part in a rebellion, and everyone pretends that nothing has happened?’
It was a good question, but General Ochoa took no action. He could neither sack the high command, nor discipline the junior officers who were clearly plotting another coup. Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, the entire government was paralysed, unable to act.
Ochoa did manage to set in train the preparation of an academic survey of the situation within the armed forces, for he wanted to get a clear overview of the dimensions of the dissent. Admiral Cabrera was handed this important task, and was provided with a team of university researchers. They interviewed a large number of senior politicians and generals, both in retirement and in active service, and they also sent questionnaires to 5,000 servicemen stationed at the most important garrisons in the country, at Aragua, Táchira, Zulia, Monagas, and Caracas.
Their report, signed by Cabrera, was ready by the middle of July. It revealed the existence of five serious complaints about the condition of the armed forces and about the state of the nation, and made a number of comments and recommendations. Some of the complaints were about conditions of service: the inadequate nature of the health service within the armed forces; the ineffectiveness of the social security system; and the ‘poor’ perception of the system of promotions and of the provision of compensation for the loss of seniority. Other complaints indicated a more general (and thus less remediable) discontent: a lack of leadership; and the culture of corruption, both political and military, that permeated the country at the highest level.
The chief of the general staff, General Iván Jiménez Sánchez, received the report and took note of it. He even promised that he would set up a commission to ensure that its recommendations were implemented. Inevitably, perhaps, given the political stasis in the country, the report was shelved.
In August, with no guarantee that any reforms would be made in the wake of the February coup, and with no attention paid to the July report, Admiral Grüber’s group began to plot a new coup. Those included in his conspiracy were Cabrera from the navy, Visconti from the air force, and a number of civilian contacts, chiefly from La Causa R. Grüber’s group also enjoyed the support of the surviving members of Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement, directed from Chávez’s cell in the Yare prison. The group called itself the ‘July 5 Movement’, in homage to the independence struggle and Venezuela’s national day.
More time seems to have been spent on planning events after the imagined success of their coup than on thinking how they might make the actual uprising more effective than the previous one. The initial political plan was to form a Council of State, with both civilians and officers, and with a civilian as president. The council would last for a year or so, and try to reorganise the country. The model was that of the Patriotic Junta of 1958, though they had also read up what happened on the occasion of Rómulo Betancourt’s coup against General Medina Angarita on October 18, 1945, when a ‘revolutionary junta’ had been installed in the Miraflores palace.
Their plans were subject to innumerable delays, and several key plotters lost enthusiasm as the weeks went by. Elections, for governors and mayors, were due in December, and the conspirators realised that their actions might be misconstrued if their coup were to occur during or after that event. They decided that they would have to act quickly, in November. Admiral Grüber, whose pseudonym was ‘Julius Caesar’, describes in his memoirs how the decision was taken ‘to cross the Rubicon’.
On November 25, he put the final touches to his preparations, making a video recording of the speech that he planned to have broadcast to the nation on the day of the coup. He practised before the cameras, and the technicians seemed satisfied with the result.
Two days later, on the morning of November 27, he arrived at his headquarters to preside over what he hoped would be a well-organised coup. Yet as before, in the case of the Chávez coup, there were serious errors and omissions, with important participants failing to keep their promised appointments. Worst of all was the failure of the communications equipment. Like Chávez before him, Grüber had no means of keeping contact with the officers in other parts of the country. He too was destined to be isolated and out of touch.
There was one difference. This time, the conspirators had managed to seize a television station, and Grüber pinned his hopes on a civilian uprising. If his video were to be shown on television screens across the nation, calling for support for his programme of national reconstruction, he fondly imagined that the masses would rise up and support his rebellion.
Disaster struck again, and no one seems to know quite how it happened. Instead of the measured and recorded tones of the admiral announcing a coup d’état and calling for popular support, a series of conflictive images flickered across the television screen. Masked men appeared, and promptly embarked on a round of looting reminiscent of the Caracazo; occasional bursts of rhetoric could be heard from the voice of the imprisoned Colonel Chávez.
It seems that the videos had been switched, or perhaps the operator had picked up the wrong one to put in his machine. No one subsequently claimed responsibility for what went wrong. The televisionwatching nation, preparing to go to work, did not know whether to laugh or cry. They certainly had no intention of going out into the streets to support a revolution organised in such an incompetent way.
Later in the morning, as he had done in February, President Pérez appeared on the screen to announce that all was well, and at midday Admiral Grüber surrendered. At that very moment, an air force plane passed over Caracas, making a supersonic bang. Grüber’s video that was never shown had mentioned a flypast, as the signal for the people to take to the streets. Now, nobody moved. General Visconti wisely embarked his air force conspirators onto a Hercules cargo plane and set off across Colombia to seek sanctuary in Peru. At the prisons of Yare and San Carlos, a fresh group of failed military conspirators joined Colonel Chávez behind bars.