The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela

3 The Military: From Marginalization to Center Stage

c h a p t e r t h r e e The Military From Marginalization to Center Stage Harold A. Trinkunas On the evening of April 11, 2002, the third day of a general strike against the government, the Venezuelan armed forces rebelled against their president, Hugo Chávez Frías. Reacting to the bloody outcome of clashes between proand antigovernment demonstrators near the presidential palace, the commander of the army, General Efraim Vásquez Velasco, announced in a nationally televised address that he would no longer obey presidential orders. High-ranking generals and admirals soon followed him on the airwaves, expressing their solidarity with the army commander and their opposition to the president. Within hours, the senior military o≈cer in the Venezuelan armed forces, General Lucas Rincón Romero, announced President Chávez’s resignation . Remarkably, the transitional government formed by a leading figure of the opposition, businessman Pedro Carmona, and backed by many senior military leaders lasted less than forty-eight hours. By April 14, 2002, President Hugo Chávez had returned to power, and his civilian and military opponents scrambled to pick up the pieces of their failed political adventure. In the months following the April 11, 2002, coup, Venezuela’s political leadership has tried to minimize the importance of divisions and conflict within The Military: From Marginalization to Center Stage 51 the armed forces, but to no avail. Public hearings by the National Assembly have heard from most of the major participants in the April event, and it is clearly apparent that the Venezuelan armed forces are profoundly politicized and divided. Former senior commanders such as General Manuel Rosendo, once the number three figure in the armed forces, have been highly critical of the e√orts of the Chávez administration to influence the political cast of the senior o≈cer corps (Poleo, 2002; We√er Cifuentes, 2002). This degree of politicization and civil-military conflict is nearly unprecedented in Venezuela’s recent democratic history. Although some presidents had experienced public di≈culties with military o≈cers during the Punto Fijo period (1958–98), these incidents were rapidly resolved in favor of civilian authorities (Maso, 2000). However, in the Fifth Republic, open military politicization has gone hand in hand with increasing levels of military participation in government decision making and policy implementation. This suggests that a fundamental transformation of civil-military relations has occurred in Venezuela and calls into question whether elected o≈cials have authority over the armed forces in this country. It is clear that any future democratic government in Venezuela, whether led by President Chávez or his successor, will have to contend with the reemergence of the armed forces as a political actor. Since the election of President Chávez in 1998 and the transition to the Fifth Republic, the role of the Venezuelan armed forces has expanded rapidly, deemphasizing external defense in favor of internal missions. This change has been not only in scope but also in the degree of participation by military personnel in state policy making. Simultaneously, through the process of writing and enacting a new constitution in 1999, President Chávez dismantled the mechanisms that previously allowed civilians to monitor—albeit inadequately—the armed forces and exclude them from political activity. Changes in the roles and missions of the armed forces and the institutions of civil-military relations suggest that civilian control in Venezuela has been eliminated. The shortcomings of this approach to civil-military relations are made clear by the aftermath of the April 11, 2002, coup. In the event of further civil-military conflict during this or any future administration, elected o≈cials will find themselves deprived of the institutional means by which to assert their authority over the armed forces or protect the security of the regime. In e√ect, Venezuelan civil-military institutions, as is the case with many other features of this country’s political regime, have unraveled to such a degree that they can no longer be compared to similar institutions in consolidated democ- 52 Harold A. Trinkunas racies. In fact, Venezuelan civil-military relations also inhabit a ‘‘gray zone’’ somewhere between democracy and outright military praetorianism (Myers and McCoy, 2003). Expanding the Role of the Armed Forces Since the inauguration of President Hugo Chávez in 1999, the role of the armed forces in Venezuela has rapidly ballooned from a relatively narrow focus...