Venezuela: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
Beasley-Murray, Jon
So this is how a modern coup d'etat is over- thrown: almost invisibly, at the margins of the media. Venezuela returned to democracy despite a self-imposed media blackout of...
...Now the networks had instituted their own cadena, the apparent diversity of variety shows masking a uniform silence about what was happening on the streets...
...Yet this neopopulism has failed, and even several weeks on, the fate of ChAvez's government, and indeed also of ChAvez himself, remains uncertain...
...One sign of this breakdown is the withdrawal of any popular legitimation for political systems-the clamor in Peru, Argentina, and now Venezuela (among other countries) has been against politicians of any kind, all of whom are regarded as equally corrupt and equally inadequate to the needs and demands of the multitude...
...Rather, events in Venezuela have demonstrated the limits of televisual representation itself, and so of the "neopopulism" that makes the medium central to its form of governance...
...They were chanting slogans in favor of Chivez, and carrying portraits of the deposed president...
...All the television stations were now running the images provided by channel eight-a new cadena had formed, as commercial television lapsed into a new form of stunned silence...
...But the failure of any representation of April's insurrection might also point towards a politics that is itself beyond representation, beyond a set of systematic substitutions of people for politicians...
...C hdivez once thought he depended upon television...
...Television has worked for the President, and his attempts to monopolize the medium in the weeks leading up to the coup, and on April 11 itself, were in some senses merely an extension of this characterthe margins of the media...
...Hence it is a mistake to put too much emphasis on the fact that the particular owners of Venezuela's commercial channels were set against the regime-though one of these, Gustavo Cisneros, is rumored to have bank-rolled the coup attempt...
...Vol )(XXVI, No 1 JULY/AUGUST 2002 19 e Vol XXXVI, No 1 JULY/AUGUST 2002 19CRISIS IN VENEZUELA his return from the political wilderness...
...No change on those other channels, however, most of which had returned to their regular programming...
...Not all was celebration, it is true: The television showed scenes of mourning for those who had died in the violent end to Thursday's protest march, but the stations also eagerly covered live the police raids, breathless reporters in tow, hunting down the Chdvez supporters allegedly responsible for these deaths...
...The regime has been given a breathing space, but it could still be overthrown, by democratic means or otherwise, especially if it continues, as before the coup, to depend all too much on the figure of the president himself, whose personal charisma is already lost on the middle classes...
...Given the continued lack of news coverage, we decided to go out and take a look for ourselves...
...No more stones were thrown, but the demonstrations could now at least be glimpsed on television, in fragments, in a series of blurred images the cameras snatched through cracked windows and over balconies...
...Other friends came by, full of similar rumors, and with word that people were gathering outside the national palace...
...Approaching the center of Caracas, we saw that crowds were indeed converging...
...The current regime has legitimacy, but this legitimacy does not come from a parade of invented rituals or fireside chats held in front of the cameras...
...Isaias Rodriquez...
...Carmona himself was then interviewed, by CNN...
...The state-owned channel was off the air...
...Chavismo" itself created the political vacuum that briefly allowed the far right pact of arms and commerce to take control...
...Several times the channel attempted to show images from inside the presidential palace, but these were eventually successfully screened first on CNN: The "guard of honour" defending the palace was declaring its loyalty to Chdvez...
...it comes from the multitude's constituent power...
...For in the tumultuous 48 hours in which the president was detained, it became clear that "Chavismo without Chivez" has a power all of its own, apt to surprise any confused attempt at representation...
...Venezuela now had three presidents simultaneously: Hugo Chavez, Pedro Carmona, and Cabello...
...We turned the television off...
...he was being held against his will at a naval base on an 18NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASCRISIS IN VENEZUELA A May 23 Caracas newspaper reads "Get Out" demanding the resignation of Chdvez's Attorney General, Dr...
...This time, however, he was no longer alone behind his desk, but flanked by most of his ministers and in a room crowded with people, buzzing with excitement and emotion...
...If this number of demonstrators was arriving from the eastern suburbs, then many more must be converging on the palace from the working class western part of the city...
...And then the state channel went off the air...
...Moreover, the former president had not resigned...
...island to the north...
...The President returned to the office from which he had been broadcasting on Thursday afternoon, when he attempted to close down the private stations and as the coup was unfolding...
...but the networks were airing soap operas and variety shows...
...ChAvez should not repeat the mistake-made both by the nineteenth-century liberators he reveres and the early twentieth-century populists he resembles-that he can serve as a substitute for that multitude, or that he can masquerade their agency as his own...
...the coup demonstrates that that model is, at best, in crisis...
...A group of 30 to 40 young and mobile demonstrators, on motorcycles and scooters, were agitating outside the plate glass windows...
...She added that none of this would appear on the television...
...Support for, or at least acceptance of, what was once an overwhelmingly popular regime remains in decline, in part as a result of a relentless assault by both the press and the television networks, but also because it has so far failed to achieve its stated aim of transforming what, for all its oil resources, remains a country with considerable poverty...
...Venezuela returned to democracy despite a self-imposed media blackout of astonishing proportions...
...Restaurants were full in traditional middle class nightspots, such as the nearby village of El Hatillo, with its picturesque colonial architecture and shops selling traditional handicrafts...
...The pact between military and commerce was beginning to unravel...
...But no camera teams ventured outside, and we still had little idea as to Thousands of people were outside the presidential palace demanding Ch6vez's return...
...At one point CNN's anchor pointswitched to the same image of demonstrators "attacking" the building...
...As president, he has consistently tried to use the mass media as a means of securing a direct, apparently personable and approachable, relationship with the Venezuelan people...
...he must negotiate with them without at the same time betraying-and indeed while starting to fulfill-the desires of the multitude that overthrew it...
...hen a development: Suddenly one channel broke its regular programming to show scenes of the street outside its own headquarters...
...A local proChdvez mayor who had been in hiding from the repression was briefly visible...
...Those behind the presenters' desk were nervous, one fiddling compulsively with something on the desk, another shaking while holding the microphone, but there they were: a couple of journalists, a liberation theology priest, and a minister and a congressman from the previous regime...
...As the Armed Forces as well as the seat of power effectively passed back to the control of those loyal to the deposed regime, shortly before three AM Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, returned to the presidential palace, mobbed as soon as he left his helicopter by thousands of supporters in a state of near delirium...
...Only one question remained, posed by the thousands at the gates of the presidential palace and still besieging the private television stations: Would we see Chavez...
...More cell phone calls assured us that the crowd outside the palace was still growing, and still peaceful...
...large, but it was growing...
...Some reports were arriving of the crowds on the streets, but mainly we heard official pronouncements...
...The demonstration was not emed to be normal the day ; but news was word of mouth e that another as afoot...
...mate regime took place while the country's middle class was watching soap operas and game shows...
...The minister spoke first, and fast...
...In the event, however, the multitude came to fill that vacuum-silently at first and almost invisibly at tude, and not upon any televisual accessibility...
...And so the apparently unthinkable happened...
...We then headed towards the city's opulent East Side, and came across a procession of people advancing along the road towards us, people clearly poorer and more racially mixed than the East Side's usual inhabitants...
...He declared that the city was calm and under his control and he denied the interviewer's suggestion that he had been forced to take refuge in any army base, downplayed any insubordination among sectors of the armed forces, only to announce that his next step might be to fire some of Voi )(XXVI, No 1 JULY/AUGUST 200217 Vol XXXVI, No 1 JULY/AUGUST 2002 17CRISIS IN VENEZUELA the military high command...
...A Step in the circulating by Right Direction" was the banner headline on the front page and cell phon of one major newspaper on story w Saturday, and the new president, Pedro Carmona, former head of the Venezuelan chamber of commerce, was beginning to name the members of his "transitional" government, while the first new policies were being announced...
...Thousands of people were on the streets outside the presidential palace demanding Chivez's return...
...He first came to prominence thanks to a televised impromptu speech to fellow rebels following the failure of his own coup attempt in 1992...
...Over the next few hours, channel eight would go on and off the air several times...
...Until a similar group turned up at another channel's headquarters, then another, then another...
...The BBC had a reporter in the crowd, and spoke of thousands of people gathered...
...Each time the immediate fear was that it had been forcibly closed down again...
...Rather, it is that the multitude suggests another possible, liberatory, side to the almost complete breakdown of any semblance of a social pact that characterizes the Latin American "mainstream...
...Elsewhere, however, another story was afoot, the news circulating by word of mouth or cell phone...
...First the army chief spoke, and we heard the signs of incipient splits among the forces behind the ruling junta: The army would continue to support interim president Carmona only if he reinstated Congress as well as the other democratically elected regional governors who had been unconstitutionally deposed the previous day...
...We doubled back and tracked the march from parallel streets, watching as the numbers grew, as passers-by were called to join in this unexpected protest...
...edly asked its Caracas correspondent whether or not local television was covering this tense situation: No, he replied, despite these same channels' protests over alleged censorship under the previous regime...
...She gave a version of the violent end to Thursday's march that absolutely differed from the narrative the media had put forward to justify the coup that had followed: The majority of the dead had been supporters of Chivez, not opposition protesters, and the snipers firing upon the crowds were members of police forces not under the regime's control...
...another from a journalist who also cancelled an appointment, saying that a parachute regiment and a section of the air force had rebelled...
...I turned it on: indeed, not a sign...
...Later, around one AM, amid the confusion, we saw pictures of Chivez's vice-president, Diosdado Cabello, inside the palace, being sworn in as president...
...The congressman appealed directly to the owners and managers of other television stations to portray what was happening in Caracas...
...Neighborhood police were eyeing them carefully, but letting them pass...
...He has published on Peronism, Sendero Luminoso, and Central American testimony, among other topics...
...He would like to thank particularly Luis Duno and Marnie Hylton for their hospitality during his brief but eventful stay in Caracas...
...This was the occasion on which he famously declared that the rebels' goals had not, "for the time being," been fulfilled, laying open the possibility of Ch vez speaking on television on April 20, 2002...
...By the evening of Friday April 12, Caracas seemed to be returning to normal the day after the coup that had brought down the regime of President Hugo Chavez...
...Some rocks were thrown, some windows smashed and graffiti sprayed, and suddenly a new cadena formed as all the networks not been screened on what was happening at the presidential palace...
...A huge popular revolt against an illegitiJon Beasley-Murray is co-director of the MA in Latin American Cultural Studies program at the University of Manchester, England...
...The international channels were showing footage shot during the day, of police repression of protests in the poorer neighborhoods-the footage was out there, but had any local channels...
...Control over the state oil company, PDVSA, the world's largest oil company and Latin America's largest company of any kind, had been central to the ongoing crisis that had led to the coup, and its head of production announced, to much applause, that "not one barrel of oil" would now be sent to Cuba...
...Early on Saturday afternoon, I received three phone calls in quick succession: one from somebody I was due to meet who called on his cell phone to say he was turning back as he had heard there were barricades in the streets and an uprising in a military base...
...These events resist representation and have yet to be turned into narrative or analysis--the day after, the newspapers simply failed to appear-but they inspire thoughts of new forms of Latin American political legitimacy, of which this revolt may be just one particularly startling harbinger...
...State television had, amazingly, come back onto the airwaves...
...Thereafter television could do no more than bear mute witness to a series of events almost without precedent in Latin America, and perhaps elsewhere, as a repressive regime, result of a pact between the military and business, was brought down less than 48 hours after its initial triumph...
...Though Chivez and Chavismo claim to represent that multitude, April's insurrection should be the signal that the regime is in the end dependent upon, and constituted by, that multiCh6vez tried to reconstruct the contract between people and nation by televisual means, but the medium itself rebelled against him...
...We were switching rapidly between channels-to CNN and the BBC at the top of the hour, and then through the various commercial channels to try to see at least a partial view of the multitude that must now be on the streets...
...At around 10:30 pm, on one of these sweeps through the channels, we saw a station that had been dark had now come back to life...
...But as we drove around, we saw almost no sign of any police or army on the streets...
...It is not so much that Chivez himself demonstrates that other models are possible...
...Finally, the head of the National Guard pronounced that respect and recognition needed to be shown to those who had supported-and continued to support-the deposed president, Chavez...
...television networks took notice only in the very final moments, and, even then, only once they were absolutely forced to do so...
...As ChAvez's personalism allows for no competition, it leaves few alternatives to those who believe in the generally progressive causes advanced-if intermittently- by his government...
...But, according to the constitution, if Congress were reinstated, and in the absence of the previous president and vice-president, the head of Congress should rightfully be next in line as head of state...
...As we had access via cable to BBC World and Spanish-language CNN, however, we started to receive reports of disturbances in various parts of Caracas that morning, and some details about the parachute regiment's refusal to surrender arms to the new regime...
...Darkness fell, and still no word from any of the national networks...
...Indeed, the privately owned networks had previously protested loudly and bitterly about the former president's policy of decreeing so-called cadenas (literally "networks," but referring to Chdvez's public addresses themselves) in which he obliged all the networks to broadcast his own, often long and rambling, addresses to the nation...
...But the group moved on and the soap operas resumed...
...In the center itself, and at the site of Thursday's disturbances, some improvised barricades had been constructed using piles of rubbish or burning tires, marking out the territory around the national palace itself...
...istic style...
...Meanwhile, we were listening to the radio...
...a third from a friend who warned there was gunfire in the city center, and that a state of siege might soon be imposed...
...each time, it turned out that technical problems were to blame as the channel was making do with a team unaccustomed to the equipment...
...Yes, we were...
...But the balance of power had shifted to supporters of the previous regime...
...He is one of the few world leaders with his own call-in show, in which for several hours a week he chats with members of the public live and on air...
...hanks to that multitude, Venezuela continues to constitute a dissident exception to the contemporary prevalence of a neoliberalism that has only accentuated the divide between rich and poor throughout Latin America...
...Now the self-censorship of soap operas and light entertainment stood in the way of any representation of what was slowly emerging as a pro-Chdvez multitude...
...Every Venezuelan commercial station was continuing with normal programming-and the state-owned channel had been off the air since Thursday's coup...
...A counter-narrative was emerging...
...We decided to head home...
...This march was headed towards the city center, as were a stream of buses apparently commandeered by other Chavistas...
...A friend phoned almost immediately: "Are you watching channel eight...
...The color balance and contrast of these studio images were all wrong, the cameras held by amateur hands, and only one microphone seemed to be working...
...ChAvez still has a large proportion of the middle classes firmly set against him, people who supported the coup...
...We turned on the television...
...The current president, Carmona, was the illegitimate head of a de facto regime arising from a military coup...
...Those who had banged on pots and pans for months and marched the previous day to protest against Caracas se the government seemed to be breathing a sigh of relief that returning to r the whole process had been resolved so quickly and appar- after the coup ently so easily...
...The situation was extremely confused, the majority of the channels were still transmitting none of this, and rumors reported on the BBC suggested that two of the three-Carmona as well as Chdvez-were currently being detained by different sectors of the armed forces...
...Hugo ChAvez tried to reconstruct that contract by televisual means, but the medium itself rebelled against him, and it will continue to do so...
...Venezuela's coup, and the revolt that overturned it, constitute another sign of the disappearance of the former contract-however illusory-that brought together people and nation...
...The people who had taken over the state television station were clearly improvising, desperately...
Vol. 36 • July 2002 • No. 1
