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Until 1992, with thirty four years of uninterrupted civilian rule, Venezuela was considered one of the most stable democracies in South America. This fact was largely due to the behavior of the military, which has played an important yet contradictory role in Venezuela's political history. In October 1945, a group of young officers executed a coup d'etat that led to the establishment of a democratic regime. However, in 1948 the armed forces put an end to the democratic experiment and established a military dictatorship. In 1958, military officers again played a central role in politics. They overthrew dictator Marco Pdrez Jimenez, and a year later facilitated the transition of power to a democratically elected regime.
Despite more than a dozen minor coup attempts in the early 1960s, the country's elected leaders managed to consolidate the democratic regime and to bring the military under civilian control. The Venezuelan armed forces appeared to have overcome the legacy of caudillism and praetorianism that characterized Latin America during this period. This record prompted Alain Rouquie, a keen observer of the region, to state in 1982 that Venezuela is one of the few states in South America where for over "two decades the relations between the civilians and the military have been of the non-interventionist type" (Rouquie 1982:198).
This rather enviable record was broken in 1992, when the Venezuelan military staged two coup attempts against the constitutionally-elected government of President Carlos Andres Perez. Though the coups failed to unseat the civilian authorities, nevertheless they signalled, that under certain conditions, the country's armed forces could and would revert to praetorianism. Moreover, one of the leaders of the coup attempt, Col. Hugo Chavez, was elected president of Venezuela in the December 6, 1998 elections. This article will explore the factors and motives behind the coup attempts, analyze the causes of failure, and evaluate Venezuelan civil-military relations since 1992 that led to Chavez's electoral triumph.
The Setting and the Causes
Like all other social phenomena, military conspiracies and coups do not happen in a vacuum. Instead, they tend to occur in societies characterized by weak economies, social fragmentation, and political instability. Venezuela is a classic example of an export economy and, as such, has experienced the ups and the downs associated with it....