QUERETARO, Mexico, April 12 (UPI) -- His fall had become a matter of time, but when it came it was sudden and a little unexpected. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had won the enmity of most Venezuelans. Only an incident was needed to bring his tragicomic reign to an end. The incident occurred Thursday.
Chávez has been a bullying president, but not a violent one. But Thursday, on the third day of a general strike, a protest in Caracas was met with gunfire and 10 people were killed. It then appears that some senior military officers suggested to Chávez that he should resign -- things were getting out of hand. The normally combative Chávez acceded to their request. Thursday evening the military was saying that it had taken control. Friday morning Chávez announced that he had resigned. After a little more than three years and -- because of sweeping constitutional changes he had introduced in his first, popular days, two election victories -- Chávez was out, even though he has four more years of his term to run.
It is not hard to pinpoint why he fell. He had words but no policies, not even the radical, left-wing ideas that he sometimes mentioned but from which he swiftly stepped back.
Chávez was a mouthpiece who made speeches lasting hours, just like his friend and, to some extent, model, Fidel Castro in Cuba. He no doubt dreamed of enjoying the degree of control Castro wields over Cuba, and he sought it by turning to Venezuela's own revolutionary, the nineteenth century liberator Simón Bolívar. But Chávez's Bolivarian revolution only briefly caught fire. What Venezuelans wanted were more jobs, less crime, less corruption -- a sense that the country was ending the long slide back that began in the early 1980s when oil prices began to drop from the peaks of the 1970s.
Chávez was Venezuela's hope, the hope first of the poor but then of the whole country, the Robin Hood made Sheriff of Nottingham in what would be a time of justice and beneficence for all. Chávez could not deliver any of this. He brought only words, erratic decisions, insult followed by charm, disinvestment, a weaker economy: disappointment.
Now Chávez is in the custody of the military, the organization from which he sprang as a coup-mongering middle-ranking officer in 1992, but among whose hierarchy he has never been popular. Venezuela's military, although still a political force in the country, has kept out of government for decades. Its intervention now should not be seen as the beginning of a military government. Pedro Carmona, the head of Fedecámaras, the employers organization -- which has temporarily acquired street credibility because it backed the anti-Chávez strike called by the unions Tuesday -- has taken control provisionally. Soon, no doubt, fresh elections will be arranged.
Chávez, if he is lucky, will be allowed to go into exile, probably in Cuba. But he may well not be lucky. There have been many allegations of corruption and they will probably be investigated. Chávez may end up in jail, where he will be kept under tight security. There may be a question mark about whether that is the best place for the man who was once Robin Hood -- and who may become Robin Hood again, in difficult years to come.
For there is a side to Chávez's rise and fall that it is important to bear in mind. Chávez was, as we have said, a mouthpiece. He was a channel for this tormented country's frustration -- in particular, the frustration of the growing number of poor Venezuelans. They are poor because an economy that is utterly dependent on oil cannot provide a high standard of living for thirty million people--unless oil prices treble or quadruple, as they did in the 1970s. Venezuela can no longer provide its people with the jobs and handouts it could once afford. A non-oil economy must be built, and that will take time, political stability and reforms that Venezuela's poor will find painful and perhaps unacceptable.
Venezuela is a divided country temporarily united by its disapproval of Chávez, its false savior. But Venezuela's problems go deeper than Chávez. He was a symptom, not their cause. The dream of oil-fed prosperity and the reality of inequality and poverty -- that is Venezuela's curse. The country is tense. Prosperity is not so easy to build.
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