QUERETARO, Mexico, April 30 (UPI) -- In mid-April, the coup came and, in three days, went. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is still there.
Chávez's opponents, with U.S. approval, certainly, though not with meaningful U.S. backing, made their move too soon. And now a nervous Chávez is rethinking but still does not know where to go.
His first change was both simple and wise. Workers in the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, had rejected Chávez's appointment in February of an obedient Central Bank economist, Gaston Parra, as its head. Chávez, they believed, was going to sack the company. A strike at PDVSA became something galvanizing, a flame that lit the protest that briefly removed Chávez from power.
Chávez had to do something to calm down PDVSA. He found the solution and named the head of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Ali Rodríguez, to the post. Rodríguez is a respected oil man who has shown little inclination to involve himself in politics. PDVSA workers welcomed the appointment and went back to work. For Chávez this was one big problem solved.
Sunday came the next major step. Chávez replaced his unpopular sidekick, Diosdado Cabello, as his vice-president and appointed Jose Vicente Rangel, who had been defense minister to the No. 2 role. Rangel also is a former foreign minister. Chávez has an experienced man at his side.
But a new defense minister has not been appointed, presenting Chávez with a huge challenge. Two months ago he claimed, unconvincingly, that the military was at his side and therefore a coup could not happen in Venezuela. Events have disproved that claim. Now the task of bringing the armed forces fully behind him is impossible. Chávez's enemies in the military hierarchy are not going to be won over.
On the other hand, Chávez has his supporters, most notably at the powerful Maracay barracks less than two hours from Caracas. It was from Maracay that the move came that brought Chávez back to power. Chávez's goal is therefore as clear as it is difficult to achieve: to avoid alienating the support he has in Maracay and to leave his enemies with no good reason to launch a new unconstitutional attack on him.
If the military is one area of vulnerability, the economy is another, and still more difficult to repair.
Chávez's unstable term has been disastrous for the economy. Investment and growth have plummeted, and wealthy Venezuelans have taken their money -- and sometimes themselves -- out of the country.
Some of the blame for this must lie with the planning minister, Jorge Giordani, a longtime Chávez associate. He has prime responsibility for economic policy. But three years into his term, it is hard to give any description to his economic policy other than that it has been chaotic and has sewn uncertainty about property rights.
Since the weekend, it has been rumored that Giordani is going to be replaced and that Teodoro Petkoff, a planning minister for a time under former President Rafael Caldera, had been approached.
Petkoff is a remarkable figure who, on the basis of his biography, might be thought to have an affinity with Chávez. Early in life, he was a Marxist guerrilla, but by the time that Caldera turned to the middle-aged Petkoff in 1997 -- with the economy, as now, in desperate straits -- Petkoff had become an economist with a viewpoint closer to that of Wall Street than of Che Guevara.
Under Petkoff, Venezuela approached the IMF for a standby agreement, which was granted, and the country went down the route of orthodox economic policy for a short but promising interval during which investment and growth leaped. But the policy waned as Caldera's term drew to a close and Chávez headed in a quite different direction.
That Chávez should approach Petkoff now is therefore a signal that he -- though not many of his supporters -- senses that his unorthodox policies are leading nowhere, and that he needs a more orthodox approach if money is to stop leading out of the country, and growth, expected to be negative this year, is to resume.
That is the signal of a policy U-turn. But Petkoff, who told this correspondent more than three years ago that he would not serve in a Chávez government, has turned Chávez down.
Chávez has a problem, one of his own making. He has managed the economy badly for three years and has amply demonstrated his authoritarian tendencies. What Venezuelan economist with any credibility would want to be associated with him?
This means that Chávez now and in weeks to come is going to continue groping for an economic policy -- and for a way to handle public opinion in a country that his singular personality divides.
For all his remarkable comeback, the tragedy of Chávez is unchanged. He is a symbol of the frustration and anger of Venezuela's poor, of their despair with a divided country that has oil wealth and a wealthy elite, but that has been going backwards for more than 20 years. However badly Chávez has run the country, many of the poor still see him as one of their own, while they distrust the elite.
That the division between rich and poor is so stark in Venezuela is the fault of the elite, which has failed to run the country well for decades. But Chávez, ironically, is making Venezuela's inequities still worse -- the poor suffer more from a weak economy than the rich.
What remains unclear is how Chávez's term will play out. The dangers are very great. He splits both the civilian population and the military. Civil war is possible. It is also possible that an ousted Chávez would provoke the sort of guerrilla conflict that has dogged Colombia for decades, impoverishing the country and obliging most of its citizens to live in fear.
An outcome of this kind will best be avoided if Chavez's opponents are judicious and patient. They have a right to oppose him, but not to overthrow him in a coup. They would do best to wait for Chávez to discredit himself even with his own constituency, the poor. Perhaps then Venezuela might learn something from the rise and fall of an unwise demagogue.
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