NINETEEN years ago in Venezuela a right-wing military coup briefly unseated its elected President Hugo Chavez before loyal armed forces units and a popular mobilisation of Caracas’s barrios turned the tables and restored Chavez to the presidency.
The coup was mounted by a combination of industrialists, businessmen, media owners, the principal trade union movement’s leaders, Catholic bishops and conservative military officers, working closely with the US government.
When Chavez won the presidential election in 1998 with 57 per cent of the vote and a mission to transform the country, Venezuela was not — contrary to a mainstream media myth — a model, egalitarian social democracy.