Putsch comes to shove: Venezuela

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world after yesterday's dramatic attempt to oust Venezuela's president. We take a look at coups around the world. What makes them happen, what makes them succeed, and what are the risks for coup plotters who fail. And a surprise raid on North Korea's embassy in Madrid reveals just how difficult and thankless it is to be a dissident against the North Korean regime. But first, in Venezuela yesterday, the opposition leader Juan Guaido made his move to try to overthrow the embattled President Nicolas Maruro. He claimed his Operation Liberty would be the final push to depose a man who has retained power only through a sham election. Mr. Guaido is supported by millions of Venezuelans who are suffering from regime inflicted hunger and hardship. But it's the support of the military he needs in order to take power. And despite promising early signs, not enough of them decided to abandon Mr. Maduro.

La Venezuela de la violencia, La Venezuela del Golpectado.

In a defiant television address, the the president called the attempt a failure, lambasting those who handed their souls over to the coup mongering far right.

I was woken up shortly after 6am by the sound of saucepans being bashed, which is a traditional form of protest in Venezuela.

Stephen Gibbs writes for the Economist. He was among the crowds in the capital, Caracas yesterday as events unfolded and.

It soon transpired what was going on and that was that Juan Guaido was calling for a military uprising. It soon became apparent that this was by no means a normal day. All shops were barricaded up as they usually are when there is a protest. But this was not a typical protest because Huang Waido was out with soldiers and they were all standing on this motorway that overlooks the military base Military air base right in the center of Caracas. And those soldiers were wearing blue armbands as a sort of symbol of their defection. And the crowds grew and grew. And inside that air base, the sort of big question was whether the people inside, the soldiers, the conscripts inside, would heed what those outside were saying, which is, come and join us. Rebel against the Maduro government. Pretty quickly, it became apparent that they weren't going to do that. They were firing tear gas towards the crowds, towards us that were just on the other side of the barricade. And then things got even uglier. The rebel soldiers, apparently sort of rattled by something, began to fire live rounds into the air. That got a whole lot of people running. And it was a precarious situation. And then there was a sort of a standoff that lasted for several hours. One of the more striking things there was, there was Leopoldo Lopez. He is Venezuela's most famous political prisoner. He's been in jail or under house arrest since 2014. So to see him walking the streets, not walking particularly far, was quite extraordinary. And, you know, he managed to release himself by a defection of those people that were guarding him. So it was clear that this wasn't, as I say, a normal protest. Something unusual was going on that went on for several hours until after the tear gas sort of got unbearable. Most of the protesters recamped to a big square in Altamira here in eastern Caracas. And there was Guaido and Leopoldo Lopez and several members of the National Guard who had defected. And they were being sort of hugged by supporters. Some of them were there with their family. And this was the image, of course, that the opposition was hoping would be repeated massively across the country. This is what they're trying to do. They're trying to do a sort of velvet revolution where the feared security forces give up, put down their arms and say, you know, we're not going to support Maduro anymore. We're with this new president and everything's going to change. It didn't happen.

It sounds like there was good public support on the streets anyway for Mr. Guaido. Are the people rallying behind him more widely?

The short answer is yes. I mean, given that he was a relatively unknown figure last year, and now he is unquestionably the most famous opposition leader in Venezuela, it is probably worth saying that a lot of the support for Guaido is a sort of protest vote against Maduro. Maduro is not popular, but given that he is saying that he's leading a popular Revolution that in his last contested election, the one that Guaido and the opposition and much of the international community says was rigged last year, you know, he's standing for re election, or he stood for re election in the midst of the deepest recession in the world, inflation heading for 10 million percent, everyone feeling poorer, more miserable, public services here collapsing. So, you know, the idea that he could really command serious support seems implausible.

And what about the military whose allegiance has always been the linchpin here? What support does Mr. Guaido have from them?

I mean, it might be fair to say not as much support as he hopes. Since he came on the scene in early January, he has repeatedly said, look, I can only do this if the military come with me. I think there's no question that in the lower ranks of the army and the armed forces, people are not happy here because they're suffering exactly the same way that most Venezuelans are suffering. The problem is that the high ranking generals and Venezuela notoriously has a very top heavy army with thousands of generals. A lot of them are benefiting from the chaos here, from the corruption opportunities that may afford them, and also the whole armed forces. This is one of the things that Hugo Chavez, Maduro's predecessor, did. He politicised that institution effectively. Everyone sort of vows their allegiance to the socialist revolution and not just to Venezuela. So it is a relatively well controlled institution, as Juan Guaido is finding out.

And what will happen to Mr. Guaido if this fails altogether?

If this fails, which is perfectly probable, I don't think it's necessarily the end of Guaido. You know, he will probably continue and hope that the sort of drip by drip discontent in the military against Maduro will ultimately bear fruit. And I think the other person to watch is Leopoldo Lopez. He's now out of house arrest. He's going to be living, it seems, in the Spanish Embassy. That means he can see people, he can meet people he can negotiate. And that will be an interesting additional little twist to this long running saga.

Stephen, thanks very much for your time.

My pleasure.

While Nicolas Maduro seems to be clinging to power in Venezuela, opposition forces in other parts of the world have recently succeeded in deposing their dictators. But what can we learn about coups from past examples? In April, two despots were ousted, Abdelaziz Utaflika of Algeria and Omar Al Bashir of su. This might seem coincidental, but for some academics working to predict coups, some patterns are emerging.

Predicting coups is hard since one, they're in the future. And two, they're incredibly rare.

Wade Zhou is a data journalist at the Economist.

There are four factors that are most linked to coup risk. The most obvious is economic growth. Countries with sluggish economies or ones that are in hyperinflation tend to see more coups. How long a regime has been in power matters a lot, but this is a little bit tricky. New regimes take time to consolidate power, so they're vulnerable early on. But after around 18 months, citizens tend to grow weary of despots. So really, they're safest at around 18 months in. Another major factor is the weather. So countries that face severe floods or extreme droughts tend to see more coups. This is just because these events are linked to crop failure and rising food prices. But perhaps the most important factor is political stability. So countries that have seen coups recently are the ones most likely to see coups in the near future.

And so broadly, are coups becoming more or less common?

Funnily enough, coups are becoming much rarer. So in the 1960s through the 1980s, you would see around a dozen coups every year. Since then, you only see one or two. Last year, there were actually no coups.

And are there regions of the world that are kind of more coup prone than others?

Well, coups used to happen all around the world, in Latin America, in Southeast Asia. But these days, coups are becoming increasingly concentrated in the Middle east and Africa. These countries are still lagging behind economically and are prone to adverse weather conditions.

With this in mind, dictators of regimes vulnerable to coups have developed some strategies to try to reduce their risk of being deposed.

Dictators can do a lot to reduce the possibility of coup, but the main thing is just making sure that the men with guns around you are loyal to you. And you can see how that's played out in Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro has lavished money on the army, and they have seemed to have decided that the best thing for them now is to keep him in power, not to follow these calls to throw out the president.

Daniel Knowles is our international correspondent.

Or you can do the opposite. You can create your own personal guard around you and starve the army of money and keep them away from the capital and away from you, which is what the former president of Congo, Joseph Kabila, did. But basically make sure that the people with guns near you are loyal, and people with guns who aren't loyal to you are far away from you.

So in the case of Venezuela, with an opposition leader trying to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro being Unsuccessful. Where do you think that went wrong?

It seems that Guaido, the opposition leader, he didn't really have more than a modicum of support within the armed forces. And I think to succeed, you need one of two things. You either need enough military power that you're guaranteed to win, or you need to persuade everybody that you already have. So if you have a faction of it, you can maybe take control of the radio stations or the television stations. You can persuade anybody it's already done and that there's no point in fighting back. And Guaido didn't have either of those things. He had sort of the rhetorical backing of foreign countries, but he didn't have any real backing. He didn't have the ability to actually do what he was asking for. We've seen in other places that coups do often fall apart. I mean, one of the most obvious ones in recent years was the attempt in Turkey in 2016. But there have been smaller ones in Burundi in 2015, in Gabon last year, actually just a small one where they have failed because they've been half baked, essentially. They've not been able to persuade people that they are actually in control. They've not been able to seize the sort of apparatus of the state quickly enough and effectively enough to make it what a coup needs to be, which is sort of a fait accompli.

You know, there are clear cases where a country would be better off without a leader, Venezuela being a prime example. But is a coup a good way to get rid of a bad guy?

That's the sort of interesting question we're facing increasingly. Not just Venezuela, but Sudan very recently, Zimbabwe a couple of years ago, where you have these dictators who've been in power for, you know, a long time, perhaps decades, and they don't want to step down. You can't get rid of them through sort of constitutional means because they'll rig elections or whatever. I mean, how do you get rid of them? And sometimes, yeah, the army does have to step in. The problem is what then happens, because if the army comes in or whoever comes in, our armed group comes in and get rid of them, well, who are the new people? They may want to keep the system going, or they may kind of weaken a patronage network which the president had in power and create a civil war. So, you know, where you've had dictators taken out, not just in coups, but in revolutions, say, or in Libya, for example, you know, it can just end up with a power vacuum that is worse than what happens.

So it depends Is the short answer?

Pretty much, yeah.

Okay, well then let's try to draw some lessons from past coups. What can we learn from those that have happened?

Zimbabwe had a coup. This guy, Emerson Manangagwa came to power. He was pretty much allowed to do that by the international community, by the African Union. They didn't really consider it a coup and they, they let him hold elections after launching this coup and basically validated his regime. That doesn't really work. You know, an alternative case is Burkina Faso, where the military took out the long standing dictator, Blaise Campore in 2014. And the African Union said you have to hand over power to a civilian administration now. And they did. And when there was a coup in 2015, which tried to reverse that, that was again reversed because it didn't have the international support. So the lesson is, you know, if you're going to have coups, take out bad leaders, then fine, but make sure that there's a lot of pressure then on the people who've done the coup to hand over of civilian, non armed kind of administration.

And so taking the examples of Sudan and Algeria, two countries that have lost their leaders recently, what advice would you give to the forces for democracy in those countries?

Sudan and Algeria, you know, they're quite different countries. What they have in common is that they've both been ruled for a long time by these quite militarized cliques without the general public being involved. And they both have these big protest movements which force those cliques to get rid of their leaders. Now I think what's important is for the protesters who have achieved that not to let that be it, because just change, changing the leader of a country doesn't mean that you change the sort of institutional structure. You don't change the militarized cliques who are actually in power. So I think probably if they really want democracy, they have to keep up the pressure even once the tyrants have gone and push for more systematic change. And they need to be quite unified and keep that going even as concessions come through. Because if you give up too early, as happened in say, Egypt, things can be reversed again.

So plenty of dictators are still in power in the world and they will surely have been watching events in Venezuela, in Sudan, Algeria, and thinking about how to coup proof themselves. What do you think they're learning from all this? Aside from the need to keep the.

Military sweet, I'm not sure you can really coup proof yourself. Dictators try, they can reduce the risk of a coup happening, but ultimately they're still dictators. They still have to govern through fragile systems of personal rule because that's what makes them dictators. And so if they reduce the likelihood of a coup, they might increase the likelihood of a civil war. And I think the only way to really stop those sort of very disruptive changes of power from happening is to have, you know, actual institutions and democracy and things that are built from the ground up that represent people. And so, you know, perhaps dictators should hold genuine elections and let their people run their country.

Right, to stop being dictators, in short. But in all seriousness, dictators broadly aren't just going to step down for a multitude of reasons. But there are ways to transition from dictatorships to democracy. What do we know about the required steps for that?

It's difficult because a dictator's not just a dictator. He has a whole bunch of people beneath him who all stand to lose out. You know, this is why transition from these patrimonial regimes to democracy is so difficult. You know, if you look at cases like Liberia or the Gambia now, you know, places that have transitioned away from dictatorship without civil war, I think what you need to avoid is too much retribution and you need to just sort of allow civil society groups to grow and gradually take over over time. And it's not going to be quick, but it, it can happen if you sort of gradually see power.

Daniel, thanks for coming in.

Thank you.

It sounds like something out of a thriller. One afternoon in February, a man knocked on the door of the North Korean embassy in Madrid. He asked to speak to the person in charge. As he entered, the visitor then let in his accomplices.

Ten people broke into the North Korean embassy in Madrid and allegedly beat, tied up and interrogated the diplomats inside the embassy.

Lena Shipper is the Economist's sole bureau chief. She says the intruders were hoping to gather information and to persuade the diplomats to defect.

After they'd done that, they stole some hard drives and computers and fled in a couple of cars that belonged to the embassy. And they eventually escaped to Portugal and then to America, where they say they presented some of their loot to the FBI as evidence. This is the first known instance of people actually breaking into an embassy of North Korea abroad. But it's in a way, one of many attempts to destabilize the North Korean regime from the outside.

Well, this particular instance, though, sounds pretty high octane spy thriller stuff. What happened to the people after they ended up in the States?

So I think it went slightly wrong because they wanted to know this thing happened and it was a big deal. And People would notice and read about it, but they weren't planning to be unmasked. But what happened was they were. People found out who they were. Spanish court issued extradition warrants for the two main perpetrators. And American prosecutors have responded. They've arrested one of them. They raided the apartment of the other guy. And then after all that happened, the group decided it was probably better to come forward. It turns out they're part of this thing called Cholyma Civil Defense, or also known as Freetresson. And they said they wanted to set up a provisional government and they regard themselves as the sole legitimate representatives of the North Korean people.

So you mentioned that there are other activists of this sort. I mean, this sounds like fairly revolutionary stuff. Is this the form that activism takes?

So this kind of thing is very unusual. As far as I know, as far as anybody I've talked to knows, there's not been this kind of break in into a North Korean embassy. But there's always been North Koreans in South Korea particularly who do resist North Korea. And the way they do it is, I guess it's a form of information warfare. So what they do is they put leaflets and USB sticks with films and that sort of stuff into balloons and try to send them across the border into North Korea. And they try and persuade people in North Korea on the other side of the border to defect, but it's very risky. There have been instances of North Korean agents trying to assassinate those activists or going after them in other ways. And the South Korean government also doesn't like them because they worry about tension along the border because sometimes North Korea shoots at the balloons and then there's a risk of military escalation. And also now, for the past year, there's been a policy of rapprochement between south and North Korea, and the current government doesn't want to jeopardize that. So they're not fans of this activism either.

So this kind of information warfare, does it work? Are people encouraged to defect?

I mean, we don't really know, but not really. If you look at the numbers of North Koreans that manage to leave the country in any given year, they're very low. I think it's pretty safe to assume that mostly it doesn't have an impact.

What about the more amped up version where you raid an embassy and so on? Does it look as if that's had any effect?

It's very unclear whether that's done any damage to the North Korean regime. Maybe they've had to change some passwords or something. Given that they made off with some computers, but there's probably not been any real damage sustained.

But is there a sense that there's a kind of growth in this, in the number of dissidents, or the lengths that they'll go to? I mean, this feels like an escalation.

Yeah, it seems like a pretty singular escalation at the moment. There's no indication that there are many more people resisting now than there were or that there's any kind of movement brewing inside North Korea. And I think the group of people who do that sort of thing has always been pretty small because most North Korean refugees in South Korea, they have other people concerns. They need to adjust to living in a country that's very different. The South Korean government always provides a bit of funding and some protection for the dissidents, but even so, they discourage their activities. Maybe partly because, in a sense, the South Korean government itself is the sort of best dissidence there is against North Korea, because formally, the South Korean government also claims to be the legitimate representation of people in North Korea.

And opposition any more vocal than that is likely to stay relatively quiet.

That is true. Yeah.

Lena, thank you very much for coming in.

Thanks very much, Jason.

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