The Venezuelan military and the failed coup attempt

Asa Cusack does a postmortem of the recent failed coup attempt in Venezuela, Guaido's military mutiny miscalculation Aljazeera 02/03/2019.

Javier Corrales addresses the loyalty of the Venezuelan military as well in How to Tackle Venezuela’s Military Problem New York Times 03/04/2019.

Cusack emphasizes several factors that didn't get reported very well in the mainstream US and German/Austrian press.

There was a lotz of reporting in the US press about the involvement of Venzuelan generals in drug trafficking and corruption. "Corruption" has become a kind of conjuring word for Americans and Europeans such that when it's invoked against a government under criticism, no further thought is required.

Cusack discusses the illicit benefits available to senior military officials this way:

For those at the top of the tree, privileged and poorly controlled access to anything carrying a state subsidy - most notably food, oil, and dollars - enabled different forms of speculation. Cheap food and oil could be smuggled into Colombia, Brazil, and the Caribbean and sold at a huge mark-up.

Demand for dollars combined with capital controls created a black market whose exchange rate soon soared above the fixed official rate, allowing cheap state dollars to be recycled through the two markets, the difference in prices passing from state coffers into private hands. Control over borders and remote areas of the national territory also facilitated involvement in drug trafficking.

Here's where it becomes a problem when "corruption" is enough to put an end to thought about US policy toward a country should be. And this kind of official corruption is particular hallmark of petrostates, including Venezuela. Which doesn't mean that it's not a problem or that it doesn't do damage to economies. It does mean that any new government will have similar challenges in dealing with corruption. Corruption is also not grounds for war.

He also notes that the chavista governments involved the military in a close military-civilian alliance, "further reinforced this, directly involving the armed forces in the delivery of social projects." He sugggests this is one of the several factors that the coup planners underestimated in thinking generals and significant additional portions of the military would quickly go over the coup side.

Cusack also points to the straightforward patriotic/nationalistic factor, which the American media seem to largest ignore:

Given that their core function is to protect the homeland from foreign invaders, armed forces everywhere already have a natural inclination towards nationalism, but a Bolivarian ideology centred on escaping the oppressor's yoke only reinforced this tendency in Venezuela. And while for Latin American independence hero Simon Bolivar the oppressor was Spain, by the end of the 20th century the United States had come to occupy this role.

This in itself makes the US sponsorship of Guaido's bid to unseat Maduro extremely hard to swallow for the military. More fuel was added to the fire by National Security Adviser John Bolton admitting that Venezuelan oil is a motivating factor for US involvement and by Trump assigning the Venezuela portfolio to Elliott Abrams, best known for his role in covering up gruesome atrocities and illegally channeling funds to murderous paramilitary armies in Central America in the 1980s. [my emphasis]

He also notes that Venezuelan military officials have good reason to doubt the sincerity of promises of amnesty coming from the Trump-Pence Administration.

Javier Corrales makes the less-than-credible claim that Nicolás Maduro's government "has the heart of only one institution: the military." But he talks about the "unconventional" nature of civil-military relations in Venezuela:

But the politics of decoupling the military from Maduro has proved complicated because Mr. Maduro’s military alliance, in many respects, is more unconventional than not. His military is not a single, professional, vertical organization. It comprises multiple elements, each with its own interest in supporting the regime. A strategy to divorce it from Mr. Maduro requires deploying policies to address each of those groups.

There’s the standard military establishment, which in Venezuela consists of professional career soldiers. Then there are nonstandard groups. They include ideologized soldiers, working together with Cuban military and intelligence officials to crack down on dissent. They also include bureaucrat generals who support Mr. Maduro because they have good jobs running state-owned corporations, and profit-seeking soldiers, who are making a fortune trafficking in illicit markets, including the drug trade. Finally, there are Maduro’s killing agents, in charge of repressing. [my emphasis]

The "killing agents" to which he refers are the citizen's militia, aka, collectivos. While the difference between a citizens militia and a death squad may heavily depend on which side the gun barrels are facing, I don't have enough familiarity will the details of how the citizens militias in Venezuela have actually been functioning to comment the accuracy of his characterization.

But his description does confirm, for better or worse, that the chavista idea of civil-military organization was robust enough to resist the bald-faced attempt at a US-directed coup that we've seen play out this year.