Venezuela’s uprising shows the potential dangers of a civilian-military alliance

By the time most readers in North America awoke Tuesday morning, a military uprising was underway in Venezuela. Juan Guaidó — the president of the National Assembly, whom many countries including the United States recognized in January as the country’s constitutionally legitimate interim president — tweeted a video of himself on a military base at the crack of dawn. By his side stood his mentor, opposition leader Leopoldo López — an unexpected development, since López was supposed to have been under house arrest.

Flanked by uniformed service members, Guaidó declared that Venezuela had entered the “final phase” of the overthrow of authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro. Guaidó renewed his calls for citizens to take to the streets, and for the military to switch its loyalty from Maduro to him.

Not so fast. By the time most of the Western Hemisphere went to bed, it appeared that Maduro would hang on to power for yet another day, or month, or year. The military, apparently still largely loyal to Maduro, deployed tanks and tear gas against civilians who poured into plazas and public spaces at Guaidó’s call, and military weapons are rumored to have “disappeared” in order to arm pro-Maduro paramilitaries. The recently freed López took refuge with his family first in Chile’s embassy and later Spain’s, while Brazil granted asylum to 25 dissident members of the military.

The history of Venezuela’s April 30, 2019, uprising will be written in the coming weeks and years. Experts on coups note the event appeared poorly planned and executed. One intriguing but unconfirmed rumorholds that it had been planned for later and was suddenly moved up to prevent Guaidó’s arrest; and that his military backers got cold feet when the date changed. Another one, promoted by no less than US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is that Maduro initially intended to flee the country and decided to stay only at Russian urging.

But taking a step back to think like a political scientist, how should we understand Tuesday’s events? Were they an attempted coup? A democratic uprising? I argue they defy easy categorization — but that how we understand them matters a lot.

The uprising looks like a coup in many but arguably not all respects. Professor John Polga-Hecimovich of the US Naval Academy notes that academics have come up with a lot of definitions of the term “coup.” The definitions share three core elements:

· The who: A coup is launched by a small group of people close to power — most commonly the military, sometimes allied with politicians or other political elites. (Yes, citizens might go out to the streets, as in Venezuela, but they’re not the ones effecting the transition of power.) Guaidó flanked by the military seems to count. Check

· The what: A coup tries to take over “government,” or the executive. The object is to control a country’s public sector, namely, the military and the bureaucracy — pretty clearly Guaidó’s goal. Check

· The how: Here’s where it gets tricky. A coup involves “illegal” or “extraconstitutional” methods; it also entails violence or the threat thereof. Coups can be bloodless, but one needs at least tacit military support to claim and hold power. Guaido’s attempted reliance on the military satisfies the “capacity for violence” half of the definition. Half a check.

But was the attempted uprising “illegal” or “extraconstitutional”? If we accept that Guaidó is the legitimate interim president of Venezuela, arguably no. Guaidó’s defenders maintain he simply tried to reassert constitutional authority after a “usurper” (the opposition’s preferred term) stole the election of May 2018 and has refused to relinquish power. This is why Bloomberg refused to call it a “coup,” noting that many countries consider Guaido to be the country’s legal, legitimate president. Half an X.

Yet constitutional issues are still fuzzy. Political scientists argue that institutions (including constitutions) make politics predictable and incentivize people to follow the rules of the game. The awesome thing about constitutional transitions of power through elections is that all the major players know what to expect. When politics becomes predictable and routinized, the stakes fall, and conflicts are less likely to turn violent.

But constitutions don’t exactly provide a step-by-step guide for ejecting a “usurper” from power. There are no clear procedures governing the military’s potential transfer of loyalty from Maduro to Guaidó. In fact, most members of the Venezuelan military perceive a system of formal and informal rules requiring loyalty to Maduro. So the opposition and its international sympathizers might believe Guaidó’s claims are constitutional in the abstract, but many of the country’s relevant players disagree with that interpretation of the constitution. And even if they did agree with him, there are no obvious constitutional procedures to follow.

This matters a lot. If or when the Venezuelan opposition eventually unseats the “usurper,” the country will be in uncharted territory, resembling the aftermath of a military coup more than that of a democratic election. The democratic opposition has proclaimed its intent to call for new elections as quickly as possible after Maduro’s fall. But in the hours and days following the end of the Maduro regime, little can be taken for granted. History is littered with cases of military-supported transitions of power (whether you call them coups or uprisings) that are supposed to lead to elections and democracy … and don’t.

Political science research provides reasons for optimism that a future Venezuelan transition could lead to democratic elections. Though most coups lead to new authoritarian regimes, over the past decade, academics have examined what makes military coups occasionally propitious for democracy. Venezuela looks like it has many of the appropriate conditions: a discredited authoritarian regime; a history of citizen-led resistance against the regime; an alliance between democratic politicians and the military; a history of partisan electoral competition. A military-civilian uprising in Venezuela could go the way of Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution, which ended 41 years of dictatorship, or Nigeria’s 1999 coup-initiated transition to democracy.

Yet things could go awry. Maduro has held on to power by paying keen attention to who controls firepower. He has allowed military officers to take on lucrative criminal smuggling operations, while also strategically arming paramilitary groups known as colectivos that take on some of the regime’s dirty work. A post-Maduro regime will have to incorporate and appease all these groups — any one of which could try to derail a democratic transition.

For the present, the most immediate danger is intensified repression from the Maduro regime itself. Following the example of Erdogan’s response to Turkey’s 2016 coup attempt, Maduro could interpret the events of April 30 as a sign of the need to crack down brutally on civil society and purge the military. And if the repression succeeds, speculation regarding the outcomes of a future uprising will remain an academic question.