Hugo's Close Call.(Hugo Chavez)(Brief Article)

People power it wasn't. Although more than 200,000 antigovernment protesters marched through the streets of Caracas--some to their deaths--the short-lived April 11-12 coup against President Hugo Chavez was secretly hatched by two small but powerful groups: senior military officers and several of the country's richest businessmen. The leaders of the putsch had extensive ties to the U.S. political and economic establishment. At the vortex of the whole mess was the billionaire television magnate Gustavo Cisneros, a fishing buddy of former president George H. W. Bush and king of a business empire stretching from the United States to the Southern Cone.

The failed coup's repercussions have only begun. Although most leaders in the region immediately condemned it as an assault on constitutional rule, the White House equivocated, blaming Chavez for the crisis and raising painful questions about the sincerity of the Bush administration's commitment to democracy in Latin America. Worse, the coup and its aftermath can only add to the uncertainties of a region already shaken by the Shining Path's revival in Peru and the shift of Colombia's civil war to a dangerous new urban phase. In Venezuela itself, Chavez seems likely to become even more set in his demagogic ways. In Washington, meanwhile, Democratic critics are calling the coup a U.S. foreign-policy disaster and planning a full investigation.

The inquiry could become the Bush administration's first foreign-policy scandal. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is seeking classified cables and other documents detailing contacts between top U.S. officials and Venezuelans involved in the failed attempt to overthrow Chavez. Those contacts, NEWSWEEK has learned, are more extensive than the White House has publicly acknowledged.

In the months before the coup, several dissatisfied Venezuelans visited Washington for closed-door talks with U.S. officials. In December, for example, just weeks after U.S. intelligence officials picked up warnings that dissident Venezuelan military officers were plotting against Chavez, Venezuela's top commander called on Rogelio Pardo- Maurer, the Pentagon officer in charge of special operations and low- intensity conflict in Latin America. "I viewed him as being in the same situation as Col. [Augusto] Pinochet in 1971," says Pardo-Maurer, who sympathized with the visitor's complaints about Chavez but wagged his finger "in a friendly way" and warned in Spanish: "No golpes"--no coups.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials appear to have been caught off guard by the coup's timing. And that raises another embarrassing point: why weren't they better informed? "This is a huge intelligence failure, and the ultimate responsibility for that lies with the CIA," says Jack Sweeney, a Venezuela expert who writes for the risk-assessment firm Stratfor.com. "They not only failed to detect that the coup was being hijacked, they failed to realize that it could be reversed."

The White House has never concealed its dislike of Chavez, a man Fidel Castro has fondly called "my political son." It's no ...