23rd Feb 2003. The Sunday Independent
A Lucky Break for Two Irish Documentary-makers in Venezuela Led to a Superb Piece of TV
Written by Declan Lynch

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If Chavez; - Inside the Coup had been a drama, a work of fiction based on real events, you might criticise some of the Latin American stereotypes, the all-too obvious chasm between the good guys and the bad guys, and how in the end the good guys win just when it seem certain that they've lost.
In a country like Venezuela, which has vast quantities of oil and still the majority live in squalor? I'm afraid any script suggesting victory for the good guys in a country like Venezuela would be binned on ground of hopeless romanticism and general immaturity.

If it had been a TV drama, you'd' say it was tightly scripted and action packed and full of uplifting statements about the human condition and you could nearly imagine it as a musical of the old- fashioned kind that puts you in good humour for about a week.

But of course you would know it was fiction, an idealised vision which is tragically at odds with the actual Situations in a festering hell-hole like Venezuela.

Well "Chavez; Inside the Coup" wasn’t a play or a novel or a film, it was a documentary in RTE's True Lives series, which rose out of a visit to Venezuela by film-makers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain to make a programme about charismatic President Hugo Chavez,, and which led to them being trapped in the presidential palace in the middle of an attempted coup.

As such, it is probably one of the best documentaries I have ever seen on television, and undoubtedly one of the finest pieces of journalism within living memory.

But I don't want to damn I with faint praise. When, with one lucky shot, it exposed the lies of the evil oil barons about the shooting which stared all the trouble, you felt you were witnessing some sort of miracle.

The plot was classically simple: Chavez gets democratically elected to the chagrin of the evil oil-barons and their good buddies in the Bush administration, who express "extreme concern" that Chavez "doesn't have America's interest at heart". Chavez gets ousted by these malign forces, spirited away amid scenes of chaos orchestrated by them. But Santa Maria!, his palace guards remain loyal, and amid scenes of total consternation, Chavez is brought back, the coup is declared null and void by the good guys on state television, and the evil oil-barons flee to Miami having duly emptied the safe in the palace.

Meanwhile, some Irish film-makers are in the thick of it recording it all and wondering perhaps in the quieter moments if they will have to build a large shed to house all the awards which are undoubtedly coming their way. And if they will live to receive them.

We actually saw the empty safe after the evil oil-barons had fled. Now again, if this was a TV drama, you'd be accused of constructing a black-and-white world, some undergraduate fantasy in which all the best- looking women are fighting for democracy, with wise words of encouragement from Gabriel Garcia Marquez type, your standard-issue Latin American intellectual and mystic.

There they all were, in the flesh, the women, the intellectual and the good soldiers defying the evil oil-barons on behalf of the people, battling all the time with the sights and sounds and smells of life in a banana republic, where misery abounds but it's always lovely weather for a coup.

Of course this story is not over yet. As we speak, the guys who fled to Miami in helicopters are probably briefing some "conservative think-tank" which is formulating anti-Chavez policies for the Bush administration based on the need for "stability" in the region. De-briefed, the same guys will later be seen leaving a Miami night club with a hooker on each arm, flecks of cocaine on their perfectly manicured moustaches, bottles of expensive rum clinking in the pockets of their puke-stained white linen jackets. And if you ask the right people who those guys are, you'll be told they are the Venezuelan government-in-exile.