During visits to Venezuela last year, it was clear that López remained a rock star among young opposition activists, even after his arrest. “Leopoldo is a person of extremely high democratic and Catholic values,” Alejandro Aguirre, a member of JAVU (United Activist Youth of Venezuela), one of the main student groups behind the February protests, told me. “He’s also an athlete,” added Aguirre, who I met at a May 7 opposition forum called “Thinking Differently Is Not a Crime” that was hosted at El Nacional, one of the country’s largest newspapers. “Athletes are morally clean, unblemished, [and] more mentally sharp than other people.” He also talked about López being a good family man. “Leopoldo,” he said, “is an example for youth.”
Later that day, the telegenic Tintori, a former model, kite-surfing champion, and reality show star, appeared at a rally for political prisoners held in Chacao, the Caracas district where her husband once served as mayor and which has been a center of anti-government opposition. It also happens to be one of the wealthiest localities in all of Venezuela. Vibrant in a bright orange windbreaker, with her flawless smile and long blonde hair, Tintori’s strengths as standard-bearer for her jailed husband’s message were on full display.
“They want to imprison our dream!” she shouted, posed next to one of the life-sized cardboard figures of her husband that had become ubiquitous in the opposition strongholds of wealthy eastern Caracas. She praised her husband’s record as mayor, mentioning a Chacao health clinic where doctors “treat you with love, as if you were someone special.” She continued, “This is what we Venezuelans are all like, all equal, rights for all people without distinction and without privileges! Today, the struggle of one is the struggle of all!”
The day’s events offered a glimpse of the media-powered populism that has helped López and his political party gain traction where Venezuela’s established opposition, led by a coalition called the MUD, or Democratic Unity Roundtable, has failed. The opposition lost big in 18 of the 19 national and regional elections and referenda held since former President Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1998. Though rarely noted in the U.S. media, the deep-seated rifts between the MUD and its leader, Henrique Capriles, and the younger, more radical flank of the Venezuelan opposition led by López are reported on with the excitement of a soap opera in Venezuelan media. “For the opposition parties, Lopez draws ire second only to Chavez,” Mary Ponte, a leading member of the center-right Primero Justicia opposition party, once said, according to a 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable. “The only difference between the two is that López is a lot better looking.” In a section of the same U.S. embassy cable titled “The Lopez ‘Problem,’” U.S. State Department officials described López as a “divisive figure within the opposition” who is “often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry — but party officials also concede his enduring popularity, charisma, and talent as an organizer.” Certainly no previous Venezuelan opposition leader has succeeded in projecting himself onto the international stage like López has.
But the international embrace of López has depended heavily on his image as a stalwart defender of democracy — someone at a safe distance from the highly unpopular coup attempt of April 2002, in which elements of the military and business leaders ousted President Chávez for 47 hours. A July 2014 white paper about his trial authored by two attorneys who have represented him and his family — Jared Genser and José Antonio Maes — asserts that “López was not a supporter of the coup and he did not sign the Act Constituting the Government of Democratic Transition and National Unity (‘Carmona Decree’), the document that attempted to oust Chávez and dissolve the National Assembly and Supreme Court … nor was he allied with the business leaders who led it.” López himself often points to his loyalty to the constitution, as in the New York Times op-ed which appeared in March 2014, in which he wrote, “A change in leadership can be accomplished entirely within a constitutional and legal framework.”
But interviews with key figures in the 2002 coup, a look at López’s close associates, and a review of Venezuelan press accounts, videotaped events, and U.S. government documents paint a more complex picture about these claims.
