Check the question about the US plane at the island where Chavez was being held. It belonged to long-time Bush I friend and arch enemy of Hugo Chavez, Gustavo Cisneros, owner of most of the media in Latin America including most of the Spanish language media here in this country. Very enlightening interview!!
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In 2001, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain traveled to Venezuela to videotape a behind-the-scenes profile of President Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected leftist president who had been swept into office by a groundswell of support from the poor sections of Venezuela’s cities and countryside. While filming in April of 2002, they found themselves in the midst of a coup attempt against Chavez, and their cameras were there to capture those incredible moments of April 2002. They compiled this footage to create the documentary “The Revolution will not be Televised.” Bartley and O’Briain were interviewed by Brian Forrest in October of 2003.
BF: At what point did you realize you were no longer making a portrait of Chavez but rather documenting a coup?
KB & DOB: The nature of the documentary changed quite dramatically, what set out to be a profile of Chavez and a look at what was going on in Venezuela turned into the story of a coup from the inside. Clearly on the night of the coup we realized that we were witnessing something quite extraordinary but we were reluctant to make any drastic decisions about the documentary. The decisions that were made were largely made in the edit and it was a slow and difficult process since we'd spent months prior to the coup filming with something quite specific in mind and we were reluctant to let that all go. In the end we tried, within the time constraints, to present as best we could the situation in Venezuela as we'd experienced it before moving the story along into the events surrounding the coup.
BF: Were you afraid for your personal safety? How did you deal with it?
KB & DOB: People always ask if we were afraid and the truth is that it's very hard to explain the emotions felt on the night of the coup, the whole thing was very surreal and happened so fast...and yet the hours spent in the palace that night, before Chavez was taken away, seemed to go in slow motion. Of course there were times when we all wondered how the night would end-- would they bomb the place?-- but we never considered leaving. However the following day was an entirely different and frightening experience, we hadn't slept or eaten since the previous morning, we were watching people we knew whose homes were being raided, we were getting calls telling us to get out of the country with the tapes for our own safety. Generally the repression on the day Carmona took over was very frightening. We both knew what had happened in Chile in 73 and the coup-leaders very quickly tried to generate a climate of fear in the capital. It was palpable and deeply disturbing.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1050
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