Gasoline is scarce in Venezuela and it is already announced that the planting cycle will be seriously affected by this.
The rains of May - if it rained in May, of course - will fall on barren terrain; experts from the associations of agricultural producers calculate that, without seed or fertilizers and, to top it all, without fuel, the height of the famine will reach the entire country in late July. Maybe much earlier.
Consult other texts by Ibsen Martínez
Venezuela: pandemic and police terrorism- Patient zero
- Venezuela and the military plague
The tsar of precooked cornmeal spread a message to the country not long ago and on social media. The charismatic captain of a private agri-food emporium so unsinkable that twenty years of expropriatory chavismo, arbitrary price controls and criminal extortions associated with foreign exchange profits have failed to win, used a characteristically willful language, of the type they call institutional. He spoke with a futuristic and patriotic tone in his voice, dictated by the pandemic emergency.
I remember that these messages of the type "against all odds," "our commitment is Venezuela", etc., once infused our population with almost 30 million arepa eaters - a majority of them today completely lacking - the founded certainty that the chavista regime's outrages against private property had a limit, certainly imprecise, but whose rationality was expressed, more or less, in this way: “Chavistas are barbaric, but not stupid: they know they are inept. They know that, if they expropriate the Polar Companies, the arepas would disappear in three days, not to mention the family table, but also the ancestral memory of Venezuelans. ”
In Venezuela, it was always claimed that expropriating General Motors from precooked corn flour would provoke a social outbreak that, to put it in a culinary image coined by Simón Bolívar himself in a difficult trance, would cause the regime to vanish “like a piece of get married in chicken stock ”. The truth, I don't think so, I mean, I don't think so anymore.
Among the ideas that still circulate inertially among Venezuelans, especially among their hapless middle class, each day more diminished, more absorbed in itself and more dispersed throughout the planet, is this desktop mechanism with which the political cycle of country: relaxation, corruption and pimples have a limit beyond which "people get ready and the social outbreak comes." In the Venezuelan public imagination of the last half century, the social outbreak takes the form of the unforgettable 1989 Caracazo .
This invocation of the social outbreak accompanies the desire to see a military coup arrive that, mediating a period of turbulence, leads to a presidential election that, for a time, restores something similar to social harmony.
In Venezuela, the ideal of harmony was concretized for a few decades in a "redistributive conciliation with elite conciliation", according to the formula popularized by our political scientists at the end of the 20th century. A book conceived by Moisés Naím and Ramón Piñango brilliantly summarized in 1989, the same year as the Caracazo, that “illusion of harmony”.
The apotheosis of that reconciliation of oil-income hunters was the Saudi Venezuela that followed the oil price boom in 1973. The restorative spirit, the longing for those splendors of inequality, still obfuscates many and leads them to expect everything from the Southern Command aircraft carriers and a week-long Tomahawk missile campaign.
As the Venezuelan generals of today have opted for the kleptocracy and are dedicated only to escort cocaine shipments and to guard the routes of extraction of the bloody gold and the Orinoco coltan, it only remains to dream of a landing of the 82nd Airborne Division in the park of baseball of the University City of Caracas. Militarism in our America was a Venezuelan invention and the famous forty years of democratic alternation that went from 1958 to 1998 did not succeed in evicting it from the midbrain of Venezuelans. Venezuelan or gringo, as long as El Salvador is a military man.
Heating the street, promoting something similar to a spontaneous social outbreak to “pull” the generals was the design that failed in 2002 with the April coup of that year and, later, in 2003, with the strike of managers and technicians from the state oil company.
What I find amazing is that this has been the opposition strategy that has prevailed since the violent demonstrations of 2014 and 2017, genuine intifadas suffocated by blood and fire by the same "constitutionalist" military that sought to insubordinate.
Consider that the actions of Juan Guaidó throughout the year 2019 were all expressly aimed at promoting a fracture of the dome and although the street accompanied him at all times, the announcement so announced never occurred.
We were in those when the drop in crude oil prices and the emergence of the coronavirus put us in quarantine.
Maduro and his generals have not wavered for a moment and cynically use the anti-epidemic quarantine to secure military tyranny. Never before, in two decades, had a night as dark and presaged as been laid over Venezuela today.
Prisons continue to fill with decent people, civilians and the military. Hunger and pandemic are everywhere. My admiration and gratitude for those who in Venezuela, whether or not their strategy is correct, still fight under these conditions against a bloody dictatorship have no limits.
You can follow EL PAÍS Opinion on Facebook, Twitter or subscribe here to the Newsletter.