For more than 20 years, throughout the longest and most dire predominance of the military over the rest of Venezuelan society, our democratic opposition has failed to shape any strategy that, in its essence, has not been militaristic.
This may seem provocative nonsense because for 20 years the most celebrated opposition feasts have been their massive peaceful marches to reject the tyrannical practices of Chávez and Maduro and to demand elections or referendums. Elections, referendums: can you imagine anything more civil than aspiring to the freely cast vote? What can be militaristic about it?
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However, it is singularly notorious that in the highest levels of the Venezuelan opposition - political and media, alike - it has resorted, since the beginning of the last decade, to the idea that the only function of the opposition mass is to demonstrate on the street his brave rejection of the regime in such a belligerent and persistent way that it makes the country ungovernable and forced the intervention of the "good military".
It is true that thanks to "street pressure" there have been victorious election days. All of them, without exception, have been brutally ignored, both by Hugo Chávez and, for the last five years, by Nicolás Maduro.
Every governor elected with an overwhelming number of votes has, since 2008, been stripped of powers and economic resources enshrined in the Constitution and, moreover, crushed by a "protector". Neither more nor less than a gauleiter , according to Hitler's style and, also according to Hitler's style, invariably a military man.
There are not a few elected deputies who have been expelled from their seat manu militari with specious and illegal arguments. The elected mayors of the country's populous capitals have simply been thrown into a dungeon for years or pushed into exile. The assembly designated by majority universal vote in 2015 has already been reduced by a third thanks to these tyrannical files. An admirable elected councilor was thrown from the tenth floor of the military-run political police headquarters.
Since Hugo Chávez, the felon who violated his constitutional oath in 1992 by leading a cunning and bloody coup against citizen peace, Venezuelans have been witnesses and victims, not only of bulky aerial battles fought irresponsibly over the slums of Caracas by botched pilots of happy trigger, but the systematic looting of oil and mining wealth at the hands of mafias unfailingly led by high-ranking military.
The state-owned oil company, already diminished by the looting it has been subjected to for 18 years, plunged into functional collapse under the management of ignorant National Guard generals, experts only in violating human rights. With them, Petróleos de Venezuela degenerated into a huge laundry of illicit capital.
In the so-called “Orinoco mining arch”, they are Venezuelan generals, in collusion with irregular members of the ELN and “dissent” from the former FARC, who exploit the bloody gold of Guyana while degrading the environment in our Orinoco, murder informal miners and decimate the indigenous population.
In the course of two decades, violence against all things civil has struck people, laws, speech, customs, and customs. It began at the same time that Chávez, still a presidential candidate, poisoned our civility with his chascarrillos of double sexual meaning, the anecdote of his great-grandfather's montoneras, his exclusively militaristic version of the history of our independence, his patriotic Bolivarian phraseology, his exhortations to finish the unfinished work of the father of the Fatherland fighting great battles, or better still for him, a great endless battle.
Nicolás Maduro, a former union member of the Caracas metro, usurper of a position by civil definition, adheres to that tradition, imperceptibly modifying his attire until today wearing an indefinable Maoist liquilique cross with buttons and loops that imitate a marshal's warrior.
Despite all this, the oppositional imagination, and I am not referring now only to that of the political leaders, has not ceased to cherish the myth of a great sword that is decided by "the right side of History", according to the formula, so corny as a sectarian, popularized by Henrique Capriles.
The rhetoric that accompanied the emergence of Juan Guaídó on the Venezuelan political scene is based on that old fixed idea: that of sensitizing, by force of acts massively repressed by the military and police of the regime, a mythological official with a democratic and republican soul who, slyly, awaits the moment to withdraw his support for Maduro and his general drug trafficker.
No other idea animated the days of April 2002, the 2003 oil strike and the bloody intifadas of 2014 and 2017. His most recent fiasco occurred on April 30, 2019. Apart from achieving Leopoldo López's asylum in the Spanish embassy, only two high-ranking officers deserted to "the right side of history", both people in trouble: one of them is, probably, a soulless torturer of political prisoners and the other a bizarre intelligence chief, liaison officer with the former FARC and drug trafficker.
I write all this impressed by the videos in which Cliver Alcalá Cordones, a Venezuelan general, a former Chavista throat cutter for whom the US DEA came to offer 10 million dollars. One of his accomplices has just been caught by the Colombian traffic police while mobilizing a park of assault rifles.
In the videos, Alcalá Cordones, now a deserter of the Cartel de los Soles, splutters the profession of democratic and libertarian faith and almost lets out the cry of the betrayed when he mentions Juan Guaidó with an incriminating spirit. He alleges –mendately? -, to have a copy of the contract signed between Guaidó, a contracting company for tortuous gringo mercenaries, a famous electoral strategist and himself to liberate Venezuela.
Looking at the videos, I remembered that more than a year ago his name was, in effect, mentioned with something similar to enthusiasm - as a decisive acquisition, as if he were Generalissimo Miranda in 1810 - by some personalities of the Venezuelan exile, here in Bogotá.
How much will Venezuela still have to suffer to completely disembark, without remnants, from which the historian Manuel Caballero rightly called "military plague"?
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