Maduro and his opposition go to Mexico

Nicolás Maduro, during the presentation of the covid-19 balance, this Sunday at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas.EFE MIRAFLORES

Recently, in a timely interview with Juan Cruz for this newspaper, the Mexican essayist Alma Guillermoprieto, a singular observer of our America, commented, in passing, about my country: “Venezuela?

I haven't been going for years, because I have the feeling that she is spinning around on herself ”.

Guillermoprieto is certainly in tune with the feelings of millions of Venezuelans, inside and outside the country. Like

The Invention of Morel

, an insurmountable fiction by Bioy Casares in which the same characters, congregated on a desert island, reappear every night in an equally deserted museum, give each other the same courtesy gestures and exchange the same words, all by the work of a fantastic staging device invented by Morel, a crazy scientist, this is how Venezuela presents itself today, to the ill of my countrymen and myself.

The regularity of the Morel device depends on the tidal pattern and uses the kinetic energy perpetually produced by the waves. In a very similar way, the Venezuelan dictatorship and the different corporations that oppose it have offered us the same scenes for years, made the same warnings, launched the same dictatorships against each other, ritualized everything from the remote occasion, back in 2002, when Former Colombian President César Gaviria, then Secretary General of the OAS, presided over the meetings that would save the crisis and preserve the democratic exercise.

Each of these episodes unfolds according to a very specific arrangement of Venezuelan politics in the last quarter of a century, a way of parliamentary that I will call "of ineffective iteration" that lasts for many days until, at a certain moment, and unexpectedly, one of the automatons stops looking like it and, accusing the opposing side of disloyalty, leaves the negotiating table and what could have been the Congress of Vienna degenerates into a cockfight.

The rupture, executed with the meager theatricality and little rhetorical flight that allows the mediocrity of our entire political class, gives in the mood of the pantomimes of both sides the effect of a glossy bath that erases years of iniquitous continuity tricks from their moral memory.

This outraged kicking of the board enables the participants - but only in their eyes - to start over, from scratch.

There will be more about the continuist neural microcircuit that characterizes Chavistas and anti-Chavistas alike in just a few paragraphs.

I notice that I have written “equally” and, the truth, I have been unfair: Maduro and his adversaries are not the same at all.

Watching them get ready for the round of Mexico brings to mind the heroic times of the beginnings of baseball when, just after the Civil War, the United States was filled with itinerant baseball teams that traveled from city to city accompanied by their “

exhibition troupe.

": An adversary team of lies that allowed the public to enlighten the mechanics of the game.

Maduro and his

exhibition troupe

have previously visited Oslo, Santo Domingo and, albeit briefly, Barbados.

The cycle came to a halt when the boldest faction pinned their Trumpist hopes on an unlikely military pronouncement followed by a US military intervention in support of a government in exile.

But after the announcement of the round of Mexico, once again the few opinion pages of the few independent Venezuelan newspapers will host articles signed by so-called fundamentalists of the vote that will advocate for negotiation, reconciliation and the rescue of democracy by going to elections even if Maduro puts the ballot box in a gas chamber.

On this occasion, the supporters of the dialogue with Maduro point out that the lifting of economic sanctions that Washington conditions on clear signs of openness and electoral cleanliness is crucial for the regime. We are told that the latter makes it plausible that, for once, there will be “fairly clean” elections, as unfortunately suggested by an opposition representative before the electoral college.

It is also affirmed, from the opposition, that without the intervention of a multinational military force there is nothing left but the long march towards recovering the relevance of the vote, the first step of which is to attack Maduro's electoral challenge in November. I don't have the answer to the question about what to do, and I just hope I don't sound too anti-political when I say that I can glimpse the next scene that Morel's invention will bring in that they have all managed to get Venezuela into.

When Maduro prevails, as he will, in the fraudulent elections to which the opposition does not want and cannot stop attending under pain of sinking into irrelevance, the dictatorship, with the help of the pandemic, hunger and its merciless repressive apparatus, will defeated, forever, the lied strategy of citizen insurrection, in reality vulgarly coup, that two years ago invoked the "Guiadó coalition" and, with or without sanctions, will have long assured their permanence in power.

For his part, Guaidó and everything he represents and what is similar to him will have no other way than the withdrawal of his government in exile while USAid, overseas petrochemical provent and unknown donors from Madrid make it viable.

This can also be time consuming.

The rest of the political opposition will gravitate, according to their affinities, towards one or the other pole of this bicontinuism.

The common Venezuelan will have to concentrate on surviving as long as the renewed strains of covid19 allow it.

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