Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in Moscow in 2018. Valery Sharifulin (Getty Images)
Will Maduro survive Putin's war?
For all we know, it beats me that it is very possible that he will achieve it.
To assimilate the idea that Maduro's dictatorship could last indefinitely, well beyond 2024, the date that the unsuspecting and always optimistic Venezuelan opposition dreams will end, it is necessary to overcome, even for a few seconds, the Anglo-American hypocrisy that equally It has imbued both the gringo series on Pablo Escobar or El Chapo Guzmán as well as the no less gringo series, spectacular, bloody and pointless operations called Plan Colombia, called Just Cause, the Mérida Initiative or Operation Honduras, all added to the futile and very expensive hours of herbicide flights In colombia.
Beans cook everywhere and, thus, paying just a little attention and wisely browsing the net, a list of non-fiction series and books about the narco-submarines of the Mexican and Colombian cartels that sail the Atlantic, tracing the routes of Columbus, from Oaxaca to the Ría de Vigo and Gibraltar.
It is characteristic that almost all Latin American narconovelistics refer their plots, almost without exception, to what an economist related to
Reaganomics
would call "the supply side."
The gossip of people dedicated to the production and international transportation of merchandise, people with always deadly manners, are almost the only thing that moves the story.
Rarely, rather never, the story is about money laundering, much less about what the journalistic parla of yesteryear knew as "high politics."
Chains of
off-shore
paradises do not provide bloody plot twists and that is why the outcomes are only conceived in terms of the decapitation of informers with chainsaws and macabre pit pits.
I am thinking about all this today because I have compatriot friends whom I feel are very hopeful about what might happen to Nicolás Maduro and the omnipotent Bolíburgueses in Madrid and the kleptocratic generals that they carry in their back pockets now that Washington and its European allies have decided to raise the level and the extent of economic sanctions against Putin and the gang from the Russian Federation.
My friends have already taught a lesson about something, especially after the fiasco of the invasion of marines in Venezuela that they had two years ago and that in the end Trump never ordered, so they are not very “fussy”, a word that I learned to use here in Colombia and that, like so many Colombian voices, is very traditional and very decisive.
It happens that since they don't quite like Joe Biden, the Venezuelan critpotrumpismo, endemic morbidity in Brickell and Serrano, inhibits them from vigorously denouncing Putin's atrocious war.
All in all, there has been no shortage of people who fantasized out loud and that is why I know that many are excited to think that the war in Ukraine will bring consequences not foreseen by Maduro and that, now, the so-called "externalities" will precipitate his fall.
I, of course, would also like to see the end of the Chavista-Madurista dictatorship, but not at the price of a nuclear holocaust promoted by Putin, Maduro's staunchest ally, apart from Iran.
The reaction of France, Germany and other European nations deserves applause and reasonably encourages hope that the fire will cease.
This time it seems that things will not turn out for the KGB judoka like in 2014.
However, it is disheartening to think that the barbarian in the Kremlin has been able to bring the world to the brink of a third world war just because of what Anne Applebaum, and with her other lucid and upright observers, have long denounced: the hypocrisy of the West and its great financial centers, obscene laundries of Putin's money, the Russian oligarchs and their infamous associates.
Among the latter, the Venezuelans and their globetrotting bishops, such as Alex Saab, stand out.
It is good news that they will tighten the screws, although it would be wonderful to see a war won at the point of sanctions.
The history of financial sanctions is also the history of how tyrants have managed to circumvent them indefinitely.
And in this, Iran and Putin's Russia have found in Nicolás Maduro an outstanding pupil willing to emulate them in everything.
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