Juan Guaidó, in his office in Caracas, on December 30. LEO ALVAREZ (AFP)
Two oligarchies are fighting today in impoverished Venezuela, both are tyrannical and militaristic.
The convention attributes democratizing ideals and purposes to the opposition coalition.
Many of its individuals, in effect, consider themselves to be liberal democrats, supporters of the market economy and the republican and civil regime.
Also of the separation of powers, the alternation in power and the rendering of accounts of the positions of popular election.
To question its good faith implies ignoring the human rights violations of which its leaders, activists and supporters have been victims, even fatalities, for many years.
However, and paradoxically, the opposition political groups, taken as a whole, have already ceased to be democratic in their deliberations and in their methods.
The word "democracy" in his speech is, if nothing else, just a pretense.
In essence, the Venezuelan opposition has ended up offering its compatriots a program that roughly restores everything bad that could have preceded Chávez.
Its anachronistic and annihilating militarism deserves a little elucidation.
Since the beginning of this century, the political parties of the last century already being swept off the map by the overwhelming irruption of Chavismo, the barons of the press, the "environmental analysts", the advisory survey laboratories of industry and banking,
last but not least
, the super managers of the state oil company, took the lead in discontent and alarm.
They did it with astonishing disdain for the contemporary history of Venezuela and for everything that politics demands of the ars, skill, patience and left hand.
A stellar moment in their performance was the strike in which a 21st-century establishment of oil super-managers with zombie ideas about politics, acting
nine to five
with Blackberrys and PowerPoints, sought to bring about the overthrow of a 19th-century military charisma with zombie ideas about the economy.
It was preceded by a failed military coup whose master plan followed the ancient, simplistic pattern of John Foster Dulles in the 50s: to create a "climate" of civil unrest that could pass for a legitimate general insurrection and provoke the intervention of the barracks.
By trying to save themselves the effort—the hassle—of building a long-term civilian and electoral alternative, they only managed to hand over to Chávez and Fidel Castro, in just eight months, the military high command and the state oil company.
The astonishing thing is that, fifteen years later, Leopoldo López,
golden boy
of an outstanding Harvardian brotherhood, has not produced a better strategy but only a freeze-drying of the Foster Dulles method.
In the process it became clear that John Bolton does not match the points of Foster Dulles and that Venezuela is not Guatemala, 1954.
Less than 100 days after launching their campaign for a return to the democratic norm, we learned that López and Guaidó were secretly courting the tutelage of the military cacocracy and the contest of the Supreme Court of the Madurista dictatorship.
The botch of April 30, its prequels and sequels, scuttled the "USS Guaidó."
Two generations of politicians born between the 50s and 90s sank with his crew, the founders of Primero Justicia and, most notably, the “operators” of the so-called “generation of 2007″, co-opted by Primero Justicia and its detachments.
Some of them were called to colonize as political commissars the subsidiaries of the state oil company (PDVSA) during Guaidó's ill-fated interim.
His most important performance was, thanks to a clientelist looting, to bankrupt Monomeros, the largest fertilizer plant in Colombia.
The opposition leadership has become an oligarchy—a “government of the few,” in this case with an alarming lack of representation, embodied in the National Assembly—which, thanks to Guaidó, obtained temporary subsidy from Washington.
That money sustained for three years the illusion of a government in exile ready to supplant that of Maduro, General Padrino and the Rodríguez brothers.
To dispense with Guaidó without regard, the National Assembly, elected seven years ago, wanted to invest itself in addition to the administration of the nation's assets abroad: nothing less than Citgo Oil Corp and the nation's gold deposited in London that, thanks to to the indignant reaction of the opposition civil society that denounced the unconstitutionality of the outrageous arbitration, they are for now safe from an outburst similar to that of Monomeros.
It goes without saying that, in the era before Chávez, another parliamentary oligarchy equally devoured by electoral passion, conspired to remove Carlos Andrés Pérez, with a speed comparable to that reported by Guaidó, when there were only months left to finish his term. .
Guaidó, who was a proxy for Leopoldo López, has the consolation of running for the primary election of the opposition that seeks to elect a candidate that is opposable to Maduro.
It would be a gallant tempt, at the height of his proven and courageous dedication to politics.
No one, moreover, will reproach him for a march into exile.
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