It is difficult to get a tragic idea of a country whose name is a diminutive with clearly satirical intent: the word Venezuela by itself does not refer to anything originally portentous, magical or profound like Atitlán, Tierra del Fuego, Anahuac or Macondo.
Venezuela rhymes more easily with habichuela, portañuela, triquiñuela, mujerzuela.
Also with "rochela" which is another name for the vacilón and the algazara and for what in bullfighting parla is called querencia.
At school age we were grouped with the story that a 16th century Italian navigator, a cosmographer named Amerigo Vespucci, just seeing the stilt houses of the aborigines of Lake Maracaibo, was carried away by nostalgia for nothing less than Venice.
“Venezziola!” He exclaimed, amazed at the imaginative industriousness of the natives.
An 18th century Creole chronicler launched the martingale that Amerigo meant with astonishment, “it resembles a little Venice”, when it is obvious that he was speaking, condescendingly, of some monstrous riverside entities under palm trees drunk with the sun.
Castilianized by his travel companions, the word ended up giving its name to our region of "arepa devourers", as the deadly arquebusier Lope de Aguirre struck down the Venezuelans of his time.
What I might want to say with all this is that I find it understandable, today, that the universal imagination does not easily associate the word "Venezuela" with the idea of seriousness or with any tragic sense.
The Caribbean, the emotional basin where my compatriots fit best, has been prodigal in joyous interpretations of Creole joking and relaxation: I think of the Cuban Mañach or Nazoa from Caracas who saw in our lightness and indifference a kind of inadvertent stoicism, a savory wisdom of living that is not the exclusive moral attribute of the rubbish but also of the so-called elites.
Examining the deep relationship between the choteo —the Venezuelan joda—, on the one hand, and the mamadera de gallo —intricate notion, intelligible, however, throughout the region—, on the other, offers a great challenge since the mockery and the art of deception are not exactly the same thing.
This, which I hardly know how to name, is visible, for example, in the reaction of the opposition political class to the embezzlement of 20 billion dollars that the state oil company has suffered in the last three years and by its own directors.
The case shines, it does not admit elucidation: people from the government stole them;
there is no blameless government institution in Venezuela.
In denouncing the regime's corruption, all opposition voices invoke a recent report on corruption prepared by Transparency International.
Said report places Venezuela in position 177 of a list of 180 countries auscultated.
In the world opacity championship, Venezuela is among the four leading finalists.
All this is happening while the opposition parties are discussing whether or not they should rely on the National Electoral Council (CNE) for their independent citizen consultation, an extension proven loyal to Miraflores, accused of having liquidated, twenty years ago, the secret of the vote.
On that occasion, the list of those who requested before the CNE the call for a referendum to recall the mandate of Hugo Chávez was made public and has been used since then as a discriminatory index that prohibits the signatories from the right to work in the Public Administration and to contracting with the state.
The issue is relevant because it is about choosing the candidate who will challenge Maduro for the presidency of the republic in 2024. With one exception, all the pre-candidates today praise the transparency and capabilities of the CNE.
The organizing board of the primaries talks about the CNE as if it were a Swiss technical body that regulates weights and measures.
Maduro's loud denunciation of his own oil minister is a mockery.
Requesting the Maduro CNE contest in a citizen election has already been a rooster's bottle.
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