Something does not seem to go into dealing with the Venezuelan crisis – 22/03/2019

Something seems to be going wrong in dealing with the Venezuelan crisis. The arrest by political police chavista of politician Roberto Marrero, Juan Guaidó's chief of staff, is a challenge for the fifty or so countries that recognize this leader as acting president of Venezuela. This provocation is due to the fact that the Bolivarian autocracy believes that it succeeded in undermining the powerful offensive raised by the opposing leadership when it declared Nicolás Maduro a usurper and interpreted an article of the Constitution to crown Guaidó as a provisional measure until the convocation of elections. The broad international support that this has provoked, and which started with the United States, has given a shine to this play.

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However, the axes barely moved from where they were and nomenclature, on the other hand, deepened their authoritarianism. "The harsh words of the White House, the sanctions, including the oil embargo, have not caused a collapse of the regime or a major defection by the military leaders," according to an article in newspaper. Foreign Affairs, which is not exactly a left publication. The depth of the corrupted bond that discipline the armed forces has not been taken into account. We know that Venezuela has a thousand generals in activity, especially above the American workforce. the greatest military power on the planet. Even the recent disaster caused by the power outage has not caused damage to the disguised autocracy – similar to the one that exposes the abandonment of its refineries this year, with just 800 000 barrels per day of production – in an example of the war that is supposed to confront the country. "Hypocrisy is the external side of cynicism," Mason Cooley was right.

This evolution should be a lesson for those who have supposed, precisely in Washington, in the front line, that the introduction of this character of the opposition would lead to a sudden explosion of internal alliances. In fact, the situation was underestimated, its time and the knowledge of these complicities that bind the regime. This is not a surprising behavior. The current White House has shown a persistent tendency to confront the simplification of complex conflicts, putting an end to their incompetence. This has been the case with Korea, the North, the Middle East or with the trade war unleashed against China, scenarios in which little of what was planned has been achieved or regressed.

Washington and its partners could have started a certain level of negotiations to find an electoral solution to the crisis with Venezuela's global allies, but he is in conflict with everyone, China and Russia. Beijing would not block an exit of this kind that would collect its more than $ 50 billion lent to the scheme. Moscow, it is more difficult. He also has a fortune buried in this Caribbean country, but his goal in this country is geopolitical. Cuba, meanwhile, Chavismo's main regional sponsor and sponsor, would surely have a different and more pragmatic attitude than the current one if the opening that Barack Obama had promoted in Havana had not been demolished .

The aforementioned US magazine highlights the disdain expressed by Trump officials badigned to Venezuela about the economic and political interests of the vast remnant of the region that is not part of this new "axis of evil" that encompbades Venezuela , Cuba and Nicaragua. "The first step," he said, "should have been to cover embbadies in the region." There is no ambbadador in Belize, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Panama and this week has named Mexico, and in most others there are ambbadadors, but they are waiting for their relief. "

Yes, Guaidó and his allies have won a triumph in an aspect that has been at the center of the Venezuelan opposition's urgency since the deepening of the country's decline. They managed to give concrete leadership to the demonstrations and the bad mood of the population to prevent the fury of the most battered bases from degenerating into a proper dynamic and that the control of the crisis is lost. This alternative should not be taken for granted and is perhaps the most important and serious threat to nomenclature.

The problem of the armed opposition is that the lack of results undermines a very strong expectation installed to reinvigorate the figure of the "acting president". Maduro and his flock bet to guarantee and show the internal unity, especially with the armed forces, and wait for the disintegration of the challenge of opposition to a wall. The strategy has already been practiced by the regime and she knows it requires patience that is not free of brutality.

This is partly why the procedures of the Bolivarian autocracy show an increasingly obvious affinity with the behaviors, facing the same challenges, dictatorships of the recent past of Latin America. As in these examples in Venezuela, the leader is not touched, but his environment. The basics of militancy are terrorized by unplanned raids that few can see after national censorship and are pierced by a triumphalist speech. Marrero was abducted by a group of tasks from the Sebin, the regime's political police, who works in a nearly drawn mold of Pinochet's DINA. They arrive in the crowd at night, break everything they have at their fingertips and threaten people with guns on their heads or try to defend those they're going to kidnap. It then disappears for hours, days or forever.

As has already been said, the format of the repression of the opposition recalls the procedures of Alfredo Stroessner's Paraguayan dictatorship, which operated with a theatrical institutionalization and the repetition of the words Patria (this was the name of the newspaper la tyranny) and justice.

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The frustration of the leaders, who gather huge crowds in their democratic demands, is reflected in the reappearance in Guaidó's speech of the threat of foreign military intervention. In statements to El País or the BBC, he considered this option as "A question of responsibility" of dissent. The slogan, taken from the disturbing speeches of the extremist sector that runs in Donald Trump's cabinet (John Bolton, Elliot Abrams and Senator Marco Rubio) had disappeared after the demonstrations that revealed the summit of the Lima group in Bogota at the end of month. Last February At this meeting, at which US Vice President Mike Pence participated, the Latin American countries, including Argentina, pointed out that there had been no place "for the use of force … The transition to democracy must be conducted peacefully by Venezuelans, supported by political and diplomatic means". Guaidó also attended this meeting.

It is possible to understand the reasons why this issue reappears in the opposition, but it should be noted that it is not observed that the purpose of the scheme is precisely to cause this path. Maduro must deepen the desperation of the opposition for this litany to continue to resonate. The threat of military intervention is invigorating the Bolivarian nomenclature, which rightly supposes that such an action would break its isolation and disrupt the nationalist bases that follow the dissident leader.

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This is also why there was the provocative arrest of Marrero and the falsification of a handful of grotesque evidence against the ruler revealed, in case there is another lack of arrogance, by the Minister of Interior Néstor Reverol, one of the first military regime. accused in the United States for drug trafficking.
Copyright Clarín, 2019.