The unfortunate definition of a banana republic that has so plagued the history of Latin America is based on two elements: the coup d’état, sometimes bloodless and sometimes bloody, but always with comical nuances; and electoral fraud, sometimes subtle enough to make it credible, and most of the time, so crude that it is impossible to hide.
In 1947, the old Anastasio Somoza ordered the seizure of the ballot boxes, which were locked in the basement of the National Palace, until his electoral judges published the results that he himself had drawn up, pencil in hand. To carry out the frauds, it matters little whether there are sophisticated systems for counting the votes, whether biometric or non-biometric.
In 1988, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas swept the presidential elections as a dissident candidate from the left wing of the old and everlasting PRI. Shortly after those elections, Cuauhtémoc showed me in Mexico the computer spreadsheets that showed how he was winning at all the polling stations. Suddenly, “the system,” controlled by the PRI, “shut down,” and when it was started up again, he appeared to be losing at all the polling stations. Fraud at gunpoint had given way to electronic fraud.
The last of the farcical scenarios, the Venezuelan elections, take us back to the classic times of banana republics in hot lands, a staging that seems to have come from the pen of Don Ramón del Valle Inclán, an expert in grotesque dictators, not in vain did he create the prototype of Tyrant Banderas.
The play opens with a colorful scene: Maduro, who has ordered his National Electoral Council to declare him the winner of the elections he lost three to one, appears before his Supreme Court of Justice to lodge a complaint, and the magistrates receive him in a solemn session, all elegantly robed, while in his National Assembly his deputies demand jail for the candidate who was robbed of victory, his Bolivarian Guard represses protests against fraud in the streets, and his Minister of Defense appears on television in campaign attire denouncing that everything is a vile maneuver by imperialism.
Maduro calls on his judicial magistrates to certify Maduro’s victory, gifted to him by Maduro’s electoral magistrates and defended by Maduro’s army, while Maduro’s police repress Maduro’s adversaries. A scene that can be crowned with an epigram by Ernesto Cardenal: “Somoza unveils the statue of Somoza in the Somoza stadium.”
The farce is a grotesque falsification of the truth, and its greatest expression is the grotesque. The great farce in the situation in Venezuela is to pretend to believe that there exists a State of Law there, where an electoral anomaly has occurred that can be corrected in accordance with the mechanisms that the State of Law itself provides: legal appeals, review procedures, constitutional resources. And that Maduro, who ordered the fraud to be carried out, is going to submit to the adverse ruling of serious and independent judges who will reverse the expeditious machinery of deception, proclaiming himself the winner even before the false votes have finished being “counted.”
In Venezuela, far from a State of Law, what we have is a dictatorship that has long decided not to let power be taken away, threatening a bloodbath, even if the popular vote decided so, as it did. A regime that was born under an already obsolete messianic conception, the Bolivarian revolution first and foremost. Elections are useful as long as they can win them, and they play at democracy as long as they can do so with malice aforethought and advantage. I have already seen this film.
When the revolutionary fuel is exhausted, wasted, misappropriated, or falsified, and the votes needed to win no longer fit, because dreams become nightmares for people, and those votes can no longer be counted in a transparent manner, sophisticated machines become a hindrance, but that does not prevent fraud. You cannot lose. Then you have to reach for the gun, or black out. Bring down the system.
Electoral fraud is neither left-wing nor right-wing. It is fraud. A left that turns a blind eye to fraud, or justifies it, or supports it, because those who commit it are left-wing, will have no moral support to denounce fraud when the right commits it against the left. And a left that supports dictatorships, and on top of that, fraudulent, has been left in tatters.
The president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, has given the best lessons in recent days about the fact that frauds have no ideology. Respect for the popular will is part of the defense of fundamental human rights, beyond outdated doctrines that mandate silence or abstention in order not to violate the self-determination of peoples. Which consists, precisely, in respecting the will of those peoples.
And the people of Venezuela today cry out for respect for their thwarted will.
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