The date of his arrival in Paris is etched in his memory: November 23, 2015. “Everyone who emigrates remembers the definitive day when their life changes forever,” he says. He left Caracas for good and settled in Europe. First in Paris. Currently he is based in Spain, in Malaga. Rodrigo Blanco Calderón (Caracas, 1981) is the author of The Night, winner of the III Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Biennial Prize in 2019, the Critics’ Prize in Venezuela, and the Rive Gauche Prize in France. There he narrates the years of suffocation in a Caracas ravaged by the energy crisis during the Hugo Chávez regime. He was also a finalist for the International Booker Prize, Sympathyand with The calves was a finalist in the 5th Ribera del Duero Short Narrative Award in 2017.
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Blanco Calderón, contributor to the Spanish newspaper ABCpromoted various cultural projects during the regimes of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. Together with some friends he created a publishing house in CaracasCommon Place, who later opened a bookstore of the same name located in the Altamira area, the coordinates where the bloody protests of 2014 took place. That place became a space of resistance. Blanco Calderón is one of the Venezuelan authors who, from exile, together with Karina Sainz Borgo and Juan Carlos Méndez Guedes, call for the return of democracy: “I have not published a single page that is not crossed by the bullets of Venezuela.”
These days the power supply was cut off at the residence of the Argentine embassy in Caracas, with six asylum seekers from María Corina Machado’s campaign team inside. It is impossible not to think about The Nightmarked by blackouts. In what context did you write it?
I wrote the novel between 2010 and 2013, in the context of the energy crisis in Venezuela. These were particularly difficult years in the already difficult history of Venezuela because the energy crisis marked a before and after: it went from a difficult, politically, socially and economically conflictive situation to a truly critical, dramatic, horrifying and dark situation. The three years in which I wrote the novel span from the declaration of the crisis to the announcement of Chávez’s death. That is, the transition from bad to horror.
Did you have hope for a change of era in the election of July 28?
On the one hand, I was and continue to be very impressed with the process of change that María Corina Machado is leading. I believe that she is, without prejudice to the others, the political leader that we have needed and have been waiting for for a long time, with clear objectives to lead us all to this position of political unity that has not been seen in 25 years. This work has translated into a voting force that is the great value that we have right now, the incontestability of Edmundo González’s victory that has put Chavismo completely on the ropes and forced it to commit fraud. On the other hand, I am pessimistic because I was sure that Maduro was not going to recognize the results, that he was going to commit fraud and that he was going to start the process of repression, persecution and murder of dissidents. Strangely, I have not felt dejected. Rather, I have been very optimistic because I feel that there are things moving in Venezuela at a social and political level that are different.
What was the experience of undertaking a cultural project of that magnitude in Caracas, with its values, in such an adverse context that was hostile to dialogue?
Between 2005 and 2015, I tirelessly worked as an independent cultural manager. That activity, in that context, was very overwhelming, and, of course, it was charged with a tremendous political sense. Those of us who did it and those who continue to do it carry out acts of resistance against a totalitarian and pamphleteering State, which kills all forms of human expression. Creating a publishing house, having radio programs, holding cultural events and having been linked to this bookstore was recharged with a series of emotions that goes beyond a literary perspective. I believe that in Venezuela we have become accustomed to creating a community with a consciousness of resistance.
There were intellectuals and professors who supported the regime. Are there still intellectuals who support it?
I think that the so-called Bolivarian Revolution had a golden age, linked to the good fortune that Hugo Chavez had at one point, who was a charismatic psychopath who also had a lot of money. He had the highest oil revenues in Venezuelan history and he squandered them. That serves to buy wills. In Venezuela I must say that they were writers who were not very representative either in quality or quantity and that, in addition, with the arrival of Chavezism they put their creative work on hold because they produced practically nothing else. Today it is difficult to find a writer of any importance who still puts his hand in the fire for the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro.
How do you think these 25 years of regime have affected or impacted Venezuelan literature, with censorship, persecution and exile?
It must be studied in blocks of time. There is a difference in charisma, but not in method, between Nicolás Maduro and Hugo Chávez. During Chávez’s reign, until 2006, there was a honeymoon period, and from that moment on everything began to crumble. At first, Chávez was a global phenomenon that attracted a lot of international attention to Venezuela. This allowed transnational book companies to set up shop in the country and begin to publish many works to try to understand the Chávez phenomenon and, by extension, a lot of Venezuelan literature was published. When the honeymoon and the money of Chavismo began to end, around 2010, the paper crisis began. Exchange controls made it impossible for companies to extract dividends from the books they sold in Venezuela, the transnationals left and the book market began to crumble. Today there are very few independent publishers. There has been a brutal deterioration in editorial production and this affects writing. A young writer, like I was, who wrote knowing that there was a system of prizes and competitions that would perhaps allow me to publish, is not the same as a young person today who has nothing to eat and no incentive for creativity.
And what about those writers who emigrated, as is your case?
It has been terrible for them because they have completely lost the little cultural capital they had in Venezuela. Because they are literary nobody outside Venezuela and it is very difficult to make a name for themselves.
Is there a political will to prevent your books from being published in Venezuela?
I would love to be able to say that they don’t publish me in Venezuela because my books are uncomfortable. But there is something to understand about the Chavista dictatorship: it is an illiterate dictatorship. It is a 21st century dictatorship that is only interested in TikTok, social media, and reggaeton. Maduro, although he seems like a dinosaur, is a much more modern dictator than Daniel Ortega, who follows the model of a dictator in the style of Castro, who persecutes intellectuals, bans books, and declares Gioconda Belli, Sergio Ramírez, and 92 other intellectuals stateless. Maduro is bankrupting the book industry just as he has bankrupted the oil industry. There is simply no way for books in general, whatever they may be, to get there. It is a policy of suffocation.
Do you think Maduro really believes what he says? Is he a cynic who believes his own lie?
I have spent many hours reflecting on this. It is a reflection on evil: how can a person or a group of people, a power structure, exist that can lie so shamelessly, that is capable of organizing a country so that people literally die of hunger while they live the high life. Maduro is a psychopath, a cynic like any person with that level of power, but there comes a point where a psychopathogenic community is created and that is why it is so dangerous.
Does Spanish or European progressivism understand Latin American dictatorships and populism? There are political figures who support or are benevolent in their view of the Venezuelan regime.
The case of the Chavista dictatorship is not understood in Spain. I am not referring to militants of the most obtuse left, with whom there is no possible dialogue. I am referring to friends, people who ask you, and I start to tell them 0.1% of everything, and they do not understand. In Spain there are a series of prejudices and ideas about Latin America and what has to do with dictatorships. They are marked, of course, by the experience of Francoism, and it is understandable, and by the dictatorships, above all, of the Southern Cone in Latin America in the seventies. It gives the impression that this is the only model of dictatorship. It must be understood that dictatorship is a mechanism that is updated.
In what sense does he say that?
Evil is updated, just as technology is updated. And the dictatorships of the 21st century are dictatorships of delirious ideological syncretism that have used democratic mechanisms to install authoritarian regimes. The model of the coup d’état with tanks, with the military taking over the Palacio de la Moneda, that has already happened. Now power is achieved through electoral and democratic means and from there a constituent assembly is called to allow indefinite re-elections, the supreme courts and the media are co-opted.
Is there a possible way out of this labyrinth that has been built in Venezuela?
I imagine a scenario like the one we have now, but taken to its maximum consequence. We Venezuelans organized ourselves around our political leaders, we went out en masse to vote and it was an overwhelming result that not even Chavismo could credibly cheat. Now it is up to us to demonstrate and defend it. It is important to see that there is support from the international community and it is encouraging to see that a number of countries do not recognize the results. The important thing would be for that pressure to come from its own allies, from Gustavo Petro and Lula, above all. The problem is that the more time passes, the more the dictatorship is repressing, killing.
You were young when Chavez came to power. At what point or after what event did you realise that that government was dangerous and harmful?
From the first minute. I grew up in a house with democratic values and we didn’t like what we saw. But it was a gradual process. Almost all my friends from university ended up working for Chavismo. It was very hard to see friends who supported paramilitary groups shooting at a march where I was. My moment of exhaustion was in 2013, when Maduro won his first election against Henrique Capriles. Even then, the political leadership didn’t understand who they were dealing with.
LAURA VENTURA
THE NATION (Argentina) – GDA
Madrid
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