If Venezuela were a literary genre today, it could well be characterized by tragic realism. The inauguration of Nicolás Maduro for a new term (2025-2031) places the Caribbean president in the dishonorable pantheon of tyrants, real and fictional, in Latin American history. His assumption is the consolidation of a process of autocracy. The self-proclaimed victory without the support of the electoral records – requested endlessly by human rights organizations, third countries and opponents – represents a novelty in the modus operandi of Chavismo, which until now had more or less respected the electoral processes. In this way, the legitimacy of origin that every democratic regime is supposed to have is broken and, therefore, the doors to dictatorship are opened.
The story of this tragedy would be incomplete if we do not also look at what has happened in the opposition in recent years. On the one hand, the evidence that the country does not have an internal project sufficiently organized and plural to constitute a solid alternative to Maduro. It is likely that since the 2012 elections, when Henrique Capriles led a proposal that knew how to not only compete but also make Hugo Chávez himself hesitate, Venezuela has not found that offer. Since then, what has prevailed has been attempts to locate confrontational figures, with a personalist strategy articulated from the outside. The case of Juan Guaidó is, without a doubt, the most grotesque.
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