A little over twenty years ago, a type of traveler from the Indies that we did not expect began to frequent Venezuela: the academic or correspondent from the European left. He came, of course, to “observe the process” that Chávez had started.
Not that the invasion of Europeans and Americans of all ages and genders that flew to Venezuela was an absolute novelty, all of them eager to live a primordial experience among good savages and better revolutionaries. All in search of the proverbial “originality of revolutions”, that freshness of the Third World experiment that invariably ends in dictatorship, misery and death. After all, there is enough record of the visit that the Sartre-de Beauvoir couple made to Cuba to see up close the hurricane that wiped out the sugarcane plantation.
It can be said that thanks to the commanders Piñeiro and Valdés of the Americas Department, almost all the nations of the continent received a Guevarista guerrilla focus and an illustrious visitor from the first world committed to the cause. This is how, at least in the Caribbean Basin, each commander in its prime had its journalist, its historian, its exegete. Actually, I wanted to write “etcetera” and look what came out.
In the same way that Fidel Castro had his Gabo, each Torrijos with a pistol at his belt touched his Graham Greene. Hugo Chávez was no different.
Of course, the decreasing trend of symbolic returns to the left at the end of the last century, a seasonal phenomenon that accompanied the rise of the Washington Consensus in the region during the 1980s, made Chávez have to be content with Ignacio Ramonet, Heinz Dieterich and Marta Harneceker . Oliver Stone’s infatuations, it seems to me, are already of another genre.
The truth is that, from those auroras of socialism of the XXI century, I retain the image of an English documentary filmmaker who, back in 2001, enthusiastic about the idea that, from Notting Hill, had been made by Bolivarian circles, was disgusted — hey !, she got very brave, she left the gathering taking her camera and her lights — when I compared them with certain characters from Guerrillas, VS Naipaul’s shocking novel set on a fictional island in the English-speaking Caribbean where a “revolution” takes place.
Compare Venezuela with one of those Naipaulian countries, cruelly dysfunctional and violent until the murder, like the one where it takes place A bend in the riverIt is courting the fulmination of the multicultural progressive combo but — said in passing and just for today—, each wild occurrence of these Chavista-Madurista years confirms the simile for me: Chavismo-Madurismo is third world hell according to Sir Vidia Naipaul. And even worse.
All the miseries, pain and deaths, all the nonsense of these years that have taken my country to the extreme that 95% of our population lives in poverty while six million people have chosen to exile, are condensed in the images of a criminal in an orange mechanic’s briefs in a maximum security cell. The socialism of the XXI century is not competitive authoritarianism, nor a hybrid regime nor resignified populism, but a mafia state.
You can and should condemn the unproductive excess of the war on drugs unleashed by Richard Nixon, but when you live in a continent where the dismissal of the powerful is the norm, seeing the figurehead of Nicolás Maduro in handcuffs and behind bars reconciles inescapably with the DEA.
The apostille of this column is all gratitude and recognition to the retrievers of the portal Armando.Info, especially to the tenacious Roberto Deniz, archetype of the journalist of the future, kind incarnation of the modesty of the civil hero.
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