I would have liked to be in that meeting of the Unitary Platform with Manuel Rosales and María Corina Machado (MCM) where they finally decided the candidacy of Edmundo González Urrutia, like a mosquito stuck to the wall, listening to the arguments of each party. In particular, I would have liked to hear the defense of Rosales by AD and UNT, who despite being despised by more than 80% in the voting intention, these specimens still nominated him as candidate. Someone should have recorded this defense on video for posterity, as a clear proof of the fervent support of these parties for the continuity of the regime.
But I do not believe that the discussion was as long as it is said to have been. MCM would not support Rosales, nor would Rosales abandon his aspiration if not everybody supported him. And a third candidacy such as that of Dr. Corina Yoris Villasana or any other supported by MCM would not be accepted by the CNE. So? It remained the one that was already there. There was not much to discuss there.
The discussion was not about deciding the best candidate, but about who the regime would accept. More pathetic, impossible. A greater surrender, unimaginable. But Venezuelan opposition politics, led by an official opposition that is only there to survive, has reached such extremes. And a people who are in that plan, in political survival mode, could never grow to get rid of this regime's stench.
Only MCM, the only representative in that meeting of the Venezuelan opposition, had something to say there. The others were no one at that meeting to even open their mouths. That's how disrespectful I say it. So I consider that she alone decided who would be the candidate. Let's call him, for reasons that I will now explain, Candidate X, because for all intents and purposes it could have been anyone, no disrespect intended, who finally hit the lottery of representing the Venezuelan opposition in a presidential election.
Throughout our history, Venezuela has been a country of caudillos, which in fact is a feature of Latin American culture. When we began to elect presidents through popular vote, we always sought to sell the "best cock", according to the cultural standards of the country. We could make a historical review of why people voted for this or that candidate in each election since 1947, and although it would be an exciting intellectual exercise and I do not have enough space, I could also reach the general conclusion that the candidates who won were the genuine representation of the historical reality of each political moment of the country. And always the "best rooster" turned out to be the best.
Without going too far back, Betancourt and the return of democracy, Leoni, Caldera I and II, Pérez I and II, Herrera, Velázquez and Chávez, were the living reflection of what was happening in the country. These presidents were not a coincidence. They were the result of what was happening in Venezuela. The beginning of democracy, the oil boom, the subsequent brutal drop in international oil prices, corruption and the political crisis that brought us Chávez. It seems like a movie for those of us who grew up and were educated at that time.
MCM as candidate would have been the faithful reflection of that consistent history of the country, and the emergence of her leadership is born out of what is and continues to occur in Venezuela, as the essence of the Nation, as Dr. Asdrubal Aguiar rightly called it. Asdrúbal Aguiar "...a lady who starts visiting the whole country, does not use an ideological discourse, does not use a party discourse, does not use a power discourse, does not use an electoral discourse, but tells Venezuelans I want you to go back home so that you can be reunited with your brothers, the grandchildren can be reunited with their grandmothers, the wives with their husbands. That is the essence of the Nation" (see The Essence of the Nation, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/the-essence-of-nation.html).
But according to this reasoning, MCM rides on top of what is happening in the country and the common feeling of freedom and change is reflected in her, as the certain light at the end of the tunnel. That is why the stench that is weighing us down is blocking her the possibility of being a candidate NOW. And I stress now because this is not the end of the road yet.
If the political clumsiness exhibited so far by the political leadership, presents and sells Candidate X for his personal and professional trajectory, or simply because "he is the candidate of the unity", only the Electoral System of the NEC, without counting on the abstention by not voting rather than voting for one that "the regime accepted", will take him by the horns far ahead.
Candidate X should not be the same, but the incarnation of the will for change that we all have to get out of this plague that governs us. And the people would not believe any of those who are running him from the Unitary Platform, who preferred to bend over backwards so as not to break with the regime, deciding that candidacy in a closed room behind our back on October 22.
But, how is this achieved if Candidate X is not MCM? By signing a commitment before the Venezuelans prior to the election, promising that Candidate X will be nothing more than an element within a transition government of 1 or 2 years, and that he will summon the democratic forces of the country to govern with him in that transition, and especially the MCM, with the immediate call, at the beginning of his mandate, to a Constituent process of an original nature for the Refoundation of the Nation, and subsequent new presidential election according to the new constitutional text.
This would be the ONLY way for Candidate X to gain the confidence of the country and sweep away with an indisputable triumph, in spite of the mega fraud he will be the object of on July 28. It would be exactly a variant of the strategy applied by Hugo Chávez in 1998, when Venezuelans interpreted that we had to get out of the way of the main clowns that led Venezuelan politics at that time, when we were wrong not in the what but in the who.
Even if the MCM may shoulder Candidate X as "the codfish man" and parade him around the country, it will not make the people trust someone who did not come out of the opposition votes, and coming from the machinery of an official opposition squared with the continuity of the regime, without a similar commitment before all Venezuelans. Let us hope that the true leadership that put Candidate X in this situation will be, as in the past, at the height of the magnitude of the historical process of Venezuela.
Caracas, April 21, 2024
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
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