How difficult it is to make someone understand the difference between what should be and what IS. We Venezuelans are permanently in this never-ending discussion. And that has a lot to do with our very Venezuelan way of being, which has manifested itself so many times historically. Thinking about this reminded me of a passage from one of the last unpublished books left by Francisco Herrera Luque, El vuelo del Alcatraz (The flight of the gannet), which was published in 2007:
When Bolivar said goodbye to Paez in San Fernando de Apure, a city besieged by the plainsman, the Liberator, already on his way back to Angostura, notices that the troops of General Paez are very reduced, and addressing the Centaur of the Plains says to him:
“-Wow General Paez -comments Bolivar with
concern- I did not imagine that you had had so many losses. They have killed
half of your people.....
-I wish it had been like that! - said the
“llanero”, disconcerted. The casualties you see are not due to death but to
desertion. Llanero is not fit to stand guard for very long, not even for a
woman. They say that if they stay too long in one place their legs get moldy,
that the good thing is to go from one place to another, and in the meantime to
fight, plunder and kill.
-But I suppose that you will make a terrible
punishment for deserters,” commented the Liberator with a grave accent. The
least a deserter deserves is to be shot…
-What for, Libertador? -said Paez with plain resignation. As soon as I return to the fields and go from one side to the other they will come looking for me, because that is theirs. What need do I have to take away friends for customs that are strange to us?” (1), Page 83.
This single paragraph of that fabulous Venezuelan history by Herrera Luque could explain the reason why Paez kept Venezuela, leaving the Liberator himself out of the country, and subsequently separating Venezuela from Gran Colombia. The deep understanding that Paez had, not only of the llanero, but of the Venezuelan people of his time, certainly gave him an advantage very difficult to overcome. Why shoot people that he could use later, in favor of a European custom? That is the IS. Bolivar's action was the duty of an officer aware of the rules of war, only without taking into account that the subjects of that action were Venezuelans.
In this long political journey that has been going on for more than 25 years, we Venezuelans still insist on stubbornly ignoring the “is” for the “should be”. This still causes us a lot of stress, discomfort and uneasiness. Reality is certainly hard, but not because it is hard it can be ignored, entrenching ourselves in the fact that the must be -which is not being reality- must prevail and must somehow be changed by forces beyond our control, and which guarantee us that we are right in our must be. But these forces can't (or won't?) do anything to make that reality of ours (or IS) change into a should be.
The most recent example of this social attitude of Venezuelans is the elections of July 28, 2024. Edmundo González Urrutia (EGU) effectively won the elections of July 28, 2024. It would have been expected that his triumph would have been recognized, but it was not so. Contrary to what many in the opposition thought, the regime never had the intention of recognizing the victory of the opposition (in fact, it has insistently told us so for the last 25 years), and kicked the table and said that they had won, period. Just like Jalisco. If I don't win, I snatch.
However, the opposition, instead of assuming that the regime had carried out a coup d'état and act accordingly, insists that this should be fulfilled above the mood of those who dared to carry out such an outrage to the Popular Sovereignty, and who have deepened after July 28 a whole repressive apparatus to screw themselves in power after taking that decision (see From fraud to coup d'état, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/from-fraud-to-coup-detat.html).
Based on that premise, the strategy that the opposition began to apply after June 28 is to try to “convince”, with the corresponding international pressure from those who have recognized the triumph of EGU, that the regime, even if it is carrying out a coup d'état -and that they unleashed an indiscriminate and violent persecution against anyone who claims that it was them who lost the elections-, “change their attitude” and return to the democratic path so that we may all live in peace again, if that is what it was before 28J, and move towards a Rule of Law.
Perhaps it is possible that I have missed some of this whole story or I do not know it all, but one thing is the reaction to an electoral fraud and quite another to a coup d'état. They are two completely different things in approach and narrative, even in terms of a strategy vis-à-vis the International Community. But today we will not focus on that small but great detail.
We insist on a must be, which if not impossible, has a very low probability of being possible, given the circumstances in which things are developing and the repression unleashed in the country. But unless there is something unknown to us -which is certainly the case- the approach and strategy of the opposition towards the events in the country must urgently change, and if there is anything beyond “wishful thinking” for a “self-fulfilling prophecy” involving the proclamation of EGU on January 10, it must be urgently manifested on pain of destroying the hope and confidence of Venezuelans.
The opposition communicational battery is trying to convince us that “Maduro will fall tomorrow” because he will not withstand the growing rejection of the International Community and will be isolated from the concert of nations. Or that he will fall because he violates Human Rights. Please! That has not been a major problem for countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Belarus, North Korea or any other blatantly authoritarian country with more than 60 years in power. The calculations made by the Venezuelan regime and its current executions point to its long-term survival, while we insist on what should be.
With these words I do not intend to demoralize anyone and I am sorry for the possible crudeness of the expression. I only wish that we wake up from the “electoralist” dream that was built for us by the opposition, which convinced us to escape from a reality that we did not want to accept trying a duty to be as opposed to the ES since 20 years ago, when the Coordinadora Democrática self-destructed like a soda cracker under a stick of water, on August 15, 2004, hiding from us to avoid giving us the face after the apotheosis marches we made and never seen before in the world, reappearing later to tell us to continue trying to get out of this serious problem with an electoral strategy, instead of recognizing that we were facing a tyranny that should be treated as such, building since then an opposition strategy aimed at not seeking votes but freedom, because they had also committed a fraud in Chávez's recall referendum.
And all of us, including myself finally, accepted that strategy because in one way or another the regime in all these years had thrown us candies, such as the National Assembly in 2015 and one or another governorship or mayoralty in the country, in the different regional elections, but without changing its increasingly asphyxiating and authoritarian course. I imagine that those who still do not wish to “lose spaces” will be looking for their numbers for the queue in the CNE that gave Maduro as “winner” in the elections of 28J, for the new mega elections of 2025. The good thing about that is that they will be publicly identified as part of the regime and of all this continuist tragedy.
But Venezuelans are resilient. That is the great thing about our nationality. And we have history to prove it. For example, we differ from Colombians in our approach to the struggle for freedom, as well described by Herrera Luque in the above mentioned work. Just read this paragraph without waste:
“New Granada, unlike Venezuela, which has seen its population shrink by a quarter and its wealth destroyed, suffered little from the Spanish reconquest. Pablo Morillo baited his retaliation on five hundred notables who intellectually led the revolution. Once the ringleaders were destroyed, the rest of the Neo-Granadians put up no resistance. In Venezuela, every hundred miles there was a leader who fiercely opposed the Spaniard, without stopping to consider what was happening to his colleagues. If in the plains there was Paez, in the East there were Piar, Mariño and Bermudez, as well as Zaraza and Cedeño. The great merit of Bolivar -as Urdaneta told the Caracas colonel Ambrosio Plaza- was to have unified us under a single command. If this had not been the case, we would have been already broke. Almost a quarter of a million Venezuelans was the price of our disunity” (emphasis added) (1), Page 101.
It was enough for Morillo in New Granada to disband the chiefs. In Venezuela there were many chiefs, only that in those days those chiefs were military, unlike now. And under a unified command, with Bolivar at the head, they achieved what no one in the civilized world at that time would have thought: a barefoot people defeated one of the best armies on the planet and still had enough left to export freedom. I believe that this is a good moment to think that the conditions are ripe to organize ourselves first internally to face this new challenge posed by the ES, which in my opinion is still the only way to assume things in order to crystallize the duty to be to which we aspire so much...
Caracas, August 28, 2024
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
(1) Francisco Herrera Luque, El Vuelo del Alcatraz, 2007, Editorial Alfaguara,
ISBN 978-980-15-0265-4
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