Caracas Chronicles

After a long day full of meetings, errands, and other such trivialities, I sit down to write a post and, lo and behold, I can’t find a worthwhile topic.

I scan the news, and what I find is not worth a tweet, much less a post: Information Minister Ernesto Villegas calling us all coup-mongers, Prisons Minister Iris Varela repeating what the voices inside her head are telling her, and, oh yes, inflation last month was a whopping 4.7%.

All of these things are significant in their own way (well, except for Iris, she’s just plain sad). But still – how many posts can we write about inflation in Venezuela? Is Villegas even worth a second look? Even Maduro’s bizarre courtship of Edward Snowden gets boring after a while.

It’s in times like these when I remind myself that, wait a minute, Hugo Chávez is dead.

He. Is. Dead. Long gone. Sleeps with the fishes.

No more cadenas of Chávez singing live. No more crazy policy proposals. No more provocative, unheard-of-statements. No more pomp. No more circumstance. No more silly hats, talks of bowel movements, and of conjugal bliss. No more rousing the rabble like only he could do. Chávez is gone, and the only news he’s making is when he pops up in a bust somewhere. It used to be he was fodder for those of us who write about Venezuela. Now … well, he’s just fodder for worms.

This – the slow yet unstoppable decay of what remains of a revolution, now led by unimaginative wannabes – is the new normal. It’s not pretty, and some days it’s not even worth writing about. Chavismo has become the culmination of error upon error, capped off by the decision to leave bland, uninspired characters at the helm.

It’s in days like these when I secretly wish – for only a second – that Chávez was still around, if only to make my job as a blogger a tiny bit easier. But he’s gone, and in his place we have these losers.

Thanks a lot, Chávez. Again.