Caracas Chronicles

Guaicaipuro Lameda’s take on the here-and-now…

For now, the opposition trumpets a precarious unity, shorn of political purpose, forced into being by reality and meant only to place a few people in “winning positions” on the election lists, and so much so that only the most daring venture to assure us that they will deny the revolution a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.

And so, its clumsiness in the face of traps, its cowardice when the time comes to defend itself against powerplays, its lack of concrete achievements and its naivete when it comes to responding to the nature of its adversary have disqualified this leadership which neither acknowledges past failures nor learns from them and, as a result, the voters who oppose the revolution find themselves fragmented and confused as they drown in a mix of feelings that range from anger and frustration to disappointment and hopelessness.

Today, the opposition people, without a discernible future or a winning spirit and having lost faith in themselves, have given themselves over to prophecizing about coming revolutionary events. Thus we hear people who go as far as to say they’ll lose their homes or have to share them with those the revolution imposes. This is a sign that defeatism is imposing itself on the opposition while triumphalism becomes the real adversary of the revolutionaries. They have no one left to fight with, and to cover up their mistakes they’re reduced to blaming the problems their incompetence bars them from solving on those who haven’t been anywhere near power for seven long years.

And so, and “for now”, it seems the revolution is here to stay and to inflict terrible damage on Venezuelan society, enslaving it to a government that deifies poverty as an instrument of domination and subjugation that allows it to keep itself in power. We shall have to see if those who have lived in poverty and exclusion are willing to suffer through such a fate while a revolutionary oligarchy grows in an opulence that magnifies the inequalities that brought forth its own birth.