Caracas Chronicles

As I argued in my previous post,  the political and economic crisis that Venezuela is facing gives ample room for outsiders to appeal to the people who are not convinced by chavismo, the MUD block, or both.

Take a look at the following video from Julio Jimenez (aka, @juliococo), and tell me if he’s not grasping this opportunity to thrive in the political spectrum (I guarantee that those 12 minutes are worth it).

Who is Julio Coco? Not much is known about him other than he claims to be an unemployed left-wing activist, a self-proclaimed atheist marxist who nonetheless celebrates Christmas. When the protests began, he recorded a video that quickly went viral. Now, he is a celebrity, gracing talk shows and debates.

Basically, Julio Coco’s points are:

• people are dying,
• mayors and legislators have seen their rights trampled,
• there are no dollars for medicine, so there is also “economic repression” caused by scarcity,

so, how dare the MUD talk to the government about “human rights”? How dare they sit and talk to the government?

Julio Coco is a nobody, but he is a silver-tongued nobody. Lacing his speech with profanities, he rants against the government and against the opposition, against old-time politicians and against believers in market economics. Julio Coco has become an important mouthpiece for the current protest movement – bark, rage, righteous indignation, but ultimately not much more than that … other than a blanket defense of the same economic model that got us into this mess.

We have heard this before.

Juliococo smells his chance, and he is taking it. As he himself wrote a few months ago:

“When people do not understand, they act as if out of inertia, they follow the trends, they are susceptible to the machinery of mass psychology, to lies, to pressure, to blackmail, to fear…”

Words to live by.