Caracas Chronicles

A few days ago, Quico tried to throw the MUD a bone and help them through their four-day long colonic deliberation in responding to the latest anal rape CNE announcement.

Quico has recently been on a questionable/creepy MUD-love-fest bender for reasons which I still cannot understand. But Caracas Chronicles is open to diversity of opinion (however misguided), so I’ll give him a shot at redemption.

Never mind. I can’t. I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight knowing that I am complicit in this massive, asshole hypocrisy.

In making an argument about how MUD should “leverage the dates for the 20% Drive into a National Protest Event,” Quico is helping perpetrate a monstrous deception. Quico knows full well there’s not going to be a referendum before January 10th. He wants to call out people to demonstrate on a demonstrably false premise.

Because, in fact, here’s the dirty little secret that everybody knows but nobody wants to say out loud: NOBODY THOUGHT THE REFERENDUM WOULD HAPPEN THIS YEAR, EVER.

NO

BO

DY

Not the MUD, not Capriles, not even your dear, sweet, sugarless-cookie-baking grandmother who is probably going to bed without a proper dinner tonight.

So asking our electorally…. actually, our all out generally fatigued population to participate in some bullshit 20% signature collection ruse for the purposes of “proving to the world that we, in fact, are an overwhelming majority” is as stupid and cruel as the Q&A portion of a beauty pageant.

It’s stupid because there’s a longstanding precedent of the government not really caring how many votes you got (7,707,422 last time, to be exact), period.

It’s time to recognize MUD for what it is: the least worst thing we have to an opposition electoral umbrella.

It’s cruel because, in their infinite self-absorption, MUD’s honchos still think that they can conceptualize and manage what they arrogantly refer to as a “street agenda,” and raise expectations accordingly. Nevermind that they’re calling on a society to openly protest on behalf of an initiative that they themselves never even believed in to begin with, and also demanding tactical efforts which they know full well they are not capable of leading.

It’s time to recognize MUD for what it is: the least worst thing we have to an opposition electoral umbrella. They proved their chops come 6D. But to expect MUD, that grab-bag of competing personal power agendas and murkily defined, minimally contrasting “ideologies,” to effectively strategize our way out of this shitstorm, is, well, a mistake.

And a product of our well-placed desperation.

Political parties are important, necessary even for a functioning democracy, but only if they have a well-organized civil society to hold them accountable.

I drank the Kool Aid for a bit, and I won’t blame you for having a sip now and then, too. Nobody held the MUD at gunpoint in taking on the responsibility of our political stewardship, they did so because they wanted to, and sold us on their resolve….and we believed. And yes, political parties are important, necessary even for a functioning democracy, but only if they have a well-organized civil society to hold them accountable.

We stopped doing that.

So here we are, an opposition duped into thinking that our leadership knows what it’s doing, even though it was caught blindsided by a CNE announcement that, apparently, absolutely anyone could see coming.  And yet, after the mother of all pipichetadas to our democratic change-seeking egos, we wait patiently for MUD to announce its sovereign decision on how to proceed come Monday morning.

It’s as if Reverse Stockholm Syndrome and Learned Helplessness had conceived a demonchild after a one night stand in the middle of a Humanitarian Crisis. And one of the parents is a runaway dad who can’t give two shits about the expectations he’s raised. That’s what we have right now.

There is no justification for a seventeen-year-old-and-counting savvy opposition to not have foreseen this, and to not have a contingency in the works. They cannot hide behind “consensus” and “democracy is tough” to justify their clear inability of rising to the occasion.

Monday’s MUD announcement will most likely amount to be a half-baked, weak-willed call for taking on the 20% signature drive. But please know that this is not the least worst result of interparty negotiations, a well-meaning dilution of various extremes unto the lowest common denominator. To accept this reasoning would be to give MUD an easy way out of the mess it got us into in the first place.

I need you to understand that Monday’s announcement is the straightforward evidence that MUD lacks the balls to call a march unto Miraflores, and that we (those that still choose to remain in Venezuela) would all be best suited, at this point, in devoting our time to finding a proper Vice President so that a transition might be negotiated next year and we can survive until 2019.

Nada más que hacer.