Caracas Chronicles

There’s no sugar-coating possible: the accords announced by the Vatican-mediator today represent a comprehensive victory for the government, and a shocking, stomach-churning surrender for MUD.

Vague, non-committal, couched in the kind of chavista-propaganda “newspeak” lifted right out of the Misión Verdad style guide, the Communiqué read out by Monseignor Celli confirms all of our fears about the “dialogue”: that it’s a farce shrewdly orchestrated by the government purely to delay, divide, demoralize and demobilize.

It should be entirely obvious to anyone with dos-dedos-de-frente that keeping this charade going for as long as possible is the government’s only goal.

It begins with a commitment from both to “fight all forms of sabotage, boycott, or aggression to the Venezuelan economy”, essentially putting the opposition’s signature on the government’s signature propaganda lie: the economic war.

It then lays blame for the constitutional crisis not on the blatant abuse of the Supreme Tribunal for partisan purposes but on the National Assembly’s “desacato” of those absuses, on its contempt for that Kangaroo Court.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it veers off into a pledge to prioritize the border dispute with Guyana in the context of talks, because as we al know the Essequibo is the main reason we are dissatisfied with the government.

Shockingly, MUD’s Carlos Ocariz then tried to spin us by releasing a communiqué saying the dialogue had reached a result — the liberation of ‘detained persons’, like that, using the government euphemism — that no one from the government has signed up to. Then he vowed to keep fighting for early elections, only for Aragua governor Tareck El Aissami, to call bullshit in the most public way:

Nada de eso se discutió. Leer COMUNICADO de la mesa de diálogo político. El RR está muerto de FRAUDE!! https://t.co/tQ0FSwhb0o

— Tareck El Aissami (@TareckPSUV) November 12, 2016

Look, the only part of agreement that the government is really interested in is MUD’s commitment to sit down again for another formal session three weeks from now, on December 6th.

It should be entirely obvious to anyone with dos-dedos-de-frente that keeping this charade going for as long as possible is the government’s only goal.

Writing that is painful to me. For a long time I’ve stuck by MUD, even as it made decisions that raised many an opositor eye-brow. I’ve yelled at Emi to chill out, I’ve dished out chancletazos to my VP friends, I’ve dismissed many a concern about MUD strategy as keyboard warriorism. I, of all people, cannot be said to point the finger at MUD lightly.

But Rafael Osío Cabrices’s tweet about today’s communiqué tipped me over the edge. Because I know Rafa well, I respect his insight and I know him as both a passionate democrat and someone constitutionally allergic to bombast.

So when I see someone like him tweet something like this…

Yo soy comunicador y no veo aquí un error de comunicación de la MUD. Someterse al lenguaje del malandrato no es una torpeza: es una traición

— Rafael Osío Cabrices (@osiocabrices) November 13, 2016

…I know the gig is up.