Caracas Chronicles

For Monday, November 28th, 2016. Translated by Javier Liendo.

“Hard times are times of trial”

Nicolás Maduro

Forgetting to pretend the three days of mourning he imposed, the idiot philosopher decided to honor the military aviation right in the anniversary of its violation during the second failed coup d’Etat committed by Chávez’s followers, which he had the nerve to call a “heroic campaign.” A detail: the Venezuelan air force was created in June of 1946, not on November 27th of 1992, a dark day that plunged many Venezuelan families into actual mourning.

With FIdel’s example

On November 11th, El Porvenir (Cariaco, Sucre state) was the scenario of nine extrajudicial executions against local citizens. An officer and four sergeants of the National Guard who served in the region’s National Anti-Kidnapping Squad were arrested for this atrocity. Before Interior minister Néstor Reverol said that they don’t discard further arrests and that they assumed the commitment to investigate every detail, families and victims protested for several days, demanding he speed up the proceedings and denouncing that those men were ordered to carry out the executions.

Eleven Army officers (all of them members of the Batallón 323 Caribe) are being processed for the disappearance and death of twelve people in Barlovento (Miranda state,) whom they had detained between October 16th and 19th. It was impossible for their family to locate them at any police or military post, or in any hospital, that’s why they filed a complaint before the Prosecutor’s Office, resulting in the creation of a team to investigate the case. Two bodies were found last Friday and the remaining ten were found on Saturday. None of the twelve people murdered had any criminal record.

Isolated shame

The OLP’s success has practically been measured in casualties -whom they wrongly identify as criminals-, and has simply promoted the excessive use of force, with the severe certainty of impunity

Like Reverol, the Prosecutor’s Office doesn’t discard more arrests, because they’re investigating other cases with similar characteristics, contradicting the statement issued by the Defense Ministry claiming that this was an isolated event, that the Armed Forces have a humanistic vocation and that they always guarantee the highest respect for Human Rights. The Operation for People’s Liberation (OLP) -started in July, 2015- has only multiplied the Armed Forces’ abuses and excesses. Many institutions dedicated to the promotion and defense of Human Rights have cautioned about the danger of using the military for citizen security plans. The OLP’s success has practically been measured in casualties -whom they wrongly identify as criminals-, and has simply promoted the excessive use of force, with the severe certainty of impunity.

The impertinence

It’s an insult to honor the military -from any corps- having such recent evidence of massacres in Cariaco and Barlovento. It’s not a lack of sense of opportunity, but a depravity. And thus, Nicolás spoke from Aragua state, hopping with excitement for the aerial parade and shouting his pride when he sees the sukhois flying through the sky. Despite the lack of food and medicines, he expressed his satisfaction for the creation of a new team of Special Forces to serve for contingencies in the country’s aerial space and fight off “any fourth generation war attempt.” Nicolás claimed in cadena that “we must keep relaunching ourselves everyday (…) relaunching our institutions everyday”; we won’t have any valid authorities this way, of course. Since he’s inspired by the presidential sash, he claimed that 2016 will be remembered as the heroic year, the year when nobody surrendered: “It’s easy to live through times where the odds favor us, but it’s very hard to fight during turbulent times.”

Forced dialogue

After the usual insults against the opposition, he said: “Let’s be done with so many conspiracies, the calls to hatred, provocations, stop discussing matters that don’t interest Venezuelans, stop the campaigns to spread hatred

“I represent the voice of the great majorities when I say that Venezuela wants dialogue for peace,” and like the autocrat he is, he added that he won’t allow anyone to leave negotiations for the remainder of 2016, extending that to 2017 and 2018. After the usual insults against the opposition, he said: “Let’s be done with so many conspiracies, the calls to hatred, provocations, stop discussing matters that don’t interest Venezuelans, stop the campaigns to spread hatred,” claiming that we’ve waged “an infernal economic war” -hard to call it anything else, considering the corruption and impunity of our only enemy, the PSUV-, that we must free the country “from the criminal economy imposed by the oligarchy at home” -the PSUV’s, of course-; and he followed this with the stupid narrative of an heroic and determined people just because we’re the country with the highest inflation in the planet for the fifth year straight.

The guy who slipped away

Sometimes, when I’m bored, I watch José Vicente Rangel for a while. Yesterday, he talked about how unlikely it was for the Venezuelan opposition to behave democratically, because they’re not democratic nor do they want to solve anything with the dialogue; predicting the Democratic Unity Roundtable’s imminent split. The funniest part was the segment dedicated to the recent study issued by the “impartial” agency Hinterlances, which says that 66% of respondents believe that Nicolás has been faithful to el finado’s legacy; 52% agree that the true issue isn’t Nicolás but the drop in oil prices, and 54% believe that Nicolás is working to increase oil prices. We never know how a good salsa selection could affect the hydrocarbons market.

…

“Nobody surrenders here, carajo! Against a criminal and murderous empire!”, Nicolás said. If we swapped “empire” for “government” -it fits perfectly-, this is the only phrase I would support in his speech yesterday, dedicated in gushing over the military. It was an excess even for him. Sadly, he didn’t honor the guy with the pink shirt in VTV, that hero of November 27th, 1992.