Caracas Chronicles

That’s how Nicolás described the videos he presented yesterday night, enjoying his role as a dictator who can promote hatred because he has leeway to do whatever he wants. The sudden flashes of religious fervor for the resurrection failed to blindside the facts. I assume that, unable to mobilize the necessary militants for a decent march on April 19th, he chose the easiest way: bullying the opposition into calling off protests, a strategy that he’s pursued with increasing boldness, trying to twist the evidence against him, as if people’s conviction depended on showcasing his Human Rights abuses on live TV.

Authorized

Nicolás said that the evidence he’ll present was authorized by the Prosecutor’s Office and the Judiciary “so you can see how they plot” and guaranteeing a defeat for the far right, which he described as “violence, terror, hopelessness, death and treason.”

He congratulated the CICPC, the SBIN and the Prosecutor’s Office for their participation in the investigations, claiming that the videos and “the country’s legality” will help him triumph over those who incite violence. He said he presented the video because he thought it was crucial to coalesce public opinion.

The videos

Nicolás ordered the videos to be shared “massively,” claiming that “all the detainees had decided to confess,” speaking of paid mercenaries that would help him find the brains behind the crimes that he never really described. Trashing due process, Nicolás presented a video of Guido Rodríguez, a young man arrested for the attack against the Judiciary’s Executive Headquarters (DEM), saying that he’s “behind bars and tried” —that’s a lie. He also showed a video of twin brothers José and Alejandro Sánchez – PJ’s twins – but with their faces blurred.

On @DomingoMaduro’s Twitter account, they uploaded the video with the kid who says he’s from PJ Juvenil and that the Sánchez brothers hired him to commit vandalism and paid him Bs.300,000.

Some of them are also mere propaganda, with mixed images from 2002, 2014 and 2017, labeling Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular as terrorists and even musing whether the opposition has spirituality, only to say: “lethal acid against fascism.”

Threats

According to Nicolás, the opposition’s in a blind alley. Ratifying that TSJ’s reversed rulings remain in force, he claimed to have “special and constitutional powers” and said he wouldn’t hesitate to imprison anyone regardless of who they are, if necessary. He authorized Interior minister Néstor Reverol and vice-president El Aissami to “sue those who are discrediting security forces,” as if complaints of torture instead of an impartial and independent investigation, could justify threatening those who denounce Human Rights abuses.

He blamed the assault against the DEM on Carmelo Zambrano and also accused lawmakers Tomás Guanipa, Marialbert Barrios and José Guerra as terrorist leaders. He demanded cooperation to identify those who promote violence and remarked that parliamentary immunity wasn’t untouchable.

Dialogue

Despite heaping on the abuse live on cadena, Nicolás wondered what was the alternative to dialogue. His options: war, confrontation and death. Judging by his tone, those seemed offers instead of opinions, but anyway, he claimed to have called the opposition to negotiate time and again and that’s why he despises “all traitors who conspire to destroy the nation from Bogotá, Miami and Washington.”

Convinced that the word “dialogue” has the same effect of a wooden cross against vampires, minutes later, he made a call for the opposition to respect dialogue because it’s active right now, according to him, because there have been conversations every day, both here and abroad. Nicolás claimed he saw polls showing that 72% of people condemned “dissident violence as a kind of politics.”

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Yesterday’s cadena showed a dictator, one that celebrates the institutionalization of torture and the freedom to demonstrate his Human Rights abuses, grateful for having won what he called a game. Lastly, he announced more persecution and arrests, more impunity for security forces and the full establishment of the civilian-military union with the Armed Forces on the streets at dawn. Caracas militarized? That’s how his offer sounded like.