By Jose Roberto Duque – Aug 29, 2020
If that entelechy called “unity” means that all the members of a current or trend advance in an unbreakable and galvanized block, with a unanimously agreed method and goals, then everything is divided in Venezuela. Institutions, unions, families, hierarchies, associations of all kinds. Chavismo and anti-Chavismo, government and opposition, everything has been or was born cracked, diversified and multicolored.
Even the brain of many individuals is divided into compartments that do not agree on the place in history where they must fight. In the schizophrenia of the times, there is plenty of people who think and speak from one perspective, but act (because they need to, or because reality is stronger than their dreams) in the opposite direction.
Take the previous paragraphs and replace “Venezuela” with “the world”: yes, it works in the same way. Only that for a country, a people and a government besieged that simple “gripesiña” that in other circumstances would be called merrily and meekly “diversity” can be harmful or deadly.
We have the most powerful enemy that can be found on this planet announcing that their mission is to enter our territory to kill and seize resources and institutions, and still, or suddenly, there are comrades who do not know where to shoot or are threatening to shoot inside our trench.
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Chávez’s most important feat consisted in making a crowd impossible to amalgamate walk in one direction. His project, unfinished or defeated by circumstances, was the unification of all tendencies around or under the direction or leadership of a single party of the Revolution. Both results (victory and defeat) were good news, both were the product of new and refreshing exercises that showed us the world, naked and without masks, with all our nuances.
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From this sidewalk one could be alarmed at a certain easily observable situation. The enemy has an advantage over us because their factions have a clear essential objective: to destroy us, to make us disappear physically and as a historical current. That goal is a requirement for the achievement of other goals, which are what divide them: control the state and the country’s resources, ally with the United States and other powers in the mission of preying upon and distributing our wealth among corporations.
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In this mission they cannot travel together because each party or power group wants the loot for itself and not to distribute it to anyone. The neoliberal paradigm demands winning the competition and the crushing of other competitors; you will only see the right-wing parties united when it comes to joining forces to defeat Chavismo. In an electoral process, the central objective, to bring together all the wills, is easy; problems come later. Defeated or triumphant we will see them again with knife in hand, and the tripping machine well oiled.
Does this behavior or way of functioning also work among us (Chavistas)?
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Personally, I have witnessed situations where a certain noxious and disruptive goblin wreaks havoc on organizations or entities that deserved and needed greater harmony. Would it be better to ask him for unity? For the purposes of what is revealed in this article, surely. I have seen directors of “divided” institutions (state agencies): this group versus that other, each with their bosses and visible cards. When one of “theirs” proposes and launches to execute a plan or policy, the other group or clan is usually activated in an obstacle mode. Its mission becomes to sabotage or hinder the institutional plan until it becomes unfeasible in practice. The plan fails and that side feels victorious and triumphant: they hindered and destroyed the adversary’s work.
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It does not matter if the institution, the Revolution or the country were also injured: if we manage to make the adversary fail (who is also a revolutionary or Chavista and is supposed to push the car to the same place as us) then “we win”.
The worst thing about this strange logic is that there are a number of young people witnessing the routine and “learning” a lesson that will hardly be erased in the future: those boys are being told that this is called “doing politics.” That politics consists of making action impossible for others, no matter what project fails.
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It also falls into the category of “doing politics”, with all the doubt and cautioning quotes, ignoring or overlapping the fact that in all state institutions the germ and the anti-Chavista organization survive in many ways. There is not a single ministry or body where everyone is or feels committed to the construction of the Bolivarian project, and that includes the police and state security forces. The entities that possess the arms of the Republic, the Armed Forces first of all, are full of elements that have not hesitated to take up those weapons to shoot against the government, the institutions and the people.
An Oscar Pérez came out of an institution of the Chavista government. It is absurd and irresponsible to pretend that this subject and his film companions were the last of their kind to remain in the CICPC and the rest of the police forces. A Figuera headed SEBIN and he now lives in the United States under the protection of American intelligence. You have to be very distracted or malicious to pretend to believe that this guy didn’t leave his chips scattered in that structure. Even so, everything that the members of the CICPC and SEBIN (and now the FAES) do is attributed by groups, NGOs and individuals pretending “to be funny”, to the government of Nicolás Maduro.
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The thesis of an unified Chavismo under a single and unanimous leadership is not viable. But this does not make the persistence of a dozen groups or clans in an attitude of effective or purely emotional blackmail unavoidable, much less necessary. No new or “historic” party should claim for itself the ownership of a Revolution that has had its substrate in the people and in the ethical bond called Chávez.
Other binders: the central goal, which is the destruction of capitalism, and the construction of a form of organization-action different from that dictated by the hegemonies of capital.
They divide us or we divide ourselves because we have different methods and surely rhythms that are difficult or impossible to synchronize. To get out of a city from its center to the periphery there are two possible ways: to circulate through its streets, to cope according to its obstacles and rules, or to arm oneself with a powerful machinery and to open through what is crossed a rectilinear and unstoppable channel from Plaza Bolívar (Caracas center) to Tazón (one of Caracas exit points), never crossing or looking sideways (or back, which is where history is supposed to be).
Those who propose for now the violent liquidation of private property and the implantation of the dictatorship of the proletariat want to go from the center towards the exit of Caracas, skipping and devastating streets, traffic lights, highways, people, mountains and structures. The acting Chavista government has decided to go to the exit of Caracas queuing, stopping, turning aside when there is a closed street, avoiding gaps, respecting the check points. Those of us who conserve from our youth the desire to obtain quick and obvious results fall into despair. And maddeningly long and winding is the course of centuries-long history that has brought us here.
There is something that some defenders of “all or nothing, and I want it to be for this afternoon” seem to forget: among the trenches or conquests that must be defended there is a “government”, this acting Chavista government. The reason has been repeated a lot, and it will be necessary to return to it: because the Revolution can do good with this ally (sometimes ineffective and almost always clumsy, but ally) in power. If this ally is overthrown, the next government will not be the flawless and perfect revolutionary that the “historic” parties (in reference to PPT or PCV) yearn for, but a murderous and devastating transnational structure that will take us back to the century when we were prostitutes and slaves of the United States. The revolution will have to continue but under conditions that those same “historical” ones are not prepared to face.
Even so, they persist in tasks and in scrambles of analysis that sometimes ignite and sometimes do not even spark: attributing to the government the massacre and disappearance of Chavista and revolutionary activists and militants, calling “concessions to the bourgeoisie” the necessary withdrawal movements on the battlefield, the searching and generalization of particular situations in order to convince the world that we are a failed project of society: the easy mechanism of laboratory propaganda is the weapon of groups and characters that without Chávez and without Chavismo would not have been heard or read or ignored or anything, beyond their book clubs of Marxist classics.
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On the role of the international “left” in the current Venezuelan moment, it will also be necessary to take more than one glance, in a separate work. The verification that there are campaigns supported by “left” factors, complementary or parallel to those of the imperial machinery, is another necessary act of recognition of the terrain. Know and understand that its main mission is also a form of blockade or isolation: to try to show that the government of Venezuela “is not leftist,” and therefore deserves to be execrated and overthrown (by the right).
That they are here (and there) doing their job, and that they don’t care if their intentions are shown, is an important signpost on the path of the struggles to come. The brigade of propagandists disguised as the “left” is a beautiful-looking apple that, when opened, reveals its rot. A known papaya is better than an unknown apple.
Featured image: When denouncing the attempts at political division by the Venezuelan left, Maduro asserted that the hawk Elliott Abrams must feel very happy. Photo: AFP
Translation: OT/JRE/EF
Jose Roberto Duque
Jose Roberto Duque is a Venezuelan writer and journalist, political analyst. Since 1990 he has ventured into various facets of journalism and literature. He has been a chronicler, columnist and editor in newspapers and magazines (El Nacional, El Universal, Tal Qué, That is the News, Topics Venezuela, Épale Ccs, among others), in blogs and digital pages (Blood Traction, Mision Verdad). He was editor and information editor in several newspapers, on the Ávila TV and on the Venezuelan News Agency.
