01/10/2014
Xavier Reyes Matheus is a political analyst
The mentioning of Leopoldo López as part of a list of political leaders and activists from several countries who have suffered death, imprisonment or persecution, and remembered by Barack Obama during his speech at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on the eve of the meeting of the UN General Assembly, highlighted the fragility of democratic and constitutional guarantees in Venezuela under the current regime of Nicolas Maduro. On the day of the highest international forum, the half-empty auditorium where Hugo Chavez's successor delivered his peroration, a speech muddled up with alter-globalisation proposals, criticisms of NATO's 'terrorist' actions in Syria and indulgent considerations toward the Islamic State–which he described as a "Frankenstein nursed by the West,"– also marked the difference with the magnetism exercised by the late architect of the 'Bolivarian Revolution' in his theatrical presentations, on those who pinned on the '21st century socialism' their hopes that freedom and justice would definitely settle in Latin America.
The responsibility for this change in perspective, which seems to have finally opened the eyes of the world to a project vampirising representative democracy to become a totalitarianism, should be credited to the courage of opposition leaders, such as López or Maria Corina Machado, who even dared to risk their freedom and physical integrity to denounce the abuses of the regime. Something which was particularly difficult in the international arena, under the powerful patronage strategy put into practice by Chavist diplomacy through a prebendary and Mephistophelian use of alliances sealed with the oil check-book. Precisely here, on his premiere at the UN Assembly after his coming to power, Maduro devoted several paragraphs to boast of the control he exercises over these continental initiatives which sought to convert the Bolivarian dream of South American integration into a series of clubs moved by bastard interests, in which eyes don't see, ears don't hear and tongues don't speak before the violations of the Rule of Law.
Experience with this type of constrictor regimes whose rings deceptively close more and more on the civil liberties and civil rights is not new: how many times have we asked ourselves, before the evidence of the terrible atrocities perpetrated against the people, where the rest of the world was when this was happening? The Venezuelans themselves had already experienced some of this, but none of the despotisms suffered in the country's contemporary history had caused in their society and its civic values such as a fracture as the one caused by Chavez. Today we cannot fail to be moved when we read the letter written to Miguel de Unamuno by an almost teenager Rómulo Betancourt, then leader of the student movement, in April 1929 from his exile in Santo Domingo, a year before had dared to challenge the brutal dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. The budding politician, who was called to be the father of Venezuelan democracy–that system which Chavez proposed to tear down accusing it of being bourgeois and exclusive, even though it was the one which allowed him to win the presidency through free elections–was desperate to strike in any world body or personality a chord that would sensitise them to the cause of a youth thirsting for freedom, and who also dared to challenge the cruel authoritarianism of a government supported by the security of oil: 'What can we do about this, maestro, about this terrible situation?' Betancourt asked the rector of Salamanca, then a model of ethical integrity for many Latin-Americans (and banished, as well, by the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera). 'Protest?… By protesting with the offering of their liberty and perhaps even their life, my comrades have been imprisoned and deported… And besides, maestro, our voice is so weak, it has such a short radius of impact! And the "others", those who have won the right to be heard in America, where are they?, you ask me, maestro. Ah! "They" are so miserable, so pitifully miserable! They all bow down and scrape to their master, extending their beggar hand for their share of the feast'.
The same thing–to Cuba's distress–that will happen in our century with the Castro brothers happened to Juan Vicente Gómez, who died of old age in 1935 without having left power.