The hierarchs of residual Chavismo riddled with hatred gabriel boric. In the corridors of power in Managua and Havana they are ruminating curses and contempt against the Chilean president. And if a leader is hated by leaders of the authoritarian left, it is because he does not belong to that ideological species.
Sayings and facts can be questioned, but it is clear that Boric does not try to impose a populist model or express identification with the left-wing authoritarian regimes. On the contrary, from the outset he made clear his differences with those leaders and denounced the human rights violations they commit systematically.
The positions expressed by gabriel boric and the repudiations that he is receiving from Nicolas Maduro and Diosdado Cabello, in addition to the insults muttered by the Cuban nomenclature and the couple who took over Nicaragua, confirm that Chile has a centrist president, even though there are conservatives who are describing him as trying the same thing that Salvador Allende tried: to convert to Chile in a socialist country.
In that country and in the region, those who describe sebastian pinera like an ultra-conservative right-winger, they view reality through an ideologized hard-left, or outright authoritarian, lens. In the same way, those who in Chile and in the region describe Boric as a “Marxist” or a “populist” are not showing that they are from the center-right, but from a hard conservatism, the right that is in the genes.
You may agree or not, but the measures promoted by the Chilean president They aim to open redistribution pathways and widen access to quality health care and the highest level of university education, while taking care of the macroeconomic framework of capitalism.
Just as the true center-leftist is the one who sees in sebastian pinera what he is: a moderate, a centrist or center-right; the true center-right is the one that sees in Boric, not a Marxist or a populist, but a social democrat or center-leftist.
The same appreciation could apply to Gustavo Petro. The Colombian president has a guerrilla past, but that does not imply that he promotes a revolutionary plan. In fact, the April 19 Movement (M-19), the insurgency that it formed during the 1980s, did not profess Marxism-Leninism. It was a strange case of a guerrilla with social democratic banners, which defended the ideas of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. Although that general led a four-year dictatorship after overthrowing Laureano Gómez, he promoted a development model and later entered the party system.
The M-19 was born in rejection of the fraud that stole the 1970 election to hand over power to Misael Pastrana.
“Rejecting liberal democracy leads to dictatorship,” he said Gustavo Petro to make it clear that he is not on the side of Chavismo, Orteguismo and Castroism.
Neither the Kirchnerist leadership nor Evo Morales would defend the concept of “liberal democracy” using those two words demonized by left and right populism. Petro used it. And he said that those who attack liberal democracy go towards dictatorship. An appreciation that, indirectly, qualifies the regimes of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba as dictatorial, also encompassing the leaderships that, on the left and right, reject the demo-liberal system and seek to replace it.
The Colombian president is trying normalize relations with Caracas and he does not want clashes with Managua or Havana, but stating that, outside of liberal democracy, what there is is dictatorship, implies an important contribution to the reconstruction of centrism, so attacked from authoritarian populisms.
The importance for the Venezuelan economy of the reestablishment of relations with Colombia explains why Maduro and Cabello did not pepper Petro with insults, as they did with Boric. The Chavista leaders choked on what they would have wanted to tell him for having defended liberal democracy by treating them, indirectly and implicitly, as dictators. Those were days when authoritarian left-wing populisms were harshly challenged by popular figures who once identified with the left.
The death of Pablo Milanés made newspapers, radios and television channels reproduce his vision of the Cuban regime, showing the denunciations made by that co-founder of Nueva Trova against what he considers a dictatorship that took away Cuban freedom and plunged them into a sea of deficiencies and frustrations.
Although as a young man he had suffered confinement in one of the forced labor camps created by Fidel Castro to lock up dissidents, Milanés became a defender of the regime in the beginning of his music career. But at the beginning of the 1990s, he turned to dissidence, denounced the crimes and the “failure” of the regime, and ended up leaving Cuba.
At self-considered progressive elites who in Europe and Latin America defend until today the Castroism that still prevails in Cuba, Pablo Milanés told them through many microphones to put themselves once and for all “on the side of the Cuban people”, who do not have “freedom” or “food ”. And that was heard again by many media due to his death.
The same position expressed Joaquin Sabina, a Spanish singer-songwriter who had praised Castroism for decades. As if he had listened to the claim of Pablo Milanes Against the progressives that praise calamitous dictatorships or remain silent in the face of their crimes and failures, the author of “Who has stolen the month of April from me” publicly abjured those praises of ruinous authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
In the list of great composers and singers who came to the crossroads of authoritarianism is Joan Manuel Serrat questioning Hebe de Bonafini for having defended ETAcriminal armed wing of Basque separatism.
Alejandro Sanz also questioned left-wing authoritarianism, daring to criticize Chavismo when Chávez was still living and ruling in Venezuela.
In the second half of the 20th century, minstrels who denounced conservative authoritarianism swarmed. They played a fundamental role in a time plagued by right-wing dictatorships. Now, the singer-songwriters who are raising their voices against authoritarianism They denounce left-wing regimes, whose crimes and calamities are kept silent by the leaders, intellectuals and artists who define themselves as progressives. And they believe it.
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