maybe Maria Corina Machado is too conservative to represent the broad democratic spectrum that wants to end authoritarianism in Venezuela. She has also made mistakes, such as accepting to be Panama’s alternate ambassador to the OAS while being a deputy in the National Assembly of her country. Thus, she offered the justification that the rchavista regime he needed to take his seat away from him. He has also shown the pettiness and meanness that kept the dissident leadership weak. But there is a fact that cannot be ignored: the polls show that he is the one who has the most support in the population and would prevail in the primaries of the dissident space, leaving himself with great possibilities of defeating the regime in the presidential election, if these were transparent.
These statistics show that, more evident than the accusations of the Comptroller General that disqualified her from holding public office for fifteen yearsIt is Maduro’s concern about the possibility that dissidence will triumph in next year’s elections.
Despite the fact that in the ongoing negotiations the impunity of the civil-military nomenclature in all its crimes and embezzlements will surely be agreed, the opposition triumph would be a tragic alternative for the residual regime that Hugo Chávez left behind when he died. For this reason, the power apparatus headed by Maduro and Diosdado Cabello would debate between two possibilities: postponing the elections indefinitely or perpetrating fraud.
The problem with the second alternative is that, in order to disguise the heavy defeat suffered by the ruling party as a victory, the fraudulent maneuver it would have to be very big. That would make it visible and trigger a crisis like the one that brought down Fujimori in Peru in 2000, after attempting a grotesque fraud to steal the victory from Alejandro Toledo.
In this way, anticipating a very probable defeat or the dilemma between suspending the elections or committing fraud, Maduro “disables” those who would defeat him.
If you don’t anticipate like you did with Henrique Capriles and other popular figures of the dissidence, will have to make the mess that he did with Freddy Superlano, the candidate for Leopoldo López’s party, Voluntad Popular, in Barinas, the homeland of Hugo Chávez, whom he disqualified after his victory in the last gubernatorial election. In other words, he stole a triumph that had already been accomplished.
The precedents of fraud and proscription are so many that it is absurd to assume that without external pressure there will be fair elections. However, and contrary to positions that they themselves had held in previous cases, Lula and Alberto Fernandez they say that repudiating the disqualification of Machado would be an unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela.
It sounds hypocritical and absurd to say, as the Argentine president said, that the exclusions of candidacies applied by Maduro are “a problem of the Venezuelans that Venezuelans must resolve at a dialogue table.” The justification for his refusal to repudiate the disqualification of Maria Corina Machado It is absurd because dictatorships obviously do not resolve their differences with dissidence through dialogue. In any case, under strong external and internal pressure, dictatorships can negotiate, but they never dialogue.
Was it logical to expect that 20th century regimes like the one they led Raphael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Stroessner in Paraguay, agreed at a dialogue table on clean rules for pluralist electoral processes Trujillo and Stroessner held rigged elections, with dissident leaders banned or imprisoned.
Alberto’s justification sounded like irony in bad taste. Referring to the relationship between a dictatorial regime and dissidence as if it were the relationship between the ruling party and the opposition in a Rule of Law sounds like a sarcastic mockery. It is obvious that internal dissidents need external help.
It is also hypocritical to justify authoritarian regimes, as the president of Brazil does. In 2019, Alberto publicly denounced, and with good reason, the imprisonment of Lula ordered by Judge Sergio Moro.
Lula thanked the international support he received while he was in prison. These supports accused Moro of disguising a proscription with legal arguments. But Neither Lula nor Fernández had the coherence to demand from the Venezuelan regime what they had demanded in Brazilas well as in Ecuador, for the convictions of Rafael Correa and Jorge Glas.
They also supported the version of Evo Morales about his fall, but they don’t say a word about the leaders anti-chavistas outlaws. Latin America’s youngest presidents bring the coherence and dignity that many veteran rulers in the region lack.
TO Mario Abdo Benitez He can be blamed for not having made a critical review of the actions of the Colorado Party in the service of Alfredo Stroessner, the dictator to whom his father served as secretary. But the Paraguayan president took a correct position regarding the current authoritarian regimes.
The Chilean gabriel boric He does not use the double standard that the old exponents of the Latin American left use, without blushing. Another young president thinks the same: the Uruguayan Luis Lacalle Pou. The three denounced the proscription of María Corina Machado. Although Lula and Fernández say otherwise, marginalizing the leader of the Vente Venezuela party from the electoral process is equivalent to what Daniel did Ortega with the opposition candidates that he disqualified, imprisoned and expelled from Nicaragua.
Maduro does it underhandedly through the Comptroller General, which the Cuban Communist Party does openly: purge the lists of candidates for the National Assembly. Another regime allied to Chavismo, the Iranian one, does the same through the Guardian Council, the body that decides who can and who cannot be a candidate in the Islamic Republic.
Maduro uses the Comptroller General as a Guardian Council. Lula and Fernández, who publicly accept as valid the self-perception of “outlaw” that Cristina Kirchnerremain silent in the face of serial bans in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Strictly speaking, Alberto Fernández had denounced Ortega’s injustice with Cristiana Chamorro and the other candidates who ended up in exile. But when Lula began to use the double standard, she made a U-turn, abandoning one of the few positions with democratic coherence that she had shown in foreign policy.
