Dangers and opportunities in Venezuela

First obvious reflection: If Venezuela is a dictatorship, how come the opposition won?

All those who have been questioning Venezuelan democracy should apologize today (that’s a rhetorical comment; they’ll never do it. Those who think that power belongs to them because of their family and wealth believe that they have permanent carte blanche.)

President Maduro came out immediately to acknowledge the result. That’s how it should be. The opposition has invariably ignored all the election results it has lost since 1998, the year of Hugo Chávez’s first victory. Sometimes as a bloc, others splitting themselves.

The least loyal to the Constitution have always been Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado, whose attitude has not been followed by Capriles, who has always opted for the ballot box.

The PP, much influenced by the Opus Dei in its relations with Venezuela (the other influence is solely economic, such as when Felipe González gave Galerías Preciados to Gustavo Cisneros), has always been closer to the putschists. Remembrances of the origin of the Spanish right.

Venezuela has stayed above the fray: clean elections and unquestioning acknowledgment of the results. Would that Mexico or the United States did the same.

It is equally evident that the economy has handed the bill to Maduro’s administration. It is unfair that a crisis that was not generated by the South American continent (let us remember that it came about with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the U.S.) Venezuela is now paying as if it had been its responsibility.

The sharp drop in the prices of oil (Spain’s equivalent of an 80-percent drop in tourism) is a blow that’s hard to take, all the more when the crisis is utilized by the opposition to besiege the government with sophisticated forms of “economic war,” such as pressures to break up the OPEC and keep oil prices low, the hoarding of goods, the intentional hiking of prices, fraud in the dollar exchange, smuggling, a psychological war fueled by the communications media, and sabotage.

There are scenarios in Venezuela’s political struggle that remind us of the scenario in Chile prior to September 1973, which set up the coup against Salvador Allende. Let’s hope that the international community will be alert against any spurious attempt to win outside the voting stations what should only be won at the ballot box.

Finally, it is evident that Maduro’s administration is equally responsible. Chávez’s loss was a major blow. The equilibrium built by Chávez was not inherited by Maduro. It needs more time. And the opposition, aware of that weakness, has not stopped harassing the government in the past three years.

President Maduro, on the other hand, has not been successful in demonstrating to the Venezuelan people the achievements of the past 17 years. That’s what happened in Britain when the working class, turned middle class, ended up voting for Margaret Thatcher.

True, the opposition did claim Chávez as one of their own, but that was mere propaganda. Not very credible, coming from those who always opposed him.

The risk of dismantling the Bolivarian public bet on health care, education, housing, and food is in the hands of the opposition. (Let’s see what begins to happen in Argentina.)

If the people have not understood it, it’s the responsibility of the government and the people with a conscience. If the opposition’s propaganda is effective, it is the duty of the government to unmask it. It doesn’t know how to do it.

Equally, the government has not shown good results (despite major advances in recent months) in the war against corruption and violence, in the importation of food, in the control over exchange fraud, in providing jobs for trained middle classes, in combating inflation.

Although all those issues are part of the economic war, if you don’t win you lose. And that’s what the ballot boxes have said.

Now is the time to jointly discuss — government and opposition — the needs of Venezuela. Of the majorities. Of the people. Just as President Maduro has accepted the result of the parliamentary elections, the opposition must assume that Venezuela’s constitutional president is Maduro and should respect the presidential elections that gave him a mandate.

That dual acknowledgment should mark the beginning of the negotiations on the solutions the country demands. It would be a mistake for the opposition to repeat what it did after the coup against Chávez in 2002, when it began to dismantle the existing institutionality.

Some proposals by opposition leaders on Monday [Dec. 7] point in that direction: if a majority in Parliament allows it, change as many posts as possible, building a “dike” to block the Maduro administration. Some people never learn, it seems.

Treated as urgent, those shared solutions should tackle an increase in the price of gasoline, a revision of public spending, the war on corruption, an end to hoarding and the artificial price hikes (there, the opposition can talk to the importers, who are mainly responsible for the shortage of goods), a radical regulation of exchange controls (the opposition should utilize pressure where the government cannot) and the establishment of a productive base that breaks away from the oil revenues.

On those issues, the government and the opposition should come to firm accords. And that will be possible only if the opposition listens to the needs of Venezuela, not the orders of the United States or the foreign corporations that seek to make Venezuela a haven for new piratical practices.

It is a good time to find out if — finally — the Venezuelan right is willing to bet on its own country.

Juan Carlos Monedero Fernández is a Spanish politologist, college professor, essayist and politician, the former secretary of the Constitutional Process and the Podemos program.

[Taken from the blog Comiendo Tierra (Eating Dust) in the Spanish digital daily Público.]