Since Maduro complied with the orders of his Cuban handlers to send heavily armed thugs and the Venezuelan National Guard to kill, torture, terrorize, and arrest individuals participating in protests in Venezuela, a different battle has unleashed. A kind of misinformation war, where we have the official BS issued in outlets like the New York Times or The Guardian, and then, well, the reality, published practically by everyone else—casual observers, reputable human rights NGOs, multilateral organizations, democrats from across the region, governments, the Church, music legends, independent media, etc., etc.
Maduro and his Cuban handlers are not willing to sit idly by as the true nature of the chavista revolution is unveiled. There’s too much money at stake. Maybe Maduro said it best the other day when he referenced 18 nations in the region whose “stability” (whatever that means in chavista language) depended on Venezuela. It would be easy to list countries, especially in the Caribbean, whose economies would suffer if Venezuela turned off the tap tomorrow. A chavista spokesperson, the notoriously infamous housing minister Ricardo Molina, stated, from Cuba of course, that there were two Venezuelas. He is absolutely right. There truly are two Venezuelas: the imaginary one that exists only in the ethereal world of chavismo, and the other. There’s no doubt or disagreement about that. Maduro “lives” in a Venezuela where everything is rosy. So do his cronies and associates. Each of the 29 million Venezuelans occupies a Venezuela of scarcity, uncontrolled crime, unemployment, abuse, corruption, runaway inflation, crumbling infrastructure, and a long list of other issues. I think one example is enough to illustrate this point: in the chavista world, Hugo Chávez was “infected with a brutal and aggressive cancer in 2011”; in the real world, well, you get the point.
So, while Maduro and the MUD sit in a dialogue aimed at pulling Venezuela out of its current situation (good luck with that), a fierce misinformation war unfolds, one in which no one anywhere will be able to mediate. In this war, the two “warring parties” (chavismo and reality) are so opposed that reconciliation is unthinkable. Because the deranged, akin to religious fanatics, which is what chavismo boils down to, cannot be persuaded, do not want to be persuaded, in fact, they take any word that deviates from their dogma as an insult, and thus the two positions are irreconcilable. The Middle East is a good example.
Images and videos of Maduro’s National Guard brutally assaulting a defenseless and partially disabled woman have shocked the world. Likewise, reports of a young arrested student being sodomized with a rifle, or peaceful protesters being shot in the head, continue to shake those uninterested in the reality of Venezuela. For you, reading this post, such acts of brutal repression have no place in a civilized society, and those who carry them out must be prosecuted without delay. But Maduro sees things differently, you see. To him, what was done to Marvinia was completely acceptable. Marvinia’s attempt to reason with the National Guards attacking people in her neighborhood was an affront that could only be met with the kind of response witnessed. That’s it, end of story. Any behavior that strays from chavismo’s dogmas is an attack on its belief system. No possible dialogue about it; any talk is just for show, to let the world see that chavismo “has good intentions.” The dialogue in 2002-2003 left Venezuela with a wound that still hasn’t healed, and 12 years after the day 19 people were killed in downtown Caracas, we still await the results of the previously convened “truth commission.”
Maduro controls the National Guard. Maduro controls the collective thugs (actually, regime-sponsored paramilitaries) who terrorize protesters with complete impunity. In fact, notice Maduro’s priorities and sense of relevance: a representative of the paramilitaries was sitting last night in that farce of a dialogue, but no student representative was present. Maduro controls the judiciary, which has been extremely busy removing and imprisoning democratically elected officials on false charges. If Maduro were sincere in his “dialogue,” he could have offered something: an unfair prisoner release, a call to disarm his thugs, an order to reverse an illegal measure stripping a congresswoman of her position—there’s a list of things he could have done. Unfortunately, Maduro did not. For one simple reason: his “reality” conflicts with reality. None of the things asked of him are even worthy of consideration, because none of those issues exist in the flat earth of chavismo. Political prisoners’ freedom sounds very different from the freedom of “fascists, coup plotters, funded by international narcotrafficking cartels, pawns of Uncle Sam,” which is pretty much how Maduro views Leopoldo López, for example. Disarming the paramilitaries looks very different from undoing the “revolutionary attempts to build democracy from scratch by supporting grassroots movements,” which is how Maduro sees his heavily armed collectives.
And that’s the case with tangible things, like incarcerated people, tortured individuals, and those killed, with real names and real lives, with real families, locked up in real prisons. Just imagine when we reach visions, worldviews, belief systems, morals, etc. No possible entente when the two sides at the table have such different understandings of the terms, borrowing from Chávez, the worldviews. It’s anthropologically impossible. So we will continue reading, on one side, members of the Islington group like Seumas Milne providing us with the gospel of chavismo (and praised along the way by the same tribe), while on the other side, we witness an increasingly progressive and dramatic deterioration of living conditions in Venezuela, which will bring majority suffering to the 29 million Venezuelans who are not part of Maduro’s Potemkin village.
Molina’s assertion of “two Venezuelas” can be extrapolated to almost any other topic. The official chavista line is dragging this into the old left versus right dilemma, and they’re desperately trying to do so, though it’s the complete opposite. At its most basic level, it boils down to reality versus fiction, facts versus beliefs, legal versus illegal, democracy versus kleptocratic dictatorship, accountability versus impunity, rule of law versus capricious dictates of the regime, respect for inalienable human rights versus not, flat land versus the blue planet.
Reality is the first victim of this misinformation war. For example, the documents exposing rampant corruption published on this site have no place in the chavista universe. It never happened. If public outcry forces them to admit that corruption is one of the main causes of Venezuela’s misery, chavistas will respond by attacking the messenger or, as they’ve done, censoring this website in Venezuela. The truth is that in chavismo’s extensive propaganda apparatus, criticism is mostly absent. I’ve been told that independent media recently lost another outlet: El Universal has supposedly been acquired by chavista cronies (I heard that Samark López put pen to paper representing chavismo), and now joins Cadena Capriles, Globovisión, El Nacional, Venevisión, and Televen. Soon there will be almost universal uniformity of “information” within Venezuela. Communication hegemony.
Abroad, the debate will continue among a small cabal of non-representative and largely discredited communist nostalgics and everyone else, hence there’s no real debate but rather a settled matter. It’s worth mentioning that the former have failed to win the hearts and minds of their own voters; their racist viewpoints are confined to radicalism hotspots, present, though equally ridiculed, in all societies. To conclude, for those seeking information about Venezuela, the first question should be: what does the local fanatic say? Reality is likely to be found at the other end of the spectrum. Meanwhile, this site will continue to show what chavismo doesn’t want the world to see.