It’s not an overstatement to say that in many Venezuelan households, regardless of politics, there is a firearm. The website gunpolicy.org cites some statistics: “The total estimated number of firearms (both legal and illegal) held by civilians in Venezuela is between 1,600,000 and 4,100,000… In a comparison of the number of privately owned firearms in 178 countries, Venezuela ranked No. 27… Illegal firearms cannot be accurately counted, but estimates range between 1,100,000 and 2,700,000 in Venezuela.” Despite the Chavismo’s efforts to implement gun control measures, it remains a fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of weapons are out there. With this in mind, how many collective attacks will it take for people to start taking matters into their own hands? Is Maduro even remotely concerned about the consequences of the brutal repression carried out by his thugs?
We can all agree that Maduro isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and his Cuban handlers couldn’t care less about the life and well-being of Venezuelans in general. However, they are playing an extremely dangerous game by deploying a do-or-die strategy that aims to instill fear in protesters. Just yesterday, three people were killed, one of whom was reportedly a 6-year-old girl. The Universidad Central de Caracas was the scene of clashes for most of the day. Contrary to the conventional wisdom held by those far away who assert that the protesters are “mainly middle class” in “mainly middle-class areas,” a growing body of evidence shows that the protests are not isolated incidents confined to Caracas. Skirmishes between the National Guard/collectives and protesters have been reported in Mérida, San Cristóbal, Maracaibo, Valencia, Valera, Ciudad Bolívar, Barquisimeto, and Maracay, to name just a few major cities. In fact, the deaths mentioned earlier occurred in Valencia’s La Isabelica, without being defined as a “mainly middle-class” area. Sources in San Cristóbal tell me that the National Guard/collectives have already surrendered in some zones, where they no longer repel stones but engage with bullets, and the situation in Mérida is also spiraling out of control.
How far does Maduro want to take this? Doesn’t anyone in his circle realize that, unlike the opposition’s base, he could call on his henchmen to immediately stop further bloodshed and unnecessary deaths? The strategists within Chavismo, if they exist, are playing with fire. Most people will recall what happened in Venezuela in 1989 and should dust off some historical facts. It only takes one order to go awry for everything to descend into unmanageable chaos, and if that were to happen, we would be left with a mountain of corpses. Chavismo lacks the logistics to quell a national uprising. They know it, and everyone else does too. By exercising brutal repression in selected areas, they seem to think that terrorizing a few here and there will stop the protests. Unfortunately, that’s not happening. On the contrary, student-led mobilizations are spreading across the country and radicalizing.
So what now, Maduro? What happens when those who hold those weapons decide they’ve had enough?