Leer en Español
Back in January 2019, when the Interim Presidency of Juan Guaidó was at its peak of fervor, I unintentionally fulfilled the uncomfortable role of the doomsayer, since I declared for a Paraguayan newspaper that “Venezuela will be the second Cuba, the South American Cuba”.
Needless to say, I earned an avalanche of criticism and insults from Venezuelans in Paraguay, as well as in other parts of the world and in Venezuela itself. Even foreign colleagues questioned my position, since, for all of them, the fall of the narco-tyrant-neo-communist was imminent. I kept silent and stoically maintained my position, as I am used to criticism.
The consolidation of the far-left
Unfortunately, with the bitter passing of time, my thesis was confirmed. The interim government -for multiple reasons that I will not detail here – experienced an ephemeral and sterile existence, taking with it a real and effective opportunity, a valuable and unrepeatable time to free the country from the national and transnational criminal hordes that today hold the Venezuelan society hostage.
All these variables indicate not only a simple return of the socialists in Ibero-America but that 2021 is the year of the “consolidation of the radical left in the region”.
With the combination of the two factors mentioned above, plus the regrettable defeat of Donald Trump in November 2020, Venezuela will remain without major variation of its deplorable internal status quo, even in the hypothetical and improbable case of the death of Maduro.
I make this remark in order to understand the magnitude of the situation and how powerfully entrenched the structure of transnational mafias is in Venezuela. In other words, from 2021 onwards we will, unfortunately, observe that the mafias will dominate the hemispheric political arena, as Jean-Francois Gayraud already pointed out in 2007 and was recently reiterated by the Paraguayan security expert Jorge Llano.
The only real possibilities of the liberation of Venezuela are under a unilateral or multilateral US-led invasion or an internal armed rebellion. Unfortunately, there is neither the will nor the installed capacity for any of these alternatives, therefore, everything else that is done, results in diplomatic and political actions, with no effective results.
The big question is why has the International Community allowed this horror? Very simply, as Chomsky said a couple of years ago: “the International Community is not a community”, it is a complex interaction of interests and where the great powers end up imposing themselves over the rest of the actors.
The governments of the free world lack the political will, ergo, a solid and high moral stature to undertake this necessary, imperative, and very costly undertaking. That is, to bet on Venezuela’s liberation through a military operation, even though the political/financial cost/benefit equation currently shows a negative balance.
It should not be forgotten that not only Venezuela but also a large part of the international community, are invisibly affected from the dark depths of the ocean by the enormous mollusks represented by the powerful transnational mafias, who benefit financially and operationally by keeping Venezuela reduced to a failed and occupied state.
This prevents any effective effort to liberate the Caribbean nation, leaving both the country and its people forgotten and subsumed in the most absolute indolence of the regional governments.
Nahem Reyes is a PhD in history from the Andrés Bello Catholix University and associate member of the American Studies Center of the Central University of Venezuela. // Nahem Reyes es doctor en Historia de la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello y miembro asociado del Centro de Estudios de América de la Universidad Central de Venezuela.