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Both Hugo Chávez and his heir Nicolás Maduro counted on a critical element that helped their successful survival in power for 23 years: false oppositions.
They were not really one single opposition, they were and are several impostors and coordinated oppositions playing the game of the political strategies of consolidation of the regime.
Chavism -and its puppeteer, Castroism- have been innovators of “tyrannology.” They leveraged tailor-made “rivals,” supposed antagonists who went to as many contrived “dialogues”, negotiations, and fraudulent elections as were launched to pretend a plural, democratic and competitive scenario. It is impossible to understand today’s consolidated Chavism if one does not closely observe the actions of the facilitators of its political survival.
These “opponents” not only cooperated in creating scenarios controlled by the regime in moments of high tension, but also intervened in two central aspects. First: they facilitated the blocking of a true liberal and democratic option by displacing the truly oppositional citizen sector (embodied, in the Venezuelan case, by the leadership of María Corina Machado, with whom they were deeply disloyal). Secondly: they gave ideological containment, undermining and dismissing any criticism of the underlying motive of the social, political, and economic disaster: socialism.
In parallel, they attacked not only the real opponents to the criminal political power, but neutralized any ideological alternative to socialism. The self-labeled “centrists” —such as those that have also appeared in Peru and other countries in the region— end up favoring the leftist pattern of power, created on the basis of criminal actions and selective impunity.
At this stage of the process, it is obvious how Venezuelans yearn to get out of the socialist Chavism, but certain “oppositions,” cohabitators with the regime, don’t let them. These ways of acting of Latin American tyrannies —don’t forget Nicaragua— are already textbook.
When the feigned “oppositions” are built according to the dictatorial need, and when the potential dictators control and associate with sectors of the armed and intelligence forces, the path becomes irreversible. This is how the so-called “opposition simulators” patiently helped to disguise as “democrats” the narco-chavistas, the criminally organized tyranny in Venezuela.
Replicating the political game
In Peru, these efforts are gradually being executed from the Government Palace and with results in Congress and in certain press media, and functional political movements both in the regions and in the capital of the country. When the leftist co-government of Pedro Castillo and Vladimir Cerron advances the authoritarian plan with negotiated military and police support, pretenders will abound —even claiming to be in favor of the constitutional vacancy due to the moral incapacity of the president, but without lifting a finger to activate it— giving indirect support to the palace officialdom.
It must be emphasized that the extremists of the corrupt pro-senderism that control the Presidency in Peru know of the urgent need to replicate the contentious policy executed by the continental left. Thus, an initial Bolivianization and then a more controllable Venezuelanization of the false Peruvian “oppositions” is taking shape.
Political analyst and columnist focused on issues of risk and political conflict, radicalization and violent political extremism // Analista político y columnista enfocado en temas de riesgo y conflictos políticos, radicalización y extremismo político violento