They want us dead

The election campaign for the presidential elections in Venezuela, which are scheduled to take place on July 28, officially begins on June 4th.

After all the obstacles and prohibitions imposed by the Chavista regime to prevent the participation of a candidate who had the chance to oust Nicolás Maduro from power, Maduro finally agreed to run against Edmundo González Urrutia, María’s candidate supported the unified candidate of the anti-Chavista opposition Corina Machado, the winner of the primary, but disqualified and excluded by a regime that has announced a thousand times that it will never allow a change of power.

There is therefore great skepticism as to whether such elections will ever take placeand if so, whether there will be a minimum level of democratic justice.

I followed the recommendation of Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Who recommends reading the novel “Venezuelan” by Javier Moro for everyone who wants to get an idea of ​​​​the cruel drama in which the once richest country with the highest per capita income in Latin America finds itself.

“They want us dead” (Espasa, 571 p.) is indeed a great book that provides a comprehensive overview of the country’s ongoing collapse through the tragedy experienced by Leopoldo López, the main opposition political leader in 2014. The author of such insightful works as “Era medianoche en Bhopal” (2001), “El sari rojo” (2008) and “El imperio eres tú” (2011), with which he won the Planeta Prize, treads on territory that he knows well, the astonishingly lush, fertile and magnificent Venezuela, which he has experienced and traveled many times since his childhood and youth.

Moro begins with a prologue in which he succinctly describes the political struggle in which Leopoldo López’s direct ancestors were already involved in the 20th century, short but intense pages to contextualize how what the Venezuelan elites thought, that it would never happen in their country: the establishment of a ruthless dictatorship was christened the “Bolivarian Revolution,” whose security levers were to be entrusted to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Human rights observatories estimate the number of extrajudicial executions by Chavista killers to be over 6,000, in addition to the torture systematically carried out by various police and intelligence services.

However, Leopoldo López believed that he could effectively defend himself in court if he voluntarily surrendered to the authorities after a mass demonstration in which several young people were killed by collectives allegedly in the service of Chavismo. Of course, this was not possible, and the regime’s attorney general confessed, after leaving the country herself, that she had been put under extreme pressure to fabricate false evidence.

The book, which details her release from prison, her reception at the Spanish embassy and her escape from Venezuela, also centers its narrative around the seemingly fragile Lilian Tintori, López’s wife, a former and famous TV survival show host . Those who followed her on the small screen remember the image of a Lilian who was determined that her program team would not go hungry. After catching a huge anaconda, she cut off its head, put its meat on the grill and satisfied the hunger of her fellow adventurers.

The regime knew that by eliminating López, its tyranny would be resolved without major problems. It would be enough to maintain fear by suppressing all protest and using great propaganda to distribute small compensation among the ever-growing number of poor people. These are the bags known as CLAP (Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción – Local Supply and Production Committees), whose contents are increasingly reduced and in which the meat is known to exist but has never been seen. They did not count on the resistance of Lilian Tintori, Antonieta Mendoza, Leopoldo’s own mother, and her husband. Lilian and her mother-in-law traveled to all the foreign ministries of democratic countries, many of which had to receive them and learn from their own lips what was and is happening in Venezuela. The father of Leopoldo López was also the voice of the dissident Venezuelan people in the European Parliament, where with his testimony he had to face the MEPs of the extreme neo-communist left, who have always been fearless defenders of Latin American dictatorships on the left wing.

The forced exile of the López family is also the forced exile of the more than seven million Venezuelans who had to flee misery and political persecution. The main characters in Javier Moro’s book embody the heroism of the entire Venezuelan people. At the same time, they represent the hope that the nightmare will one day end, through democratic processes. Let’s hope so, although there are serious reasons to doubt that this will happen. The Venezuelan opposition’s proclaimed candidate, Edmundo González, says Maduro is demanding “guarantees” to eventually leave power. It is not difficult to guess that these alleged guarantees would consist in the fact that he, his family and his entourage would enjoy complete impunity for the crimes committed and would enjoy undisturbed the colossal fortunes accumulated during these years of plunder of public and private coffers became.

Latin American dictatorships are becoming increasingly difficult to overthrow, not only in Venezuela, but of course also in Cuba and Nicaragua. They don’t even talk about “revolution” anymore, perhaps aware of the ridiculousness of continuing to promise this supposedly revolutionary well-being when the people, sunk in misery, are literally starving while watching the excesses of a ruthless and corrupt minority. And as the title of Javier Moro’s novel suggests, such regimes do not hesitate to eliminate anyone who threatens their totalitarian power.

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