Coup warning?

Coup warning? / 14ymedio, Gerver Torres
Posted on February 17, 2015

14ymedio, Gerber Torres, Caracas, 16 February 2015 — This article should
appear today in the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal. It was
censored. From here I make public my resignation as columnist for that
newspaper, for which I worked for fifteen years.

Maduro speaks daily with shock and anguish of conspiracies that he
discovers, that he dismantles and that apparently reproduce themselves
everywhere, all the time. Why does Maduro feel so tortured by a possible
coup? The truth is that when one recognizes the circumstances
surrounding him, one comes to the conclusion that Maduro is right and
has many reasons to be distressed, to fear a coup, and even more than
one. Let us review some of the circumstances.

His international allies have abandoned him and are all in serious
trouble: Cubans rushing to reestablish relations with the United States;
Argentine president Cristina Kirchner at the end of her term with an
economy in a tailspin and facing serious accusations of all kinds.
Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff, also with a stagnant economy and
overwhelmed by the Petrobras corruption scandal, the biggest in the
history of Brazil. Vladimir Putin, submerged in the Ukraine crisis,
under sanctions by the European Union and in severe difficulties because
of the fall in oil prices. Iran, negotiating a nuclear accord with the
United States and trying to redefine its relations with that country.

Men very close to the regime are fleeing the country and starting to
openly attack the regime: Leamsy Salazar defected to the United States
with his wife to tell the story of the Cartel of the Suns (cocaine
traffickers within the Venezuela military); Minister of Foreign Affairs
Rafael Ramirez will sneak away, distancing himself from the regime. At
any moment a bomb explodes there; Giordani reappears emboldened to say
that the country has become the laughingstock of Latin America, just
months after he was kicked out of the government.

The country's employment is in the toilet, with Venezuelans experiencing
totally unexpected events, lines, shortages, patients dying in hospitals
for lack of supplies, runaway inflation, and other tragedies such as
unchecked and unpunished crime.

Maduro can no longer count on abundant oil revenues and access to debt
which could postpone the solution to many problems.

Maduro lives in a country institutionally ruined, turned into a jungle,
without a Judiciary, devoured by corruption. Meanwhile all this was
generated by the same regime that presides today and served to sustain
it over a long period of time, this same lack of a framework of
institutions that now turn against it. The regime no longer has anything
to latch onto but repression.

Maduro knows that his popularity has fallen very low, not even the
Chavez loyalists want him any more.

Maduro knows, and this is not small thing, that his eternal commander —
Chavez — found justification for the 1992 coup in problems much smaller
than the country has today.

How is Maduro not going to be anguished by the possibility of a coup?

Source: Coup warning? / 14ymedio, Gerver Torres | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/coup-warning-14ymedio-gerver-torres/