Nicolas Maduro’s Two Plans

Nicolas Maduro's Two Plans / 14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner
Posted on November 8, 2015

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami, 7 November 2015 — Nicolas
Maduro knows he will lose the election on December 6. The disaster is
too intense. So say all the polls. Ninety percent of Venezuelans want a
change. Eighty percent blame Maduro. Seventy percent are determined to
vote against this thoroughly incompetent government.

Venezuelans are tired of lining up to buy milk, toilet paper,
whatever. The inflation horrifies them. Everything is more expensive
every day that passes. The salary of a month is consumed in a week. The
corruption disgusts them. They know and intuit that the Chavista
leadership is an association of crooks with no lack of
narco-traffickers, all colluding to plunder the country. Lacking flour,
violence is the daily arepa (bread). Caracas is one of the most
dangerous cities in the world. And one of the filthiest. (This is also
what Cubanization is: Wreckage and sewage running in the streets on the
worn out pavement full of potholes.)

But Maduro blindly obeys an axiom of the Castros: "The Revolution will
never surrender." The Revolutiuon is actually a verbal construction
that, in reality, means The Power. The Power is what is never handed
over. The Revolution is a plastic thing that transforms itself so as not
to lose power. The verbal construction has other rhetorical components:
"the people, social justice, anti-imperialism, the oppressed poor, the
greedy rich, multinational exploiters, the Yankee enemy." There are
hundreds of expressions that arm the story.

Until 1998, according to the Castros, power came from the barrel of a
gun and the Revolution was declared. This was the dogma. This is what
they had done. At the end of that year, Hugo Chavez won some elections
and came to power by other means, but with the same ends. Fidel,
reluctantly, accepted the change in method, but clarified that power is
never relinquished.

He accepted that Chavism dismantled in slow-motion the scaffolding of
the liberal democracy and liquidated the trifles of the three powers and
the freedom of press and association, but made it very clear that the
Revolution, that is, Power, was never negotiable. Alternation was a
ridiculous republican practice of the soft bourgeoisie. That option did
not fit into a genuine testicular and revolutionary model.

What will Maduro do in the face of the electoral defeat predicted by the
polls and his decision never to relinquish power, imposed by Cuba but
enthusiastically taken up by him and the Chavista leadership?

Maduro has a Plan A and a Plan B.

Plan A is to try to win the elections or to accept losing by a minimum
amount. How will he perpetrate it? Jailing or prohibiting the
participation of opposition leaders who could drag their supporters to
the polls. This is the case, among others, for Leopoldo Lopez and Maria
Corina Machado. Manipulating the voting machines. Generating false
ballots. Drawing the districts to favor his voters. Abusing the media
100 to 1. Putting obstacles in front of the opposition vote in a
thousand ways .

The intention of the government is to discourage the democrats so they
do not vote. They calculate that with the total of all these tricks they
can win, or lose by a small margin. And if they lose, they buy at any
price a handful of dishonest deputies and continue with the power
fiercely clenched between their legs.

And if Plan A fails? Plan B would be launched if the avalanche of votes
is such that there is no way to hide a stunning defeat. That's what
happened to Jaruzelski in Poland in the summer of 1989. He used all the
advantages of power to crush Solidarity in partial elections limited to
the Senate, but Walesa and his democratic tribe obtained 95% of the vote
and nearly all the seats. The communist regime collapsed before the
evidence of widespread rejection.

Maduro has had the courtesy to announce his Plan B. If he loses he will
use the prerogatives of the enabling law to demolish the few
institutions of the Republic left standing. In that case, he will govern
"revolutionarily" with "the people and the army" through a
civilian-military junta. They call this infamy "deepening the
Revolution." Hand over power? Don't even dream of it. He would create a
satrapy pure and simple, collectivist and brutal, without bourgeois
disguises.

What should Venezuelans do? What the Poles did. Come out to vote in
massive numbers. Bury this filth under a mountain of votes, and fight
ballot by ballot and polling place by polling place, without fear and
without faltering.

Plan A is worse than Plan B. Plan A continues a dying farce that will
inevitably lead to a slow and painful death. Plan B has the advantage of
shamelessly undressing the totalitarian character of this dictatorship
and puts an end to the doctored narrative of the revolution of the
oppressed. End of story.

Many Venezuelans, Chavez supporters or not, military or civilian, will
perhaps not remain impassive while Maduro and his masters in Havana
distort the popular will and impose a permanent yoke. It will all play
itself out on December 6. Perhaps life itself.

Source: Nicolas Maduro's Two Plans / 14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner |
Translating Cuba -
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