Nicolas Maduro’s Insults

Nicolas Maduro's Insults / 14ymedio, Luis Nieto
Posted on December 5, 2015

Background from Translating Cuba: Uruguayan Luis Almargo,
secretary-general of the Organization of American States, sent a letter
to Venezuela's National Electoral Council this November regarding
potential irregularities in the upcoming elections and condemning the
assassination of an opposition politician at a campaign rally.
Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro responded by saying, "to call
Almagro a piece of trash is an insult to trash."

14ymedio, Luis Nieto, 5 December 2015 – It is not Nicolas Maduro's
insults that provoke sadness, but rather the reaction of Luis Almagro's
compatriots, because the current secretary general of the Organization
of American States (OAS) is a Uruguayan senator from the Popular
Participation Movement (MPP), the majority group of the Broad Front
(Frente Amplio). If the ex-president and senator José Mujica and the MPP
are informed about the Venezuelan situation, it is even more
incomprehensible that they can be so hard on Almargo, who is demanding
guarantees for the opposition within a democratic system, as required by
Mercosur (the Southern Common Market) of its partners.

Or perhaps Almagro was unknown to ex-president Mujica or was imposter
during his tenure as Foreign Minister in Mujica's administration. What
matters now is knowing whether the OAS secretary general will fulfill
the duty of overseeing the quality of democracy of the countries that
make up the institution that he leads, or will be distracted, like his
predecessor José Miguel Insulza was, when he served at the head of the
regional institution.

In Venezuela, we have seen the closing of newspapers and the purchase of
radio and TV stations with public funds and their subsequent operation
by Chavistas; the express dismissal of elected deputies at the will of
the president of the National Assembly and the regime's number two,
Lieutenant Diosdado Cabello; the imprisonment on false evidence of
governors and mayors elected by popular vote; the detention and
prosecution of students simply for demonstrating in the streets; the
financing and provisioning of paramilitary groups such as El Picure
which, curiously, is now mentioned as possibly responsible for the
assassination of the Social Democrat leader Luis Manuel Diaz; use of the
Venezuela's state-owned oil company (PDVSA) for partisan purposes,
because none of this could have been done without generous cash.

Venezuela lacks nothing that one would see in any dictatorship,
although, it is true, it maintains a very thin crust of democratic
formality. Lately we have heard the argument that in the Caribbean the
kind of insult Maduro uses to disqualify Almargo is nothing unusual. It
is also true that Chavez dispatched insults with pleasure when he wanted
to illustrate his contempt toward someone. And in Cuba, as well, the
term "worm" is applied to those who oppose the Castro regime.

But wanting to generalize this behavior to the entire Caribbean region
is an unjustified excuse not to clearly reject Maduro's insult to
Almagro. He said it one, two, three, several times and from various
angles, so as to leave no doubt. He is accustomed to showing the whip to
his friends, and has called the Uruguayan vice president a coward. Who's
next?

Almagro isn't speaking based the politics that drove the president he
served under, Mujica, he is the highest authority of the OAS, and it is
logical that his opinion represents the plurality of the countries that
make up that organization, and which are beginning to tire faced with a
regime that only flees forward, indebting the country to China and
Russia to disguise its extravagances.

Maduro, a cocky blowhard who doesn't respond to ridicule as he relates
in details the conversations he has with birds, still generates some
kind of expectation in the Latin American left. In private, the whole
world is laughing at him, but he continues to feed the hopes that this
is the path to socialism.

Living in the limbo of political ethics is dangerous, and more dangerous
if you occupy important positions, or take advantage of your notoriety
to spread the idea that anything goes. In Chavismo there is no
possibility of moving toward socialism. None. Rather, the regime seems
inspired by "the worse the better," so any little help in increasing the
arbitrariness, the institutional loss of prestige, the loss of the
decision-making power of citizens, is welcome.

Fidel Castro had already raised complacent smiles with his use of the
term "pluralcrap" to refer to the system of political parties with which
Uruguay has built its society. The left let it go, like a vitality that,
perhaps, it continues to share.

Maduro's insult should raise a unanimous and unambiguous condemnation,
first of all by Almagro's partners. When it comes to human rights there
is no territoriality, or is there? True or not, Uruguayan deputy Maria
Macarena Gelman? You, more than almost anyone, bear witness to the fact
that human rights have no country.

The letter Almargo wrote to Tibisay Lucena, Chavista president of the
National Electoral Council, is a clear compendium of the unfavorable
conditions that the Chavista regime imposes on the opposition, ahead of
the December 6 parliamentary elections.

Apart from Maduro's insulting language, which should be broadly rejected
by the Uruguayan left, it is the threat, implying that if the opposition
wins he will resist from the streets, and we already know what that
means: calling up his civil-military alliance against the Democratic
Unity Roundtable of Venezuela.

From the head of the Executive Branch, with the Armed Services at his
command, Maduro is announcing that he will take control of the streets
and, in this case, he will engage in, among others, the same crimes that
he himself invented in order to prosecute Leopoldo Lopez, San Cristóbal
Mayor Daniel Ceballos and Mayor of Metropolitan Caracas Antonio Ledezma,
among more than one hundred political prisoners. With the aggravating
circumstance in this case that Maduro will oppose, with the use of
public force, a decision that emanates from the popular vote. An
announced coup d'etat, nothing more, nothing less. Does Almagro's letter
to Venezuela still make no sense?

Maduro, and Latin American governments as well, started badly because
they were blind to the amount of evidence of fraud presented by the
Venezuelan opposition in asking for an audit of the election data. Many
of these governments, we must not forget, were recipients of the
millions that Chavez stole from Venezuela in order to create an
favorable environment internationally for himself. Not only can it be
said they were bribes, because they were delivered as solidarity
donations with great fanfare, but, how else can one classify the
suitcase full of cash that Antonini Wilson took from Caracas to Buenos
Aires in a plane belonging to the state oil company, as if everything
were Chavismo's private property, to the shame of his gullible friends?

Did Uruguay not receive, among so many other gifts, the electronic
scoreboard for Centenario Stadium, 10 million dollars for clinics, and
even what was necessary to remodel the building now occupied by the
President of the Republic? Why would the Venezuelan government give
Uruguay this money, which belonged not to it but to its people, when
today its people don't even have toilet paper?

When Maduro insults Almagro he insults all those who are following with
great concern what is happening in Venezuela, where we have family and
friends. He reminds us too much of what we experienced in Uruguay and,
as well, of the courageous attitude of the government of the late
Venezuelan president Carlos Andres Perez, the only Latin American
government that broke off relations with the Uruguayan dictatorship,
following its abduction of Elena Quintero from the grounds of the
Venezuelan embassy in Uruguay. The same Carlos Andres Perez against
whom, years later, Chavez, Maduro, Cabello and Cilia Flores attempted a
coup d'etat. Even if only by the margin of doubt before these attitudes,
all Uruguayans should take Madruo's words as a personal grievance.

_____________________

14ymedio Editorial Note: This op-ed was previously published in the
Uruguayan weekly Voces. It is reproduced here with permission.

Source: Nicolas Maduro's Insults / 14ymedio, Luis Nieto | Translating
Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/nicolas-maduros-insults-14ymedio-luis-nieto/