Venezuela: the penultimate via crucis

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 23/04/2024

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The beginnings of the Venezuelan 21st century will be recorded by history as those of the most colossal institutional destruction. Process that opened the doors to the most rampant of all populisms experienced by the region since independence from Spain in the 19th century. Curiously, the dismantling of Venezuelan democracy was carried out by the elites who simply and bluntly rejected the ideas of economic competition and the construction of broad consensus in politics. Political decentralization and economic freedom were thrown overboard in favor of participating in the extraction of rent that was guaranteed by political leaders with little commitment to the rule of law and much less to democracy.

Curiously, the Venezuelan people did not accompany the elites in this process since the great winner of the 1998 elections was abstentionism, particularly in the CD and EY strata, throughout this century they have increasingly rejected the barbaric despotism of a regime ally of transnational organized crime to support the electoral route at every opportunity.

This path has been hard, difficult and tragic since the regime has not hesitated to torture, kill and disappear dissidents. But Venezuelan civil society continued its democratic course. He organized marches and protests. Participated in electoral processes. He collected signatures to repudiate leadership and managed to seize legislative power from the regime in 2015. Today he is ready to seize the executive.

Many analysts believe that the democratic ambitions of Venezuela's civil society will once again be frustrated. However, let us remember what Bolivar said “when a people decides to be free, it ends up being free.” And the people of Venezuela have decided to be free. After many frustrations, today it is grouped behind a firmly democratic and libertarian leadership. This is a leadership that has never abandoned the country and that did not put its needs to cover living standards before those of returning freedom in the country. It is a leadership that suffers with the Venezuelans the tragedy of infinite poverty; the absence of public services to educate and give healthy growth to their children. A leadership that accompanies the empty homes of migrants. A leadership that breathes with the country.

That leadership embodied by Maria Corina Machado and today reinforced by Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia is creating a political consensus that the country only experienced when it decided it wanted a democracy. This political consensus will serve to begin the transition towards freedom and democracy, which in itself will be a via crucis. Because the country is economically devastated; institutionally destroyed and emotionally collapsed. But this via crucis, as Saint Paul will say, is that of redemption because it precedes that of the advent of freedom.

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