Well friends, it seems I’ve been proven wrong… Some of you may think, “this guy is a joke,” and you might be right. However, what seemed normal a month ago is no longer the case, as Venezuela has officially become a de facto dictatorship since yesterday. No more pretenses, no more poses, none of that. The chavista assembly approved a comprehensive enabling law yesterday in the first ‘discussion’ – as if they were discussing orders from the dictator – which effectively means that Hugo Chávez will govern by decree, controlling almost all aspects of the country for the next 18 months. The silver lining is that from now on, quite literally, without hesitation or remorse, we can enjoy calling the coup leader Chávez as many times as we want “democratically elected dictator”™, just as he always wanted to be. It’s official now. It’s also great to describe Venezuela in its proper context as a non-democratic country, ruled – by decree – by a militaristic dictator, as many of us have maintained for years.
It’s no surprise why Chávez didn’t want to debate Rosales on his “country project” during the campaign. This time he was careful to hide the true intentions behind his ‘21st century socialism.’ Moreover, Chávez’s rapid movements in recent times lead me to conclude that he knows something we don’t and is acting accordingly. His swift actions may relate to the supposed number of votes cast in his favor. Someone high up in Rosales’s campaign team confided to me not long ago that an optimistic assumption about the number of polling stations supervised by opposition witnesses on election day pointed to 60%. If the total number of polling stations was around 33,000, this percentage suggests that in 13,200 of them, there was no one from Rosales’s camp to ensure that voting was transparent. What if the race were much closer? What if the margin wasn’t 3 million votes but just a few thousand? We will never know, but I am sure that not once during the campaign did I hear Chávez say he would govern by decree in January. Not once. Just imagine this campaign promise:
“Compatriots, give me your vote and out of love I will become a dictator, I will remove those you placed your trust in during the legislative elections of December 2005, and I will govern by decree, without consulting you or any of your representatives about this matter, but fear not, this is only for 18 months, until ’21st Century Socialism’ is firmly established in Venezuela.”
Would that have earned him 7 million votes? Definitely not. Also, why the sudden attack on RCTV? Could it be that all the official TV channels combined have less than one-fifth of RCTV’s audience? The dictator needs media with reach; there’s no point in having countless community radios, TV channels, and ‘Bolivarian CNNs’ if no one is watching, if the message doesn’t reach its target audience, right? Of greater concern for the regime is the social status of RCTV’s audience, because while satellite dishes are common in many suburbs of Caracas, the people from that stratum love their soap operas, an area where RCTV excels. Is the dictator intent on changing the fabric and values of our society? You can bet on it; his now public communist persona just proves the point. And I couldn’t agree more with the flattering Eva Golinger who, from her ivory tower in Alta Florida, tells the world this isn’t about freedom of expression. It’s not; it’s more about the dictator’s need to communicate effectively with his supposed electorate.
The radicalization of Chávez’s dictatorship will only accelerate its political downfall. So sit back, make sure to grab enough popcorn, because, much like in Reservoir Dogs, the show will end up being red, very red…