The Invasion That Won’t Come

Nicolás Maduro dressed as a soldier during a Government ceremony in Caracas. (EFE)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Carlos Blanco, Caracas, March 4, 2020 — There are fewer people hoping for an invasion to free Venezuela than those making fun of those supposedly waiting for it. These days, electioneering has changed the dishonest dilemma of “either we understand each other or we kill each other” for that of the no less ominous “elections or death,” until it could be “elections or Maduro forever.”

The logic that sustains the electoral illusion insists that nobody is coming to free Venezuela from outside and, given those circumstances, there only remains the domestic effort and, since citizens lack arms and military support, the only thing to do is go to the ballot boxes. Just as the accommodating wise men used to say, “Take what you can get.”

What’s certain is that there is not nor will there be an invasion unless the madness of the red leadership carries out open military actions abroad. This will not happen because the heads of the criminal organization have decided to dress up their external incursions with surreptitious funding for destabilizing groups and the always generous help for ELN, the FARC dissidents, the colectivos, and other gangs.

There will be no invasion because the United States is not in any political condition to do it and because the democratic forces of the country are not asking for it, among other things, because turning Venezuela into a space of prolonged foreign military occupation doesn’t interest or suit anybody.

If this is true, where will the internal forces for change come from? What role will the countries that support the removal of the regime and the restoration of democracy play?

I think that the internal forces can emerge from the progressive alignment of political and institutional factors that have differed in the past, but that now assume the goal of the replacement of the regime and understand that the electoral option with “the end of the usurpation” will lead to the continuation of the fraud.

The countries that reject the regime also differ from one another: those who try for elections of any type “with conditions” (which the regime will never give) and those who believe that it’s necessary to replace it with arm twisting. The first led by Europe and the second by the United States, Colombia, and Brazil mainly.

The convergence of the national coalition with the international coalition, between those trying for a regime change from within and without, is the key to building an irresistible pressure that will force supporters of the regime to crumble even more. One day there will rise those who will remove their little heads from the rotten environment full of flies and filth to say: Nicolás, let’s go, everyone hates us here.

There will not be a prolonged war a la Mao Zedong, but rather something I imagine similar to January 23, 1958 or April 11, 2002, when the generals, inspired, pressured, or frightened by the force of the people, said to the tyrant: “Either you run or you join us,” and, in the examples mentioned, Pérez Jiménez and Chávez ran…

Translated by: Sheilagh Herrera

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Editors’ note: This text was previously published by the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional. We reproduce it here with permission.

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