Exhumation and Maradona: Antics and rotten fruit of the Bolivarian Revolution

Venezuela has become something between a Kundera power struggle with subjective jurisprudence and lack of freedom of speech and a Garcia novel where everything is unbelievable anywhere except for in the state of magical realism. As food shortages in Venezuela are aggravated by rotten food on the Colombian-Venezuelan border—a major blemish on Chavez’s ability to provide rations to the poor even if he had the oil money of the 2005 era—his saber-rattling begins once again. Chavez, with Argentine futbol superstar Diego Maradona at his side, has now severed relations with Colombia after Colombian President Uribe asked the OAS to look into Chavez’s relationship with the infamous left-wing narco-terrorists FARC and ELN. Although out-going President Uribe’s demands overstep his sovereignty, Chavez is not as innocent as he wants to be. He claims that the FARC and ELN should not be defined as terrorist organizations while there are links between Miraflores and FARC rebels. This is all happening as the Venezuelan economy is crumbling on top of the weak foundation on which it is based. In the midst of this, Chavez has exhumed the body of national independence leader, Simon Bolivar (who was more akin to Napolean than to Chavez), due to a Chavez-created conspiracy of a capitalist assassination of the Venezuelan idol 180 years ago.

The absurdity of farce and fiction in Caracas brings way too many questions as to the future stability of Venezuela. Reality has become subjective to the caprice of an authoritarian who has lost his ability to buy his political power. While Chavez’s friends (Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Ortega in Nicaragua, and to an extent the Kirchners in Argentina) may empower some of the poor, Chavez is leading Venezuela—and its poor and its rich—to the slaughter. For this egotistical bullishness, he will become a hero in the quixotic stylings of Ernesto Guevara, who is better remembered for an amorphous philosophy, a motorcycle bildungsroman, and mythical tattoos on Hollywood starlets, rather than the reality of suppression and corruption that appears to have been forgotten by history.