As a good con man, he believes that this new fallacy will work out well for him and will allow him to remain in power for much longer.
By Yoani Sanchez (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – Nicolás Maduro has finalized, this Friday, one of the most notorious cases of presidential hijacking in the recent history of Latin America. The sash on his chest, the swearing-in in front of the president of the National Assembly and the few leaders who attended the investiture ceremony, were part of an elaborate script that the Miraflores Palace designed for the occasion. But pomp is not enough to turn someone into the legitimate ruler of a nation. Citizen votes are the legal path to achieve this and the tenant of the Miraflores Palace does not have them. His new mandate is illegitimate, as much so as is the inauguration he carried out on January 10.
What is born from lies can never confirm the truth, it should be stressed. On a similar date, but in 2013, Venezuelan official propaganda was focused on making national and international public opinion believe that Hugo Chávez was recovering from cancer in Havana and would soon return to the country to take office as president. There was talk that he was in a “stationary” stage of his convalescence, after suffering postoperative respiratory failure that complicated his recovery. However, the testimonies and indications that have emerged a posteriori indicate that, most likely, on that January 10, twelve years ago, the military coup leader had already died or was in a state that made him incapable of being sworn in as president. The subsequent pantomime of his supposed transfer alive to Caracas and his official death in March 2013 is becoming less and less credible.
I remember that, during those days, the Cuban regime also launched a furious media campaign to reinforce the thesis of a Chávez in full capacity to lead the country. For those of us who are well acquainted with the narrative traps of Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, it smelled fishy from all sides. Maduro’s leadership of the Venezuelan nation emerged precisely from that farce; it is the direct offspring of a colossal hoax that, surprisingly, the major international media have been too lazy to investigate all this time and the majority have accepted as true that crudely retouched story.
As a result of this deception, a man who has plunged the country with the largest oil reserves in the world into an unbelievable economic crisis, has forced millions of its citizens into exile and spread corruption and clientelism throughout the nation has risen to the top position. That initial falsification is, to a large extent, the cause of the impunity with which Maduro was photographed this January smiling with the yellow, blue and red sash across his chest. Like a good swindler, he believes that this new fallacy will work out well for him, allowing him to remain in power much longer.
To help Maduro complete the lie, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel could not be missing; in the end, it was the regime of Fidel and Raúl Castro that was one of the managers of that original invention that placed him in the presidential chair. The Cuban leader has traveled from the Island, even in the midst of an extremely serious situation that would have made any other leader refrain from leaving his country. In the province of Holguín, 13 soldiers, nine of them young recruits of the Military Service, remain missing as of last Tuesday, after several explosions shook warehouses where ammunition and weapons are stored. The situation merits the uninterrupted presence of the first secretary of the Communist Party on the Island, but the engagement in Caracas was inescapable.
Díaz-Canel could not be absent from the staging of this coronation because he is part of the theater. Havana supported that fiction that brought Maduro to the Presidency for the first time and will continue to do everything in its power to keep him in office. This will affect Castroism not only with regards to a part of the oil supply it needs but, very probably, to its own survival.
Translated by Translating Cuba.
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