In Venezuela They Blinked By Beatrice E. Rangel Latin American Herald Tribune January 5, 2015
109 of the 112 opposition assembly members including National Assembly President Henry Ramos Allup took the oath of office to form the National Assembly of Venezuela on January the 5th.
Everywhere in the world this is a customary and rather boring ceremony but in Venezuela it grasped the attention of world media that followed its proceedings step-by-step. Such attention sprang from the fact that it was preceded by multiple attempts on the part of the Bolivarian Government to block, suspend, cancel or render void the ascent to the Assembly leadership by the opposition alliance that had legitimately been elected by the people of Venezuela on December the 6th.
From that date onwards, the executive branch of the government of Venezuela emulated the coyote in the Warner Brothers animated series Roadrunner. Like the coyote, President Maduro devised every possible stratagem from packing the Supreme Court with 13 card carrying members of the government party to enacting an endless chain of laws aimed at corralling all economic activities so as to control resources and continue extracting graft to secure top level government officers’ personal retirement funds.
More recently the government friendly Supreme Court agreed to revise the petition to nullify 4 seats at the Assembly in what many observers described as “a judicial coup.”
All these signals pointed to a crash between government supporters who would block the entry to the Assembly of the newly elected opposition majority.
This scenario failed to materialize and the swearing ceremony took place with minor disturbances.
President Maduro even took it to the airwaves to announce to the world the democratic disposition of his administration. The much-feared former President of the Assembly, Mr. Diosdado Cabello, attended the ceremony in his new role of backbencher with correctness.
This step forward in the recuperation of democratic freedoms in Venezuela could have been upset by the government by means of promoting violence. Such behavior was expected by many and there were pockets of motorcycle riding, masked "colectivos" who did attack a few. But, for the most part, the bully blinked.
And if the road to freedom is to continue, it is important to understand why the bully blinked.
Clearly the driving force was the stand taken by the leadership of the Bolivarian Armed Forces.
With about 7 sealed drug traffic related indictments quietly awaiting opening in NY’s South District, the Venezuelan military could not afford to make waves.
Supporting the government position of blocking entry to the Assembly premises by the newly elected majority; bringing the much feared colectivos into action to plant chaos in Caracas or arresting and torturing opposition leaders would add injury to offense as on top of drug trafficking, there would have been human rights violations.
So they let the government know that the armed forces would take a constitutional shelter for the time being.
The economy, for its part, seemed to be collaborating with the remain locked away approach taken by the military. Scarcity is becoming truly abject and the absence of corrective action could throw the country into hunger and violence. Mr. Maduro now knows that he will not be able to extract a dime from China or Russia. And he needs a lot of dimes to prevent a humanitarian crisis from taking place.
Suddenly he realized that hunger and violence are not good political partners.
Finally, there was the international community.
Latin America’s absence from concern over the last few years about the loss of Venezuela’s democracy was truly unnerving but understandable given the largesse of the Venezuelans handouts.
The US, for its part, was responding to the most brutal aggression to its homeland since independence days. These were not the days to give Latin American nations yet another excuse to fail to abide with the rule of law and blame the United States for upholding it.
But now the checkbook is gone and the U.S. is going after corruption given that it is nurturing organized crime and terrorist networks.
These developments made the Venezuelan government blink.
The hemispheric community should realize that it needs to preserve the environment that led the bully to blink. Otherwise there will not be any democracy left in Venezuela or eventually anywhere in the region as totalitarianism is an easily spreading disease.
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