Caracas Chronicles

Invasion is the legend of a city, imaginary or real, besieged by powerful enemies and defended by a few men, who may not even be heroes. They will fight to the end, unaware that their battle is infinite —Jorge Luis Borges

As Schrödinger’s Tyranny simultaneously consolidates itself politically while becoming economically unsustainable, many are asking what should be done about the upcoming “elections”: to vote or to abstain?

The short answer is: “nothing.” It would be better to regroup with an eye on the fight against constitutional reform, the defense of fundamental rights, and surviving the new economic tsunami likely on the horizon.

But “regrouping” means leaving behind the repetitive debate between voting and abstention, a debate that now belongs more to the toppled elites who have led our opposition movements until now, than to Venezuelan society as a whole. More importantly, it requires us to change what we mean by “opposition”—a task as difficult as surviving disaster and repression.

Those who vote

In a recent interview, Andrés Caleca laid out his reasons—and those of his party—for participating in the coming elections: the electoral campaign, he said, would give visibility to an opposition that cannot appear in any other way due to repression. “In a dictatorship like this, you can no longer organize a protest without ending up with people arrested or killed.”

It’s a puzzling claim, considering that the Committee for the Freedom of Political Prisoners (CLIPPVE) and several unions, including the university professors’ union, have recently taken to the streets. Are those not opposition efforts? Is organizing professors, retirees, and the relatives of political prisoners not “organization and political outreach”?

Still, Caleca is right when he says: “We need to organize society in such a way that it becomes a broad and undefeatable movement.” That’s indeed the goal. The problem is that he reduces politics to “strengthening the parties”—and reduces the parties to electoral committees, which in turn reduce civil society to a bank of voters.

In that sense, the criticism he levels at abstentionists for lacking strategy could be even more forcefully applied to his own camp: where is the strategy among the electoralists beyond voting compulsively?

The abstainers

María Corina Machado has recently tried to restore some sense of epic purpose to her narrative. Her propaganda apparatus has revived the notion of VEN, the “movement of movements” supposedly being built in the shadows using the structure created during the electoral campaign—leaving us to wonder why this didn’t begin months ago, even before the fraud. Why wait until now to build it?

We’re now told that the opposition used a “swarm strategy” last year (really?), and we’re being teased with a mysterious clandestine operation that will “pressure Maduro from the shadows”—without actually explaining what this entails. To make matters murkier, she blurs the line between clandestine action and civil disobedience.

But unions, peasant organizations, and social movements are also cultures. Their mere existence radically alters how people understand the world.

But clandestinity and civil disobedience are not the same. Much of civil disobedience is public, and even the most secretive activity reveals itself—through its effects or because the clandestine organization publicizes it. The who, when, and how of secrecy can remain hidden, but the what must be public; otherwise, we’re left with nothing but faith in the acts of an invisible power—just as María Corina wants.

In truth, Machado’s real bet remains on the visible power of Trump. And, as we’ve said before, it is both difficult and illogical to build a so-called “movement of movements” under the shadow of a political brand that is clearly a personal project rather than a collective opposition effort.

 “No one saves themselves alone”

Netflix recently released El Eternauta, a series based on Héctor Oesterheld’s legendary comic book—a science fiction story about ordinary people organizing to resist invasion and catastrophe. Its themes also echo in the haunting and beautiful film Invasión (written by its director Hugo Santiago with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares), in which a group of anonymous citizens clandestinely defend their city from a similarly hidden invasion.

Such fictions would have been unimaginable in Venezuela, where a phrase like “no one saves themselves alone” would probably just be co-opted by some politician, like “resistance” and “participatory democracy” have been before. Despite Argentina’s history of authoritarianism and caudillismo, its society—and others in the Southern Cone—inherited a political imagination whose complexity and richness are unthinkable in a petrostate like Venezuela.

Because Venezuela never underwent solid industrialization, it never developed powerful unions. The rapid collapse of agriculture prevented the rise of major peasant movements, and urban or neighborhood movements never gained much strength and were later absorbed by chavismo.

If the word “opposition” doesn’t come to mean “resistance against dictatorship” or “strengthening society” instead of “strengthening parties” or “following María Corina,” we’ll remain trapped in that same repetitive story.

But unions, peasant organizations, and social movements are also cultures. Their mere existence radically alters how people understand the world. For better or worse, they are the environment in which institutions are invented, and where parties and leaderships are born. The weakness of these forms (both as organizations and as cultures) in Venezuela is at the root of our vulnerability to elitism and authoritarianism. This weakness is inseparable from a history where the early end of dictatorships came at the cost of reducing civil society to a bonsai tree in the garden of political parties and economic elites.

Yet Venezuela is not the first country to endure a dictatorship, or where the opposition has had to go underground. The misleading—if not outright deceptive—visions of political mobilization and clandestine action under dictatorship only serve to confuse the public. These narratives reflect the internal debates of old elites, shaped more by their own interests and fears than by the demands of the moment.

The vote-or-boycott dilemma, then, is less about the average citizen, who stands defenseless amid repression and collapse, than about political elites trying to reclaim their former positions or recreate the world they once knew.

So, in the face of this situation, the real question is: what action—if any—can break us out of this déjà vu and make way for a story in which ordinary people can save one another, or at least try?

Free the bonsai

Many have already taken the next step: organizing around shared demands by creating new ad hoc organizations (like the Movement for the Freedom of Political Prisoners, groups of retirees, or mothers and relatives of youth killed by FAES) or revitalizing existing ones like professional associations and unions (especially the embattled university professors’ union). In other words: uniting, assembling, and organizing people so they are not alone.

We’ve already discussed how difficult this is, given disaster and repression. But the logical next step would be to coordinate these fragmented struggles into a hybrid organization, partly clandestine and partly public, that becomes the backbone of the “broad and undefeatable movement” Caleca describes.

However, as we’ve said repeatedly, this movement cannot be built in the shadow of the traditional parties and elites. These actors are incapable of seeing beyond their own navels and continually drag us back into the same déjà vu, the same Groundhog Day: the tired back-and-forth where anyone who talks about the dictatorship not being removable through votes gets the same answer—an insistence on the power of the vote.

Faced with such a staggering lack of political imagination and historical perspective, the future of the opposition depends more on whether this bonsai society can begin to grow than on which gardener wins control of the pruning shears.

This fight to liberate the bonsai takes place in many arenas, including our own minds. It’s also a battle over meaning. If the word “opposition” doesn’t come to mean “resistance against dictatorship” or “strengthening society” instead of “strengthening parties” or “following María Corina,” we’ll remain trapped in that same repetitive story.

Beyond the electoral mirage and Washington lobbying, beyond the battles of lies, there’s the fight against the regime’s totalitarian constitutional reform. There’s the defense of fundamental rights. There’s the imperative of collective survival. There’s the need for a realistic strategy to organize and empower Venezuelan society, not fantasies about transitions that never come.

Let’s hope that in the months ahead, our public debates will no longer echo the private discussions of old elites, but instead reflect what ordinary people are doing—locally and beyond—to make another history possible. One where people, heroic or not, can resist disasters and invaders.As the young man says at the end of Invasión: “Now it’s our turn. But it will have to be done differently.”