«The plan is perfect. You understand me. All the goals we set at the Sao Paulo Forum have been achieved. We are doing much better than we thought,» said Nicolas Maduro. Meanwhile, the whole region is burning with riots and plunder. It is about the dictator of Venezuela assuming part of the responsibility for the tragedy that has plunged Latin America into chaos. The criminal acknowledging his crimes.
But this is nothing new. It is a worn-out, often unsuccessful recipe that has been tried over and over again in the region, and it has hindered progress for millions of desperate people in the Third World.
There was a feeling that on this side, the world did not want to move forward and would never do so. The perception was that Latin America was fiercely attached to living an illusion and that any gesture of sincerity would be met with fists and fugitives. A primitive region. Rough and backward.
In reality, that was just a facade. A well-designed agenda always existed behind the “spontaneous” movements that presumably fulfilled the will of the people. The agenda was armed from Havana, planned to the last minute detail.
In 1982, the conservative government of Osvaldo Hurtado accepted the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund and implemented economic adjustments. The measures resulted in fierce protests: riots and looting. When the Balaunde measures, or “IMF package” as the left called them, were implemented, riots plagued Perú in 1982. Before, Mexico in 1981. Costa Rica, as well as Brazilian President Joao Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo, suffer the same fate when austerity policies suggested by the Monetary Fund provoked a state of siege and repression in Brazil. Alfonsin in Argentina experienced it, and years later, in an outburst of honesty, former president Cristina de Kirchner, now a vice-presidential candidate, would confess, “I want to be absolutely sincere. This is a political instructional manual for looting, violence, and destabilization of governments, and it has its history. And the truth is that those looting that ended very badly and forced the early departure of Dr. Alfonsín were not very spontaneous. We all know that they were provoked.”
Venezuelan researcher and writer, Thays Peñalver, has written an important article about this: “For the first time in history it was revealed that movements that end with “azo” were nothing but the contents of a communist agitation manual and the one who recognized was the president who had used it, also revealing that this ‘manual’ had existed in Argentina since the 1980s.”
The agenda was strategically brought to the Dominican Republic under the presidency of Jorge Blanco in 1984 and, sometime later, Fidel Castro would say the following:
“There has already been some social friction because in Santo Domingo there was a social outburst; it was not catastrophic for the system, but it caused some friction. When the International Monetary Fund forced the Government of Santo Domingo to apply specific measures, there was what we might call a spontaneous uprising in the Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, the government found itself in a position where it had to advance troops, soldiers, and police to control the people and ended up in the assassination of over 100 persons. These weren’t revolutionaries. They were men, women, teenagers, homemakers, ordinary people of the town, who spontaneously threw themselves into the street.
Then he would conclude: “It is probable and possible that a social outburst will lead to a revolution, and so I have said in some of those interviews: generalized social outbreaks of a rather revolutionary character. (some of the references can be found in this link)
The friction leads to a revolution. Leftist leaders such as Fidel Castro and former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner found it difficult to guard the confidentiality of the script. It is no longer a secret, nor can it be pointed out as a theory of hysterics, that many of the social movements that have marked American history with blood and fire were never spontaneous, but rather, they complied with the efforts of the Castros to subvert the region.
By the end of February 1989, Venezuela suffered mainly due to this deadly monster. The episode, known as El Caracazo, which left a terrible toll of more than 250 dead and thousands of dollars in losses from looting and riots, was the first significant blow suffered by the legitimate government of Carlos Andres Perez. This administration was willing and determined to move Venezuela away from the old model and towards modernity.
Perez, who had been elected 83 days earlier with 52.89% of the votes, never recovered. The demonstrations in the Caracas neighborhoods were tarnished by the noisy presence of Caribbean snipers. The protests made it possible for Venezuelan democracy to resist two armed attacks years later by military coup plotters similar to Havana.
Fidel Castro is no more, but his franchise remains alive and strong. It is no longer monopolized by the Sao Paulo Forum but is now also in the hands of the nascent Grupo de Puebla, made up of the natural enemies of freedom in the Americas.
It is no coincidence that Chile burns today after a gesture of honesty by Sebastian Piñera’s government and after the Chilean foreign minister proposed sharper measures such as a naval blockade against Maduro’s regime. Nor that Ecuador has already been set on fire and that both outbursts are backed by the communists and the Latin American left. Perú is getting agitated and, in Mexico, the narcos are collaborating with the state to subdue the underprivileged population. The left has a long history of conspiracies and constant conflict to plague the continent with agitators and subversives. It is naive not to realize that we Latin Americans are once again witnessing a dangerous realignment of the greatest threats this region has encountered in the last sixty years.
Nicolas Maduro is not the only honest one. The second man of chavismo, and Venezuelan capo, Diosdado Cabello, also had a moment of frankness amid this chaos. At a march held by supporters of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, Cabello said: “What is happening in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Honduras is just the breeze, and a Bolivarian hurricane is coming. We are not isolated in the world; on the contrary, Venezuela is becoming more consolidated every day.”
The Secretary-General of the Organization of American States issued a timely statement concerning the confessions by the high-ranking agents of Chavismo:
“The prevaling currents of destabilization of the continent’s political systems originate in the strategy of the Bolivarian and Cuban dictatorships, which seek again to reposition themselves, not through a process of re-institutionalization and re-democratization, but through their old methodology of exporting polarization and bad practices. The ‘Bolivarian breezes’ that (Cabello) has referred to have caused destabilization, violence, drug trafficking, death, and corruption. The Bolivarian breezes are not welcome in this hemisphere.”
We at the PanAm Post endorse each and every word of the poignant statement of the Secretary-General of the Organization of American States. However, we will add: Latin America is paying a high price for not confronting chavismo in time. Urgent action is necessary to neutralize the Bolivarian tumor, which has already spread and threatens to dye all of Latin America red again.