Munich versus Londres

Talking at the EU parliament. 

No, the spelling "mistake" in the title is intentional, I know how to spell London.  The point here is that catching up with my reading I came across a surrender article of Luis Vicente Leon on El Universal Sunday and a the account today of Maria Corina Machado exposing the Venezuelan situation at the European Parliament, that weeks before its election finds the time to receive her. The first is Munich, the surrender of democracy to a form of Realpolitik and the second is the courageous appeal to resist like de Gaulle in London in 1940 when all seemed lost. Thus French Londres.


I read twice the infamous article of Luis Vicente Leon and I really, really want to believe that it was ill edited and thus he did not mean what he meant.  In short, no need to elaborate, from reading the article you gather that not only resistance is futile, that the opposition is lost forever and that the best we can hope now for Venezuela is a corporatism state system, that is, a state that controls pretty much everything and considers interest groups and the private sector as mere contractors for its needs.

Luis Vicente Leon is the spokes person for Datanalisis, a pollster with a long tradition of occasional sulfur smell, and as such he is the frustrated wanna-be final guru of the opposition. In short, for years I have known that reading Leon, when you have the stomach for it, must be filtered by his desire to be considered the oracle of the opposition, the one through which we finally will get out from under Chavez shadow. Since he has failed I suppose that article is a his spiteful way to tell us: "I told you!"

The most striking thing for that OpEd piece is that the man actually seems not to mind the outcome, that it may actually be a relief to have a country where the regime exerts finally a tight political control but where in exchange it allows for more viable economic working conditions. As if it were possible considering that the extraordinary corruption of the regime would preclude for an equitable share of wealth between the regime potentates and the remaining private sector, either co-opted by force, or simply bought out. Truly, a corporatist state where the economical control is exerted by those with the political control, the worst form of capitalism, China like...

Now, Luis Vicente may be right, but he is politically tone deaf and deserves utter contempt for so openly preparing his comfortable future when repression succeeds finally.

That is,  if repression succeeds, because we have a more hopeful vision, a proof of stamina and democratic will when Maria Corina Machado, expelled illegally from Venezuelan Parliament, is received with honors by the foreign commission of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. Interestingly we learn that the Venezuelan embassy was invited but declined to attend which is, in democratic European union parlance, unacceptable and an admission of guilt.

Whatever the effect of Maria Corina Machado (who was also received by the Brazilian congress and will be received in other places) we have two visions: the neo-collaborationist one of the L.V. Leon of this world and the resistance one, the democrats, like Machado.

The thing about time of troubles is that it reveals with great cruelty the truth in people.