Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
“We are never going to hand over power to fascists”, Nicolás Maduro said for the umpteenth time. Surrounded by the officers of the electoral body that declared him the winner of the presidential election, Maduro made it clear that he considered his victory a battle between purity and evil.
On another occasion, surrounded by the generals who declared their unrestricted support, he spoke of the difference between God and Satan. In his appearance before the Superior Court of Justice, which granted him the right to expose the justifications of his victory, he spoke of the defense of the Venezuelan Constitution and of those who “trample on the law and national order, causing chaos and terrorism”.
In front of foot soldiers, he demanded their unconditional support. To students, he explained the dangers the United States poses “for freedom, democracy, and the sovereignty of our country.” He made it clear that Venezuela’s independence was at risk due to imperialism’s intentions to take over Venezuela’s natural wealth, especially oil.
What is Maduro’s basis for staying in power, given that he lost the election by a landslide? The minutes, presented by the opposition, have not been disqualified by the official electoral body nor by the Superior Court of Justice. Nor has the ruling party been able to present valid minutes that disprove the opposition’s data. From a political and moral point of view, the opposition can presume an overwhelming victory and that Venezuela should prepare for a peaceful transition of power from Nicolás Maduro to Edmundo González. In any democracy, this would be the case. But Venezuela is not a democracy.
And a peaceful transition of power is unlikely. Maduro is already celebrating that more than 2,000 “terrorists” have been imprisoned. However, he does not publicly celebrate the fact that “Venezuelan” security forces have executed more than 30 people, as far as is known. They talk about “Venezuelan” security forces because, according to several Western intelligence agencies, the security forces that beat, arrest, and kill members of the opposition are not Venezuelans but Cubans and Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group, hired by Maduro. The reason? Maduro cannot trust his troops acting repressively in the streets because, indeed, it was their parents, grandparents, wives, girlfriends, children, and friends who voted for the opposition. Perhaps even the troops themselves will have voted against Maduro. Under these conditions, Maduro cannot risk an uprising of the soldiers against the generals and himself.
Mercenaries are a handy resource in this world of multiple wars. The fact that Maduro has “internationalized” the Venezuelan conflict by hiring Cuban and Russian mercenaries adds another layer of difficulty in finding a way out of the matter. Maduro’s invectives and accusations, including specific words, are becoming more and more similar to Putin’s sayings and phrases in his “holy war” against “fascism and Nazism in Ukraine”. Maduro and Putin have allied, and the circle closes with Cuba, China, Iran, and Nicaragua. In other words, now it turns out that the electoral fraud in Venezuela is, apparently, the product of a confrontation between the liberal Western bloc and the Eastern bloc with authoritarian regimes. Or, in Maduro’s words, the fascists of the West against the popular governments of the East.
Any similarity between Maduro’s allegations, demonstrations, and behaviors with what is happening in Mexico is not a surprising coincidence. It is the same script. Let’s see.
Although still incomplete, Andrés Manuel López Obrador is trying to build the same scenario in Mexico as in Venezuela. Plan C, which the new Congress of the Union will probably approve based on a tricky qualified majority, will go irremediably in that direction.
He has done everything possible to subordinate the Legislative Branch to his political agenda. In the 2021 elections, he lost the qualified majority, which delayed the development of his plan for political domination. But he dedicated the last three years of his administration to creating the conditions to impose himself in 2024. He took by assault with blackmail and threats to the National Electoral Institute (INE) and the Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF). It was essential for his project of dominating electoral spaces, just like Maduro.
The colonization of the electoral bodies was the product of a sordid war against its former members. But he has already succeeded: the INE and the TEPJF now belong to Andrés Manuel López Obrador and obey his mandates, just like Maduro.
This control will allow him to advance one more gigantic step towards the total domination of the state apparatus. By forcing the INE and the TEPJF to approve an illegal and immoral scheme of over-representation of his party in Congress, which will allow him to approve everything the President wants without consulting anyone, he will be able to totally colonize the Judicial Power, by forcing the resignation of all the Justices, Magistrates and Judges in the country, giving him and the drug traffickers the possibility of appointing all the new judges. Colonization to control the judicial power and banish the idea of independence and autonomy in decisions forever, just as has happened in Venezuela.
The total control of the Legislative Branch will also allow the Executive to eliminate all plurinominal representation to eradicate, once and for all, the existence of annoying political dissidence in Mexico. There will no longer be, in AMLO’s logic, fascists, terrorists, or imperialists in Mexico. It will be a country inhabited by people condescending to his ideas and ideology, which he says is of an immaculate and popular purity unparalleled in the national territory. The elections will serve only to ratify the absolute and total hegemony of the official party.
Thus, without officially changing the Political Constitution that governs us, factually, it will be thrown into the dustbin of history. Three Powers of the State, independent among themselves and with the same rank? To the Trash. Federalist State? Of course not: centralism will be the rule in the presidential figure from now on. Democratic republic? They will say that these are conceptions of fascist neoliberalism, which, in the past, led us to ruin, allowing interests alien to the people to gain access to power. From now on, we will be guided by the luminous vision of popular democracy, embodied in the figure of the President who understands everything and does us the favor of interpreting it for us.
For these reasons, the new political model that we will adopt has two additional consequences. First, we do not need autonomous bodies to oversee the conduct of the Supreme Power because it will intelligently dispose of the entire public treasury in accordance with the higher interests of popular democracy. Accountability will be a tale of the past, an unnecessary task, and will lead to the pointless waste of public resources other than to ensure its permanence in power.
Another consequence will be the new inseparable relationship between the President and the leadership of the national Armed Forces. They will be one and the same thing. There will be no difference between them because together, they can determine the future course of the Homeland without allowing fissures in the concept of Homeland and national interest. Never again, fascism, neoliberalism, or imperialism in Mexico. This will be joined by drug trafficking.
This is the script that López Obrador is copying from Maduro. We see Maduro entrenched in the apparatus’s control, and he can last a long time like this, associated with the Eastern bloc in the new configuration of world blocs. This is, by the way, the model of governance adopted in Cuba, which has been in power for more than 60 years. And I am afraid that, if things are not stopped in time, López Obrador and Morena will take us down the same path.
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