By Nehomár Hernandez
If something must be said about 2022, it is that it has been a year in which the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro strengthened his tyranny, to the point of presenting it to the international community with a clean face.
An operation that had been orchestrating for some time, consisting of projecting the image that Venezuela is not so bad, that things have been gradually being fixed, has come together for the purpose of making Maduro be treated again as one more president by the European Union, and has built the scenario in which the Joe Biden administration will eventually give him the same treatment.
The understanding with the Government of the United States is clear and evident. In front of or behind the scenes Maduro has been holding negotiations with Biden’s encomenderos. Negotiations that have already borne fruit in concrete things, always to the detriment of the democratic struggle in the South American nation.
On the one hand, the Venezuelan regime managed in October for Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, the nephews of Maduro’s wife, to return to Venezuela in the midst of a hostage exchange with the US government that involved seven other people with US citizenship.
The “narcosobrinos”, as they are popularly known, were apprehended in 2015 for participating in a conspiracy to introduce nearly 800 kilograms of cocaine into the United States. This fact dealt a mental blow to those who believe that outside of Venezuela the criminal actions of Chavismo can come up against the justice mechanisms that evidently have not been present within the country for decades.
This is not at all surprising if one considers that throughout the year the White House has been sending messages to Miraflores, assuring that it is willing to negotiate with the Venezuelan tyranny in exchange for it leading to fairly credible presidential elections.
Said approach has already materialized with the return of Chavismo to a negotiating table established in Mexico with certain sectors of the opposition.
A process that has also had the endorsement of the European Union and in which the conditions for the 2024 elections are intended to be structured. Until now, there is no certainty that Chavismo is giving up positions, with a view to allowing its removal from power by democratic means that year. Quite the opposite.
At the moment, one aspect that has been absent in these talks is the release of political prisoners, which by the end of the year and according to the NGO Foro Penal amounted to 274 in Venezuela.
However, what has derived from the negotiation in Mexico is the granting of a new license from the Biden administration to the North American oil company Chevron, so that it could resume operations in the Caribbean nation.
At the beginning of December, said company and the Maduro regime signed an agreement to resume joint activities in the energy sector.
All in all, the Venezuelan opposition has shown itself to be completely out of joint and incapable of generating political damage to the regime, ultimately assuming the electoral route -again- as the method of struggle to be used between now and 2024.
During the last stretch of this year The names of at least a dozen opponents who intend to challenge Maduro for the presidency have been revealed, without the substantive approach to the transparency of the electoral system and respect for minimum democratic conditions appearing anywhere.
Thus, 2022 has also been the year in which practically the entire Venezuelan opposition has lowered flags and has folded to the electoral strategy, leaving behind the speeches that proposed confrontation with Maduro by other methods. Juan Guaidó himself has fallen into this mess, who has fully embarked on the call to vote in 2024.
After all, Guaidó, until now called the interim president of Venezuela, has been betrayed even in recent days by a segment of the parties that supported him; all this by openly requesting the definitive cessation for next year of the figure of the “interim government” and everything that this entails.
On the other hand, and in addition to the propaganda campaign carried out by the Chavista regime, the basic situation in Venezuela has maintained its characteristic negative features: for example, by the end of November the accumulated inflation in the country during 2022 was 195% (the highest in the region along with that of Argentina), in addition to experiencing a new process of depreciation of the Bolívar (the local currency) that reached historical minimum values with respect to the dollar.
The correlate of this disaster has continued to be the growing flow of Venezuelan migrants leaving their country of origin for other nations in the region. During this year, different international organizations certified that more than 7 million people had left Venezuela in recent years. This dire situation has led more than 970,000 migrants, according to the UN Refugee Agency, to request asylum in different parts of the world.
With information from La Gaceta de la Iberosfera