Venezuela officially has a new tyrant king — and we hereby proclaim him Catfish II!
There’s always been an eerie physical resemblance between 20th-century Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez and 21st-century Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. The jet-black helmets of hair. The bulldog cheeks. And the bushy mustaches — the source of Gómez’s nickname, El Bagre, or The Catfish.
But now the political likeness is complete as well.
There’s the medieval brutality: Gómez was a homicidal degenerate who collected torture methods instead of stamps. Today, Maduro is accused by the U.N. of crimes against humanity.
There’s the magical-realist orgy of corruption: Gómez stole so much of Venezuela’s oil wealth, and Maduro has allegedly trafficked so much cocaine through the country, that one was and the other is among the world’s criminally richest men.
And — as Maduro confirmed unequivocally a week ago — there’s the monstrous rape of democracy: Gómez ruled Venezuela for 27 years. Maduro, who came to power 11 years ago, threatens to rule for at least another six now that he and his mafioso regime have engineered the most Neanderthal electoral fraud the western hemisphere has seen in more than a generation.
Venezuela had other despicable dictators before Maduro. Cipriano Castro. Marcos Pérez Jiménez. And Maduro has sealed his place in that ghastly gallery.
But the Gómez comparison matters most. That’s because much of the aura of the socialist “revolution” Maduro heads relies on the ancestral claim of its founder, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. He insisted his great-grandfather was the llanero, or cowboy, Pedro Pérez Delgado, aka Maisanta — who led a guerrilla campaign against Gómez’s dictatorship.
This week, Maduro desecrated that people’s lore like a dog hiking his hind leg over a Caracas fire hydrant.
He is Gómez, not the guerrilla.
How else to describe Maduro’s obscenely brazen theft of last Sunday’s presidential election? His utterly implausible declaration that he somehow defeated opposition challenger Edmundo González, 51% to 44% — when every credible exit poll showed him losing to González by a landslide of 30 points or more, after every credible voter poll had showed him losing to González by 40 points or more?
How else to characterize his refusal to provide the opposition and the international community with any legitimate proof of his illegitimate victory? His withholding of the precinct-by-precinct tally of Sunday’s vote — his middle finger flashed at every country and respected election observer organization that’s calling out his scam, which is so knuckle-dragging it makes ogrish ballot burglaries like Mexico’s in 1988 and Panama’s in 1989 look sophisticated?
How else to cast his threats to arrest not only González but opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose overwhelming popularity with voters caused him to bar her from running in Sunday’s election? His thug military’s attacks — and those of his thug street enforcers known as colectivos — on Venezuelans who’ve taken to the streets to protest his Gómez-ish despotism?
It’s sad but unsurprising that Latin America’s more retro and spineless leftists — led by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Colombian President Gustavo Petro — gave their ideological bro Maduro a pass this week by abstaining from an Organization of American States vote to demand he cough up the actual election data. (The resolution failed as a result.)
Still, genuinely 21st century-minded Latin American leftists like Chilean President Gabriel Boric and Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo aren’t buying Maduro’s appalling, 20th century-style lie.
So maybe — just maybe — conscientious leftists in the Americas are coming to the gut-wrenching realization this week that unconscionable leftists like Maduro are clubbing leftism’s image to a bloody pulp and kicking it into a ditch to die.
Maybe — just maybe — it’s dawned on them that Latin American leftism today doesn’t evoke cowboy lionhearts like Maisanta but rather caudillo losers like Maduro.
Maybe — just maybe — they’re shamed by the fact that even reactionary autocrats like Gómez presided over economic growth, while a “revolutionary” like Maduro has engineered the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history. An emergency that’s forced a quarter of Venezuela’s population to emigrate in the past decade.
Even so, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they’ll shame Catfish II into giving up power — because, like Catfish I, he had no shame to begin with.
Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.
