A popular Venezuelan saying — más bulla que cabuya — can refer to loud-mouthed thugs who are all noise and no noggin.
Like Nicolás Maduro.
The Venezuelan dictator says he’s “breaking relations” with WhatsApp because it’s allowing folks to express too much criticism of the massive, brazen, knuckle-dragging election fraud he committed on July 28 — when he declared himself the winner of a presidential contest the world now realizes he lost by millions of votes.
That’s right, Maduro is severing diplomatic ties with the Republic of WhatsApp. It’s somewhere on the world map; just Google it, you’ll find it. Anyway, Maduro has expelled its ambassador. So no more arepas for you, WhatsAppians! (Is that what you call people from WhatsApp?)
Ah, if only Maduro’s bulla was the only bulla we have to listen to now, as Venezuelans and the international community try to figure out how to dislodge one of the most disastrous and despotic Latin American leaders of this or any century — and as those who defy him are getting rounded up and sent to prison camps.
Maduro’s opposition challenger, Edmundo González, won two-thirds of the July 28 votes. But Venezuela’s mafioso socialist regime, including the military, is digging in to keep Maduro in power. And so this is when we start hearing the lefty-loosey and righty-tighty bulla about how to solve the Venezuelan crisis — neither of which actually does.
Let’s start with the lefty-loosey bulla — the tiresome, Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing apologetics from the left exhorting the world to loosen pressure on Maduro right now because, well, as a socialist his heart is always in the right place and, besides, he wouldn’t have to act like a tyrant if the U.S. and other fascist forces hadn’t declared war on his country.
And who better represents the lefty-loosey dogma than Colombian President Gustavo Petro — the former leftist guerrilla who always checks his spine at the cloakroom when dealing with his ideological hermano next door.
Not only can Petro not bring himself to say publicly that Maduro’s victory claim is ludicrous; last week, Colombia abstained from an Organization of American States vote on whether to demand Maduro publish the July 28 vote tally — which Maduro disgracefully refuses to do.
Instead, Petro blathers that we shouldn’t “fall into the strategy of war and the separation of peoples” and urges Maduro and Venezuela’s opposition to pursue a rapprochement — even if that means leaving a brutal and ruinous autocrat unchecked in the Miraflores presidential palace for at least another six years.
And, oh yeah, the imperialista U.S. should lift all sanctions against said autocrat.
I’m all for dialogue — if it leads to Maduro conceding a democratic election result. What insults me and every democrat on the planet is Petro’s suggestion that Maduro and the two-thirds of Venezuelans who want him gone should hug and patch things up now.
It’s as if Petro were a 20th-century policeman telling a physically abused wife and her abuser husband to just work things out.
Petro has company — most notably fellow Maduro-coddling leftist presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico.
But there’s a legion of bulla counterparts on the righty-tighty side — like Florida’s own Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, who’s leading conservative cries to have the Biden administration re-tighten the economic sanctions screws on Venezuela to make Maduro cry uncle.
Rubio asserts this crisis never would have happened under former right-wing President Donald Trump and the oil sales embargo he slapped on Venezuela.
That’s right — because under Trump, the Venezuelan opposition never even remotely approached the electoral corner it’s painted Maduro into now. And it has done so thanks largely to the electoral negotiations and agreements, which included an easing of oil sanctions, that Biden’s overseen.
Rubio’s right to condemn Maduro’s criminal betrayal of vote-respecting pacts like last fall’s Barbados accord. But the senator himself looks like a retro cop — telling us to punish the abusive father by heaping more suffering on his kids.
That’s essentially what re-applying the full Trump penalties package, rather than focusing on targeted sanctions, would mean at this point for already desperate — and emigrating — Venezuelans.
So please, all the lefty-loosey and righty-tighty Venezuela zealots, spare us your bulla — and try using your noggins now.
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.
