Daniel Ortega “wins” a presidential election by imprisoning opposition candidates and in Raúl Castro’s Cuba they extend, as Christo would with his conceptual sheets, the national flag, especially a building to hide from the eyes – from whom? – to a free and smiling man.

Nicolás Maduro will not need to go to those extremes to ensure primacy and prolong his dictatorship, perhaps indefinitely. Maduro has had for a long time what Ortega and Gorgona Murillo have not; Maduro has an aché that does not attend Díaz-Canel: Maduro has the Venezuelan opposition.

When the electoral pantomime of November 21 takes place in Venezuela, after eight years of having been elected for the first time to the presidency, one of those periods of predominance, outrage and shame will begin that, since we were independent, we have given the last name as call the tyrant and always with the suffix ato: the monastic, the guzmanato, the gomezato, the perezjimenato. Thus, Christmas 2021 will be the first Easter of the mature, rhizome of another rhizome, the chavezato.

These years that will end next weekend will be counted only as those of learning the art of bullying. They will be, for the Creole Mommsen, the years of the collapse of the oil industry and the exodus of what will soon be twenty-five percent of all of us in 2014. However, they will not constitute the primordial era of the mature.

The matureAs such, it will begin next week, and it will have counted on the petty stupidity of the political class to achieve it.

I already seem to be seeing the candidates for governorships and mayoralties, candidates from the seventy times seven oppositions defeated by the massive fraud, affirm on Globovisión’s talk shows that the recovery of the vote as a weapon has begun. They like that image, the vote as a weapon; they let it escape every so often.

A sample — a little bit, no more — of their damaging foolishness and abhorrent pettiness can be seen in the silence that the negotiating delegation observes about the Nicaraguan elections at the Norwegian dialogue table, which from time to time signs a memorandum of ground rules with Minister Jorge Rodríguez.

I will be told that the high sights of the negotiating table – ensuring a presidential election in 2024 for the political boss of Juan Guaidó – impose diplomatic restraint, lest Maduro get angry and we remain, in this municipal and Andean quagmire, without budget for the mayor of San Francisco de Tiznados, where, who removes, can begin the recovery of the fighting spirit.

The same is true in the case of Cuba: after all, Díaz Canel is an ally of Maduro, the mustache has his little fidelista heart, why offend him now that we are back on the constitutional, peaceful and electoral route?

It is already an after-dinner topic to dispatch these things with benevolence, making it clear, as José Rafael Pocaterra did in Memoirs of a Venezuelan of the Decandenia, that our compatriots do not have any tragic feelings. That is why we can be proposed on Friday a military departure for tomorrow Saturday in Cúcuta and on Sunday an electoral procession in Caracas without anyone’s wig rolling or dropping the glass eye. If that’s true, there wouldn’t be much to ask for.

All in all, and since we are staying in the hotel of the unproductive negotiations, it costs nothing, I say, to modify the order of declarative priorities, transpose some paragraphs and first demand, for example, the immediate release of all political prisoners and, now we’ve reached 700,000 barrels a day, a humanitarian oil-for-food program.

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