Why nobody in Caracas is celebrating
Ten years ago, Venezuelans learned what happens when the regime is down but not out
Flashback.
It’s December 6th, 2015. Just over ten years ago.
After a hard fought parliamentary election campaign, Venezuela’s opposition has won two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly — enough, theoretically, to rewrite the constitution. It’s a massive win, and a huge blow against what is already a sharply authoritarian regime.
After these results are announced, I head out to report on the mood on the streets.
What I find is strange.
The streets are quiet.
Small groups of opposition die-hards gather in a few spots in the most anti-chavista bits of Caracas, my hometown. But there are no mass celebrations, no noisy horn-honking, no confetti, none of the outburst joy you’d have expected if people had really sensed the regime was done for.
Already back then Venezuelans knew better than to get too hopeful about a half-victory. They were happy to see an awful government humiliated, of course. But they were also weary. Because the same people were still in power. They still had the guns. They still ran the prisons. And the torture chambers. Nobody could quite bring themselves to believe something as prosaic an election would change all that.
It was no time to celebrate.
As it turned out, they were right. Over the months and years that followed, Maduro and his governing clique drained that win of all significance. They orchestrated far-fetched court decisions that drained the new National Assembly of all its power. Over the two years that followed, Venezuelans hit the streets in huge numbers to protest the powergrab. They were just met with more and more violence. As repression increased, people chose to abandon the country rather than to keep getting beaten, and jailed, and tortured.
Thinking back on that election night in 2015, it strikes me that the crowd was right. They weren’t celebrating, because there was nothing to celebrate. Not yet. They knew they were in a dictatorship just as much after that election as before.
That’s what kept running through my mind last night as I saw footage of Venezuelans celebrating in Madrid, in Miami, in Lima and in Mexico City…but not in Caracas. People back home understand that an important thing happened. A historic thing. A good thing. But they also know that on Sunday, Venezuela was just as much a dictatorship as it had been on Friday.
In the ways that matter most to people in Venezuela, nothing really changed. The guys with the guns are still the guys with the guns. The political prisoners are still locked up in their dank cells. Electronic communications are still being spied on just as actively as they were before. If anything, dissent is even more dangerous now than it was before Maduro was extracted. Because the regime feels more threatened, and if there’s one thing Venezuelans have learned in the last 10 years is that the more threatened the regime feels, the more viciously it gets.
Donald Trump, in his press conference, showed a shocking inability to understand any of this. He kept talking as though the removal of the president amounted to the collapse of the regime. That’s a fantasy that’s easy to sustain when you live in Washington, but far too dangerous to entertain if you’re in Caracas. Back home, people know very well that a single misjudged tweet can land them in a prison cell, or a torture chamber. That in a weird way, Venezuela is no freer now than it was on Friday.
All along, I’ve feared the Venezuelan job would be left half-done, leaving the country even more repressive than it was before: an all out police state. It’s obvious that Venezuelans’ well-being is precisely the last thing Donald Trump will consider when deciding next steps.
Chavismo without Chávez turned out to be far worse than with him. Chavismo without Maduro may be an even more brutal beast than it had been with him.
The streets were quiet in Caracas the day Maduro was taken away. There’s a message there we need to be tuned into. People aren’t celebrating. Because they can’t. They’re not free yet.
It’s been years since Venezuela faced any options that were not awful. That didn’t change this weekend. But in the menu of awful options ahead of us, leaving this chavista rump in charge of the country seems like the worst option.
The videos of people celebrating are all false? I know someone from Venezuela who says they're ecstatic. Yes it's true it could backfire, but to say literally no one is celebrating?
Googgle “colectivos.” No one is on the streets because they could get shot.