15 de julio 2024
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The degradation of men in power is directly proportional to the time they remain in power. We know this well: the longer they stay at the top, the worse and more twisted the concrete expressions of degradation become.
Just reading a biography of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, or Teodor Obiang Nguema, written by rigorous historians, is enough to see the similarities that arise across countries and eras among dictators. They are astonishing, as if the degradation of the powerful follows general patterns that reproduce anywhere and anytime.
The degradation I speak of is expressed in a range of behaviors. From the variations of these behaviors, great novelists like Miguel Angel Asturias in Mr. President, Mario Vargas Llosa in his masterful The Feast of the Goat, or Gabriel García Marquez in The Autumn of the Patriarch, have constructed characters perverted during their exercise of power. Besides being extraordinary exercises of fiction, these works provide us with tools to understand the Putins, Ortega-Murillos, or Maduros of our time.
A phenomenon I want to note here is the fear that inevitably penetrates dictators. The longer they hold power, the more their sense of illegitimacy grows, and a constant state of fear of imagined or real enemies sets in. Paranoia is a kind of affliction of the dictatorial species. Therefore, in their gloomy thoughts and nightmares, conspiracies, betrayals, stabbings in the back, disloyalties, and infidelities repeat themselves.
This path of paranoia is inseparable from another phenomenon: isolation. The dictator, even if conspiracies do not exist, withdraws from the public. He avoids crowds and open spaces. He perceives enemies, assassins, or spies everywhere. As a result, due to his increasingly severe reclusion, he becomes alienated from reality, from the pulse of everyday life. He entirely depends on what his courtiers tell him, whisper to him, or offer as the next chapter of an endless sequence of gossip (here too the same relation operates: the more time in power, the more daily hours on average spent on gossip).
But that ring surrounding the dictator —made up of trusted and, at the same time, distrusted subjects— desperately needs to justify its existence, to ensure it will not be removed, dismissed, replaced, or simply ousted. Thus, a morbid, pathological cycle is established: the members of the ring focus on three practices incessantly.
The first is fighting among themselves to conquer the position of preference before the dictator. The second is inventing threats and schemes to further isolate the dictator in a sphere of distrust. And the third is filling him with praise and flattery. Over days, weeks, months, and years, family, friends, and members of the first and even the second ring, speak to him of his talents and successes; of his recurring achievements; tell him stories of his popularity; reiterate his enormous value; and repeat that there is no other human on earth capable of facing the country’s problems like him.
Now, the tremendous part of this pathetic comedy is that the dictator believes it. He sees himself as a superior being, destined to govern indefinitely. And even though it happens, as with Maduro, that he is the main person responsible for the country’s economic, social, and moral debacle; even though he is the indisputable and vociferous leader of a corrupt and incompetent government; head of the chain of command that persecutes opponents, kidnaps, tortures, and subjects them to the most extreme humiliations. Likewise, despite being clearly the primary promoter of intolerance and exclusion, isn’t he responsible for the detention and persecution of hundreds of entrepreneurs and citizens who are kidnapped, imprisoned, fined, or have their businesses closed for providing services to the campaign of Edmundo González Urrutia and Maria Corina Machado?
Any citizen, at first glance, is able to see that rejection of Maduro is the most potent negative emotion present throughout Venezuela. However, despite all these indisputable evidences, the people surrounding Maduro —his acolytes and lieutenants— have begun to repeat that he is the only one who can save the country from sanctions. They tell him he is the only one who can restore the lost peace (the peace he has systematically demolished); the only one who can get the economy running, the economy whose destruction he not only continued from Chavez’s work but also deepened and took further.
At this point, one must ask: is the argument that Maduro is the only possible savior of Venezuela pure desperation in the face of imminent defeat, or is it a clear expression of the degradation process of power? It is both: desperation and degradation, degradation and desperation, the emotional, organizational, and political state of the power elite, with only 14 days left until voting day.
This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.
