A few days ago, in a personal message made public (or in a message written personally but intended to be made public), Laura Restrepo wrote to the director of the Hay Festival to inform him that she was giving up participating in the next edition. “I understand your philosophy of opening the doors of this important cultural forum to the discussion of various topics from opposing angles and opinions,” he told her. “But inviting Ms. Machado as a speaker has crossed the line. You cannot give a platform and facilitate an audience to those who, like Ms. Machado, promote positions and activities in favor of the subjugation of our people and against the sovereignty of our countries. Imperialist intervention is not discussed, but rather rejected without consideration.”
It seems to me that you are wrong. By canceling her participation in the festival, and doing so under the pretext that the festival had invited a woman whose positions she does not share, Laura Restrepo abdicated the main duty of a public intellectual: to enter the debate. He did not do it: instead of giving reasons, he preferred to take an attitude; Instead of arguments, he preferred to use gestures. And it’s a shame, because the current situation in Venezuela is extremely complex, and our understanding of everything that is happening in the Caribbean would have been enriched, without a doubt, by confronting the many visions that we can have of this brutal crisis: including that of an intellectual as important as Laura Restrepo. At the Cartagena festival, she held at least four events in which she could have explained to the public and journalists why she thinks what she thinks: why it is unacceptable to think what María Corina Machado thinks, to say what María Corina Machado said, to act as María Corina Machado acted. Instead, he said inviting María Corina Machado “crosses the line.”
And this is perhaps what worries me the most: that Laura Restrepo feels that there is a limit and, above all, that someone has the authority to draw it. I don’t think that’s the case: not even when it comes to someone I respect and admire as much as Laura Restrepo.
The debate these days reminded me of one of the best conversations I saw at the Hay Festival: in 2008, the Welsh festival invited John Bolton, who was at the time one of the most visible advocates of the invasion of Iraq, to present a book about his years as US ambassador to the United Nations. Peter Florence, then director of the festival, took charge of the conversation, and for almost an hour he questioned Bolton about his unredeemed warmongering, his Americanist convictions and his rejection of all multilateralism, but above all he questioned him harshly on the justifications for the Iraqi catastrophe, war crimes and lies about weapons of mass destruction. Under the pressure of a good interlocutor, the ideas of the hawk of the Bush era collapsed before everyone’s eyes. And no: I’m not saying that Bolton is Machado. (In these times of fragile written comprehension or willful misunderstandings, even these things need to be clarified.) I bring up the anecdote to argue that a festival of ideas not only can, but must, “give a platform and facilitate an audience” to all positions: even those that displease one or more guests.
Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is the leader of a government of thugs with obvious fascist tendencies (this was demonstrated on January 6, 2020 and the following days, and I spoke about it at the time) and what is happening in the Caribbean, the extrajudicial execution of a hundred boat crew members who were probably transporting drugs, is neither a fight against drug trafficking nor a defense of the United States: it is a blatant violation human rights and, above all, a way of exercising social and political control. on a Latin American country, as happened in Guatemala in the 1950s, in Panama in the 1980s, and in Colombia during all those years of certifications and decertifications and monumental gringo hypocrisy. And yes: I wrote about all this at the time. What is happening in the Caribbean could be the prelude to imperialist aggression, and there is no doubt about it; and there is even less doubt after the announcement, with all the trumpets and letterheads, that the Trump regime is returning to the rogue imperialism of the Monroe Doctrine.
And let’s be clear: we Latin Americans must regret that the Venezuelan opposition, after years of suffering the unspeakable, is so desperate that it is joining forces with this government of murderers and thugs that openly despises Latin America. The Trump administration kidnapped Venezuelan citizens, mistreated them, imprisoned them without proof of any crime, and deported them, not to their country, but to the infamous prisons of El Salvador. Many are migrants who fled the Maduro dictatorship and were accused of belonging to the Aragua Train with the only evidence being that they had tattoos or wore certain tennis shoes (see Jonathan Blitzer’s lurid report in the New Yorkers). Yes, the mistreatment and contempt for Venezuelans who fled Maduro is reaching levels of inhumanity and infamy within the Trump administration; But María Corina Machado dedicates her prize to Trump and in an interview, when asked about her reasons, she responds as follows: “President Trump is the one who today leads an international coalition that responded to the cries of Venezuelans.
I don’t think so: President Trump is leading nothing but a new style of aggressive imperialism intent on controlling oil and some sort of return to 19th-century hemispheric hegemony, and he doesn’t care about the clamor of the Venezuelans. But I also believe that María Corina Machado leads – she does – a Venezuelan opposition which not only clearly won the last elections and saw how the Maduro regime stole them before everyone’s eyes, but which has also suffered countless persecutions, political imprisonments, repressions and tortures, even against children (see the horrifying Amnesty International report of November 28 last year). The Venezuelan reality is painful because the country – or at least the one that wants to regain democracy and freedom – is located between Scylla and Charybdis: on one side, the repressive and murderous regime of Maduro and its gangsters; On the other, the imperialist, aggressive and xenophobic government of Trump and his henchmen, which can be useful to Venezuela in freeing itself from dictatorship, but which will demand a very high price in terms of sovereignty.
My point is that the situation is much more complex than Laura Restrepo’s resignation seems to acknowledge. Others will envy your unqualified certainties; To me, asking that those who have another point of view not be received or listened to – those who see the world from another place, with different concerns and fears, and who risk their lives in other ways – is to simplify reality, to devalue the public conversation and to disrespect citizens, who should have the right (and responsibility) to hear all arguments to reach their own conclusion.
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