Karina Sainz Borgo: Thank you, Mr. Watne

Venezuela’s future can take many forms. “But the present is only one, and it is horrible,” read the president of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, during the award ceremony to María Corina Machado. Standing in front of an audience of … thousands of people, Watne gave a speech that many of us listened to in amazement. During the almost thirty years of splinters, torture, forced disappearances and democratic dismantling perpetrated first by Hugo Chávez then by Nicolás Maduro, I do not remember having heard such a precise diagnosis of the Venezuelan tragedy, exploited at will by all the international actors who addressed it.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Juan Carlos Monedero – and before them figures like Ignacio Ramonet – lent their electoral observance to the collapse of a nation. With their faces revealed, amused during the dictator’s celebrations, they attested to the cleanliness and transparency that a latrine could have. In the pages of “And God Entered Havana,” Manuel Vázquez Montalbán described the sympathy of writers and thinkers like Jean Paul Sartre for Fidel Castro. He called this the age of innocence syndrome. But we are not in Sartre’s world and innocence is not a luxury we can afford today. The violation of human rights is not debatable.

In just ten years of Nicolas Maduro’s government, more than 10,000 people have been murdered, nearly 2,000 tortured and 8,000 assaulted. More than nine million Venezuelans have emigrated for economic and political reasons. Among them, at least a thousand were eaten to death in the Darién jungle and more than a million are awaiting a response to their asylum request. 92 percent of complaints about human rights violations have gone unanswered, more than 300 political prisoners remain captive, and nearly 20,000 citizens have been victims of arbitrary detention. Watne is right: Venezuela’s present is one and it is horrible.

Despite the suffering, anger and abuse, Venezuelans have not given up on the possibility of restoring their democracy, despite the indifference. “As they lost their rights, their food, their health and safety – and, ultimately, their own future – much of the world clung to their old narratives. Some insisted that Venezuela was an ideal egalitarian society. Others only wanted to see it as a struggle against imperialism. Others chose to interpret the Venezuelan reality as a competition between superpowers, neglecting the value of those seeking freedom in their own country. All of these observers have something in common: the moral betrayal of those who actually live under this brutal regime,” Watne read. The chairman of the Norwegian Committee does not know to what extent his words succeeded in restoring a moment of sanity and calm to those of us who have always felt misunderstood in the crucial path of explaining how a democracy disappears. Thank you, Mr Jorgen Watne, for your lucidity.

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