They want us dead

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On 4 June, the electoral campaign for Venezuela's presidential elections, which are scheduled to be held on 28 July, officially begins.

After all the obstacles and prohibitions imposed by the Chavista regime to prevent the participation of a candidate with a chance of ousting Nicolás Maduro from power, Maduro finally agreed to face Edmundo González Urrutia, the united candidate of the anti-Chavista opposition, sponsored by María Corina Machado, the winner of the primaries, but disqualified and excluded by a regime that has proclaimed a thousand times that it will never allow a change of power.

There is therefore a good deal of scepticism as to whether such elections will ever take place, and if so, whether they will have a minimum of democratic fairness.

I have followed the recommendation of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, who recommends reading Javier Moro's novel "Venezuelan" to those who want to get an approximation of the atrocious drama in which the once richest country with the highest per capita income in Latin America is immersed.

"They Want Us Dead" (Espasa, 571 pp.) is indeed a great book, which, through the tragedy experienced by Leopoldo López, the main political leader of the opposition in 2014, gives a full account of the progressive collapse of the country. The author of such revealing works as "Era medianoche en Bhopal" (2001), "El sari rojo" (2008) and "El imperio eres tú" (2011), with which he won the Planeta Prize, treads a terrain he knows well, the astonishingly exuberant, fertile and splendorous Venezuela, experienced and travelled through many times since his childhood and adolescence.

They Want Us Dead, Javier Moro

Moro begins with a prologue in which he concisely describes the political struggle that Leopoldo López's direct ancestors had already been engaged in throughout the 20th century, brief but intense pages to contextualise how what the Venezuelan elites thought would never happen in their country came to pass: the installation of a ruthless dictatorship baptised the "Bolivarian revolution", whose security levers would be entrusted to Fidel Castro's Cuba. Human rights observatories put the number of extrajudicial executions carried out by Chavista hitmen at more than 6,000, in addition to the torture systematically carried out by the various police and intelligence services.

However, Leopoldo López believed that by voluntarily handing himself in to the authorities after a mass demonstration in which several young people were killed by collectives allegedly in the service of chavismo, he would be able to defend himself effectively in court. Of course, this was not possible, and the regime's own attorney general confessed, after leaving the country herself, that she had been put under extreme pressure to fabricate false evidence.

They Want Us Dead, Javier Moro

The book, which describes in detail her release from prison, her reception in the Spanish embassy and her escape from Venezuela, also establishes its narrative axis around the apparently fragile Lilian Tintori, López's wife, a former and famous TV survival show host. Those who followed her on the small screen retain in their minds the image of a Lilian determined that her programme team would not go hungry, so after capturing a huge anaconda, she severed its head before putting its meat on the grill and satisfying the hunger of her fellow adventurers.

They Want Us Dead, Javier Moro

The regime knew that, by eliminating López, its tyranny would settle down without any major problems, it would be enough to maintain fear by suppressing any protest, and to spread a little payment among the ever-increasing number of poor people with great propaganda. These are the bags known as CLAP (Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción - Local Supply and Production Committees), increasingly reduced in content and where the meat is known to exist but has never been seen. They did not count on the resistance of Lilian Tintori, Antonieta Mendoza, Leopoldo's own mother, and her husband. Lilian and her mother-in-law travelled to all the foreign ministries of democratic countries, many of whose leaders had to receive them and learn from their own lips the reality of what was and is happening in Venezuela. The father of Leopoldo López has also been the voice of the dissident Venezuelan people in the European Parliament, where his testimony has had to confront the MEPs of the extreme neo-communist left, who are unabashed defenders of Latin American dictatorships as long as they are left-wing.

The forced exile of the López family is also the forced exile of the more than seven million Venezuelans who have had to flee misery and political persecution. The main characters in Javier Moro's book embody the heroism of the entire Venezuelan people. At the same time, they represent the hope that the nightmare will end one day, and that it will do so through democratic procedures. Let us hope so, although there are serious reasons to doubt that this will happen. The proclaimed candidate of the Venezuelan opposition, Edmundo González, says that Maduro demands "guarantees" to eventually leave power. It is not difficult to guess that these supposed guarantees would be that he, his family and entourage would enjoy total impunity for the crimes committed, as well as enjoying undisturbed the colossal fortunes amassed in these years of plundering the public and private coffers.

They Want Us Dead, Javier Moro

Not only Venezuela, but also of course Cuba and Nicaragua, Latin American dictatorships are increasingly difficult to overthrow. They no longer even speak of "revolution", perhaps aware of the ridiculousness of continuing to promise this supposedly revolutionary well-being when the people, mired in misery, are literally starving to death while they watch the excesses of a ruthless and corrupt minority. And, as the title of Javier Moro's novel says, such regimes do not hesitate to eliminate anyone who threatens their totalitarian power.

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They want us dead

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