The usurper coup leader divides the spoils

Coinciding with the first month of the elections that he himself called, and which, as confirmed by the minutes presented by the opposition, he lost by an overwhelming 30%-70%, the president of the Caribbean tyranny has decided to reshuffle his government, ‘to move into a new era and control the peace that has been won’. 

Maduro's peace must be that of the cemeteries. Unfortunately, the so-called international community already considers the murders and disappearances at the hands of the repressive forces of the Maduro regime to be part of the landscape, so that they do not seem to attach much importance to the increasingly gross violations not only of the rule of law, which is non-existent in the Venezuelan tyranny, but also of the most elementary human rights.

Although almost the entire Maduro government has been reshuffled, the backbone that supports and drives all the excesses is experiencing a strengthening of its power. Of course, the first beneficiary is Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, who in addition to being Maduro's lieutenant, now controls the Ministry of Oil, the Venezuelan monoculture, and therefore the manna that feeds the regime's privileged ‘nomenklatura’, oblivious or indifferent to the hardships of a country where the poverty rate has reached 80%, despite having got rid of eight million emigrants, 20% of the population.

Diosdado Cabello, perhaps the most genuine and stark symbol of what chavismo is, has been rewarded with the three-term minister of the Interior, Justice and Peace. What's the point of beating about the bush if the three portfolios depend on the will of the tyrant(s) alone, and the source of law in chavismo is Maduro's will, in the manner of the enabling law of Hitlerian Nazism. 

The military, well imbricated in the gears and privileges of the regime, will continue with Vladimiro Padrino at the helm, a guarantee, then, of increased vigilance and control over the mid-level commanders, those who question themselves as to what the army of which they are part is doing repressing and harassing the people instead of defending them. 

In the second line of the Caracas government, Anabel Pereira will take charge of Finance, previously under the jurisdiction of Delcy Rodríguez, also known in the media at Barajas airport as ‘the girl with the forty suitcases’. Also, Pedro Tellechea, until now at the helm of Venezuela's battered and obsolete oil industry, will take over as head of Industries and National Protection, although it is unclear what the second heading on his new business card actually entails. 

It is not known for the moment how much of the spoils have fallen to the advisors and supporters of the Maduro regime before international bodies, such as the verifier of the Puebla Group, former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who has shown invaluable activism among the Ibero-American left in not insisting that they insist that Maduro show the genuine minutes of the elections. 

Of course, Maduro and his henchmen are counting on time playing in their favour, the calculated ambiguity of their co-religionists in the Puebla Group: Lula da Silva (Brazil), Gustavo Petro (Colombia) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico), and the progressively declining interest of the international community in analysing what is happening in Venezuela. The courageous opposition, embodied by both the real winner of the presidential elections, Edmundo González Urrutia, and his essential champion, María Corina Machado, would really need active action from the liberal side, embodied mainly by the United States and the European Union.

At this point, demanding that Maduro show the minutes, when he has had enough time to fabricate or falsify them, let alone repeat the elections (until the result Maduro likes?), are toasts to the sun that do not even look good to the most enthusiastic supporters of totalitarianism.

Allowing Maduro's usurpation to consolidate would send a devastating message to the whole world. We know that democracy is going through delicate times, but to end the collapse of democracy through inaction means purely and simply that no one will ever again be able to trust the ballot box as a peaceful means of changing society and those who govern it. The law of the strongest will be enshrined, a scenario in which the poor and the weak will have no peaceful alternatives to reverse their sad fate.