El otro escándalo / Oswaldo Barreto

The Other Scandal

The ubiquitous and stentorian call to sign up immediately with the Party [PSUV] is perceived by the masses as a scandal. Whether it be at the entrance of a supermarket, at the doors of any public or private institution or on the corners at the outskirts and center of cities, we’ve all experienced the amazement, the outbursts of mockery or anger and, finally, the intrigue and curiosity awakened by this type of situation.

Why so much noise and so much nonsense to call attention to a party, something that has always been done in this country with the moderation and the prudence motivated by the act of launching an enterprise which, in the end, is very particular and thus not easily received with enthusiasm and approval by the entire population? To call for a massive inscription in a party whose creator pretends to be the fruit of the highest political and social conscience that can be acceded to at this moment in Venezuela, the conscience that it’s necessary to make a revolution here and that in order to make it the creation of a party is indispensable, can one sensibly hope that in today’s Venezuela there exists such an enormous mass of people willing to join that party for its promoters to speak in terms of millions when calculating its possible members? Millions of members for the party of the revolution in Venezuela, a country of 25 million inhabitants, when the activists of the party that was at the head of the revolution that shook that Russian empire of more than 150 inhabitants, never reached beyond the dozens of thousands!

But, when we try to dispel the mystery the actual foundations of these scandalous aspirations might have, we inexorably end up noticing an even greater scandal.

Surely, it’s not Hugo Chávez’s conscience that there are millions of Venezuelans who want to make a revolution that has led him to the creation of this Party, but rather his bad conscience for going around promoting a revolution, when no one elected him for such an enterprise. Now he wants to turn his idea into a plebiscite, he wants the whole world to know that there are millions and millions of Venezuelans who, with their inscription in the party of the revolution, have demonstrated that they’re in agreement with his revolution. This is the true scandal we’re now living.




{ Oswaldo Barreto, TalCual, 15 May 2007 }