By María Fernanda Barreto, on November 29, 2020,
Photo: Diario de Cuba
Two years before the next presidential elections in Colombia, the largest Colombian newspaper ran a headline a few days ago: “Plan from Venezuela to affect elections in Colombia investigated,” and, of course, the matrix began to reproduce itself.
According to this article, there are caravans of people crossing from Venezuela with the sole purpose of asking for Colombian citizenship, and the surprise for the authorities of that country is that the number of claimants of that right has grown, but what confuses them most and turns on their alarms, is that, in their own words, they have observed that “the great majority returned immediately” after making the move.
According to the figures that are coming out, there was 22,147 people in 2014 and 93,975 in 2017, the number increased to 159,413 in 2018, 142,208 in 2019 and, ending in 2020, the figure is 42,586 sons and daughters of people born in Colombia who have come to claim their right to nationality by birth.
What has a simple explanation and should be seen as normal is beginning to be assumed as a national security issue, according to Colombian media corporations and their affiliates. According to what has been said, the only possible explanation for this is that President Nicolas Maduro has activated his already well-known world powers to destabilize countries that were “extremely stable,” and to guarantee that an option that is ideologically related to him will succeed in winning the 2022 presidential elections in Colombia.
As with all phantoms, the interfering presence of “Castrochavism” in the political processes of popular rebellions in other countries can only be proven with the use of parapsychology or its similarity in social communication, which are the rumors.
This is how in a very unserious exercise in journalism, that is sadly habitual, only this proof is provided: “A little more than a month ago information (from a very good source) arrived at the Colombian Presidential House about an alleged plan of the Nicolás Maduro regime to try to influence the presidential elections”.
They also indirectly accuse the Bolivarian government of corrupting Colombia’s already highly corrupt institutions. And although they deny the existence of popular support for the Venezuelan government, they do say that it is capable of an operation to infiltrate Colombia with no less than almost 600 thousand “Castro-Chavista” agents who, as was the case 200 years ago, would cross the border to free Colombia from the eternal alternation in power of the different currents of the same right wing subordinated to the United States, which has directed it since Santander marked such an unworthy destiny in 1833.
It would be surprising how little sense there is of ridicule if we did not know that behind this matrix, as always, is the most murderous oligarchy of the continent preparing itself for the electoral debacle that is approaching.
We will try to bring here a dose of reality because the ideologization of the journalistic exercise imposed by the right wing and its business consortiums is really worrisome, and even painful, for those of us who know that to build peace in Colombia it is necessary to democratize the country, and for this it is a condition like no other that the reality be known and analyzed, the one that is lived by walking the streets and the fields, not the virtual one that they build and design in Washington and because this matrix continues to feed the conflicts between Colombia and Venezuela, which is extremely dangerous for both peoples.
What the figures say
Two years ago we published a critical analysis of the figures provided by Migración Colombia on Venezuelan migration. In it we detailed that in the section entitled “Transit Migration” the following could be read: “In this chapter you will find the number of Venezuelan citizens who use Colombia as a country of transit to third countries”. There it was pointed out that, already in 2018, approximately 26% of the people who crossed the border from Venezuela returned immediately to the country.
After the crisis of xenophobia unleashed by the right wing against Venezuelan migration last year and the terrible health crisis that places Colombia among the countries with the most deaths per covid-19 in the continent, there has been a massive return of the Venezuelan migrant population, which even the Colombian authorities and media corporations have had to acknowledge.
The reason is simple and they know it: neither Venezuela is as bad as they say, nor Colombia is as good as they promote it. So this return to Venezuela is absolutely understandable and, even in terms of its statistics, normal.
They also fear an increase in the number of voters in Venezuela, since for the last Colombian presidential elections, 304,000 people were registered to vote in their consulates in Venezuela, which for the moment constituted much less than 10% of the estimated population.
Even so, the abstention among the Colombian population living in Venezuela and registered to vote was 89%, that is, only a number close to 1% of the Colombian population living in Venezuela went to vote (33,175 voters), because the majority of the Colombian migrant population in Venezuela arrives excluded from their own country, so it is common that they do not have the necessary documentation to register at the consulate and because, in addition, they are not usually interested in maintaining any kind of relationship with Colombian institutions, much less in voting.
But according to their figures, they would have now 184,794 more Venezuelan-Colombians and Colombians to vote in 2022, and counting on the culture of electoral participation that has been promoted in the country, it is probable that more than the usual 10% (18,479 people) will want to vote in 2022. They fear popular participation.
What many people do not know is that all the Colombian consulates in Venezuela have been closed since February 23, 2019, even though, by the way, they continue to report $12,555 a month in expenses to the Colombian State. And therefore, the millions of Colombians who live here are in the oblivion of the Colombian State, for better and for worse. For this reason, in order to carry out any documentation procedure it is necessary to cross the border and go to the attention points arranged in the Simon Bolivar International Bridge, Maicao, Arauca and Inírida.
This violates our fundamental rights, although it does not seem to interest the State and not even opposition congressmen, who will surely remember it when the presidential elections arrive, which the Uribism fear so much.
As we have pointed out on many occasions, unlike Colombia, Venezuela is a country accustomed to receiving immigrants. After at least five decades of intense Colombian migration to Venezuela, the calculations made by our own community indicate that there are at least 5.5 million Venezuelans who have the right to claim their nationality by birth according to Article 96 of the Political Constitution of Colombia, which now, according to the press, the national registrar Alexander Vega is threatening to suspend, with some unheard of maneuver that, in any case, would be less than legal.
Therefore, it must be said that a very small part of those more than five million have applied for their nationality in these years with full rights. The other thing is that the increase in the figures provided by Migration Colombia, of which there is always doubt given its proven arithmetic incapacities and biased handling of statistics, occurred in 2018 and that the following two years it has progressively decreased.
It does not make sense, then, that just when there are 73% fewer of these records, a scandal should break out, unless it is nothing more than a media maneuver to cover up other objectives.
Uribism knows it will suffer an electoral debacle in 2022
The debacle of Uribism in the upcoming presidential elections is easy to predict. We already pointed it out in 2019 after the regional elections of October 27 because the analysis was obvious. The defeat of the Democratic Center party and its related candidates in that electoral process made that clear.
Today the polls say so. Uribe’s follower President Ivan Duque’s popularity has fallen steadily while the rejection against him has grown, which is still less than the rejection against Uribe Velez, which only increased 8 points between August and October of this year according to the largest pollster in the country. But the demonstrations and strikes that have continued to take place even in the midst of the pandemic demonstrate this more faithfully.
This does not mean that the system is at risk, given that beyond Uribism the Colombian right wing has many partisan expressions that support it, even if they are center-right and these continue to be the most popular and they ally themselves with Uribism, even with the so-called “center-left”, in order to procure the Gatopardian maxim of “change so that nothing changes”, an alliance that in the past regional elections translated into a great number of diverse coalitions that obtained the majority of the votes.
For all this, nothing better than to show the already tired ghost of “castrochavism”, in which fortunately fewer and fewer people believe, but which for the moment continues to be useful to them.
Source: Mision Verdad, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau