By Atilio Boron, Stella Calloni and Paula Klachko on August 16, 2024
Petro and Lula photo: AFP
Presidents Petro and Lula are proposing an unusual “transitional cohabitation government and new free elections” in Venezuela to calm their incomprehensible impatience to know the definitive results of the presidential election. If both waited two and a half months to know the definitive result of the presidential election in Mexico due to the challenge filed by Xóchitl Gálvez on behalf of the right wing of that country, what is wrong with them now? Why do they not wait for the deadlines established by law, which grant the National Electoral Council (NEC) up to 30 days after the election to announce the definitive results? Perhaps they ignore the fact that these could not be published immediately and in detail due to the massive cyber attack suffered by the transmission platforms of the NEC. Furthermore, due to all the media campaign of the fascist right wing and the provocative proclamation of Gonzalez Urrutia as the winner of the elections, the issue had to be judicialized and now lies before the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice which has all the minutes submitted by the NEC and the political organizations and will have to wait for that highest judicial instance to communicate its decision.
The proposal of both presidents offends because it takes for granted that there was fraud in the Venezuelan elections, which is an irresponsible and unjust accusation that is not by chance fully in tune with Washington’s project. President Joe Biden has already expressed his support for the proposal of both South American presidents and supports the holding of new elections in Venezuela, a maneuver that implies the denial of the legitimacy of President Nicolás Maduro and opens the doors to appoint a Guaidó 2.0 in that “transitional government” and thus achieve the desired “regime change” in Venezuela, a previous step to definitively seize the largest oil reserve in the world.
Besides, a government of cohabitation? How would that be? Why didn’t Lula propose it when Jair Bolsonaro’s hordes took Brasilia by storm claiming that the election had been stolen from them? He didn’t for very good reasons, which are the same ones he now abandons by demanding a “transitional government and new elections” in Venezuela. In the same vein, why doesn’t Petro invite Alvaro Uribe Velez to share the government and thus achieve the delayed pacification of Colombia? To illustrate the merits of his proposal, the Colombian president invokes the experience of the National Front (1958-1974), the pact between conservatives and liberals that gave rise precisely to the armed struggle and violence in Colombia. Both Lula and Petro should know that a coalition government between a neocolonial and destituyente fascism and the Chavista forces would be a nonsense, a real unnatural exercise, as the ancients used to say, whose outcome history teaches would be none other than a civil war. Something that no one wishes for the much harassed and attacked Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. That is why, in a gesture that distinguishes him as a statesman, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said that he will wait for the final verdict of the Venezuelan electoral authorities before making a decision.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English