May 13: Dialogue Cancelled

Ramon Aveledo, the executive director of the Mesa de Unidad [the opposition] said this evening that it was backing down from talks with the government. On the move, Aveledo said:

Venezuela has collapsed due to a way of governing that ignores half the country (…) There is no way for the dialogue to prosper if government spokespeople dedicate themselves to insulting the people they speak to [the opposition], if the spokespeople and the government laugh at [the proposals made by the opposition] (…) We talk about the issues, we reach a compromise, and nothing happens. 

Specifically, Aveledo pointed to the fact that the government hasn’t engaged them in the ways that the opposition had hoped. For example, the opposition presented the government with a petition back on April 10, suggesting that the government sit down with representatives from the economic sector and the student movement, a petition the government has ignored. Similarly, the government has not shown any kind of response to a suggestion by the MUD to release political prisoners. The increasing severity with which the government has been dealing with the protests – which has drawn the criticism of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – was also a cause for discontent.

While the move appears to draw the two sides further away from a solution, many in the opposition felt that the dialogue would be fruitless anyway, given the government’s unwillingness to compromise and its continued attacks on the opposition while the supposedly reconciliatory talks were taking place.

In Other News

Last week, the video below aired on VTV (Venezolana de Television), a state-run television network. The video claims that a commercial that airs on DirectTV advertising the 20014 Brazil World Cup contains “subliminal messages” against the Venezuelan government. Here is the video, with my translation below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkD34lNC8F8

[Starting at 0:23] What does appear bizarre is the new DirectTV Latino-America commercial. It contains three subliminal messages that could be related to Venezuela, in support of the fascism disguised as a student movement.
Before analyzing it, watch the full commercial.

[Commercial Plays].

[At 1:10] If you didn’t see anything strange, that’s normal. Subliminal messages look to work in the subconscious level. The intention is for you to not perceive it easily, but we will show you here what’s behind the commercial.

In innumerable occasions we’ve seen Venezuelan youths making use of the “Soft Coup Manual” by covering themselves with the flags of their country, denoting that they are the victims of a cruel repression. They hang it around their necks, they kneel, they beg, and they show their hands [as if they were] the lambs of God. This is how DirectTV shows a Venezuelan fan, hitch-hiking, kneeling with a desperate look on his face, and with a flag hanging from his neck just as the narrator says, “Do you know that feeling?” It’s curious that without being in the World Cup, Venezuela is featured in the first few seconds of a World Cup commercial, and not even with a Vinotinto jersey [the Venezuelan national soccer team jersey].

If you think that he’s Colombian [the Colombian flag is very similar to the Venezuelan flag], I present you the Troncal 10 Highway, which is located in Ciudad Guyana [in Venezuela].

You can type “Inchas de Chile” in any search engine, “Chilean fans” and “Chilean Masks”, and you won’t find a single mask like the one used by the man in the DirectTV commercial. On the contrary, you will find these really ugly masks which are given out by the terrorist cells of Voluntad Popular to Venezuelan youths. In other words, the mask is not part of Chilean heritage or soccer culture, but rather a symbol of solidarity with those who oppose the Bolivarian Revolution.

This is the most shameless part of the commercial. The streaker carrying a tricolour flag: is he Venezuelan, Ecuadorian or Colombian? [The three flags look very similar]. This is what the Bogota Police uniforms look like. This is what the Quito Police uniforms look like, and the uniforms of the National Bolivarian Police look like this. Which of the three looks more like the one of the officers who detain the nudist with the flag? Moreover, it wasn’t in Colombia or in Ecuador – but in Venezuela – that the opposition carried out a horrible campaign called “Mejor Desnudo” [“It’s Better to be Naked”]… “Because Nothing Else Matters”.

Commentary

As someone who has been following Venezuelan politics on a daily basis for the past three months, the video claiming to show evidence of subliminal messages in the DirectTV commercial really shocked me by how brazen and absolutely ridiculous it was. That video is one of the most obscene examples of grasping at straws that I have ever seen. The fact that it was sanctioned by the Venezuelan government is terrifying.

As sad as the video is, it’s the latest in a trend to blame every possible entity on the planet except for the people running Venezuela for the crisis the country is currently undergoing. The video is reminiscent of one released earlier, which claimed that the popular hashtag “SOSVenezuela” was actually unwittingly employing Nazi symbols. How can the Venezuelan government begin to solve the crisis in the country when it can’t even own up to the fact that its policies are largely responsible for it? As long as Venezuela’s troubles are caused by Neo-Nazis/Regular Nazis/Colombians/DirectTV/FIFA/Paramilitaries/Terrorist/etc., the country’s leadership is absolved from any wrong doing.

1984 is one of my favourite books because it shows what an all-encompassing dictatorship would do to the truth. When I first read that Winston had doubts about Big Brother’s version of history and current events, I felt a glimmer of hope for humanity. I thought, “No matter how suffocating a government’s choke on the truth is, people will always be able to think for themselves, and some people will see through the lies.” At the end of 1984, I wondered how many other people out there were like Winston, how many other people had seen through the lies. When I watched the video I posted above, I wondered, “Who actually believes this? How can anyone actually believe this?”

Without making any comparisons between the Nazis and the Maduro government and the PSUV, my reflection on the video reminded me of a quote by Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich:

The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

This video is proof that the PSUV isn’t afraid of lying big and sticking to it, no matter how ridiculous it makes them look.