The Key Man for the Final Assault
It looks as though Hugo Chávez is putting his men into position to mount a frontal assault and set up a despotic communist regime in Venezuela once and for all.
This Tuesday, February 2, during a ceremony to commemorate the 11 years Hugo Chávez has been in power, he announced that Cuba's minister of computer services and communications and president of its State Council and Council of Ministers, Ramiro Valdés, had arrived in the country. Allegedly, Valdés is here as the head of a Cuban technical commission that has come to cope with Venezuela's current electricity crisis.
Many analysts are astounded at the audacity and cynicism of this presidential announcement, given the grave consequences that bringing Cuba's third strong man to Venezuela will have.
From his curriculum, it is clear that Valdés knows little or nothing of anything except repression, persecution, and espionage of all kinds, which he has employed against the political dissidents on the oppressed island of Cuba. Valdés has been minister for home affairs several times, particularly at times when the Cuban prisons were full of political prisoners. He has also acted as chief of three corps of the Cuban army, and according to scholars who have studied Fidel Castro's dictatorship, he is the man used by the dictator for carrying out purges in the revolutionary ranks. Since 2006, he has been the minister of computer services and communications, where he has applied his know-how in the area of repression, and today is considered the person mainly responsible for censorship of the Internet in Cuba.
The question, then, is what task has Ramiro Valdés been assigned to carry out in Venezuela by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez?
Some analysts maintain that this Castro-Chávez combination cranks up repression and political persecution in Venezuela to unthinkable levels for Venezuelan democrats.
Why is Chávez revving up the repression apparatus precisely at this time? There are two hypotheses.
One says it is because he feels threatened and weak now that he is faced with hunger, unemployment, rampant inflation, crime, widespread corruption, and the serious electricity crisis for which he himself is largely responsible and that threatens to scuttle the revolutionary process. His strategy would seem to be to crush protests by sowing terror in the population. There is the possibility that this weapon will be used against dissidents as never before in Venezuela, not even in the times of the dictatorships of Juan Vicente Gómez and Pérez Jiménez.
The other hypothesis is that he perceives the opposition as being weak and divided and, on top of that, he feels he is in such a strong position that he considers that the time is now or never if he is to set up his communist dictatorship once and for all. Those who support this hypothesis argue that the feeble reaction in rejecting Valdés's presence in Venezuela by groups and individuals who speak out on behalf of the general public is proving that Chávez is right.
VenEconomy has been a leading provider of consultancy on financial, political and economic data in Venezuela since 1982.
