The Biden administration marks the court and calls Edmundo Gonzalez “president-elect”

Marcos Salgado

The Democratic administration in the United States continues to play ahead of the curve. In Ukraine, it puts Europe (and the whole world) on the brink of a confrontation, even a nuclear one, by authorizing Zelensky to use US missiles on Russian territory. The latter, as in a calculated staging, has already occurred.

On the same Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Bliken tweeted about Venezuela, calling former far-right candidate Edmundo Gonzalez “president-elect”. Something he had been very careful to do. Until now.

“The Venezuelan people spoke out forcefully on July 28 and named Edmundo Gonzalez as president-elect. Democracy demands respect for the will of the voters,” Blinken posted on Elon Musk’s network.

“The only place you don’t come back from is ridicule,” goes the popular saying. However, Blinken, a self-confessed enemy of Venezuela, insists on doing it again, supported by fascists and terrorists subordinated to the battered U.S. policy,” Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil immediately replied on social networks.

The Venezuelan Foreign Minister urged Blinken to dedicate himself, in the last days of his administration, to reflect on his failures. “Get rid of the imperial and colonial complexes and go write the memoirs of how the Bolivarian Revolution made him bite the dust of defeat, just like his predecessors”, he remarked.

The media, always in the middle

As it happens more and more in these times, what the governments do not say officially is completed -with a clear ideological sign- by the hegemonic media.

Thus, as soon as the post was known, the central Spanish media assumed that it is “the United States” who “recognizes” González Urrutia, who traveled to Spain after the failure of the opposition maneuvers to heat up the streets after the July 28 elections in Venezuela, as president-elect.

CNN, for example, among many media, concludes that “the United States formally recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez as president elect”.

The same note assures that Blinken’s tweet “marks a significant change in US policy towards Venezuela”, risks the media.

“Until now, the U.S. and other countries had concluded that González had won more votes (sic) than the official candidate, President Nicolás Maduro, in July, but had not recognized him as “president-elect”, they explain.

What none of the notes seem to remember is what the Venezuelan Foreign Minister warns in Telegram: that the Biden administration, including the anodyne Blinken, will be leaving office in less than two months, on January 20.

Of course, with the arrival of none other than Marco Rubio to the office that Blinken will vacate at the State Department, nothing good can be expected in the relationship with Venezuela. Although it is no less true that, at least for now, both Rubio and his new boss, President-elect Donald Trump, are not saying anything.

It is not superfluous to clarify that -it always happens- it is one thing to crow from the plain and another to define strategies when governing. In any case, it should be noted that serious analyses put a huge question mark on what may happen in the future Trump administration in relation to Venezuela.

In his first version in the White House, Trump failed miserably with respect to Venezuela. There is a saying in the village: “he who burns himself with milk, sees the cow and cries”.

Looking ahead to January 10th

Will Trump play ahead of schedule and anticipate his own inauguration to raise Gonzalez Urrutia’s fist and “consecrate” him president-elect in a remake of Guaidó? No one knows. What is clear is that this is the dream of the opponents who have accumulated years of failures to get rid of Nicolás Maduro by their own means (lawful and not).

We must remember that history repeats itself once as a farce and once as a tragedy. At least the gray deputy Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself in Venezuelan territory, in a more or less crowded avenue in the east of Caracas. And he even had, afterwards, some more or less animated convocations.

It is now clear that Edmundo could not even lead press conferences in the little park in the south of Caracas where Guaidó played that he was president, with the absurd complicity of the same media that now give definitive character to the tweet of the outgoing Secretary of State.

For the time being, the government of Nicolás Maduro seems willing to armor itself and not to allow any more destitute little parks. The National Assembly, with a majority of the United Socialist Party, is bringing forward a reform to the electoral law before the end of the year, in order to avoid that in the three elections scheduled for 2025 (the National Assembly itself, governors and mayors) candidates who accompanied the various attempts to force Maduro out by force may run.

Furthermore, on the same day of Blinken’s tweet, AN President Jorge Rodriguez, Likewise, Jorge Rodriguez proposed that the discussion of the “Special Liberator Simon Bolivar Liberator Law”, which includes the political disqualification, in perpetuity, of those who “have committed harmful and brutal acts that threaten the peace of Venezuela”.

“Let them go to Washington, let them go to Miami, let them stay in the Golden Block of Salamanca in Madrid. Enough is enough. These people have to be tried and sentenced for treason,” Rodriguez demanded.