by Clifton Ross
I’d just finished this process and now felt more aware and open-minded. In the Anonymous programs we are called to “practice these principles in all our affairs, and when we are wrong, to promptly admit it.” The idea that “our common welfare should come first;” that “our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern;” and that Twelve Step groups “should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or [the program] as a whole” and the entire Anonymous organization “…as such, ought never be organized,” all fit well with the emerging social movement political perspective that I had found so compelling.
With all this preparation, I left for Venezuela on April 9, 2013, planning to meet my friend Marc Villá in Caracas and go with him and his media collective to record the Presidential election that pitted Hugo Chávez’s handpicked successor, Nicolas Maduro, against Henrique Capriles Radonski. As critical as I felt toward the Bolivarian Process, I still supported it and its candidate at the time.
Capriles had run against Chávez just six months before and lost. Chávez and his followers had pulled out the stops as Chávez referred to his opponent, Henrique Capriles, as a “pig,” among other things,9 and others, like Chavista commentator Mario Silva, suggesting that he was a homosexual, and a “Zionist” Jew.10 In fact, Capriles was a fairly moderate (and, incidentally, straight) democrat who had made his reputation in 1999 as the youngest member of Parliament and as mayor of Baruta and governor of Miranda. The queer baiting of the opposition was quite an ugly feature of the campaign with Chavista assemblyperson Pedro Carreño leading the charge in the National Assembly itself, and others following, with accusations that the “drug addicts” of the opposition were leading “a gay prostitution ring.” Carreño made these charges as he had images of men hugging projected on a large screen in the National Assembly. All this was accompanied with the usual qualifications of the opposition as “extreme right-wing” (ultraderechistas), “fascists,” and “oligarchs.”
Nicolás Maduro, ten years older than Capriles, also of Sephardic Jewish ancestry and raised Catholic, cleaves to a peculiar mix of New Age and Marxism-Leninism. While Maduro is a follower of Sai Baba, he also has a very long history in the socialist Left, specifically in the Marxist-Leninist “verticalist” faction of the Socialist League that emerged when the party split in the mid 1980s.11 Maduro had played a number of roles in the Chávez government, as member of the National Assembly, then as Foreign Minister before becoming Vice President from 2012–2013. If Capriles offered the possibility of a return to the bygone days of Venezuela before Chávez, Maduro’s history indicated a possible hardening of the process under a man who not only believed in the strong leadership of someone like Chávez, but also very deeply in gurus and vanguards, and therefore top-down command structures.
I usually route my trips to Venezuela through Bogota to avoid the hundreds of dollars in taxes the Bolivarian government lays on air travelers to Venezuela: Bogota turns out to be half the price, even including a round trip flight to Cúcuta. From Cúcuta it’s a couple of hours negotiating the border and six hours from San Cristóbal to Mérida by bus, so the travel time is nearly the same, or less, as a route through Caracas. What I hadn’t counted on was the fact that the Venezuelan government would inexplicably decide to close the borders nearly a week before the elections.
Arriving in Cúcuta, I hailed a cab and an old man who introduced himself as Gerónimo loaded my suitcase in his trunk as I climbed in the back seat. I told him I was on my way to the border and he said it was closed.
“What do you mean, ‘closed?’” I asked.
“Si señor,” he said, “the Venezuelan government closed it yesterday [Tuesday, April 9th] for the elections on Sunday. But we’ll go and see if we can get you across the river. I have a friend who can do that.”
“Why did they close it off?”
“Because Maduro doesn’t want Venezuelans to go in and vote.”
“You mean the Venezuelans living in Colombia?”
“Exacto. He knows they’ll vote for Capriles, so he’s locked them out.”
“How does he know they’ll vote for Capriles?” I asked.
Gerónimo shrugged. “Well, if they left Venezuela, they probably didn’t like that process, right? So they’ll go back to try to vote out those scoundrels.”
I had no better theory to propose, among the many I would encounter in the next few hours, so I left it there.
At the DAS (Colombian immigration) they refused to give me an exit stamp. The official smiled and said, “Sir, if we give you an exit visa you’re stuck, because the Venezuelan office of immigration on the other side is closed until after the elections.” I asked him why he thought Venezuela had closed their border and he shrugged. “They do things. Lots of strange things. I don’t know why. All I know is what they say, that they’re closing the borders for the elections.” He shrugged and smiled again.
Gerónimo offered to help smuggle me across, but I decided not to count on the generosity of the Bolivarian National Guard if I got caught. Gerónimo took me back into town and on the way I decided to go to Pamplona rather than spend time in Cúcuta.
Cúcuta, when included in guidebooks, which is rare in itself, is described as “hot and dusty” and the writers go on to emphasize that “there’s really no reason to visit” this chaotic border city other than to see the ruins of Santander’s mansion near the border. Pamplona, on the other hand, was once described to me by a dear friend as something like a smaller version of Mérida, tucked away in the mountains.
I arrived in Pamplona and got a hotel room and immediately called my friend Marc Villá in Caracas to let him know I wouldn’t be arriving as planned. Marc, being an independent sort, is quite willing, in normal times, to question everything. But these were not normal times; this was electoral season and his theory of why the border was closed was even harder for me to swallow than Gerónimo’s. We found each other on chat.
“The government has locked up the borders,” I wrote.
“No, it was the CNE (the National Electoral Council).”
I didn’t buy that. They don’t have the power.
“Why?” I asked
“Because of the paramilitaries along the border. They’re trying to keep them out so they won’t come to Venezuela to vote.”
“Come on man. You don’t believe that do you?” I wrote. “Do you really believe the paramilitaries take out visas to cross the border?”
“Some do,” he replied.
Close the border to stop a few dozen Colombian paramilitaries who want to vote in the Venezuelan elections? That assumes paramilitaries had such a commitment to “democratic processes,” or to messing with them, that they would be willing to try to cross borders just to vote—in another country’s election, no less! It was all mind-boggling. I decided it was time to find a more credible theory for the sudden closure of the Venezuelan border nearly a week before the elections. I went a block down to the central park of Pamplona, the center of the city, and arrived just in time to buy the last copy of the local paper, La Opinión.
The border closing was front-page news. The lead article announced, “The border closed until Monday” and beneath that read the headline, “Supply of Gas is Guaranteed.” The reference here was to the black market gasoline from Venezuela, where it sells for around US $.25 per gallon, which is smuggled across the border and sold all up and down the highway outside of Cúcuta for a few dollars a gallon—but still less than the actual price in Colombia, which is higher than the US price. Such is the special nature of a “black market” that has near-official status in Colombia.
I called Juan Veroes on Skype to get his take on the situation with the border closure. “Yes, they caught thirty Colombian paramilitaries,” he told me earnestly. I replied that when I saw their faces and had their names, I’d believe it. And besides, there were problems with the story.
I asked him, “when you go to vote, do they ask you for your cedula (national ID card)?”
&nb
sp; “Yes, and you have to be on the rolls with your address and it all has to match up,” he said.
“So do you think the Colombian ‘apatridas’ are on the rolls? Do you think they have cedulas?”
“No, of course not.”
So much for that story.
AFP reported that Maduro closed the borders with Colombia and Brazil due to a US plot to use Salvadoran hit men to kill him.12 This seemed on par with many of the other “plots” that Maduro “uncovered,” such as the one in which the US “infected” the late President Hugo Chávez with cancer.13 Then there was the plot Maduro supposedly uncovered that the US was sending hit men to kill Capriles and blame it on the Chavistas. Like the dozens of plots Chávez claimed to have uncovered, however, the evidence, if it ever was presented, was always thin and controversial and never up to the level of reasonable proof. Still, Maduro knew, as Chávez did, that creating paranoia rallies the masses around the flag and brings out the voters for you—if they think you’ll defend them from the enemy you’ve created. It certainly worked for Bush with all those Al-Qaeda “sleeper cells” supposedly wandering zombie-like around the US just waiting to be activated prior to the 2004 elections. Maduro, and Chávez before him, apparently counted on the same tactic working for them.
In Pamplona I watched the election from a distance. I even pretended to work. I wrote a bit; I recorded an interview with the rector of the university, strolled up and down the streets, though my “strolling” sometimes felt more like “pacing.” I attended a couple of Anonymous meetings and made friends. And I searched the papers for some indication of when the government might open the border, but there was nothing but speculation, and little of that.
On Sunday, April 14th, the day of the election, it was pouring down rain. The dry vegetation covering the mountainsides welcomed the drought-breaking downpour, but I was anxious to get to the bus station and I faced the common traveler’s dilemma in this part of the world: walk the five blocks to the bus terminal when the weather allowed, enjoy the stroll, and arrive refreshed, or pay twice what the locals would pay to have a taxi drive me there and arrive cranky and in need of exercise. I waited for a break in the rain and walked to the terminal.
The terminal was nearly empty. It was, like many provincial terminals in Colombia, neat, clean and orderly, a sharp contrast with stations on the other side of the border in Venezuela. I quickly found a colectivo, a van hoping to fill up with passengers for the trip to Cúcuta, and I took my seat, the first client. Soon we were on our way, descending the mountainside from the cool heights into the balmy valley.
Descending on San Jose de Cúcuta one is immediately struck by the number of trees in the city, a fact that is immediately lost on the visitor on entering the city itself. While it isn’t the chaos of most of the cities of its neighbor, Venezuela, it’s a busy, hectic border town on one of the busiest borders of South America. The name, Wikipedia tells us, comes from the combination of the saintly Joseph (Jose), the father of Jesus, and the Barí native word cúcuta, meaning “house of the goblins.” There is surely plenty of the latter lurking in the often-sweltering streets of this burgeoning border city, but most of them are employed trafficking contraband from Venezuela into Colombia.
But the contraband smuggling, the black market currency deals, the tanks of cheap gas, all came to an abrupt halt from April 9th until the morning of April 15th. Food rotted in the trucks, money exchanges closed their doors and the supplies of cheap Venezuelan contraband dwindled, and then the floodgates opened again.
Chapter Fourteen: The Election
I watched the election results that Sunday evening, April 14 from a dark room smelling of Pinesol in a cheap hotel in Cúcuta where I fell asleep with the television broadcasting live updates. Sometime around midnight I woke to discover that Maduro had won the presidency. The vote had been very close, just over 200,000 votes, a 1.5%, margin. Capriles was calling for a recount, and Maduro promised he would have one.
And so, I thought, the process that Chávez had initiated would continue in some form, somehow, for some time. But with such a close margin, I knew the country was in trouble. Only in the morning, when I finally crossed the border, would I have the faintest idea of just what that meant.
The day started early for me. I was up at six to get to the border, but I didn’t manage to leave my room until seven. I went to the terminal in Cúcuta to change money and prepare to cross the border. Although the prices vary somewhat between the money changers, I settled on a friendly woman who took the time to explain the mathematical logic of the change to me; to write the numbers down and do the calculations a few times so even this mathematically-challenged poet would have some clue to what the numbers meant. I had traded millions of pesos for thousands of bolívares, but I still felt rich.
I asked her how the border closing had affected her and she replied with anger in her voice, “well, imagine losing a week of work. You see from the calculations I make that we work on small margins. I’m not wealthy. And this closing really hurt bad. Thank God I was able to get over here [from Venezuela] today.” I asked her what she thought of Maduro winning and she volunteered, “Look, [the PSUV] is ruining Venezuela. People are afraid to invest there because they’re afraid they’ll lose everything and that the government will take it over. And look at what happens when it does take over: it doesn’t take care of the businesses it nationalizes. It runs industries like PDVSA in the ground. And people are suffering. Imagine losing nearly half the value of your money in devaluation, and then having the highest inflation in the world. My aunt was going to buy a house here in Colombia and she went to Venezuela and bought a business and two houses. It shouldn’t be that way. It wasn’t that way before. Venezuela was doing well. It’s gone to hell and Maduro is going to continue the destruction.”
I thanked her for her opinion, stuck twelve thousand or so bolívares in my pocket, and returned to my room to pack and head to the border.
The line between Colombia and Venezuela is invisible but dramatic. The streets of Cúcuta bustle with activity but there’s a clear order to things, unlike Venezuela, which always feels chaotic, and yet relaxed; where the motorcycles ride with or against traffic and pass on shoulders, between cars and even over the sidewalks; people jaywalk and manage to cross the dangerous streets any way they can. After passing through the various checkpoints I put my head down and went straight to the bus stop.
I caught a bus to San Cristóbal and from there transferred to a bus headed to Mérida. The bus was already full, but I found a seat in the back where an animated and angry conversation about the election was underway. The five men and one woman all had purple little fingers, indicating that they had voted, and from what I gathered of the conversation, they were all in the opposition. I say “from what I gathered” because my ear, as always, was having difficulty adjusting to the Venezuelan accent from the Colombian, and I also had difficulty focusing on the words with music blaring out of the two speakers on either side of the back of the bus where I sat.
One of the travelers, the most angry and loquacious of the bunch, was animated and would have appeared fierce were it not for the smiles that appeared spontaneously as he spoke.
“We’ve got to take this into the streets and let Maduro know that he’s president ‘por ahora,’” he said, referring to Hugo Chávez’s famous words after his failed 1992 coup when he said he’d failed to take power “por ahora” (for now). The speaker smiled slyly, and continued. “We’ve got to let them know that we’re not going to tolerate their fraud. They’ve got to recount, vote by vote.”
Another person mentioned he’d heard about ballot boxes that had been thrown away in the state of Barinas and another wondered aloud how many people had risen from the dead just to vote for Maduro.
The proclamations and protests continued as the bus started and the driver put on the road music track, a non-stop series of cumbias. This is the borderland, and Colombian cumbia is something everyone here can dance to, or in this c
ase, conspire, with. Once the engine started, between the music and the rumbling diesel, I lost track of the conversation and pretended to sleep. I occasionally considered intervening but thought better of it since I had little to contribute and didn’t want to break up what seemed to me to be a friendly political conversation, even if I didn’t necessarily share the politics.
As we left the outskirts of San Cristóbal and moved further into the state of Táchira, an opposition stronghold with a Chavista governor, I saw the driver get on his cell phone. At some point, he took a turn off the road. The Spaniard sitting next to me said, “wrong move. This road is estancada (blocked).” He was also calling a number to find out which roads were not blocked by the guarimbas1 that were now rising up in nearly every city in the country. The bus returned down the road we’d just left, made another turn and soon had taken three or four different roads and, at the advice of someone on the other end of the cell phone, had again changed direction.
We finally hit the guarimba in Coloncito, a little town on Highway 1, the Panamerican highway, near the border of the state of Mérida. Up ahead was a huge demonstration and blockade, huge for a small town like Coloncito. We got off the bus and, while the driver conferred with the passengers about what to do, I went off to a small nearby shack to get my cup of coffee for the day, in hopes of killing a caffeine headache. I returned with my coffee and a brownie and quickly ate my breakfast as the driver carefully made his argument that they should return to San Cristóbal. The Spaniard interjected that the roads into San Cristóbal were also blocked, but the driver seemed to think he could make it back to the terminal. At last, after some discussion, it was decided that now was a good time to find a cafe to have lunch.