In 1930, an extraordinary event occurred that would change the history of India and would constitute one of the central events in the birth of nonviolent civil disobedience movements. The Great Salt March, called and led by Mahatma Gandhi, was a unique act in the campaign for liberation from British rule. During the march, which covered a route of about 400 kilometers, thousands of Indians followed Gandhi in his protest against salt taxes and faced repression by British forces. Eventually the Salt March, and the protest movement it sparked, brought global attention to the Indian independence movement through extensive media coverage. The concept of nonviolent civil disobedience has had a fundamental influence on the evolution of conflicts against authoritarian governments and endemic situations of social injustice, from Martin Luther King’s movement to the fall of Milosevic in Serbia.
The process of growth and consolidation of the leadership of María Corina Machado (MCM) in the Venezuelan population of all social strata and political sympathies is truly notable in our recent history. In the popular areas of the country, MCM is received as a figure that represents the good and reconciliation to which the nation aspires. Her support base includes disaffected Chavistas, dissident Chavismo and, of course, Venezuelans close to any of the parties and organizations of democratic civil society. The regime knows this truth, it knows that it has lost popular support and that is why it clings to power today more than ever through its three tools: fear, hunger and repression. The brutal and sordid exercise of power has corrupted all State institutions and has transformed the electoral process to elect a new president into an exercise of discrimination, a true apartheid, against the majority of the Venezuelan people. In a deceitful exercise, in open violation of the Constitution, not only is MCM disqualified, but the registration of Corina Yoris, appointed by MCM, who had obtained a clear mandate in the Primary, to replace it. The shamelessness and abuse of the regime, and the violation of the Barbados Agreements, has been harshly rejected, even by some of its closest allies in Latin America, such as Lula and Petro, and of course denounced by all the democratic governments of the world.
The process of building popular power and a democratic transition towards a possible Venezuela, where Venezuelans can enjoy our country again, in a space of reconciliation, happens because we all understand that MCM is not only the presidential candidate selected in the Primary, and boycotted by the regime, but the leader of the nation. The path towards that Venezuela is becoming an irreversible process, a singular analogy of Ghandi’s Salt March, but this time a March of Dignity and Freedom, something that acquires the poetic dimension of being so fundamental for the life like salt, where we Venezuelans recover our rights and the humiliation to which the regime intends to subject us ends.
But so that the March of Dignity and Freedom does not stop, it is also essential that all democratic sectors confront in realistic and harsh terms the regime’s ambush to divert us from the electoral route. That would mean, and this is purely my personal opinion, as a first step, that the two candidates who were allowed to register, Manuel Rosales (UNT) and Edmundo González (MUD), would abandon their candidacies in favor of Corina Yoris (CY), the candidate who has the essential support of the leader of the process. This would refresh the entire toxic environment that prevails in the opposition environment. But things do not end there, because it is literally unthinkable that the regime that did not enable MCM is going to allow the unitary candidacy of CY. If that is the case, then we must think about forming a true State Pact, led by MCM and with the participation of all the sectors that have continued to follow the democratic route to open the path of transition, with all the elements that it it implies. Such a State Pact would be an emulator, adapted to the times, of the Punto Fijo Pact, which cleared the path to democracy after the fall of Pérez Jiménez.
But it must also be understood that the regime continues to have a clear plan to take over any fairly transparent election and ignore the popular will. Given this, the inevitable scenario is that of constitutional civil resistance to which our Magna Carta obliges us. Let the regime steal the presidential election if it decides to do so, but then do so naked before its people and the international community.
The March of Dignity and Freedom is underway and plagued with obstacles. The regime acts as if it were all-powerful because it knows it is in control of the institutions and means of repression. The most recent embarrassment in that direction is the abominable anti-fascism bill. On the international level, the alliance with Russia, China, Iran, Cuba and Nicaragua represents a lethal conspiracy against democracy and the stability of the continent. But the regime also knows that it lost the support of the people and there is its Achilles heel. Preserving the leadership of MCM and having contingent plans, including the State Pact and constitutional civil resistance, are unavoidable duties of all democratic forces that aspire to recover Venezuela for Venezuelans. We owe it to ourselves and to the hundreds of prisoners, disappeared and tortured in these 25 years of ignominy.
Vladimiro Mujica
* Member of the Executive Committee of the MCVM and Vice President of VenAmérica
