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Socialist-Communism has been the camel’s nose in the South American tent from Fidel Castro forward. But the body of the camel, as everyone now knows, was a Stalinist political creature that made its way through South America by the usual means: state socialism, terror, and propaganda.
The propaganda has worn very thin in Venezuela, once the Venice of South America, now a communist-Stalinist ash heap. The country’s current Stalin, Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela since 2013, is holding on to power, but a vigorous populist opposition led by Maria Corina Machado, is inching forward. Maduro has his terror and his bullets and his jail cells, still effective methods of persuasion within South American communist countries. But Machado, called the Iron Lady of Venezuela, has her rosary beads and a truly revolutionary message. According to a report in The New York Times, “On the campaign trail, she has promised to ‘bury socialism forever’ and create a nation where ‘the criminals and the corrupt go to prison.’”
The lede to the Times story, “’Iron lady’ of Venezuela threatens an upset,” is heartening: “She travels the country in white, her rosaries swing from her neck. Women cry in her arms, men beg her for salvation. Her bodyguard pulled last week by the government, she traveled the streets unprotected… shielded by the Venezuelan flag and the arms of Jesus Christ.”
As a legislator in 2012, Machado clashed with Maduro, who told her “Eagles don’t hunt flies,” she being the fly and he the eagle.
One of the attendees at a recent Machado rally in Guanare, buoyed by a renewed hope and faith, told the Times reporter that her husband and son had left the country in search of work. “’But soon they will return,’ she said, confident that Mr. González and Ms. Machado would triumph. ‘We have faith in God,’ she added, ‘that the fly is going to trap the eagle.’”
Machado has been forbidden to run for political positions, as have others in the country brave enough to raise their voices against Maduro. It is the socialist communist regime in Venezuela that determines who shall run on the opposition ticket. Machado, the Times tells us, “is not the one running for president, but she is the driving force behind the main opposition candidate, a little-known diplomat named Edmundo González.”
For his part, Maduro has faith in Maduro and bullets and prison cells and intimidation. “He vowed at a recent campaign event,” the Times tells us, “that Venezuelans would ‘fall into a bloodbath, into fratricidal war’ if he lost the election.”
Maduro almost immediately regretted his bloodbath remark, but Venezuelans know that he and his predecessor Hugo Chávez have drained the blood from their country. Once the fifth richest state in South America, Venezuela is now among the poorest. Liberty has been bled dry and prosperity has fled. A handful of communist tyrants rule the country with an iron fist. Inflation rates in Venezuela exceeded 1,000,000% by 2018, the highest in the world by 2014 under Maduro.
The people have no divisions. There is some dispute among World War II scholars what exactly Stalin meant when he asked, “How many divisions has the pope?”
Winston Churchill tells us in the first volume of his magisterial work The Second World War that Pierre Jean Marie Laval, Prime Minister of France during the German occupation “…went on a three days’ visit to Moscow, where he was welcomed by Stalin. There were lengthy discussions, of which a fragment may be recorded. Stalin and Molotov were of course anxious to know above all else what was to be the strength of the French Army on the Western Front: how many divisions? what period of service? After this field had been explored, Laval said: ‘Can’t you do something to encourage religion and the Catholics in Russia? It would help me so much with the Pope.’
“’Oho! said Stalin. ‘The Pope! How many divisions has he got?’ Laval’s answer was not reported to me; but he might certainly have mentioned a number of legions not always visible on parade.”
Stalin’s quip was uttered well before the Yalta conference. When the British Prime Minister told Pope Pius of Joseph Stalin’s cynical remark, Pius replied, “When you see our son Joseph again, tell him that he will meet our divisions in heaven.”
Socialist communism in Latin America has made a Hell of the Heaven on Earth it had promised to its people. Military thugs are everywhere, but so are rosary beads, iron ladies, and a deathless memory of better days.
As of this writing, the opposition is leading Maduro in the polls by 30 percent.
Stalin is quoted in the memoirs his former secretary Boris Bazhanov with having said with reference to a vote in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, "I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how."
In Maduro’s Venezuela, bullets, propaganda and jail sentences count far more than votes.
