Second parts are never good. Popular wisdom says that sequels are never good. Something that Marx was very clear about, as he shows at the beginning of his book ‘The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’. “Hegel says somewhere that all the great events and characters of universal history appear, as it were, twice. But he forgot to add: once as a tragedy, and the other as a farce”, expressed Marx as a prelude to what would be the account of the events that led to throwing overboard the ideals promulgated by the French Revolution, to re-establish a constitutional monarchy, and incidentally, making fun of the incredible contradictions of history, always spiraling , always cyclic. End of quote.
The Diario de Caracas on February 19, 1989, headlined on the first page: “The wedding of the century” with a creepy pretitle that said: “The crisis has its exceptions.”
The title adorned an “aristocratic photo”, in the journalistic review the wedding at full rag of the newlywed couple of the time was described; as was the one composed by the bride and groom: Fernández Tinoco-Cisneros Fontanels, Gonzalo, and Mariela, who contracted an ecclesiastical marriage in the chapel of the Siervas del Santísimo.
From there the procession set off in several Pullmans and a Rolls Royce to Alto Hatillo, where they enjoyed a buffet overflowing with caviar, lobster and smoked salmon, washed down with champagne from: La Grand Dame, from the most exquisite and coveted harvest, they enjoyed Approximately 5,000 guests attended that bourgeois wedding party at the time, of which some 300 had arrived in the country from abroad, with all expenses paid from Caracas. A piece of fluff, my compadre Pancho!
At the same time that the guests tasted the “overflowing buffet”, in the largest supermarket chain of the time, and the largest in the country, owned by the bride’s family, being the strongest financial group in that buoyant Venezuela, in those businesses were missing a good part of the basic products. The same thing happened in most of the shops in the country. The announcement of the entry into force of new economic measures, announced by Carlos Andrés Pérez, who had assumed the presidency on February 2, unleashed greed and speculation among merchants. Waiting for the increases in the released prices, the businesses retained merchandise in their warehouses. The market was left without supplies in a country that had ceased to be the Saudi Venezuela of the seventies, the time of the first presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez, and had fully entered the crisis of the eighties, of foreign debt, and impoverishment of the population. All this is a matter of semantics, today with the large hypermarkets in the hands of Arabs and Chinese, a new slap in the face to the Venezuelan citizen.
In the midst of what was already looming, a socioeconomic storm of imaginable proportions. The presidential inauguration had been celebrated, also pharaonic, and disproportionate, and totally out of context, since it announced a package of economic measures that, according to the expert economists of the time, was inevitable in order to: “stabilize the situation of the economy “. A few days after these two buttocks, the fateful and well-known February 27 and 28 occurred, which were recorded in the historical memory of 20th-century Venezuela, some like the undersigned have it very fresh in their memory, because it I lived, no one told me. The big global communications media headlined with the hair-raising phrase: “The day the hills fell.”
Today, the Venezuela of the 21st century is experiencing its worst political, social and economic crisis that any Venezuelan born in the 20th century can remember. And also since 2020, we continue to suffer the lethal effects of the covid-19 pandemic, which thanks to God has been able to control, with the immunization of the herd, 70% of the vaccinated population, according to reports from the Bolivarian government, but Despite everything, he continues to take lives.
Hyperinflation, speculation. The drop in oil, agricultural and industrial production, according to studies by organizations and universities, put on the table the widest range of calamities, which falls on the Venezuelan people. This is a piercing truth, very painful for many Venezuelans, who slowly continue to go hungry.
The education and health sectors are among the hardest hit by this serious socio-economic crisis. The amount of the minimum wage that will come into effect on March 15 is something like $29 per month.
But last February carnival of this year 2022 the networks were flooded with very descriptive reviews, and advertising of various soirees, weddings, and drifts, in still lifes, clubs, five-star hotels, and on the beautiful beaches of the Venezuelan Caribbean Sea, of the new bolibourgeoisie of the 21st century. I immediately remembered that fateful caracazo of 1989, and that golden wedding, of the Caracas high bourgeoisie of the time, which was reviewed by the newspaper described above as a slap in the face of the millions of Venezuelans who still suffer today in the XXI century.
The banal arguments, and the bulk excuses, from official sectors, trying to justify the unjustifiable. The sifrinismo, and the stupidities are more than eloquent, above all, those on the opposition side who won a few mayoralties, and governorships, as they like to blow themselves up, and make fun of people. This is how it happened in 1989, and today the same story is repeated again in this year 2022, in the face of so much insolent evil.
We have not learned the lesson of 1989 at all. Now in 2022, we see with astonishment, how that fateful phrase continues to be valid: “the crisis has its exceptions”. The icing on the cake will be the review of the honeymoon, of the offspring of a scorpion that went from being a paw on the ground, to a newly minted bourgeois, without ever having hit a block in its life, and I don’t think it will to be in one, “Taguara of a star”.
In short, “… That the country was, and will continue to be, crap, I don’t know. In 2030, and in 2099, too… the survivors will see it.
I still see many Venezuelans digging through the garbage, to see if they can find leftovers. There will be reflections! I do not know. The speculative movement, which has occurred in sectors of commerce in this year 2022, continues without any control. Adding to it the drop in work, production, and oil and industrial production, it seems that the political class has not learned from that tremendous lesson of 1989, because it is good to know that those demonstrations, which took place in Caracas at that time, did not have the political bias of being a protest against the government or against the parties, but rather it was an action against the ill-gotten wealth of speculators, it was a protest against rich merchants, and thieves.
What that commercial and speculative Caracas feared was the irruption of the marginalized, which bloodbathed the country that year, and that was only a warning at that time.
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