The limit they don't want to see, by @ArmandoMartini

There are times when politics ceases to be a game of calculations, a protocol exercise in diplomacy and becomes a race to face the indomitable force, overflowing with citizen disgust, and exhaustion of a society. Venezuela entered at that moment. Not tomorrow. Now. And those who must make decisions continue to act as if there is room for indifference, procrastination and arrangement between buds.

Crises do not announce their breaking point. They come. And when they do, politics doesn't drive events, it barely tries to catch up. Venezuela is going through a complex transition of understanding, without a script or defined horizon, with economic collapse and authoritarian suffocation, plus the terrifying roar of the earth that evidenced the fragility of a country sustained with pins. And whoever intends to build stability with arrangements that the people do not know, did not consent to and does not recognize as pr

In Venezuela, two realities coexist that are repelled with a violence that communiqués cannot disguise. Whoever administers the ruins of the State rules in an unstable equilibrium, with enormous citizen rejection, sustained by the grace and favor of transactional pragmatism. And, legitimacy, born of the mass vote, which remains blocked, exiled, declared "disruptive" by those who should defend it. That short circuit is not a political opinion. It's a ticking time bomb with the clock co

Stability is not decreed, imposed, or sustained with institutional sketches negotiated between leaders that the people did not choose, do not recognize, or respect. It depends on a single condition, that the citizen recognizes as his own the authority that leads him. When that identification disappears, the system cracks. And Venezuela has been crunching for months. Whoever does not hear it, or does not want to hear it, makes the most costly mistake in politics, confusing the silence of exhaustion with the consent of peace.

The street is emerging as a scenario because societies subjected to hunger, misery, fraud and orphanhood in the face of the onslaught of nature reach, sooner or later, a point of irreversible saturation. It is not an apology for anarchy. It is a diagnosis. An exhausted economy, public services that do not serve, unbearable collective pain and the perception that the vaunted change is nothing more than the old tyranny with new administration; it is a combination that does not require great genius

Those who design this transition must understand what does not admit nuances, no formula can be built without the popular endorsement. Trying to consolidate unsuccessful prop leaders with convenient accommodations, while trying to resurrect outdated structures whose existence survives in legal recesses, does not produce stability, causes distrust, which accumulated, does not wait indefinitely.

If indignation overcomes pragmatism and myopia pushes the citizen, there is a principle that does not admit of debate, the repression against peaceful, unarmed and painful citizens is a flagrant violation of Human Rights. History has reiterated this lesson with a clarity that should suffice; obedience to an illegal order does not guarantee impunity. Nobody. Never. In any country. The file is open, even if the power of attorney closes the doors.

The way out must be peaceful, institutional and democratic. But it will only be sustainable if the exercise of power is reconciled with the legitimacy that comes from voting. It is not an ideological preference. It is the elementary principle without which there is no democratic system that resists. That the obstacles are cleared, the structures inherited from the opprobrium are removed, and an electoral schedule is established with a certain, public and immovable deadline. No “when conditions allow.” A date. A number

The peoples tolerate deprivations with a stoicism that surprises those who rule from afar. They mourn their dead. They endure the fury of nature. But they never forgive that their will is usurped indefinitely in the name of a laboratory stability that they do not feel, do not see and do not have enough to eat.

Societies rarely announce the day when they cease to have patience. They just stop having it. The obligation of those who decide is to prevent Venezuela from discovering that limit in the worst way. The clock does not wait for explanations.

@ArmandoMartini