By TARSUS GENUS*

Is it possible to compare Nicolás Maduro with Donald Trump?

With this article I want to reflect on some of the reasons behind the stance of the Brazilian government, together with the governments of Mexico and Colombia, in defending political democracies in Latin America and neutralizing the growing extreme right, which is certainly linked to the movements European Nazifascists. The stage is Venezuela, considering it as an issue for all of Latin America, so that it has a government capable of governing and eliminates the possibility of a civil war.

In this hypothesis, its brutal liabilities would be levied above all on the entire poorest population of Venezuela, as well as on all of the poorest countries on the Continent. Legitimacy to govern or a legitimate agreement to overcome the power crisis in Venezuela is what interests the entire democratic community in Latin America. Whoever has the most votes should govern!

“The origin of the current conflict in Venezuela is the collapse of Venezuelan rentier oil capitalism that began in the 1970s” (…) “which led to the emergence of a popular and mass movement that has (or had) its most impoverished population in the country. main pillar, in conjunction with a reformist sector of the Armed Forces from which the leadership of Hugo Chavez emerges (or emerged). This excerpt is taken from the text by researcher Carla Ferreira, in the interview given to Agência Brasil on 03.08.24/XNUMX/XNUMX. The included parentheses, which refer to the past, are remissions from this scribe.

The origin of the current crisis in the US political system, which has led to the formidable advance of the American extreme right, has more distant and deeper roots. It is not only in its different electoral process, in the States of the Union, in the mutations of the global order, in the advancement of localized wars, equipped with new technological means of destruction with the creation of new local puppets and new nation-state subjects, heavily militarized .

China and Russia compete, “toe-to-toe” with the USA, in a new world order affected by the expansion of the armaments industry and the increase in “non-labor” incomes of financial capital, from which the old American hegemony survives, which thus orders also political life in submissive Europe.

Is it possible to compare, politically, the crisis of Nicolás Maduro with the crisis of “Trumpism”? Yes and no. The fundamentals are quite evident: Donald Trump in government was the caricature of a coup leader in an imperial-colonial country, who, after the failure of the coup, once again dominated the “establishment” of his country, as if his coup adventure were just a “distortion” of the American democratic-representative regime, not its warrior essence protected by a mask that, in each military occupation, makes cynical appeals for world peace.

Donald Trump managed to accommodate public opinion in the Western world, simulating his coup attempt, as if it were just the result of the temporary bad mood of a man from a rich family, who was losing his quarters on the dynasty's farm. The United States, politically, however, has always been an untimely caricature of the French Revolution, whose most prominent spirits — based on Marshal Murat's formula — argued that “the kindness of liberators is something that enchants (and) if the (savage) peoples ) to be freed from barbarism, are not aware of the good that awaits them (…) it is necessary to make them (understand) even if it is by force” (in Democracy in the mirror, Edson Kossmann, Lumen Juris, p. 190).

Marshal Murat, when he said to Napoleon, “Your Excellency is expected as Messiah”, was facing the powerful feudal remains of the decadent European monarchies, but Donald Trump and Joe Biden, when they attack Venezuela and its regime, are not concerned about being new.” Messiah”, but rather with the losses of the USA, in the multipolar world concert, if the Oil reserves installed there by nature are in the hands of a sovereign country.

The United States has always promoted coups and wars where its interests were being harmed, to impose its power over territories, in search of the appropriation of its strategic wealth. Donald Trump, with his attempted coup and “occupation of the territory” of the Capitol, inaugurated — after the Civil War — the presence of external warmongering into the field of US domestic politics, introducing a dangerous precedent into the customs of its political democracy. .

Here is also an essential difference between the crisis of Nicolás Maduro and the crisis of American Trumpism, which marks the separation of the era of traditional imperialism, the current era of new information technologies and their multi-tentacular companies, such as those of Elon Musk , which practically already function as sovereign states, above formal national states.

While Nicolás Maduro is attacked mainly by the United States, as an imperial state, Donald Trump — when attempting a coup against the American State — had the direct support of these new company-states, which exercise their sovereignty over all countries – rich and poor — openly or clandestinely, they finance and promote power structures parallel to the formal State, stimulating extreme right-wing groups, of a political or political-military nature, on and outside the networks.

Nicolás Maduro's power crisis in Venezuela, unlike what is happening in the North American state, is the result of a revolution that did not create, in the government, a new set of dominant classes to govern within the order of Chavismo. Faced with this strategic gap, Nicolás Maduro invented a military-police-popular alliance to try to build a model of sovereign development of social equality that was neither legitimized nor avenged — which made said alliance a mere pragmatic articulation of power, an authoritarian government that quickly lost its legitimacy

There is also an identity between Donald Trump and Nicolás Maduro here: both are caricatural presidents, as Donald Trump had to occupy the Capitol to try to pervert the results of the elections he lost and Nicolás Maduro has been waiving the vote count so as not to leave the Government, threatened by coup political groups mixed with a popular majority that wants a government legitimized by the polls.

Although Donald Trump is a coup leader and was president of an imperial Republic built by wars, he is once again competing for power in a country where the vast majority of its population unifies the two candidates — from the opposition and from the situation — as integrated into a messianic function. of the USA, abroad, under similar conditions to that vision contained in Marshal Murat's phrase.

While Nicolás Maduro clings to power, no longer having internal legitimacy, against opponents who demand a fair and transparent count of votes, which the regime itself guarantored during the governments of Hugo Chaves and Nicolás Maduro himself, Donald Trump returns to fight for polls that he tried to rig with his coup attempt, with all the license applicable in an imperial democracy.

Nicolás Maduro can also be compared politically with Donald Trump, because he is president of a country that has been transformed — for better or worse — from a passive country that owns the planet's enormous oil reserves coveted by the owners of the world, to a country sovereign and active in world politics.

During the Chavista revolution, the government distributed oil income to its own people and also encouraged pride in belonging to a sovereign country. Donald Trump distributed to his people the illusion of American messianism, to dominate the “savage” world outside its borders and accentuated the pride of being increasingly imperialist, for the rich and successful.

At the moment, however, what we see of Chavismo's development model — at the time of Nicolás Maduro — is that it displaced seven million inhabitants from its territory who fled hunger and lack of work, which is crucial data for judge the quality of a government regime and its political leaders. Both Trump and Maduro are different in their form and content, but both lack the legitimacy to govern again.

At the moment, to serve as an example in a world that lacks examples and also ways to combat hunger and achieve peace and freedom, Lula, Celso Amorim and Mauro Vieira are right in brilliantly conducting our foreign policy in midfield: against hunger, against wars and for peace, without imperial interventionism! The empire and its internal allies gnash their teeth and would like to see Brazil fulfilling the submissive tasks that they always assign to “savage” countries against their neighbors. It looks like they won't take it.

Tarsus-in-law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (arts & crafts). [https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I]

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