Critical Chavistas have their own conspiracy theories

“In Venezuela’s political scene of the last 20 years, nothing has happened by chance,” claims Javier Antonio Vivas Santanta in his most recent article published by Aporrea.org.

Aporrea, a chavista Web portal has increasingly become a space for critical chavismo. The term usually applies to people who defend the “legacy” of the Comandante and claim that president Maduro has betrayed that legacy.

Conspiracy theories about Maduro’s true intentions are an important part of critical chavismo. Vivas Santana, for example, is not shy to call his own analysis a Teoría madurista de la conspiración contra Chávez.

According to Vivas Santana, Maduro´s conspiracy against Chávez, which includes Diosdado Cabello as co-conspirator, began way back in 1999 with the approval of the Bolivarian Constitution. The fact that now president Maduro has convened a new Constitutive Assembly in order to “abolish” that Constitution is evidence, for the author, of Maduro’s intentions, since that year, of stablishing a “neo-totalitarian project”.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin is the main “international connection” of Maduro’s conspiracy. “Why did not Putin invite Chávez, as Lula DaSilva did from Brazil, to treat his cancer in Moscow if he was then Russia’s prime minister?” asks suspiciously Vivas Santana. “It becomes evident that the origins of the conspiracy against Chávez had tow clear long term aims,” answers the author, “The first was the abrogation of the 1999 Constitution in order to ‘legally’ implement neo-totalitarianism. The second was to sell PDVSA [Venezuela’s oil company] and hand our oil, gas, mineral, and gold reserves to international groups, mainly Russian and Chinese, as a way to consolidate power with the help of foreign governments with unipersonal political systems and with enough power within the UN Security Council.”

Vivas Santana promises a second part to his piece. In it he will consider “if the cancer that affected the Bolivarian leader was really murder.”