Nicolás Maduro celebrated his 63rd birthday this Sunday in grand style, as if it were his last. His musicians had already composed a jingle days earlier with the refrain"peace, peace, peace," which he used to accompany his clumsy dance moves, competing with those of Donald Trump. His propagandists also took the opportunity to premiere the film"Nicolás, from Yare to Miraflores" at the Teatro Principal in Caracas, a kind of distorted biography designed to glorify his attributes as a dictator.
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We are immune to fear and terror; we have the strength of a legacy. In the north, they try to say there is a dictator, a regime; they repeat it, and it's just a rehash. What we have is the hurricane-force power of a people who have become indestructible and invincible for these times and for those to come, the de facto president of Venezuela proclaimed.
Maduro's charade of peace, while he imprisons girls and grandmothers to intimidate dissidents, bears no resemblance to what is actually happening today in the oil-rich nation. Even the most skeptical can sense how the national tension has escalated to unprecedented levels: this Monday is the date chosen by the US State Department to elevate the Cartel of the Suns' designation to that of an international terrorist organization. This is a fundamental shift for Washington's plan, since this designation legally permits, in principle, military action on Venezuelan soil against the Chavista drug trafficking network.
Two parallel escalations that tighten fears and hopes equally: the overflights of US warplanes, increasingly daring and closer to Caracas each day, and the Chavista repression, directed against leaders more or less close to María Corina Machado and against relatives of rebel military officers in exile.
The suspensions or reschedulings of commercial flights by at least six airlines, including Spain's Iberia, in recent hours have confirmed that the US threat is serious. Forces deployed in the southern Caribbean, commanded by the world's most lethal aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford, are ready to launch the second phase of operations, Operation Southern Spear, starting tomorrow, Monday, four US officials confirmed to Reuters.
