Venezuela needs a grown-up strategy

By David J. Guenni B.

Venezuela needs adults thinking and acting in a serious way to achieve liberation, not children thinking magically and pretending to be adults.

Venezuela is a land worth fighting for. Undoubtedly, its enemies understand that – and so does a kernel of patriotic Venezuelans, both inside and outside the country. The Resistance against the 26-year-old regime is atomized and weak, but it still exists. A small but consistent aggregate of people remain committed to the task of liberating the Venezuelan territory from tyranny. This network has managed also to retain its philosophical conviction against all varieties of socialism and, perhaps most importantly, has managed to retain full awareness of the fact that the entire mainstream Opposition structure will never cease -and cannot cease- to collaborate with the Chavista regime.

That is the good news. The bad news is that a monumental gap still exists between conviction and results, despite years of radical action. This is perfectly understandable. Exile, betrayal, pettiness, persecution, prison, hunger, death, terror… all of these factors have shattered and scattered the Resistance, domestically and abroad, annihilating the conditions which allowed for its action peaks of the previous decades. Chaos and confusion have reigned outside the perimeter of established Venezuelan politics for too long. The odds of an organized Resistance ever coming into being to accomplish the task of liberation seem meager.

Bad news, however, should not discourage anyone within Resistance circles. The gap between conviction and results will only ever be closed if courses of action are backed by sound strategy. The fact that no such strategy seems yet available is what should disappoint Venezuelan patriots, triggering a call to action: intellectual action, at this stage, aimed at crafting a strategy for liberation. A grown-up strategy, that is. Resistance groups and networks must leave behind all vestiges of magical child thinking, which still pervades the average Venezuelan political mindset. Swimming against the current is and has always been the name of the game.

Strategy is easy to visualize. It has been defined as the arrangement or combination of certain ways, ends, and means to achieve victory. In other words, strategy is the leaders’ theory of victory. We all know that victory for Venezuela is liberation from socialist tyranny and the establishment of a new, sovereign Republic. The question is how. Strategy should answer said question. But strategy is difficult to craft, let alone to weave into existence: before it is properly communicated to, and agreed upon by, those who matter, it has to make sense.

Strategy has to address many stakeholder concerns. Let me point out some priorities or strategic imperatives:

1. An effective plan must be carried out in order to get the (pro-regime) Opposition out of the way of organizing the Resistance. Nevertheless, appearing fractured is essential in order to keep the enemy’s underestimation.
2. The Resistance must be funded/supported both inside and outside Venezuela, without compromising its networks’ moral integrity and operational security.
3. The help of specific foreign entities must be enlisted to aid in the main kinetic (military and paramilitary), intelligence, and diplomatic campaigns of liberation – not just anyone. [Note: foreign help will have to come from more than one country, and it will have to include some form of input from the other key diasporas of the Western Hemisphere who suffer under socialism (especially Cubans and Nicaraguans).]
4. Any and all socialist elements must be excluded from the mission.
5. A robust, multinational web of anti-socialist intellectuals and opinion leaders must be woven to support the mission.
6. The Resistance must at all times conduct its operations, inside and outside of Venezuela, in such a way as to increase fear in the minds of the enemy and confidence in the minds of the populace.
7. The burden of the mission, and especially its riskiest aspects, must be shouldered always with significant Venezuelan presence. The Resistance must understand the combined-arms nature of this struggle. Yet, it must never ask of foreign partners what Venezuelans are not willing to ultimately pay for in blood and treasure.

If each and every one of these concerns hasn’t been fully addressed, then we don’t have a strategy. We do not need another political party to come out of this. The Venezuelan Resistance is not in the business of elections, much less in that of party platforms. The mission of the Resistance is to defeat the enemy and regain our national territory. The enemy includes the collaborators periodically masquerading as saviors, as well as their entire support structure. The enemy also comprises all totalitarian movements and ideologies.

The Resistance’s strategy, that is, the strategy for the complete liberation of Venezuela’s territory and the establishment of a new Republic, ought to be laser focused. This strategy must avoid wasting time and energy on anything and everything not directly connected to the mission. The Resistance’s vision? To be the driving force behind the efforts to achieve territorial liberation; as well as to be an ultimate trustee, or depositary, of the last remnant of our national interest – against all odds.

The explicit or implicit vision that an organized Resistance must avoid, at every turn, is that of itself as ruling party (or parties) implementing policy to check off the items on whatever political-ideological wish-list is in the minds of Resistance group leaders. Once the mission is accomplished and victory is attained, the Resistance is done and over with. Period. Any current talk beyond that is wishful thinking and an abomination. And those are things that we have zero time for. The Venezuelan Resistance exists solely for the mission – nothing more, nothing less. And in order to succeed, a strategy is required: there’s no way around that and hope is surely not it.

Freedom or nothing!