Of the Wells of Deceit and the Heir of Incendiary Rhetoric
After years of sowing gunpowder winds, the island of the Bearded Knight finally discovered that utopias, though beautiful on paper, have the unfortunate habit of not providing food.
Once fertile and cultivated, the nation had become a wasteland of ration cards, where freedom and education were unaffordable luxuries and obedience the only bread distributed without delay.
Just as the spectacle seemed ready to collapse for lack of scenery, a new hidalgo appeared on the continental horizon, richer in words than in deeds and wealthier in resources than in judgment. Hugo, the Plainsman of Hollow Eloquence.
This heir to political madness understood that nothing intoxicates a hungry people more effectively than a military parade and a speech long enough for boredom to eclipse hunger itself.
If Che Guevara had been the ascetic of death and the king of the firing squad, Chávez became the dandy of populism, the man who realized that the conscience of prosperous nations could be purchased if one controlled the black crude that moves the world.
The archives dissected by Yofre with surgical precision reveal a pact forged in blood and oil.
Havana, old and cunning like a matchmaker long past her beauty but rich in experience, recognized in the verbose plainsman the perfect useful fool, endowed with a giant’s wallet and destined to be exploited.
It was the meeting of necessity and vanity. Cuba provided the script of repression and the watchdogs. Venezuela supplied the gold that convinced the actors of the South to play their assigned roles under the guise of friendship.
In countries that had known institutional balance, such as Uruguay or Argentina, this influence arrived like a carnival fever when the farewell song was already being sung.
The notion spread that wealth is not created but seized.
Producers were vilified while shelves emptied and currency controls were imposed at whim.
Merchants and industrious farmers were branded as traitors. In their place, the beggar was exalted as a social ideal, trading dignity for state crumbs.
Populism, as has been said, is the art of breaking a man’s legs and then convincing him that without the crutches provided by the State he could never walk.
Thus, political madness spread across the continent.
Venezuelan funds, escorted by Cuban operatives identified in intelligence files, flowed through the sewers of regional politics.
Loyalties were bought. Protests were financed. Presidents wrapped themselves in Bolivarian jackets and sold their dignity.
The politics of black and white reached its peak. One either belonged to the so-called Greater Homeland or sided with the Empire.
Reducing the world to two colors is an insult to human intelligence.
In Uruguay, this shadow brought contempt for the Constitution and national symbols. Wasteful spending replaced prudent investment. Rhetoric was applauded as factories rusted.
Decent citizens became strangers in their own land, defending non-intervention while foreign influence bought loyalties with petrodollars and crushed dissent elsewhere.
The greatest tragedy was not material plunder, but the looting of minds.
A generation was taught that poverty was virtue and merit an offense. Envy was elevated to moral principle.
Nothing was accidental. Every speech and expropriation had been rehearsed in the laboratories of Caribbean social engineering.
But no deception lasts forever.
While tyrants toasted eternal poverty, evidence accumulated in the basements of history.
The documents now emerging reveal that behind the language of redemption lay a crude and ruthless totalitarianism.
The questions remain.
How did the secret archives of the Czechoslovak StB come to confirm what many suspected.
Who risked everything to preserve them.
The answers await in the next chapter.