A menos de un mes de la fecha fijada para las elecciones parlamentarias, ¿qué podemos esperar los demócratas venezolanos?

Con toda seguridad, un recrudecer de las desatinadas y fallidas provocaciones de Chávez que buscaban hacer perder la paciencia a quienes ya inocultablemente son la mayoría  y fabricar improbables pretextos para suspender las elecciones.

No habrá ya, sin embargo,  guerra con Colombia y el magnicida volverá a embarcar a la reencarnación de Bolívar;  habrá, en cambio, elecciones. Reñidas, reñidísimas, rodeadas de un clima de ventajismo e intimidación sin precedentes. Pero habrá elecciones.

Felizmente, entre la masa opositora ha prevalecido una intuición de las celadas cuyo logro mayor ha sido no perder la calma ante los desafueros y perseverar con serenidad en el camino electoral.

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I grew up among oil geologists and drilling engineers in various oil fields West of the Maracaibo Lake Basin and, later on, in oil-rich Eastern Venezuela.

One day in 1966—I was barely 15—I went into the camp’s chief geologist’s house trailer. This particular camp was in the borders of the Orinoco River delta, a remote tropical region of flooded savannas. My parentswere very fond of this young American geologist who has just got transferred to Nigeria. So my dad sent me to help him carry his personal belongings into the company’s jeep that would take him to a small airstrip some 7 miles away.Behind his desk hung a framed yellowish sheet of paper with a long typewritten quote on it. You had to come near and look up close to read it. It appeared to be some passage of a book but, to this date, I couldnot tell for sure where it came from. It read:

“If I were a barrel of oil, comfortably located in a pool, hidden in a trap deep in the ground, the region that would be safest for me—where I might live out another 50 or 100 million years in peace and dignity—would be in some country where minerals and exploration are nationalized. The reason is that in counties such as these, there is but one hunter, and the chances of eluding him are far better than the chances of being discovered. The most dangerous place for me to live in, as a barrel of oil, would be in the United States where there are thousands of hunters and each has a different weapon” A. I. Levorsen

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Recuerdo nítidamente a los primeros colombianos que vi alguna vez: eran unos infortunados cirqueros costeños, varados en un baldío de Prado de María, mi barrio natal, un suburbio pobretón de la capital venezolana. Corría enero de 1958.

Nadie acudía a sus funciones. A los niños no nos dejaban acercarnos a ellos, pues por entonces decir “colombiano” era nombrar un “malandro”, un pícaro palabrero y “sin papeles”; un trapisondista marihuanero. Los cirqueros no tenían ni para la gasolina y se decía que mataban perros realengos para echárselos a unos leones tan flacos que parecían gente mal disfrazada de leones flacos.

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