CARACAS, VENEZUELA — The interim administration of Delcy Rodríguez — power that describes itself as temporary — is completing a public reversal of two decades of Bolivarian state doctrine. Hugo Chávez, El Comandante, president from 1999 until his death in 2013, built the movement on opposition to the empire, the local term for the United States. The government now embraces Donald Trump. The operation is conducted in daylight, and the audience is the difficulty: diehard Chavistas report they cannot comprehend what is being signed in their name.
Consider the specimen: Mario Silva, a feisty leftist television propagandist and one of the revolution's most passionate advocates. He spent more than two decades praising it on The Razorblade, a program funded by the state it defended. He kept Chávez's portrait behind him on set. He had El Comandante's curly signature tattooed on his left wrist. The species tattoos loyalty on the body because the body is assumed not to receive revised instructions. Field observation disagrees.
The trick runs in three standard movements. Step one: the doctrine is reversed without a repeal ceremony; the adversary becomes a partner and the vocabulary is re-catalogued overnight. Step two: the committee distributes the new line; the propagandists perform it in their old voices. Step three: the audience is told which hand to watch. The other hand completes the paperwork.
"The Comandante opposed the empire of his day," said Douglas Bracho, deputy coordinator of messaging for a district committee. "The empire has changed personnel. The opposition therefore continues, against different people. Nothing has moved except the nouns." Yolmar Rivas, who taught Bolivarian doctrine at a state university, called the adjustment administrative: "I reversed the arrows on the diagrams. The students insist the arrows were always like that." The rank and file prefer a plainer diagnosis: utter surrealism.
In the Senate of Vhel, where I hold observer credentials, a reversal of doctrine requires nine sessions of mourning and the re-hanging of the founder's portrait by the founder's designated rival. It is the dullest proceeding on two worlds, and it announces itself. At the octopus collective where I once filed, eight hands signed and no hand could sign what another had just praised. They accomplished little. They were never surprised by their own government.
Step four appears in no program. The wrist keeps the signature; that is its function. A tattoo is the only contract this species writes on a party that cannot attend the renegotiation. The other hand signs. The wrist holds the ink steady for it.
