Part 1
Prologue
If the Gringo ethos is “win,” the Venezuelan ethos is “ah, fuck it.” We are lazy fucking bastards.
Keep in mind that the Spanish migrators were the lazy, criminal and undesirables among the rich-enough-to-get-a-batallion-together. They weren’t anything near the purism of the English: they fucked a lot more black/indian people and killed a lot less.
There was always easy wealth in the Venezuelan areas, like all territorries of similar climates. Less killing and hardship was necessary to make shitloads of money. A lot was still used, but much less structurally and encompasing than in the English territories. All we had to do was find buyers, sellers, hell, even developpers and extractors would rush towards us with boatloads of money. Fruit, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, coca, petroleum, these have all worked at one time or another to live fucking cheaply and without doing too much. I mean, these products either literally happen naturally in abundance already, or are processed by foreigners who we charge for the right to do it.
Life, is, easy.
But, not that easy. In any case, many people decided to go like “fuck it” and kick the hardasses out (the Spanish governors and administrators, all Spain born), taking all the Mafia style steps to divide up land and grow rich from forcing people to work it. It wasn’t really that hard, surviving in those conditions was fairly easy. But the ideology they used to do this, taken from free masonic tradition (Bolivar and Miranda at least, both considered the main leaders of the Independence Wars, were both free masons), was so effective that lowly assholes were capable of mastering it, accumulating enough land, resources and manpower necessary to attempt to take the whole country over. This led to an innumerable amount of wars and skirmishes (much like Mafia families do when establishing themselves), with several short-lived “democratically elected” (the farce was required for the ideology to hold) leaders.
Eventually, some of them got extremely fucking good at doing battle and, using the most basic levels of free masonic ideology, along with small variations, were able to establish themselves for decades at a time. The most badass of them all stayed there for about 40 years, dying in power of natural causes. This is less impressive than you think. As I said, Venezuelans are lazy fucking bastards, and getting them to give up and obey is not that hard. You just need to feed them about right, as I said, a pretty easy exercice in those lands.
But these dictators presented a major hitch for continuity: They were never able to establish a lineage, so conflict always ensued their deaths or exiles.
At around the same time, the tention between the major ideological blocks broke out in Europe. Nazis and Communists and Democrats and Fascists all grew powerful enough to go for the cake, and Germany made the foolish first move. In this cataclismic clash of inmesurably over-empowered power grabs, the amount of ideology that was used was inmense, it’s quality was artfully perfected over time, and the psychological power achieved by each ideology was intense.
Since the United States chose to latch on to England, and was very succesful in doing so, a lot of that ideology overflowed into the rest of the continent. Suddenly, Venezuelans learned about the ideology of the de-militarization of democracy. Seeing how much better it looked than being further pushed around by assholes, the civilian population’s leaders began to butt in, sewing conflict within the military forces and getting them to place civilian leaders in place of military ones, insisting that they had the will and the know-how to make power in Venezuela stable, while respecting the well ideologiziced wishes of the Generals to mantain a certain level of “conservatism.”
Eventually, the civilian leaders found ideologies strong enough to cement the stability of their rule, convincing military factions that their way was the best way to respect their ideologies.
One fine day, the last military leader went by and a fully fledged “representative democracic” civilian government was funded, with careful laws to avoid conflict and keep the people fed enough to stfu about it already or get shot. This worked for a while, Venezuela was going from economic boom to economic boom, what with all the natural resources. Still all lazy fucks.
But one fine day, overpopulation happened, and there wasn’t a combination of feeding and ideology that would keep most of the subjects in line. Being too goddamn lazy, the democratic leaders didn’t take any steps to update their strategies for stability, didn’t do much about it. There were riots, the military killed a bunch of people, bus tickets got like a cent more expensive and, eventually, one more military leader would decide that it was once again time for military rule in Venezuela.
Heavy cuban-communist ideology, typical (well, actually, exceptional) regionalistic spices, and a few armed comrades got Liutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez inside the “white house” terrace in a desperate battle to topple the president. He eventually failed and was arrested… Yet he was so beautiful in his loss, looking just as resolute as when he started and saying goodby with a now-famous “We have failed our objectives… For now.”, that he captured the hearts of many Venezuelan subjects.
either because you believe that, or that it’s true.