At high government levels in the United States, Europe and Latin America, political leaders, social leaders and academics are increasingly asking more insistently about what must be the most delicate matter of the transition to democracy in Venezuela: the question of reconciliation within Venezuelan society.
This is a legitimate and urgent issue. And although there are no perfect political reconciliation processes, consideration of what happened, for example, in South Africa in the 1990s, in Spain in 1977 and 1978, in Chile after 1990 or in Northern Ireland in 1998, for example, sheds clues on the type of social, educational, political, legal and other efforts that can be made to facilitate basic conditions of coexistence.
Before continuing with the reasoning of this article, it is time to clarify what I call ‘political reconciliation’. I am referring to the collective task that we Venezuelans have to face so that, once the narco dictatorship is over, the necessary conditions are established in Venezuela for a coexistence in freedom that makes a democratic, productive and dignified nation possible.
I am among those who assume that this reconciliation process is necessary, that the viability of the next Venezuela depends on agreeing on the mechanisms that allow us to coexist and manage differences. For years, a political and opinion current has been taking place, in the streets and throughout the territory, which consists of the configuration of an indisputable majority that categorically rejects the regime, a reality that, it must be recognized, makes things easier. The number of people who still maintain some attachment to the dictatorship is small and declining, as surveys have clearly indicated and confirmed since 2014. On the contrary, the number of those who aspire to a status of democratic coexistence is increasing. This scenario allows us to think that advancing social reconciliation in Venezuela is certainly feasible.
However, there is a pretension in the current power, which must be observed with rigor and care: that the reconciliation agenda incorporates a kind of policy of universal forgiveness for civil and military officials who have carried out all kinds of crimes (corruption, drug trafficking, smuggling), which includes those responsible for crimes against humanity: murders, torture, persecution, sexual violence, unjustified imprisonment, deportations and other related things. The regime intends to mix the two dimensions – the social and citizen dimension of political reconciliation, with the dimension of justice that those responsible for the crimes committed must face – in order to achieve a generalized status of impunity.
But is it possible for institutions – through laws and other mechanisms – to establish policies of non-punishment of drug traffickers, corrupt people and torturers, that is, policies of impunity, without listening to the victims, without incorporating them into the debate about what the immediate future of the perpetrators of the crimes committed should be?
It’s not possible. And it is not, not only because society has the moral and political duty to listen to the victims, to pay attention to every word of the innumerable testimonies about their sufferings, but because the authors of the crimes do not all belong to the same category: the crimes are also classifiable, they are more or less serious, with minor and major consequences, they have affected the lives of the innocent to a greater or lesser extent. Not only is it essential to create the conditions and scenarios for victims to speak and be heard, it is also necessary, as difficult as it may be for many to accept, to listen to the perpetrators who want to explain themselves, confess their motivations and actions, narrate the events in which they participated, explain the context in which the crimes occurred.
As we know, forgiveness is not an exceptional practice. What has been one of the essential axes of Judeo-Christian civilization for more than two millennia, constitutes one of the gears of community life. Forgiveness is exercised in couples, in families, in relationships between teachers and students, in work relationships, in economic exchanges, in disputes and conflicts of all kinds, in everyday life and in the great matters of Justice and the State. Asking for forgiveness and granting it are unavoidable requirements of life together.
If we compare it with the status that the victims had a few decades ago or a century or two ago, we can easily verify it: the victims have acquired a preponderance, a protagonism, a recognition that they did not have in other times. In fact, the victims have an increasingly consolidated public relevance. Even more, there are experts who often denounce the victimhood prevailing in these times.
But what could not happen in Venezuela is that the victims do not receive the consideration they deserve; that they are ignored by the desire of some to impose a strategy of “turning the page”; that tools are not designed to express themselves; that mechanisms not be invented for their representation: I maintain that these omissions would be unacceptable and would make a sustainable process of reconciliation very difficult and almost impossible.
