Héctor Sánchez, Sociologist — The National Government has just approved a series of agreements with companies such as General Electric to “reactivate” the national power system. The amounts remain unclear—as does everything in this country, where figures blur between propaganda and opacity—but people speak of several billion dollars. An astronomical sum that, in any country with even a minimum of historical memory, would come with a rigorous examination of conscience: How did we get here? Who destroyed what we now celebrate recovering? Why are the very people who dismantled it now in charge of its resurrection?
But in Venezuela, memory is a luxury that the elites—government and opposition alike—do not even bother to cultivate. Because the national power system, the one that today needs an injection of foreign capital to show signs of life again, already existed. It worked. It was not perfect, but it provided light, refrigeration, production, and life. Then a wave of systemic corruption, deliberate underinvestment, and a sanctions war turned it into a monument to ruin.
Now, however, people speak of its recovery as though they were creating something out of nothing. As though the power system had collapsed on its own and those in power had not spent years sitting in the very offices where officials signed contracts with shell companies, diverted public funds, and imported transformers of questionable origin that burned out during the first blackout.
And as though the opposition—the same opposition that today applauds the agreements with General Electric—had not promoted the sanctions that prevented the purchase of spare parts and technologies for years, fully aware that hospitals without electricity, mothers without refrigerators, and children without fans paid the price, not the government.
But selective and convenient amnesia—as we have already said—is the password and watchword of our elites, the deeply red ones and those of every other color. And this is no coincidence: the people who now sit down to negotiate with multinational corporations are the same people who, only a few months ago, denounced those very companies as part of a “criminal blockade.” And those who now celebrate from the opposition because “foreign investment is finally arriving” are the same people who spent years justifying the country’s descent into darkness in the name of “international pressure.”
Under these circumstances, the problem is not that General Electric is coming. At least, it is not—unless we begin asking questions about the process that selected that company or any other, instead of accepting what has unfolded so cheerfully in recent days as authorities hand out contracts and concessions without any legal or transparent procedure to support them. The problem is that no one answers for the deaths linked to the blackouts, for the hospitals that lost patients, for the industries that shut down, for the country that went dark while politicians argued about who was right. The problem is that people present recovery as a blank page, as though the past never existed, as though those responsible for the catastrophe were not now signing or applauding the contracts meant to repair what they themselves broke in pursuit of personal ambitions.
Is the logic of “wipe the slate clean,” where the people must forget so that the looters can continue looting, now under the invoice of “recovery.”
But memory, however much people may try to bury it, has a habit of resurfacing. And one day, someone will have to answer: Who pays this bill? As poet Rubén Blades would say, will the Venezuelan people pay it through utility bills that are 100 times the national minimum wage, as some “experts” cheerfully announce? Or will the people who took the billions needed to repair what never should have broken bear that cost?
And no less important: once the promised upgrades take place, who will receive the energy they generate? The people, or the data centers that, according to other experts, stand ready to install operations in Venezuela?
Meanwhile, politicians from both sides divide the credit for the “reactivation,” and the people continue to wait and hope the lights stay on long enough to finish writing this sentence.
