CARACAS, Venezuela — Deep in the throes of a political crisis, Venezuela is a place of absurdities and ironies.
There’s a strike, but most places are open. (Just because the lights are out, it doesn’t mean a business is closed.) There’s a severe gas shortage — and traffic jams, too.
More than nine weeks into a nationwide strike aimed at toppling President Hugo Chavez, it’s increasingly clear that the opposition can’t win the quick victory it once expected. But it is equally evident that while the strike persists, the president can’t govern.
Meanwhile, the routine of civil society has been transformed into a surreal drama of long lines, boisterous demonstrations and daily confrontations.
Predictions of mass chaos, looting and violence haven’t materialized. But there is very little gasoline, and rarely a bottle of beer.
Life goes on, but it is not the life most Venezuelans are accustomed to. Nearly everyone talks politics, the national obsession, but no one seems capable of finding a political solution.
And Chavez remains in power, so far refusing to capitulate to opposition demands for an early presidential election.
The defining moment for Monica Martinez came in October, when her 9-year-old daughter asked: “What’s the difference between communism and dictatorship?”
“Why’s a kid asking such questions?” Martinez wondered, recalling that her own pressing issues at that age were roller-skating and hair ribbons. If little Mariana had known the result of her innocent inquiry beforehand, maybe she’d have switched subjects.
Armed with anger, Martinez decided she was through with Hugo Chavez, and joined dissident military officers protesting at Caracas’ Plaza Francia.
That was on Oct. 22.
More than three months ago.
Martinez is still there.
“Everyone does what they have to do in the place they have to do it,” Martinez said. “My place is here. I am a warrior. We are our country’s new soldiers.”
Martinez lives in a tent city set up in Plaza Francia, headquarters for the opposition movement where a gunman shot down three people in December. She quit her job managing a restaurant to join what she considers a fight for freedom.
She hasn’t stopped by her house since Dec. 16. The scariest part, she said, is the fear that hangs heavy in the dark of 3 a.m.
“I spent Christmas here — talking to my kids on the telephone,” she recalled. “What do my kids need a mother for if they have no country?”