Diosdado Cabello, the Venezuelan top leader who last week announced the arrest of two Spaniards he accused of an alleged terrorist plot that included the assassination of Nicolas Maduro, heads a ministry with a long and striking name. It is called the Ministry of Popular Power for Internal Relations, Justice and Peace. The latter draws attention to Peacein capital letters and next to the Justicesince the Venezuelan opposition considers that this ministry is the main instrument of political repression of the regime. It must be a peace similar to the peace of the cemeteries when we suffered here under another dictatorship, that of Francisco Franco.
Furthermore, the Peace issue of the Ministry of Diosdado Cabello reminded me of a reflection by the cartoonist Máximo, who rarely included texts in his historical and daily caricatures of The countrybut in the conversation he used very sharp and thoughtful language. “Why do all countries have a Ministry of Defense if none of them has a Ministry of Attack,” he told me in an interview I gave with him in the late seventies of the last century for the weekly? Aranda today. (Aranda de Duero, of course, we were both from the area).
Looking at the name as a whole, Internal Relations, Justice and Peace also reminds me of that time when a twilight Felipe González as President of the Spanish Government and perhaps very insomniac by Etas, Grapos, Roldanes, Wales (from GAL), Paesas y Perotes took the surprising decision to merge the judges and guards, the gowns and batons into a single department and create the Ministry of Justice and the Interior. He appointed as its head a shrewd and ambitious magistrate, Juan Alberto Belloch, whom some media described as The Minister with Two Faces. The experiment lasted only two years. Just, understand me, in the exact sense: from May 6, 1994 to May 6, 1996.
In democracies as in dictatorships, the names given to public organizations say a lot about the regime and who names them.
After last year’s regional elections, in which a large part of the PSOE’s power passed into the hands of PP-Vox, we saw how, in some ministries, terms such as Equality or Social Rights or the Demographic Challenge or Democratic Memory disappeared from the confessions and others appeared such as Family, Social Services or Rural Development. “The name is the archetype of the thing”, said a hendecasyllable of Jorge Luis Borges – and I never tire of repeating it.
