Venezuela’s socialist regime, in its efforts to “transform” the country into the authoritarian disaster that it is today, implemented so-called Communal Councils about 18 years ago. These very much ideologically-laced groups claim to pursue the “empowerment” of the people and all that bullshit.
Suffice to say, they’re simply groups spread across Venezuela’s communities that answer to the regime of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and organize the socialist party’s activities and whatnot, like an extremely local branch of the party.
They also control some of the regime’s programs such as CLAP, which sells heavily subsidized monthly boxes or bags of low-quality and often rotten food items to Venezuelan citizens — one of the many forms of controlling impoverished people, through food.
Naturally, my old parish in Caracas had one such Communal Council, led by a group of people, mostly women, who for them represent the only modicum of power they’ve been able to wield through their lives, and boy, do they love the power and the influence that the Council grants them, insignificant as it may be.
They also are supposed to coordinate solutions to your local community’s problems, be it a burst water pipe, potholes, or what have you. In my experience, that’s the least thing they end up doing. Back in 2020, the worn out government CANTV ISP’s ADSL cables finally gave out for good in the area. When asked to intercede and help find solutions to it, a Councilwoman’s answer to my cousin was to “just read books instead of using the internet.”
Inefficient and more worried about socialist rhetoric as they were, I never cared much for them or their actions (or lack of for that matter). That said, there was only one time where I did engage with their local Council elections, and I did it all out of spite for someone in that group that almost highly wronged my cousin, to the point that she was this close to being unjustly arrested.
This is the tale of my, I’d say successful, spite-voting antics that took place during mid-2022 — but before I get to that, I need to go back to 2019 in order to set the stage.
Pernil, or pork leg, is one of the main elements of Venezuela’s traditional Christmas dish, and while the Hallaca is the crown jewel, your Venezuelan Christmas culinary experience wouldn’t be complete without a couple slices of that delicious and gravy-bathed porkness.
As a result of the 2010’s inevitable collapse of socialism in Venezuela, Pernil became rather difficult to obtain for many around the country — but lo and behold, the Maduro regime which is always looking out for the people [citation needed lol], had been taking it upon themselves to distribute the People’s Pernil™
The pieces they tended to distribute wildly varied in quality, some were good, some were bad, and some were straight up health hazards.
In December 2019, a friend of another cousin of mine, who often used to sell cheese and other dairy products before fleeing Venezuela, was offering not pork leg, but pork shoulder pieces for sale during that Christmas season. The pork shoulder pieces she offered for sale came from Brazil, and I — who purchased one such piece at the time — can attest to their alleged origin, as these pieces came sealed in plastic and with a rather large sticker in Portuguese that served as proof of origin.
That person offered my young cousin (the one that I’m now sorta her parent figure too) a gig in the sale of the pork shoulders, offering her a commission for every piece sold. At the time, she was almost 21 years old, and a small Christmas gig for a young person is not in itself a crime, right?
Tell that to the Communal Council.
As she innocently offered the pieces for sale, someone in the community “denounced” her to the Communal Council’s leadership, claiming that she was “stealing” the government-distributed pork legs and reselling them.
Without proof that substantiated any of the claims, one person in the group took it upon herself to denounce my cousin’s purported crime to a Communal Council leader, who forwarded the complaint to a local National Guard group, who were dutifully guarding a specific street 24/7 because the mother of the Nicolás Maduro’s grandson happened to live on a building there — similarly to how the street where the Church I used to go to also had National Guard protecting it because Maduro’s sister lived on a nearby building (and also seemed to have running water more frequently than my building, but that’s another tale).
My cousin received a call from an unknown number, with a person expressing his “interest” in purchasing the pork that my cousin was advertising around the community. Now, this other leading lady in the Communal Council, perhaps more honest than the first one I mentioned, advised my cousin not to go. My cousin used one of those apps that tells you who the number belongs to based on people’s reports, and she found out that the number corresponded to that National Guard post.
Following a series of talks between my aunt and the Communal Council, the matter was “clarified” but my cousin never quite received an apology for the wrongful accusations, whatever. In any case, the COVID-19 pandemic began shortly afterwards, changing everyone’s lives for the worst.
Now, let’s fast forward to mid-2022. The pandemic was over, I had successfully filed Italian citizenship applications for my brother and I, and I was on that long five-month period while everything was being processed.
My aunt calls me one day to tell me that the Communal Council will hold elections on the following day to pick a new leader, and that “everyone in the community” can go and vote.
You may be wondering why in the world would I give two damns about all that, and the answer is that the lady that helped my cousin was running against the lady that tried to wash her hands over the ordeal — think of it as paying a favor, I suppose.
From what I was told, their race was rather close, and with the sheer lack of interest people in that area have over that nonsense, each camp was essentially squeezing “guaranteed” votes one by one to predict if they’d make it or not. At that time, the other cousin that’s now staying in my place had already moved in, so that was one extra vote.
The election day came so my aunt, my two cousins, my brother, and I went to vote in that rather meaningless Communal Council election. It was a simple system, each candidate had one number assigned, all you had to do was write that number on a piece of paper. I did the needful, so to speak, then went back to my home to do my own stuff, shitpost on Twitter some more, and all that.
Hours later, my aunt called me to let me know that the lady that helped my cousin had won by a tiny amount of votes — our five votes lmao. There were also other people vying for that position, but even though they had only like a handful of votes to their name at most, they sure helped diminish the other lady’s final votes the allure of power — insignificant as it is in the grand scheme of things — is just too much for socialist party low-rank members, I guess.
In the end, nothing changed, why would it anyways? The community, much like the rest of the country, continued its entropic march to disarray, I kept going on with my life as usual, and so did the Communal Council, I guess. The point of the exercise was to be spiteful and ensure that someone who wronged my cousin was deprived of such a “position of power” in the community.
I suppose that in the end, beyond that, it was a way to repay the favor to someone who, even though we have completely different political views and ideologies, stood up for a member of my family and prevented her from being unjustly ending in potentially big trouble for the sole crime of trying to get some extra income during one Christmas season through honest work.
-Kal
