Sooner rather than later, the ghost of Bolivar will defeat Chavismo. Chateubriand was right. There are some voices that have something sacred because they emerge from the grave. When we analyze the current political status in Venezuela and the climate of tension that the country is experiencing (with deaths and violence in the middle of the electoral campaign), a sentence from beyond the grave comes to our mind, the one pronounced by the Liberator in the speech of Angostura: "to get our nascent Republic out of this chaos, all our moral Schools will not be enough if we do not merge the mass of the people into a whole; the composition of the government into a whole; the legislation into a whole and the national spirit into a whole. Unity, unity, unity. Unity must be our motto." Almost two hundred years later, it has become clear that in order to defeat the "candidate of love" (one of the names of President Hugo Chávez in this campaign), the only way is that of the unity of the democrats. Capriles has already achieved a first and indisputable victory by call under his banner to all the civil service examination.

However, an eventual Chavismo's eventual collapse will not eliminate the political culture that has made possible the dominance of cesarism for almost three lustrums. Comandante Chávez is the product of a complex and deeply unequal society. Venezuelan history (Paez, Gomez, Perez Jimenez, etc.) cannot be understood without caudillismo. And Latin caudillos, historically, have only been defeated through coalitions of unity. So it was with all the tropical caesars, from Porfirio Díaz to Perón. The cult of personality is previous to republics -our presidents are a sort of Viceroys without judgment residency program, as Victor Andres Belaunde used to say- and the messianic aspect has been strengthened even in democracy. Chávez believes he is "the man of providential design", the redeemer according to Krauze's formula.

The long tricolor march towards freedom that today floods the streets of Venezuela has as goal to recover the republican model and the separation of powers, the constitutional balance and the representative democracy, without completely breaking with the welfarism typical of the Chavista era. Chavismo has not only instrumentalized the media and co-opted public enterprises. The caudillo has merged with the institutions. Faced with the deployment of the state machinery, the tricolor tsunami has to demonstrate that it is powerful enough to defend a victory without falling into the provocation of violence. To do so, it must continue appealing to that politics of hope that is about to defeat the Chavista Leviathan that so much fear insists on spreading.