Roberto Patiño, a rising star in the opposition movement in Venezuela, goes through a crowd of children who, spoon in hand, wait to eat.
He leads a team that distributes hundreds of meals every day in marginal neighborhoods of the capital. It is the only solid food ingested by many of the children in the neighborhood of La Vega, in western Caracas. And although they are not accompanied by explicit political indoctrination, there is no doubt that they are an important counterweight to the government's narrative that it can feed the poor on its own.
"We have found in these po[CENSORED]r sectors a fertile ground for a message of change, to build a different Venezuela," said Patiño, 30, about meals financed by Venezuelan donors both inside and outside the country.
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While the president, Nicolás Maduro, persecutes his opponents in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, desperation has led some critics, especially those in exile, to openly support violent shortcuts to get him out of power. There was an apparent attempt to attack the president's life with drone laden explosives in August, and some critics recently welcomed the suggestions of the US government in favor of intervention.
But many figures of the embattled opposition that remain in the country see their opportunity to capitalize on the widespread discontent with Maduro's mandate in the poorest neighborhoods, considered for many years his stronghold.
This is where Patiño, a former student leader, and other grassroots organizers who are between 20 and 30 years old, have been feeding the children, encouraging women to become activists in their community and organizing protests to demand public services. as drinking water and electricity.
Marialbert Barrios, who at 28 years old is the youngest member of the National Assembly, has been giving talks in empowerment workshops urging the women of a working-class area of Caracas to change their passive complaints for actions to make their Neighborhood is better for everyone.
It is a long-term strategy in a country where more and more citizens reject democracy and the old opposition guard suffers growing discredit.
"It is time for this generation that took a step forward against totalitarianism, to assume the reins of the struggle," recently tweeted Manuela Bolivar, a 35-year-old opposition legislator.
Years of solid government tactics - and of internal battles over egos and strategy - have left the opposition divided and stagnant.
A new turn
The situation improved briefly when they took control of the congress in 2015.
But quickly it was again overcome by Maduro, who began to ignore his dictates and attacked their leaders for promoting the street protests that demanded his resignation last year and caused more than 120 deaths.
Things took a turn for the worse this year with the breakdown of negotiations between the two sides that sought to lay the foundations for fair elections. The leader vetoed the presence of many of his main critics on the presidential ballot in May, leaving the opposition divided over the boycott of the meeting. Amid widespread accusations of rigidity, Maduro easily won re-election at the polls despite the fact that polls show an overwhelming unpo[CENSORED]rity.
The failures helped to set the mood against the traditional opposition leaders.
In social networks, figures such as former President of the National Assembly Julio Borges and former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles receive routine complaints - with little direct evidence - for having reached alleged secret pacts to coexist with Maduro.
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Other opposition figures were imprisoned, vetoed for politics by the courts controlled by the government or exiled, such as Borges and the former mayor of Caracas Antonio Ledezma.
In addition to a generational division, exile is also causing internal friction. Some leaders who remain in Venezuela, such as Capriles and former presidential candidate Henri Falcón, recently suggested that they are open to a new attempt at dialogue, saying that contributions from abroad will only lead to more bloodshed and consolidate Maduro.
Accusations that several prominent opposition members, in addition to government officials, received payments from bribery networks inside the state oil company or a Brazilian construction giant, also undermined its credibility.
"Venezuela needs an absolutely different leadership," said Luis Vicente León, director of the Caracas-based polling firm Datanalisis, citing polls that show that the opposition is as unpo[CENSORED]r as the president. "I'm not sure if this means youth. It means fresh, different. "
Miguel Pizarro, a 30-year-old man with tattooed arms who was elected to the National Assembly at 21, is part of that relay.
No to confrontation
He recently brought the local television cameras to the favela of Petare to draw attention to the decaying and abandoned buildings of government departments that host hundreds of people despite being described as insecure.
Like Patiño, he is more focused on everyday matters than on confrontation in the streets.
"The challenge of the political bosses is to win back the right to be heard by the country," Pizarro declared. "It's been lost because you do not discuss or talk about what a lot of people need."
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The general unpo[CENSORED]rity of the opposition and the deep internal divisions indicate that the repression of the government has paid off.
"They are not successful in managing the economic crisis and hyperinflation," said Michael Penfold, an expert at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, Caracas. "But they're pretty good at playing a divisive game with the opposition."
Patiño, for his part, said he abandoned his political ambitions to focus on feeding 1,800 children five days a week in 21 poor neighborhoods of the capital.
He believes that this is his best opportunity to influence his country by offering a vision of the future different from that given by the incessant government propaganda.
It also funded other projects, such as one to collect data on capital residents killed in an attempt to fill the gap left by the government's refusal to publish crime statistics.
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Patiño comes from a wealthy family and says that he could have forged a career abroad after receiving several job offers after his master's degree at Harvard University. But he said the fight is at home, in Venezuela, giving the children a meal a day.
"I started this initiative, first by a human sense, by a sense of what is required at this time," he explained. "But also for a conception of what the service should be."