The weekly newspaper Informe has defined the psychological battle the government is waging against the opposition in the following four terms:
Confusion: the generation of multiple threats and smokescreens launched to hide the true purpose behind official actions. Every day a new announcement or insult is introduced through several official spokesmen.
The "confusion" seeks to diffuse the various opposition efforts, not to eliminate them entirely but to dilute their ability to response to threats or announcements such that it can never be done as a whole and would therefore take time to organize a strong resistance movement.
Deception: The government is financing certain parties or opposition leaders in order to create fissures that cause deception and disappointment among the people so that citizens wind up convinced that they cannot believe in the government nor the opposition, thereby sinking into despair.
Frustration: the creation of a legal framework that will give "legitimacy" to the regime and that citizens think there is no way out of and that everything the government does is legal. So laws are created that violate the Constitution but which are vital to building total hegemony.
The Education Act is part of this strategy as it seeks to impose an educational model that at its core has the citizen and the politician. When the law was passed without any outside consultation and in record time, the point was to cause "frustration" among the people and when some portion of the public complains about the act, they are gassed in order to create a mix of disappointment and frustration among the citizenry which leads to adapatation...
Adaptation: The government wants citizens to adapt to everything Chávez says and does, to obey without questioning each of the decisions taken. The government wants the citizens to become socialists or at the very least not rebel against the authoritarian and personalistic political model.
Original article accessible here.
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