Dedicated to Lieutenant Colonel (Ej) Igbert Marín Chaparro, on the 51st day of his hunger strike in the dungeons of the DGCIM: Freedom for political prisoners!
I do not believe there is a more important historical reference to the determination not to return to tyrannies in Venezuela than the one made by the Poet of the People, Andrés Eloy Blanco, a few weeks after the fall of the tyranny of Juan Vicente Gómez:
"We have thrown the crickets from our feet into the sea. Now let us go to the schools to remove the crickets from our people's heads, because ignorance is the road to tyranny. We have cast the crickets into the sea. And cursed is the man who tries to make them again and put a ring in the flesh of a son of Venezuela" (Andrés Eloy Blanco, February 1, 1936, Puerto Cabello. Act of throwing the crickets of the Gomecista dictatorship into the sea).
But unfortunately, after almost 87 years of that day, at this point we have not been able to shake off even the crickets from our flesh, let alone the crickets from our heads. But the poet's curse is still alive: "...cursed is the man who tries to make them again and put a ring in the flesh of a son of Venezuela". For there are more than 300 children of Venezuela with new crickets, locked in the dungeons of a new tyranny.
A careless observer of our political situation would say that we ourselves are to blame for this unfortunate reality. By not having shaken the crickets out of our heads in the schools, as the Poet of the People warned us at the time, ignorance has led us once again to modern crickets in the flesh of the opponents of the new tyranny.
However, a more detailed observer of our political reality should conclude that for more than 60 years, the 40 years after 1958 and the more than 20 years after 1998, despite the increase in the number of schools and universities, the quality of our education, and especially the remuneration of teachers and professors belonging to the entire educational chain of the country, has been really miserable, and the reason for permanent union claims and social struggles of our educators.
And if we add to this the socialist disposition to keep the population poor and ignorant in order to make us economically dependent on them like hungry sheep, it could be concluded that ignorance still prevails in the country, no longer as a result of the Venezuelan people's own decision, but of those who unfortunately and in bad time were appointed to govern us, deliberately making education to be on the last step, without this situation having changed at all.
Then "ignorance is the road to tyranny" as Andres Eloy Blanco rightly indicated in Puerto Cabello, and long before him, El Libertador in the Angostura speech of 1819, in a much broader definition: "An ignorant people is a blind instrument of its own destruction; ambition, intrigue, abuse the credulity and inexperience of men alien to all political, economic or civil knowledge; they adopt as realities those that are pure illusions; they take license for liberty, treason for patriotism, revenge for justice."
How has the Venezuelan political class of the last 60 years led an ignorant people? Mainly, it has been with money, then with populist lies, and more recently, those who call themselves opponents, with the hopes of getting them out of a tyranny with which they live, and, on the other hand, the regime subjugating them and keeping them by force, with the crumbs of a wealth that no longer exists.
Under this scenario, it is possible to expect that if the day after tomorrow money reaches the coffers of the tyranny through the oil agreements with the U.S. government, the protests will end or be reduced to a minimum. And that is precisely because the generalized protest is not based on obtaining freedom, but on obtaining the money necessary to survive this hell. That is why I affirm that the democracy of 40 years ended when the money ran out, with a people looking for solutions from a military coup in 1998. Obviously, they did not find them, and the rest is history.
Those opponents who still insist on affirming that the tyranny that preceded this one left on January 23, 1958 because the people took to the streets, are once again taking advantage of the ignorance of a noble people. The tyranny left and then the people took to the streets. Here the order of the factors is -and continues to be- important. And in this case, the tyrant left because the military took the floor, especially those who showed courage and nobility in their actions against that tyranny. The regime is terrified of these actions because they loosen the screws on its fundamental supports. How much of them have been loosened during a 51-day hunger strike? That question must be being asked today with great fear by those who have ignored the petitions of Lieutenant Colonel (Ej) Igbert Marín Chaparro and are keeping him prisoner.
The challenge of a legitimate political opposition in these conditions is to take the lead in this discomfort for a tyrant without money, combined with the anguish of the survival of a people under tyranny, and transform all this into a struggle for freedom and the recovery of values that are lost when reasoning escapes through the stomach. We are not going to achieve this with those who went to Miraflores, nor with those who try to convince an ignorant people that we will get out of tyranny through votes, no matter how much US support they may have.
And to do so, they must make that curse of Andrés Eloy Blanco come true in two fundamental factors: that no one else after the tyranny dares to put crickets to any Venezuelan in this country, guaranteeing that this will not happen again in the only possible way, taking crickets out of the people's heads, eliminating the ignorance of a people with quality education, with all that this implies, starting with a first world remuneration for teachers and university professors, and first quality facilities to impart it.
And although a political opposition with such intentions has not yet been revealed to the country, it does not mean that it does not exist. One of the great advantages of those who have handed us over to the regime has been precisely to hide and make invisible those who could be their eventual substitutes, at the price of money and manipulations. Once again, popular ignorance plays an important role. "Cursed be the man who tries to fabricate them again and put a ring in the flesh of a son of Venezuela". May that curse burn the depths of those who imprison the children of Venezuela...
Caracas, January 12, 2023
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
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