Is Venezuela today still my country?

I needed to take a short break in my writing as I could not digest more news or report them with a minimum of accuracy. Today as I looked around and reflected on recent events I wondered what had happened to the country I grew up in.

I was born shortly before democracy came to Venezuela. I have never known anything else in Venezuela. Sure, there were occasional abuses, sure there was corruption, sure a few people disappeared, sure justice was too often missing, but sure we never went through what went in EVERY South American country during these years. Ecuador and Bolivia were continually wrecked by coups. Peru went from a leftist dictatorship to a rightist one. Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil lived through horrendous regimes of death and torture. Colombia has been continuously wrecked by violence and larval civil war. Paraguay had a life long El Surpremo. Even thinly populated Guyana and Suriname run into civil turmoil.

But Venezuela had escaped horror in such scale, at least until February 27 1989. And even if we put together that day, the February 4 and November 29 1992 coups together with the guerilla violence of the 60ies, we were still way proportionately behind of whatever happened in any of the other sibling countries.

This is all over now. For the first time since 1958 Venezuela has experienced actual deliberate political prosecution, politically generated violence, political willful division of society. As I write these lines I learned of yet another death in Zulia, a woman shot in the back by an Army rifle. I learned of more arrests, of more truant judges replacing ?lenient judges? refusing to validate the abusive arrests. For the seventh day in a row an excessive number of powerful tear gas bombs have been launched. For the seventh day in a row people must go to the emergency rooms because they are fed up with a system that ignores their just claims. And I mean claims, plural.

Inasmuch as the score is terrible, it only states part of the story. Because the psychological rend to our social fabric is even worse. And I am not even talking to the aggravation of class division that the present government has undertaken instead of trying to mend fences, to unite us, to improve with real methods the fate of the ones that fell by the wayside.

I am talking about my neighborhood getting ready for a home made insurrection. I am talking about myself watching Venezuelan housewives, teenagers putting gasoline in empty beer bottles to throw at Venezuelan soldiers. I am talking about myself wondering whether they were right in their protest. I resent having had to try to judge my neighbors.

I am talking about the people that are tricked into coming to shot at people that are filling up these beer bottles. I am talking about these people that ride the motorbikes that were used to pay them off to do such deeds. I am talking about these public servants that somehow have been induced into violating their conscience to terminate any trace of our imperfect civility.

I resent having to think about how we are going to have to repair all this mess.

But I am talking of even worse things. I am talking about a defense minister that this morning on TV tries to downgrade a noted journalist, Marta Colomina, by reminding his captive audience that she was not born in Venezuela, that she should respect the country that has condescended to shelter her. Even though she spent all of her life in Venezuela since she arrived as a little girl, married in Venezuela, raised Venezuelan children.

I am talking about the fascist language used by a loser who became defense minister through servility. I am talking about the kind of language that arrested commies, and then Jews, and then gays, and then Poles. I am talking about a language that beats up women, and democrats, a language that will arrest foreigners, and then the children of foreigners, and then the neighbors that it does not like, and then, and then, and then.

Minister Garcia Carneiro, I am the son of foreign immigrants that have given their lives to Venezuela. What are you making of MY country? How long do I have to wait for you to come and get me?

Caracas, March 4, 2004