Words can also become worn with use. Freedom, democracy, human rights, solidarity often come to our lips and mean almost nothing anymore because we use them to say so many things or so few that they become devalued ghosts of themselves and merely noise. But, all of a sudden, social and political circumstances recharge them with content and truth, impregnate them with feeling and reason, and it is as if they were resuscitated and again express the feelings of an entire people.
That is what we are living in these days, in Venezuela, listening to student leaders and opposition leaders, to ordinary men and women who were never before involved in politics and now are, risking their jobs, tranquility, freedom, and even their lives, compelled by the consciousness that, if there is no national democratic shock to awaken and mobilize it, their country will go to ruin, to a totalitarian dictatorship and the worst economic catastrophe of its entire history.
Although the process has been a long time coming—the last elections saw the gradual growth of opposition to the Chavist regime—the qualitative change took place at the beginning of February of this year, in San Cristóbal, Tachira State, when the attempted rape of a young woman at the University of the Andes led students to call for a huge march against personal insecurity, food insecurity, kidnappings, murders, and the systematic restriction of citizens’ freedoms. The regime decided to react harshly. The National Guard and paramilitary forces—armed individuals with guns, knives, and clubs, riding motorcycles with their faces covered—attacked students, beating and shooting them, killing several of them. The dozens detained were taken to far-off barracks where they were tortured with cattle prods, beaten, sodomized with sticks and rifles, and the women raped.
The repressive ferocity was counterproductive. The student mobilization was extended throughout the country and in all of Venezuela’s cities and villages, gigantic popular protests that expressed repudiation for the regime and solidarity with the victims. All around, barricades went up and the entire country seemed to be living through a libertarian awakening. The five hundred volunteer attorneys who had made up the Venezuelan Penal Forum and were to defend the detained and denounce the murders, disappearances, and tortures had developed a report that documented, in detail, the savagery with which the heirs of Commander Chávez tried to face that formidable mobilization that has changed the correlation of forces in Venezuela, attracting an unequivocal majority of Venezuelans to the ranks of the opposition.
My impression is that this movement is unstoppable and that even if Maduro and his accomplices try to crush it in a bloodbath, they will fail and massacres will only serve to accelerate their fall. Freedom has won the streets of the country of the real Bolívar (not the caricature that Chavism made of him), and the proclamation of “Twenty-First-Century Socialism” is mortally wounded.
The sooner it goes, the better for Venezuela and for Latin America. The way that the regime, in its frenetic effort to collectivize and convert the nation into one where the state controls everything, has impoverished and destroyed one of the world’s potentially richest countries and will remain an emblematic case of the insanity to which blind ideology can lead in our time. Besides having the highest inflation in the world, Venezuela is the country with the least growth on the entire continent, the most violent, the one in which bureaucratic suffocation is so quickly reproduced to the extreme of keeping almost all of public administration paralyzed. The regime of controls, “fair” prices, and state intervention has emptied all the warehouses and markets of products, and the black market and contraband have reached dizzying extremes. Corruption is the only area in which the country is making giant leaps.
Disconcerted by the student-led popular mobilization that it cannot manage to crush through repression, Maduro’s government, with the complicity of ALBA countries (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), tries to buy time by opening peace talks. The opposition has done well in turning to them, but without demobilizing, and demanding, as proof of governmental good faith, at least the release of political prisoners, starting with Leopoldo López, who, by being imprisoned, has turned, according to the latest polls, along with María Corina Machado, into Venezuela’s most popular political leader. I have met his mother and his wife, two admirable women who, with unusual courage, face harassment for being among the vanguard of a peaceful battle that the opposition is fighting to prevent the disappearance of the last opportunities for freedom still remaining in Venezuela.
But I would like to once more highlight the very central role that students play in the great quest for freedom in Venezuela. The Chavist revolution must be the only one in history that managed, from the beginning, to deserve the nearly widespread hostility of intellectuals, writers, and artists, as well as that of students, who, in this case, proved to be much more lucid and have better political instincts than their Latin American brethren did in the past.
It is stimulating and revitalizing to see that idealism, generosity, openhandedness, a love for truth, and courage are alive among the youth of Venezuela. Those who, frustrated by how inane are the political struggles in their commonplace and routine democracies, become cynics, have contempt for politics, and adopt the philosophy of “the worst is the best” should take a stroll through the Venezuelan guarimbas, for example, the one on Avenida Francisco de Miranda, in the middle of Caracas, where young women and men have been living together for several weeks already, organizing conferences, debates, seminars, explaining to passersby their projects and hopes for a future Venezuela, when freedom and legality return and the country awakens from the nightmare it has been living through for the last fifteen years.
Those who have reached the depressing conclusion that politics is a nasty pastime for thieves and the mediocre, and that, as such, they should turn their backs to it, should come to Venezuela, and by speaking to, listening to, and learning from these young people they will learn that political action can also be noble and altruistic, a way of facing barbarism and defeating it, of working for peace, coexistence, justice, and freedom, without shooting anyone or planting bombs, using reason and words, like philosophers and poets, and creating, every day, gestures, shows, and ideas like artists do, that move and educate and bring others along on the libertarian project. Hundreds of thousands, millions of young Venezuelans are giving an example today to Latin America and the entire world that no one should give up on hope, that a country, no matter how deep the abyss into which demagoguery and ideology have thrown it, can always come out of that trap and redeem itself.
Some of these young people have already been imprisoned and suffered torture, and some of them may die, like the nearly fifty companions that have already lost their lives at the hands of the hooded assassins through whom Maduro seeks to quiet them. They will not be silenced, but it is not fair for them to be so alone, that democratic governments and organizations do not support them and instead, at times, join in the cause with their executioners. Because the most important battle for freedom in our days is happening on the streets on Venezuela and has a young face.
Caracas, April 2014