Marcel Gascón has submitted the piece that follows which was written Mario Massone, Special Envoy of Venezuela to Romania, appointed by the Legitimate Government of Juan Guaidó and the National Assembly. It offers a vivid portrait of Venezuela today, a country where,’ as Massone writes, ‘decency and reason are criminalised and punished’.
By Ambassador Mario Massone *
Schimbare de zodie:
Prostia sinucigașă,
Fără măcar să-și dea seama,
Preia puterea.
(A zodiac sign change:
Without even noticing,
Suicidal stupidity
Takes over.)
Patria Mea A4, Ana Blandiana
The people of Venezuela are suffering under the oppression of one of Latin America’s cruelest and most inhumane regimes: the Nicolás Maduro dictatorship. Venezuelans are struggling to regain their freedom, their democracy, and the rule of law.
To illustrate our reality, let me share with you a recent event that might remind South African readers of their own recent history: an unlawful and arbitrary arrest that offers a glimpse of what Venezuelans are struggling against. Two Venezuelans, a poet and a writer, husband and wife, were arrested and spent the night in jail, accused by the de facto attorney general of the crime of hate speech.
Milagros Mata-Gil, an endearing and wonderful exponent of Venezuelan culture, has the vitality of the young 70-year-old woman she is. As a writer and as a prestigious teacher in Spanish, literature, and Latin, she is a member of the Venezuelan Academy of the Spanish Language. Her positive influence is reflected in the anthem – which she wrote – of the Municipality of Heres in Bolívar State.
Milagros has lived a prolific life. She has published many novels and essays and has dedicated an important part of her life to research activities in literature. You might enjoy reading some of her essays, like Eclipse Over a City With No Name, The Rebellion of the Fictions, or Heroes and Graves. Or one of her novels, like The Manuscripts of Lyon, Memories of an Ancient Spring or The House in Flames.
What Milagros did a few days ago was to post a few words on Facebook which led to her arrest. You might ask: What was so atrocious in those written words that resulted in her and her husband’s arrest? Let me tell you.
The title of the post is The Deadly Party. It is a biting commentary on an ostentatious wedding, held amid the COVID-19 restrictions, which that same de facto attorney general – who now feels aggrieved – attended.
The central paragraph is as follows: “The point is that the greed of the nouveau riche for social status is matched only by their narcissism, a variant of stupidity. So, they sent out and received 800 invitations. They hired 200 people to manage the catering, the bar and the service, ushers, security, bodyguards, ushers, decorators. And that’s without even mentioning the external staff associated with the guests at the ostentatious event… Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.”
Many of those who attended the wedding are now being treated for COVID-19. It is rumoured that 19 guests have died; at least 3 deaths have been confirmed. The attorney general’s own mother has reportedly been hospitalised for COVID19 after also attending the corona wedding. According to Venezuelan exile and human rights activist Tamara Suju, director of the Centre for Latin American Studies in the Czech Republic, 523 persons who attended the corona wedding have been infected with COVID19.
It is important to note that the health system in Venezuela was in a state of collapse even before the onset of the pandemic. The spread of COVID19 in the country has only made the situation worse. Shortages of beds and medical infrastructure including oxygen have led Venezuelans to increasingly treat themselves at home. Amid the crisis, Maduro decided last January to send oxygen to neighbouring Brazil, in an opportunist political gesture aimed at exposing the failures of Brazilian right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, in managing the pandemic.
Maduro’s vaccination efforts seem to have been equally contingent upon his ideological interests. The chavista regime has refused to buy AstraZeneca vaccines while committing to produce a Cuban-designed vaccine in the country, a seemingly outlandish project that is seen with skepticism by the Venezuelan scientific community. Venezuela is at the low end of the global charts when it comes to vaccination per capita, and all indications suggest infections with COVID-19 are already at levels that overwhelm the wreck that is the country’s health system.
According to some estimates, the actual daily infections are 15 times higher than the official figures suggest. That would put Venezuela in the range of 15,000 infections per day at the time of writing. The most conservative calculations, made public in April by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation of the University of Washington, estimate an actual rate 8 times the official figure in Venezuela, which would indicate that at least 8,000 persons are being infected each day.
The irresponsible behavior of the powerful is what Milagros wrote about, in a country that has been experiencing a severe humanitarian crisis since before COVID19 entered the scene. In writing what she did, Milagros was exercising her duty to show what is happening in Venezuela in these times of pain, scarcity, and suffering – inflicted intentionally by the regime of Nicolás Maduro.
She and her husband write in the tradition of Václav Havel, who wrote about “the duty to tell the truth about the world in which (the writer) lives, to talk about its horrors and its miseries”, in the same vein as the great Romanian poet Ana Blandiana: to defend “those values that the authorities want to destroy in order to win”.
Yes, in Venezuela our writers are bearing witness to the atrocities and the Terror. Terror with a capital, as capital crimes have been and are being committed against the Venezuelan people by a soulless dictator. The United Nations Human Rights Commission classifies them as crimes against humanity. Our writers, like so many other Venezuelans, are now in the tradition of the culture of resistance.
In the meantime, Milagros and her husband, the writer and poet Juan Muñoz, nicknamed Moriche, have appeared before court and have had restrictions imposed on them. They are forbidden from writing publicly and have had their mobile phones taken away from them.
The German political analyst Georg Eickhoff, former director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Venezuela, wrote from Ukraine: “I don’t think they wanted to suppress the story of the ‘corona wedding’, on the contrary. They want to show that they can do what they want and that they can imprison whoever they want and release them whenever they want.”
Milagros and Juan are now at home. It is sad to say this, but it could have been worse. They could have suffered the fate of my dear friend Fernando Alban, who was detained, tortured and killed, and whose corpse was flung from the tenth floor of the building of the secret police.
The crimes against Fernando were covered up by Tarek William Saab, who falsely claimed it was a suicide – the same Saab who is the de facto attorney general who is now feeling aggrieved for having been called out by Milagros Mata-Gil for attending the Deadly Party.
In Venezuela today, decency and reason are criminalised and punished. The grass growing over the graves of the innocent reminds us not to surrender.
*Special Envoy of Venezuela to Romania, appointed by the Legitimate Government of Juan Guaidó and the National Assembly
In 1998 former army officer and coup leader Hugo Chávez was elected to power in Venezuela. Under the banner of the Socialism of the 21st Century which he propounded, the Venezuelan revolutionary caudillo would soon launch an aggressive agenda of expropriations and capture of state institutions that gradually eroded democracy and brought the economy to its knees. Chávez died of cancer in 2013 while still in power.
Two years later, his hand-picked successor and disciple, Nicolás Maduro, suffered a huge defeat at the hand of the democratic opposition in the parliamentary elections. Maduro did formally accept the results, but he got the chavista-colonized Supreme Court to declare the National Assembly “in contempt” to render it powerless.
Maduro continued pursuing the policies of his predecessor, which had progressively caused the world’s worst hyperinflation and widespread shortages of food, medicines and other basics. Meanwhile, the production capacity of the hyperpoliticized national oil company shrunk to less than half of what it had extracted before Chávez.
The assault on the National Assembly and the despair brought about by the collapse of the economy drew millions to demand the fall of chavismo in 2017. As had happened during previous protests against the regime, dozens were murdered in the streets by the National Guard. The massive demonstrations also prompted the regime to intensify a clampdown on freedoms.
Maduro fraudulently won his first presidential election in May 2018, when the most popular opposition leaders were barred from entering the race and several other major irregularities were documented.
In January 2019, the then president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, was invested as the country’s caretaker president instead of Maduro by a majority of lawmakers. They invoked an article of the Constitution that entrusts the presidency to the head of parliament when the president fails to perform his duties.
Guaidó was soon recognized as the legitimate president by most democratic countries, including the United States, Canada and the EU and its state members. Guaidó nominated ambassadors to countries around the world and started working with his team in bringing about change in Venezuela.
However, he has so far failed to gain effective control over his country, which continues to be ruled by the chavista regime led by Nicolás Maduro. As a result, the EU last January dropped its recognition of Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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