When beginning this blog in 2019 I explained that its purpose was to enable a better understanding of the land and its people. As such, most of the posts since then do not deal with current events, but rather events of the past — whether historical or anecdotal — which, over time, serve to help us see through the fog of contemporary, tendentious reporting and allow us to focus on Venezuela herself and her people and to get at least an inkling as to why things are the way they are.
Much, if not most, of today’s “reporting” is existentialist — meaning, in this context, that it focuses on the present, usually in crisis form, and sheds little or no understanding of the moment we are living or how we got here, let alone what we are to do about it, if anything. This is ironic because the more honest existentialists from the 20th Century, men like Saint Exupéry, Camus, and others, were indeed men of action who did seize the moment and acted thereon. But they were rare. And their progeny is more disoriented than Sartre, the Grand Master of their sect.
The lack of reporting on what goes on in Venezuela a mere four weeks after the outrageously fraudulent elections in that stricken land illustrates the above. The immediate crisis has passed and the mainstream media has returned to the “look-a-squirrel!” journalism which focuses on promoting the fashionable narrative of the present day.
Well, the immediate crisis may have passed for the usual suspects (CNN, ABC, NBC, ad nauseam), but it most certainly has remained and deepened for the people of Venezuela and for us as well, whether or not we are capable of seeing it.
There have been thousands of detainees and disappearances. Arrests are without warrants or formal charges. If one complains of abuse, one exposes oneself to brutal arrests, accused of crimes including terrorism. Many minors have been kidnapped from their homes.
Having taken a page from the totalitarians whose masks fell off during the recent pandemus, the state has urged people to report “suspicious activities” in what it has called “Operation Tun-Tun”, the sound of the knock on the door when officers arrive. This has promoted an environment of mistrust and fear of sharing or speaking openly among neighbors and even relatives, not to mention church. Precisely what the totalitarian relishes: family is nothing, relatives are nothing, neighbors are nothing, church brethren are nothing … the state is all.
Any reading or viewing of Cold War literature or art will immediately see “neighbor-reporting” and “Tun-Tun” visits for what they are. I need not elaborate.
The human rights NGO, Provea, reports that “Forced disappearances and arbitrary detentions have become the new normal …. They have gone from a period of selective persecution to one of massive persecution.”
For those who disbelieve the “alternative media”, perhaps the Agence France-Presse (AFP) might satisfy:
“Edward Ocariz was cooking lunch in his home in a Caracas slum when police stormed in. ‘You’re coming with us,’ officers shouted, as angry neighbors screamed, ‘Damn you!'”
“Police — with no arrest warrant — whisked Ocariz away a week after the July 28 election…. Ocariz, 53, had complained previously about government abuses of power…. He was charged with crimes including terrorism and inciting hatred and taken to a maximum security prison….”
Multiply Mr. Ocariz by thousands, including minors and desperate parents; terrified neighbors who after complaining see their own neighbors or family members disappear, and you begin to get the idea of what is happening and why Venezuela has become “so quiet” lately.
And if you think such things can never happen in the United States, well, you’ve not been awake in recent years.
We are living in what for us can only be described as unusually bad times.
But the Triune God is on His throne and His eyes go to and fro … and not a sparrow falls without Him … and these events, as ALL events, will serve to advance His Kingdom. The counsels of the ungodly will come to confusion.
Meanwhile, at the very least, we must be aware and we must pray and even if all we can actually do is speak or write or vote, we must do at least that.
I’ll close quoting an election worker, source The Caracas Chronicle:
“Nothing prepared us for the fear we have experienced in recent days. What we have felt since July 29 until now is unprecedented. Friends hiding for weeks. Or crossing borders. A few are still holding hope for a transition … but without certainty that it will happen, in the face of violence we’d never seen….. We wonder what to do if our passport is arbitrarily canceled, if leaving the country is an option, of if arriving at the airport means a prison sentence. We deal with paranoia, attentive to any strange sound, rushing to the window to ensure everything is in its place….
“We see teenagers being torn from their parents’ arms in the middle of the night or mothers dragged out of their homes, still in their nightclothes before the terrified eyes of their children…. The checkpoints … are real guillotines where they check your phone without a judicial order, risking your safety. An incorrect message in a WhatsApp group could lead to your disappearance in a jail …. And yet, we try to put on a smile to encourage those outside Venezuela; to show ourselves strong so that our friends and family do not have to worry too much about what we are living through….
“…the heartbreaking testimonies of kids who, because of a WhatsApp message or a TikTok video, fall in the most dangerous prisons, alone, unable to see their relatives and without the right to defense. Kids who live in a country that already deprived them of a sane childhood and now inflicts on them physical torture, rape, psychological terror, for which no school, university, or way of life can prepare them….
“Waking up to calls at 6 in the morning: ‘They took M_____ in the early morning along with 20 kids from the neighborhood, they entered her house and dragged her in her underwear in front of her daughter, regardless of the screams from her family: they beat her, they beat her!’
“We knew repression was a possibility, but one thing is to call it and another to see it….”
