The terrible events of the recent elections in Venezuela are now not even a dim memory in the mainstream media. The dictatorship as well as the hoity-toity across the Americas and Europe have been patiently waiting for the memories of the flagrant fraud and bloody suppression to be fully extirpated from the public consciousness.
However, there is a group in Venezuela who refuses to remain silent, although this requires them to be more than creative to make their voices heard.
And that brings us to the “Echo” organization where actors and actresses voice the true stories of very real Venezuelans or family members who are either in hiding, imprisoned, and/or tortured and beat.
The link below should take you to just one exemplar which will also direct you to more, in case you are inclined to hear more or to help in some way.
Regarding the grand Lake Maracaibo (Lago Maracaibo) perhaps the only aspect connected to it which retains its natural and wondrous beauty are the Catatumbo lightings. And one major reason for its perseverance is that the Communist governments of Venezuela have not figured out how to expropriate them or otherwise tax and regulate them to death.
As for the lake itself, it is heavily polluted by continuous oil and chemical spills and absence of maintenance of the extensive and massive oil equipment, much of which lies dormant, rusting and leaking. Most recent sources affirm that over 70% of the lake’s surface is contaminated with oil, chemicals, and a highly toxic bacteria locally referred to as verdín (‘greenery’).
When the pro-free enterprise Bolsonaro was president of Brazil, hardly a day went by without the media harping on the “destruction” or “deforestation” of the Amazon forest. With the assumption of left-wing Lula to the presidency, such reporting has evaporated, save a few articles here and there lauding the “precipitous drop in deforestation” under the new president. And if you believe such reporting, I have a bridge in Maracaibo I’d like to sell you.
The fact is that under Socialist regimes, the “environment” suffers immensely but the reporting thereof is practically crickets, whereas under civil governments that honor private property rights, the environment fares immeasurably better, yet the “reporting” is apocalyptic.
Environmentalist organizations and activists are silent regarding the responsibility of Communist governments for the chaotic ecocide of Lake Maracaibo. When they do their pontificating, they attack “industry” or “development” and such all-too-familiar platitudes, as if we were still living when Juan Vicente Gómez negotiated petroleum concessions which induced foreign companies to invest in Venezuela before the 1920s, thereby initiating unparalleled prosperity to the country. Prosperity which endured into the mid 1970s.
The diatribes against “private industry” say nothing about the decimation of such industries under the Communists, let alone do they mention the fact that all such industry was expropriated by the benevolent state. It is the state that has been running the petroleum industry in Venezuela for decades now. In fact for as long as the obliteration of the lake has been occurring.
They are not easy to find, but one can still find photos online of the lake in the 1940s and 1950s and beyond and see that, although punctuated with oil wells throughout, the water itself is nevertheless clean. But if that exercise is not convincing enough, one can search for interviews of people who actually saw the macabre transformation, which happened before their very eyes.
People such as Anibal Gutierrez whose fruit and vegetable business on the shore was destroyed by the expropriations. So he had to learn how to fish and every morning before daybreak he goes out, using an inner tube for flotation and plastic plates for paddling an hour to get to the contaminated fish which he can sell onshore. Mr. Gutierrez fully understands that the Socialistic policies are what has driven him and many like him to find bare subsistence work, “There are days when we have very little or nothing to eat … Over 90% of the oil rigs you see are inoperable … the lack of maintenance and care have caused great contamination on the lake and on the shores … The investors — Spanish, French, Italians, Americans — left the country, and that’s when we began seeing great scarcities coupled with sky high prices, not to mention the total loss of our currency. Venezuela has never been the same.”
Or families like that of Carlos Enrique Quiñones and his wife, Ailín (pronounced Eileen) who worked in the oil industry and now sell trinkets and whatnots out of their kitchen. Their three children and grandchildren have emigrated to Colombia and Chile to work. Mr. Quiñones says, if offered to return after two decades, he would not accept given that the decades of little or no maintenance have created “ticking time bombs” such as the one that exploded in the Amuay refinery in 2012, leaving over 40 dead and 140 wounded.
The country never recovered from that catastrophe and can no longer even produce enough petroleum to supply its own needs. For anyone paying attention, that debacle in 2012 laid bare the incompetence and criminal negligence of the Communist regime. However, most reporting does not mention that but rather emphasizes the need for safety measures.
So now, Venezuela, which has the largest reserves of petroleum in the world, has to rely on Iran to supply petroleum and endures the spectacle of interminable vehicle queues to buy gasoline. Although the state blames this lusus naturae on US embargoes, Mr. Quiñones knows better and he says most of the Venezuelan people know better also.
And so now, great swathes of Lake Maracaibo look more like garbage dumps and its shores are beginning to see dead, oil covered land and sea creatures — something unheard of in its history.
But the Catatumbo lightning can still be seen.
May it serve as a reminder and hope for the people of Venezuela.
The link below (after the photos) will take you to a France 24 video report of about 24 minutes for those readers interested in a bit more (it has English subtitles). I quoted Messrs. Gutierrez and Quiñones from that video.
NASA has confirmed that the Catatumbo phenomenon produces a world record 250 lighting bolts per square kilometer annually.
The green seen from space denotes the proliferation of toxic bacteria occasioned by the massive, almost daily oil spills since the very early 21st Century.
Lake Maracaibo in 1950, thirty-five years after oil exploration began. The companies operating there were assiduous in cleaning up any spills and in maintenance.
Among the recent events in Venezuela, we now hear that her president-elect, Edmundo González Urrutía was flown out of the country and is in Spain which has granted him asylum.
As noted in my second to last post, the Venezuelan state has unleashed a brutal wave of repression against all citizens. The OAS characterizes the repression as “state terrorism” and it has included attacks against the president-elect and those who support him, meaning those who voted for him.
There is no doubt that his life was in danger when one considers the daily rhetoric spewed by the State, basically incitements against him as a terrorist who refused to acknowledge that Maduro won fair and square.
The opposition concluded that it was necessary to do all that could be done to preserve his life in order to maintain the cause alive.
My understanding is that the president-elect will be sworn in from Spain as the legitimate president of Venezuela on January 10, 2025.
I understand that the other threatened politician, María Machado, is still in Venezuela. I believe she is even more feared by the regime than Mr. González. However, there are reports that she is also in Spain. Not sure which reports are correct.
Finally, Mr. González sent this voice mail to the Venezuelan people:
“This morning I arrived in Madrid. My exit from Caracas was surrounded by episodes of pressure, coercion, and threats of not allowing my departure. I trust that we will soon continue the struggle to achieve freedom and restoration of democracy in Venezuela.”
Readers of this blog, know that I am not sanguine about the ability of any politician to “right a ship” in any country. The most he or she can do, perhaps, is to “pause” a downward spiral to give space and time for the people of a land to seek the Almighty’s mercy and forgiveness and help.
My prayer for Machado and González is that they remain safe and are able to assume their leadership roles officially and that our Lord may enable them to work with integrity for the people of Venezuela.
María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, president-elect of Venezuela
The Enlightenment temperament, anti-Christian and schizophrenic (see Humboldt), impelled the growth of “indigenismo” in the late nineteenth century and continuing onto the present day. This is a cult that emphasizes Indian America over the Spanish heritage, with bitter and unhistorical disparagement of the latter (see Tree of Hate, p. 116).
The roots of this of course lie in “our own house” with the blatant propaganda of Las Casas, eagerly seized by Spain’s European enemies and by the intellectual elite of the day and of this day also.
This in turn propelled a publishing industry promoting the Discovery as a Spanish invasion of the Americas which was purposefully destructive of Indian cultures which were superior to what the invaders brought from Europe’s Christian civilization.
Such instruction, affirmed with the certainty that proceeds from ignorance, culminated in a neat inversion of reality: a land of noble savages and quiet, peaceful aborigines minding their own business, building enlightened cultures and civilizations, suddenly set upon by blood-thirsty, superstitious, Christian Neanderthal monsters who tortured, destroyed, and murdered with genocidal fury.
And, of course, it did not take long for calumny of Spain and Columbus to bleed into contempt towards anything having to do with the Americas, especially the United States.
Perhaps the culminating event of this ahistorical propaganda was the 1980 publication of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, whose more honest description would be “A Marxist Prescription For Teaching United States History To Our Children”.
It is no surprise that Zinn’s work dedicates many pages to that great genocidal maniac, Christopher Columbus.
So from Samuel Eliot Morison paying homage in 1955 “to Christopher Columbus the stout-hearted son of Genoa who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea” we have come to the National Council of Churches in 1990, pontificating, “What some historians have termed a ‘discovery’ in reality was an invasion and colonization with legalized occupation, genocide …. “
Thanks to such tendentious “teaching”, few today know that on January 2, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella led a triumphant procession to the Granada city square where both knelt in gratitude to God for the liberation of Spain from almost eight centuries of Moorish rule. The event followed the surrender of the city by the Moors, having accepted the terms of either leaving Spain or staying in allegiance to her with the promise of religious liberty to worship according to their conscience. These terms were accepted and were honored by the royal house.
Among the multitude who accompanied the king and queen was a man committed to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Indian continent by a route that would avoid having the need to go through enemy Muslim lands. Later in that very same year, 1492, with the financial support and fervent prayers of the king and queen, he launched his three vessels to reach India by sailing west from Spain. He would have reached India, except that his calculations were off: the earth was quite a bit larger than he estimated. And the Americas stood in the way.
The man was Christopher Columbus.
For centuries the Americas recognized the greatness of the man: there are more places and sites named after him than after any other man. The capital of Ohio is named after him, as is the site of the capital of the nation, District of Columbia.
However, after the French Revolution, the attacks and slanders and half truths were relentless and eventually took their toll, culminating with the publication of Zinn’s fake history. Zinn, usually known as a Socialist, but actually a radical Marxist, despised our history and was determined to destroy its roots. In this, he has been wildly successful but by the time his work became known, thanks to its promotion by actor Matt Damon in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, much uprooting had already taken place.
If you would like to know more about Christopher Columbus and also the truth behind Zinn’s polemics, you might want to find and read John Eidsmoe’s Columbus and Cortez, Conquerors for Christ and Mary Grabers’ Debunking Howard Zinn.
The above thoughts come to mind because of my chance “sighting” of a monumental bronze sculpture which began appearing on my horizon as I drove on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico. It was a stunning sight which became larger as I approached.
However, when I came parallel to it, I saw that the area on which it stood was fenced in and locked and the surrounding terrain was overgrown and unkempt. I drove on to my destination and asked about the statue only to learn that folks knew very little about it and did not seem to care to learn more.
Some time later, I returned with several of my children. A gentle rain fell, which added to the grandeur of this phenomenon. A police cruiser happened by and stopped as I signaled him to ask what he knew about the statue and whether it would soon be open to the public. He knew hardly anything about it, other than it was “grande”.
What I later learned was that the statue is the work of Russian artist and architect, Zurab Tsereteli, who built it as The Birth of The New World, intending to dedicate it to Ohio’s capital, Columbus. As I understand it, the work was completed in 1991 in time for the 1992 quincentenary of the world changing voyage.
However, Columbus rejected it. As did New York, Boston, Cleveland, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. The city of Cataño, Puerto Rico, near the San Juan metropolitan area, offered to accept it but that intent was foiled when the FAA opposed such a tall structure five miles from the airport. Finally, a private citizen near the town of Arecibo accepted it and private funds enabled its assembly and installation.
And so it sits near the coast. A 300-plus foot tall representation of Christopher Columbus, twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty and every bit as impressive, in my layman’s opinion. And if you look into it, as I did, you will encounter vitriol and angst and disgust and ignorance, such as this:
“I am sorry for the artist, but this statue is the same as if the Jews had made a statue to Hitler!”
Or this:
“Columbus is a symbol of Genocide, not a hero to be celebrated.”
Such statements and sentiments are so far from reality and historical truth as to be embarrassing. But shame is no longer something to be shunned or avoided. Ignorance is a point of pride to many today.
We are reminded by Arnold Toynbee, “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.”
If we cannot understand and appreciate the massive gates that were opened by men such as Columbus, we are a truly ungrateful and arrogant people who need to be re-awakened to the earth shattering — in a very positive sense — impact of the voyage that took place in 1492.
