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.
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….”
Rene J. Abreu wrote a post on his LinkedIn page which you might find of interest. It is brief and compact, yet the full story. The most recent news is that the Venezuela state has suspended X (formerly Twitter) in Venezuela, thereby further hindering the communication and the uncensored news among the Venezuelan people.
I thank Rene for his post and have put his link further below.
By Rene J. Abreu
Venezuela Events After the July 2024 Presidential Elections and the “Venezuelan Mining and Metallurgical Engineers Society (SVIMM)”.
In Spanish SVIMM is “Sociedad Venezolana de Ingenieros de Minas y Metalúrgicos”, an institution created in 1958. As censorship grew up significantly in Venezuela during the last two decades, new directors took the institution lead in 2017. Bravely, this professional institution has been publicly in favor of the truth and the right doing in the natural resources industries in Venezuela.
On Sunday July 28th, 2024, a Presidential Election took place in Venezuela and the opposition won with roughly 70% of the votes. On the same day, the Government announced fraudulently their victory, showing no proof of votes and proceedings.
As it is not easy to understand this situation by my non-Venezuelan friends and readers, following are some facts that may help:
1) For 25 years the same government/political system has been in power.
2) After the first election in 1998, using the democracy tools the government was able to control all the internal institutions and became a “modern dictatorship”.
3) Some opposition parties and leaders were prohibited, controlled, jailed, assassinated, or forced to emigrate. Approximately 8 million people were forced to emigrate and some 4.5 million of them were lawfully registered to vote abroad. Only less than 70,000 emigrants were allowed to vote in this presidential election.
4) Through a Primary Election in 2023, leader Maria Corina Machado unified the opposition, but the regime disqualified both, Mrs Machado and her appointee Mrs Corina Yoris. The lawful opposition party “Plataforma Unitaria Democrática (PUD)” was able to register Mr Edmundo Gonzalez as the unique opposition candidate.
5) While the regime changed rules, jailed politicians, and used traps, the opposition built up a huge social movement of people along the country.
6) Peacefully millions of Venezuelans attended and voted on July 28th.
7) On Monday July 29th the opposition started progressively publishing in internet the actual proceedings (Acts) to prove the wide gap in votes between both candidates. This platform is still open to the world.
8) Venezuelans have been peacefully demonstrating on the streets nationwide against the fraud. The regime is violently acting as a gang of foreign and local criminals combined with some police and military Venezuelans. The repression continues now. It is urgently required the support by the world’s democracies to save the Venezuelan People and for the truth to prevail.
I would like to congratulate SVIMM for publicly demanding on August 1st the Venezuelan Electoral Authorities the publication of all the proceedings supporting their July 28th, 2024, announcement. I think that the future of geology, mining, and metallurgy is bright in Venezuela with the resilience and bravery of institutions like SVIMM.
“By the time National Electoral Council President Elvis Amoroso was shown on television handing Maduro a document certifying his victory, the opposition had scanned more than half of the tally sheets. The scanned tallies were also uploaded to a searchable website, and [those] who voted could use their government identification number to check out the tally sheet belonging to the machine they used to vote.
“The government then claimed that the electoral council’s website had been hacked. National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez insisted Maduro was the indisputable winner and called his opponents violent fascists. He called for Machado and González [opposition leaders] to be arrested.“
When those in power — the permanent bureaucracy, their media sycophants, and the political party most aligned with them — facilely tar their opponents with the fascist tag while insisting their electoral results — which not too long ago reflected the “winner” with more votes than any presidential candidate in U. S. history — are as pure as the driven snow, the rest of us ought to see the parallels that so obviously exist. As in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan opposition was clearly anticipating this and was ready to respond with actual results. I still don’t know exactly how they did this when the electoral count is centralized in the hands of the regime, but they did. Of course this does not mean that truth and justice will prevail in that dark corner of the international Socialist world; however, we can be excused for hoping that the rest of the world will grow a bit of spine and support the people of Venezuela as they exhibit the courage — courage! — that in aeons past used to characterize the free West.
Apart from a few exceptions, I do not see the same moral courage in the opposition here, in the United States.
May we remember these days — days when a husband and father was murdered in cold blood, in his own house, by the regime’s thugs; days when an election observer was dragged from her house, in her underwear, and taken by the motorcycle gangs hired by the regime to “keep order”; days when multitudes of protesters have been rounded up and taken under horrendous custody; days when the opposition offices have been ransacked and their leaders have had to seek refuge in the Argentina embassy in Caracas; days when Cuban snipers have been seen on the roof of the presidential palace, Miraflores — and be encouraged by the steadfastness of our Venezuelan friends.
