The title of this post is directly from Leviticus 26:17, a verse right smack in the middle of an extended passage wherein God promises blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. The passage also speaks of repentance accompanied by forgiveness and future blessings once again.

When I read this as a child and later as a young man, I assumed it referred to foreign powers or strangers who would rule over a rebellious or disobedient people, either nationally or personally.

However, as one decade dissolved into another, I came to see that this passage need not speak only of foreigners or strangers, but of anyone who held godless or antithetical views to God’s covenant. In other words, judgment would be seen in the disobedient or rebellious — those who have forsaken the God of their fathers — being ruled by those who are outright antithetical to God, let alone to His law.

Have you ever paused for a moment to consider that the men who spilled the rivers of blood from the veins of Frenchmen in the Reign of Terror in France were also Frenchmen?

Or that the men who tortured and slaughtered — by sword, gun, or mass starvation — the millions and millions of Chinese in Mao’s Great Leap Forward and later his Cultural Revolution were also Chinese?

Or that the men who bayoneted and butchered Russians and Eastern Europeans by the tens of millions — millions!; we often subconsciously affirm the quote attributed to Josef Stalin: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”; millions! — were also Russian and Eastern Europeans?

Throughout history, murderous tyrants were often men blood related to the people they hated; their own peoples and nations. 

This truth, helps us understand how in November, 2024, a high ranking Venezuelan official ordered the expropriation of Grupo Lamar, Venezuela’s largest shrimp producer, representing 70% of its shrimp production and over 80% of exports to Europe. And on Easter Sunday this year, its most productive processing plant, Antártica C.A. in San Francisco del Zulia, was in flames and likely reduced to ashes. 

The reasons for the expropriation are so common and mundane as to be boring: “plotting a coup” basically summarizes them.

The results are predictable: production has stalled and output has collapsed with exports to Europe falling 52% and the in country prices of shrimp have skyrocketed adding yet another blow to the strapped Venezuelan peoples.

It’s looking like another Mao-sized failure with a Mao-sounding name, only instead of a Great Leap or a Cultural Revolution, we have the Maduro Seven Transformations. 

Don’t ask.

Readers might recall that expropriations in Venezuela did not start with Chavez; but, initially, they were justified by the fomenting of envy of the foreign, primarily American, companies who were accused of exploiting the Venezuelan populace. 

In the dire straits the country now finds itself, her people can be forgiven if they do not see that the companies now being expropriated are not foreign, let alone American, but local. The men being displaced are not the ugly Gringos, but their own families, neighbors, and friends. 

I understand the founders and leadership of the Lamar Group have left the country. I do not know how many of its 10,000 employees are still on the job.

And who is doing all this damage to the beautiful land of my birth? Who hates the country so much that they are willing to shut down one of its most successful homegrown enterprises? 

A stranger? A foreign enemy? Why no! Those who now hate Venezuela and her people are fellow Venezuelans with a godless ideology of envy and hate.

A “counterrevolution” will not rectify this lamentable situation. But there is a God on His throne and He calls us to repentance. That will do far more than any machinations that man can muster.

Lamar Group owned over 13,000 hectares in the states of Zulia and Falcón

Presentación – Grupo Lamar

A YouTube presentation of the Lamar Group, pre-expropriation

Photo taken in 2023. This was a family founded business.