I just had a visit with my Venezuelan friend. She recently immigrated to Canada, no longer able to endure the many problems brought on by the regime of Victor Maduro. Like her compatriots in Venezuela she lost a lot of weight while coping with food shortages. We had a wonderful visit for two hours in a coffee shop. She is already feeling better now that she is in a country she finds to be safe, stable and welcoming.
I have long had mixed feelings about the Hugo Chavez revolution in Venezuela. The social progressive in me lauded all his policies to help the many poor in his country which, during its past, enjoyed tremendous prosperity but woeful socio-economic inequality. I have to admit that I never liked Chavez. He was from the military, and seemed full of himself, another Fidel Castro with his marathon four hour speeches, power-mongering and ego-on-steroids.
For a while, I tried to sympathize with this regime, if not thoroughly believing, then at least giving the benefit of the doubt to all the wonderful social and economic reforms benefiting the poorest Venezuelans. I was in those days an avid listener of Co-op Radio, especially the Spanish language broadcasts to help improve my language skills. Those same broadcasts became propaganda mouthpieces for Chavez from Venezuela as well as los hermanos Castro from Cuba. Because of their ideological perfection, neither the Cuban communist dictatorship, nor its Venezuelan wannabe clone, could do any wrong in the eyes of the neo-Marxist collective dominating the radio programming. Anything that even gently criticized Cuba or Venezuela was all false or biased reporting from the mainstream corporate news-media and only the Marxist alternative could be trusted. They also blamed the US. For everything wrong with Cuba or Venezuela. Poor Cuba. Poor Venezuela. Those nasty evil Americans making everything so bad for you.
I am not giving the US a pass, by the way. There is plenty of documentation from the most trustworthy of sources that verify their many acts of interference and covert and passive brutality in Latin American countries that don't do as they're told. However, where I lose my patience, is when some of those same regimes use evil old Uncle Sam as a convenient smokescreen while they continue to use their repressive policies to abuse power and by extension, their own people.
In a Spanish meetup group I became acquainted with a sweet young married couple working for the Venezuelan Consulate in Vancouver. They were also regular guests on one of the Spanish radio programs. They had only praise and adulation for their great leader Hugo Chavez as well as for his successor, Victor Maduro. Any economic and social problems in Venezuela were all the fault of US interference, especially from the CIA. If anyone offered any criticism or expressed concern to them about their country it was always the US and the CIA who were to blame. As true as this might have been for Chile I had to struggle a bit to swallow this as a blanket answer. I also became less than patient with their utter unwillingness or inability to hear me out when I raised concerns about the many problems Hugo and Victor have visited upon the Venezuelan people. Some people just hate being confused by logic.
I have also struggled about Venezuela's dependence upon oil exports for their economy. It always puzzled me that the so-called progressives from Co-op Radio, otherwise condemning the reliance and trade in fossil fuels as being the biggest threat to the planet (and it is), but only if it is being done by the evil American Imperialist Swine. If their beloved Chavistas or Castros are doing it, it is just fine since it promotes the glorious Bolivarian Revolution.
Of course we have to take into consideration the root causes of revolution and popular resistance movements, in Latin America and elsewhere. It is always the same set of conditions that give birth to unrest and revolution: social inequality, poverty, social and economic oppression, rampant, chronic abuses of human rights.
I think here is where we really see the toxic legacy of Mother Spain, or Mama Espana to the Americas. A violent, cruel and inhuman social hierarchy was simply imported to continue wreaking havoc and wiping out of existence entire civilizations and cultures in the Americas. This became the entrenched reality and has played such a major role in the development of Latino cultures. This also leaves a legacy of generational and collective trauma for many, if not all the peoples of Latin America, and such mistakes of humanity as the Chavista Revolution in Venezuela, the Cuban Revolution, the Dirty War in Argentina and Uruguay during the seventies and eighties, the military coup in Chile under Pinochet and the Sendero Luminoso in Peru, to name but a few, are but the deadly weeds sown by the poisonous seeds of endemic, encultured violence, imported from Spain and brought to fruition on the innocent.
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