The Devil's Excrement

Venezuela: From April 11 to today’s dictatorship by Veneconomy

The third anniversary of the historical events of April
11-13, 2002, is approaching, events that can be given two different
readings, depending on which side of the street you are on: the
government’s or the opposition’s.
Those who agree with the government’s doctrine will enjoy a week given
over to a full-blown propaganda offensive. The owners of the
revolutionary process will spare no efforts (or money) to continue
selling their concocted version of what happened, and there will be
many who, naively, will continue to buy it. After all, propaganda is
something that the Bolivarians have proved to be very good at.

In its determination to rewrite history –something that all victors
do-, the government has tried to erase what truly happened from
people’s memories and has invented a fairy tale of a coup d’état for
public consumption at home and abroad.

In order to successfully accomplish this mission, the Hugo Chávez
administration has resorted to media and resources of all kinds, from
making use of its iron control of the branches of government and the
abundant petrodollars to taking advantage of a rigged system of
justice. It has twisted the facts in a trumped up documentary entitled
“The revolution will not be televised,” and, as though that were not
enough, it has persecuted and cornered countless people who exercised
their legitimate right to protest, one way or another, against a system
they opposed, as well as those who, doing their job, defended them
against the barbarities committed by supporters of the government.

The sad fact of the matter is that three years after April 11-13 no
one knows with any certainty what really happened, largely because the
government itself has not allowed objective investigations to be
conducted and because it has deliberately manipulated the facts. This
is due, in part, to the regime’s desire to hide the fact that a
multitude of 600,000 to 800,000 unarmed people who tried to reach
Miraflores Palace to demonstrate their opposition to the political
project that the government wanted to implement in the country was
repelled by force.

The truth is that, in these past three years, the historical
distortion of the facts and the absolute power accumulated by means of
legal stratagems have turned a democratically elected government into
the strongest dictatorship that Venezuela has known since the times of
Juan Vicente Gómez.

This entry was posted on April 11, 2005 at 11:08 am and is filed under Venezuela.