It's old news - very old news - but I finally got around to putting my 2004 report from a trip to Venezuela back onto the internet. Here's my intro, and if you want to - for some strange reason - read the whole thing, it's here: http://mvrrecoup.blogspot.com/
April 2004
On Thursday, April 15, 2004, Professor Samuel Moncada, Director of the History Department at the Central University of Venezuela, told an audience in Caracas at the Second International Conference in Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution that the group of North Americans who had just left the meeting were of ultimate importance to that revolution. In fact, without them, he said, "We will fail."
I was in that group from North America, and but for those words of Professor Moncada, mentioned as an afterthought to some of us later by one of our Venezuelan guides, I would not be writing this account. In fact, I sometimes wish I had never heard them. I am not an activist. I am not a lover of causes. But the impact of that one sentence, even secondhand, was greater on me than anything I saw or heard, all taken together, in the nine days of our trip to Venezuela.
Of course, Dr. Moncada did not mean that our one group was pivotal, but that there are only small groups and individual U.S. citizens who are finding their way past the curtain of disinformation about the Venezuelan situation. That these courageous Venezuelan people, in their great struggle, believe that a handful of their Northern neighbors can make or break their cause, regardless of the support they get from the rest of the international community, is an indication to me that not even one of us who has been witness can drop the ball.
The people of Venezuela are, and have been since 1998, in a historic and monumental movement to establish an authentic democracy in their country. They call it El Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario (the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement). It's an incredible story in our times of a people's rise to power over decades of oppression against seemingly insurmountable odds, given hope by one determined and inspired man, of their reclamation of power after an attempt to restrain them, and of their ongoing struggle to create for themselves a representative government in an authentic democracy, and to bring prosperity, stability and social justice to their country.
The punch line is that my country, widely proclaimed to be the beacon of freedom and blueprint for democracy in the world today, is working against them.
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