A few weeks ago, Argentine journalist Martín Caparrós recalled at an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of Spanish newspaper El País that Venezuela, in 1964, was the first place in the world to abolish the death penalty. These were the times of Marshal Juan Crisóstomo Falcón, and the word “federation” had become the epitome of the supposed solution to all the nation’s ills in a young, devastated, and empty republic.
Although this was true on paper, in practice we had Antonio Guzmán Blanco, trained in the federalist ranks and who became the supreme leader of the Liberal Cause, decreeing in 1872 the execution by firing squad of his former ally, the caudillo Matías Salazar. In less than a decade, this declaration of principles had been easily overturned by one of its promoters.
The self-proclaimed revolutions continued to undermine national life until Cipriano Castro and his crony Juan Vicente Gómez defeated them all and proclaimed the restoration of liberal principles. “New men, new ideals, new procedures,” declared the man who moved the presidential office from the Yellow House to Miraflores Palace. But, having consolidated his regime and enjoying his days for vanity and festive revelry, in 1907, amidst delirium and a display of brute force, he ordered the execution of his great opponent, General Antonio Paredes, once the Army frustrated a supposed new revolution.
After sending him to the firing squad, Castro did not remain in power for long. At the end of 1908, Gómez toppled him with a palace coup, justifying the murder of Paredes as the reason his former crony was never allowed to enter Venezuela again.
The Gómez regime (1908-1935) was cruel. It tortured and imprisoned its opponents. However, he was careful to avoid such incidents. He defeated them in prisons and in the military fray to maintain his sepulchral order. It wasn’t until the next military dictatorship in the 1950s that news emerged of what we might call summary executions of members of the Acción Democrática resistance and union leaders. Thus, Leonardo Ruiz Pineda, Antonio Pinto Salinas, and Luis Hurtado remained in the collective memory when neighborhoods were named after them. The tortures inflicted by the fearsome Seguridad Nacional or the days spent in the Guasina concentration camp became literature or anecdotes in a historical thread woven by this type of political violence.
Perhaps the great Venezuelan tragedy has not only been the repetition of violence, but the inability to fully transform its tragedies into republican memory.
Later, the great unifying word was Democracy. Under this system, the country had achieved greater pluralism, freedoms, and social development. That said, excesses were committed during the counterinsurgency campaign, and thus, among others, the names of Alberto Lovera and Jorge Rodríguez Sr. remained, cases that were openly denounced in the media and for which some form of justice was sought.
In the 1980s, we witnessed the extrajudicial killings known as the “false positives” of the El Amparo Massacre and the repressive chaos of El Caracazo, a moment when the system should have been more deeply confronted with its errors and adopted more profound forms of reparation. Although political violence did not disappear with democracy, it had ceased to be accepted as a natural aspect of public life. The problem was that many of its wounds were poorly healed, if at all, and festered into resentment.
The return of horror
The 1999 Constitution was born with the idea of refounding the Republic and making it “Bolivarian.” Initially, this meant defeating corruption, building a “participatory democracy,” and erasing all traces of what they began to call the “Fourth Republic.” This refounding ultimately meant reusing and multiplying the evils of the past and waging a systematic battle against democratic resistance.
The cruelty quickly became apparent: the impunity and flippant treatment of the April 11 murders; the shootings in Plaza Altamira in December of that same year; the political assassination of the controversial prosecutor Danilo Anderson and the subsequent witch hunt; the exponential increase in repression in 2014, 2017 and 2019, and the widespread fear following July 28, 2024. This cruelty is replete with numerous new stories of deaths under the indifference or custody of the State, from Franklin Brito to Fernando Albán, Raúl Baduel, Rodolfo González “El Aviador”, the extrajudicial executions, and the cases we still don’t know about.
The ordeal Carmen Navas endured to learn about her son, Víctor Hugo Quero, and the cruelty with which his death was concealed have shaken Venezuelan society, which sees mothers as its embodiment of grief and national outrage, and which finds in women its greatest source of peaceful resistance.
As an old folk song, collected by Aquiles Nazoa and sung by Simón Díaz in his second volume of Tonadas (1976): “Little girl who embroiders the white cloth, little girl who weaves on your loom, embroider for me the map of Venezuela and a little handkerchief to cry with.” Perhaps the great Venezuelan tragedy has not only been the repetition of violence, but the inability to fully transform its tragedies into republican memory.
Every time pain becomes merely an anecdote or a slogan, the country remains haunted by the same monsters and ghosts. But, just as we have had this tradition of assassination and political cruelty, which today are multiplied in family tragedy and shared horror, on each occasion Venezuelans have been deeply moved by injustice, and this has led us to mobilize to transform darkness into brighter moments for our republic. May the future be not only bright, but much more lasting.