VENEZUELA, CONCENTRATION FIELD: "The cruelest tones of evil ..." Gustavo Tovar-Arroyo
 DolarToday /Oct 20, 2018 @ 1:00 pm

     



The unfair prison
I know Leopoldo López since adolescence. Although always stood out for his intellectual sharpness and culture, he was not exactly a young library, on the contrary, he was a tenacious adventurer. He was always restless and reckless. I remember him especially for his extreme adventures and because as an athlete he always explored very complicated experiences alone, those that require an individual a maximum effort of mental resistance, physical tenacity, concentration and discipline. Paradoxes of fate, those extreme experiences of youth, which kept him several times on the edge between life and death, would have prepared him for the most cruel and inhuman of all his experiences: the unjust jail. The Cubans could not break it, on the contrary, they made it a world emblem of resistance to Chavez infamy.

"I have known evil"
 Years of friendship have allowed Leopoldo and me to engage in conversations of all kinds, we were always officiating in the ritual of dialogue: philosophy, politics, history, Venezuelan landscapes, extreme excursions, art, recurrent topics, although invariably the most crucial conversation inspiring has always been and will be the challenging urge to reinvent Venezuela, the greatest challenge of our generation that now has clearly become the most extreme adventure of our lives. When Leopoldo left Ramo Verde he sent me a voice message in which he said: "I have known the evil, the most ruthless and cruel form of human malice," I knew immediately that his experience must have been unimaginably heartbreaking and execrable, Leopoldo had known the true and most evil face of Chavism and his imported Castroite perversity. I will never forget those words.


The worst enemy of man
 I'm in Warsaw, I'm sitting down to write this installment in a café in the historic center of the reconstructed Old Town, a city that literally went haywire after the Nazi attacks and the bestial retaliation suffered by the Poles for their attempted insurrection. One can not believe that so much urban beauty - until a few decades ago - had been dust, ruin and human waste. I just went through the unlikely memories of the extermination camps in Auschwitz. It was an experience of dread and suffocation, bitter. My imagination, I admit, was not prepared for such horror. There were times when I felt that I fainted. There is no doubt: the worst enemy of Man has unfortunately been man. How can you be capable of so much evil?


They call it crimes against humanity
 Visiting Auschwitz in the current Venezuelan circumstances was doubly painful and disconsolate, I understood a lot about our drama. The human monstrosity is not new, it is historical. The jurists call it "crime against humanity"; We suffer from the people and call them slavery, ruin, exile. They are wounds of desolation tattooed in the soul of civilization. I could not avoid associating the suffering of our political prisoners, most of them my friends, while I walked the painful dungeons of Auschwitz. Saving the inclement differences between the two agonies, I felt the suffering, crying and despair of our prisoners of conscience, their despair, their frustration, their pain.
 Evil is universal, its methods are also universal.


Between the quill and the ash
 However, evil has tonalities. I saw them in Auschwitz. I tried to write a poem-poetry is the most reliable verbal representation of the tears of the soul-but I could not. The reality was atrociously poetic, you just had to describe not metaphorize. Metaphors would be like impostors. Here poetry is cursed. The first image that one finds of the cruel tonalities of evil is the barb. The extermination camp is surrounded by thousands of square kilometers of barbed wire, crossing the door of that hell the tones of cruelty, as in Venezuela, intensify. Overcrowding (as in Venezuela), cruel treatment (as in Venezuela), suffocation by hanging (as in Venezuela), drowning in water (which both the Nazis and communists call "suicide", as in Venezuela), execution (as in Venezuela ), isolation in airless chambers (Block 11 in Auschwitz, La Tumba in Venezuela) where four inmates remained tightly stopped for hours until, out of desperation, they devoured each other's bites to reach more crumbs of air. The darkest, most intense and fatal shade of evil is the gas chamber and the crematorium, where the "enemy" is reduced to ashes (yes, to dust as delivered to Oscar Pérez and his companions). Between the quill and the ashes, I discovered the cruelest tones of evil.


Concentration camp: Venezuela
 I wrote to Leopoldo while at Auschwitz. He wanted to tell him what he had seen, to tell him that he now understood the dimensions of his comment about evil. Venezuela has its own wound of evil tattooed in the spirit. And yes, to say that Chavismo had turned the whole country into a concentration camp, a nation between the quill and the ashes, subjected to hunger, suffocation, disease and all the unimaginable shades of crime: they burn live people, mutilate , they commit suicide, they hang, they cruelly leave a nation and their children without food or medicine, all for a cruel belief, all for a monstrous need to subdue those who are not chavistas, that plague. I believe that evil has been imposed on us by Cuban heirs of Stalinist and Nazi practices, perfected by them, it is not Venezuelan, in any case, the Venezuelan evil is chavista.
 When we liberate the country, we will eradicate it.



Evil or freedom
 I also wanted to confirm to Leopoldo from Auschwitz that his sacrifice and resistance were not in vain, there was and there is a great world awakening of conscience, vital for the urgent national liberation. Finally, I wanted to say yes, that we would reinvent the country, that just as I had seen the tonalities of evil, I had seen the reconstruction of nations, but above all that I had seen the human spirit reappear from the ashes. And that adventure: the reinvention of Venezuela, the most sublime and challenging of our lives, despite the injuries and the tortures, despite the extreme experiences and pain, is intact. They will never be able to overcome our immense desire to reinvent Venezuela, no matter how many Castroites or Chavistas they may be. Never again will his evilness defeat our dream of freedom.
Never. It is not poetry, I saw it, we embody it, we are intact, we continue ..