Silence in The Silence

Fabricio Ojeda, leader of the Patriotic Junta, who achieved with many others Venezuelans the end of military dictatorship in January 23rd, 1958, which was ruled by Perez Jimenez. Ojeda’s legacy  is commemorated this week.  His role as a clandestine leader working unrecovered and knitting the fabric of freedom to open the country to democracy. He latter was betrayed by his allies who came from their exile in Unites States.

Ojeda and the political youth generation of the 1958 was blocked and prosecuted. All the left wing parties was excluded of the political access to executive power as part of a secret agreement to distribute power among the centre-right factions.  The context was the Cold War and that was a precondition of US to Venezuelan leaders in exile. This political agreement know as “Pacto de Punto Fijo” substituted the dictatorship and imposed a tutelage democracy that goes from 1958 until 1998, this period is called representative democracy. This “pact” works as a social controller to stop the popular aspiration to get full access to power. The intermediaries, calling themselves “representative”, hostage the power for personal gain, foreign benefits,  while the representative democracy drifted Venezuela into institutional chaos, transculturation and wilder open corruption for a long period of forty years. Fabricio Ojeda opposed this pact from the National Congress and understood that blockade was permanent. Then he resigned the Congress seat and go to the jungles as a guerrilla fighter. He was captured, tortured by the security forces trained by US military personal, and killed in jail, simulating suicide.

Human right violation keep happening under the complicit collaboration of the media-church-political parties. Several rebellions occurred and countless popular protest.  It is not until one of signatories of that exclusion pact, Rafael Caldera, gave the presidential seat to Hugo Chavez, who put an end to that system.

El Silencio (The Silence) is a very popular neighbourhood in Caracas , and is as well known as “23 de Enero” named after those  days of popular rebellion against the dictatorship of Pérez Jimenez.  This place was chosen to commemorate Fabricio Ojeda’s legacy.  During one minute of Silence in The Silence, all the attendees remember the events that 56 years ago opened an opportunity for the Venezuelan people but was taken away for the shake of an Venezuelan elite in conjunction with foreign powers.

Picture of ceremony of “one minute of silence” in  The Silence as remembrance of Fabricio Ojeda.

Viva Fabricio Ojeda