http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a212457.html
By: Zuleika Matamoros | Monday, 17/08/2015 01:12 PM | Printable version
And as someone who arrived without being invited we know the Operation of Liberation and Protection of the People (OLP). Among its first “actions” the “operation” in the mistreated and forgotten Cota 905 leaving a toll of 14 deaths and hundreds detained will remain in the memory, as will too the attack in the San Vicente neighbourhood in the state of Aragua or in the Panamericana[1]. The confusion and the amazement were the impressions of those of us that found out via the news broadcast of such actions. Above all those of us who live in the barriers and that suffer from the issue of insecurity in much smaller measure than the scourge of the violence associated with crime as a consequence of poverty.
The OLP presents us, by its methods, as a former law of vagrants and miscreants because it is directed exclusively at the people of the poor neighbourhoods, at the poor, a those eternally excluded, at those of us who have less opportunities. Will it be possible to end violence and insecurity if it doesn't attack the big drug traffickers who, like everywhere else in the world, flaunt their relationships with the local and international bourgeoisie, businesspeople, bankers, military and high government officials? Will it be able to get rid of the “bachaqueros”[2] or the street vendors while big articulated trucks cross the border with total impunity and that are escorted by high military officials from the accounts of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants affirm that are in macrobachaqueo? Will it be able to end common crime if the example that today's Political Leadership gives is the same that the bourgeoisie of always: corruption, impunity and abuse of power? Will we be able to get rid of malandraje[3], if it doesn't attack the corrupt people that took for themselves, and are still taking for themselves, the dollars of the nation, some as businesspeople and others as functionaries of the “revolution” and that have allowed Venezuela to be ruined and indebted?
The policy of “Lead to the underworld”
Social violence is a scourge that attacks the most vulnerable sectors of society. The neighbourhoods in which the working masses, whether they might be in the formal sector or not, live are those which suffer with particular intensity the phenomenon of social violence; especially that which manifests itself through crime. The door of the Morgue is full of poor people demanding justice without much hope of getting it.
The “answer” to insecurity and violence on behalf of those that have held Power has been for decades the same: seeing crime as a strictly individual problem and not social. The OLP acts against the “criminals of the poor neighbourhoods”, against the “bachaqueros”, against the students of public high schools and not against those who have put us in this profound crisis of grand proportions, for them there doesn't exist a possible OLP. They took 259 billion dollars from the nation (which highlights the embezzlement from CADIVI), they don't import the supplies necessary for production, they do disgusting business with the food of the people, they don't change the productive model because it attacks their interests; they generate poverty, hunger and misery and try to get rid of the consequences through repression and not the causes.
In the areas which are inhabited by those of us who live only by our work we suffer from criminal violence, institutional violence and violence from the bodies “of security” of the State today personified by the OLP. In the poorer neighbourhoods we live the forget, the indifference, the apathy, the crime, the exclusion, the need and today we relive, through the OLP, the terror, the mistreatment, the fear, the indignation, impotence.
Sometimes we wonder if by robbing a banker or an industrialist (a sector that has plundered the resources of our country, the resources of the people and that in their criminal accumulation of Capital leaves us with hospitals without supplies, with schools with major problems, with starvation wages), you could assassinate or execute the persons that committed a minor crime like the robbery of one of their cars is (like the recent case of Poliaragua[4]). It isn't my intention to justify one crime in relation to another, but is the life of the common (poor) criminal worth less than one of the trucks of a “smart-looking industrialist”? In the specific case of Aragua it was 4 lives for the truck of an industrialist.
Is the undercover implementation of the death penalty that criminalises poverty and tries to make you see as “just” those whose have filled their pockets not only through the exploitation but through embezzlement from the nation, that at the end of accounts is the embezzlement from the people, and their rights and that takes them to the abyss of exclusion and poverty.
Preventing a popular uprising?
Contradictorily those who today are in government and call themselves “the children of Chávez”, forget that they are there precisely because the people rose up against the disgrace that the governments of the “Pact of Punto Fijo”[5] were. Because not only were we excluded, without opportunities, but we were also those to whom they used to apply the law of vagrants and miscreants. That is to say that the same people that turned you into the excluded, used to make you into a criminal. So, one of the things that connected us to Chávez is that he precisely gave us the sensation that that wouldn't happen again, because in the first place he arrived with the firm intention of settling the social debt and because one of his first signs was precisely the stark criticism that he used to make to such an shameful law, precisely for criminalising poverty, abolished a little before his arrival to the presidency. We recovered together with Chávez our identity, we felt represented by him and we knew that his relationship with the people was the product of the respect for our struggles waged against the exploitative and repressive State.
Today, in the midst of a profound crisis that has us not only making humiliating queues, but immersed each time further in a poverty that advances in an accelerated manner, the Government's response is repression. In the market queues to get food we see today officials of the GNB[6] or of the PNB[7], that besides mocking the people by letting in their little friends without lining up or taking themselves the products in large quantities, they are quick to arrest anyone that gets angry and dares to protest in a loud voice. What exposes itself is that the OLP is the form that the State has found to avoid that discontent turns into the “shake-up” that we are still waiting for Maduro to make. These conditions that we are passing through today demonstrate to us that the Government hasn't had the capacity to answer our needs. Our purchasing power is totally destroyed, the feeling is of ungovernability.
The “fashion”of the high officials together with the big businesspeople that enrich themselves with the dollars handed over by the government at the preferential price[8] is to try to manipulate us; some with the inane argument of “Economic War” and “infiltrated paramilitarism”. A dangerous breeding ground for xenophobia; the others with the blatant lie “that they need more dollars to produce and import” when in more than a decade they haven't produced anything and they have made disproportionate importation and speculative practice a big business.
The contradictory and sadly paradoxical thing is that the same government that has given that prerogative to the bourgeoisie and that has let them act without control because they are part of the same business, tries today to repress the people that suffer the consequences of that perverse and mafia-style action and are those who have sustained them as Political Leadership. They have forgotten about Chávez the anticapitalist, about Chávez the rebel, about the Chávez that said “Here you can smell sulphur”, about the Chávez that said “I put all my money on the workers “ that gave birth to this Bolivarian People in struggle, because we are sick and tired of the Adeco[9] and Copeyano[10] governments of yesterday and is due to this that we are outraged when the present government for whom we casted our votes to continue on the path of transformation, of the transition to socialism, today appears more like “them” than “us”.
The hypocrisy of the opposition of the Right
Today we listen to an opposition that criticises the OLP in a stark way, in its grim dispute for the votes “of the poor that is angry and could abstain”.
They are the same people that have been mistaken as always because in truth they believe that the people have a short memory, they overlook the fact that we were the ones that recognised that same “Law of vagrants and miscreants” that was the legal subterfuge that criminalised poverty for 58 years and that remained in the collective memory as the violations of the rights to liberty, to life, as raids without judicial orders, as executions, as assassinations and was the legal shortcut that they used for decades to deprive revolutionary political leaders of liberty. This law was maintained in force by the same people that today try to manipulate us lifting the fake banner of “human rights”.
It is the criminalisation of poverty, devised by the governments of Pact of Punto Fijo who are the true miscreants that deserve to be in prison for the crimes they committed. They are the same slackers that have lived from the theft and embezzlement from the nation. Only citing one example, we have Ledezma[11], who filled with grief for the families in the Caracas slums, as well as the families of the prisoners of the Retén de Catia[12] and for the mothers of students while he used to fill his pockets with the money of the people.
The painful thing of all this is that the government with its implementation of the OLP appears that tries to act in the same way that the high officials of the Venezuela of the Fourth Republic. It appears that agrees with that premise that says “that to make serve the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past”. They dare to qualify as a scourge the “bachaqueros” who are products of a crisis for which they are responsible.
It would seem, the high command of the “revolutionary” government has lost all reflection with relation to those that live only through their labour, to the excluded, in short with the fundamental base that sustains this revolutionary process...
...Our dead, our people and our revolution don't deserve it...
For analysis of the OLP check out this interview
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11489
[1] A roadside community that was raided by the OLP in July, 2015
[2] People that hoard government-subsidized products (i.e. corn flower, toilet paper, etc.) and resell them at exorbitant black market rates
[3] Thugs
[4] A case in which the State pólice of Aragua were implicated in extra-judicial killing of car thieves
[5] Pact of Punto Fijo was agreed between representatives of Venezuela's three main political parties in 1958: Acción Democrática, COPEI and Unión Republicana Democrática. The pact bound the parties to limit Venezuela’s political system to an exclusive competition between two parties and the distribution of power between the two main political parties.
[6] National Bolivarian Guard
[7] National Bolivarian Police Force
[8] Venezuela currently has different Exchange rates for the U.S. dollar with those used for necessary imports being the cheapest.
[9] Acción Democrática party
[10] Copei - Independent Political Electoral Organization Committee, is a social christian party.
[11] Venezuelan opposition Mayor and longtime rightwing politician, Antonio Ledezma
[12] a Caracas prison
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