The historic headquarters of the Caracas Pedagogical Institute.
When Salvador Allende died by his own hand in the heat of our America’s most heinous military coup of the 20th century, Venezuela’s 1973 presidential election was less than 90 days away.
The largest faction of the Venezuelan left, all recently defeated in their Fidelist attempts to seize power with arms, now went to the elections with a candidate with hypocritical looks, manners and speeches – José Vicente Rangel. His supporters sought an unlikely electoral path to achieve a socialism that, they proclaimed, would be democratic in a Caribbean country very different from that of Luis Emilio Recabarren.
Now, after the bloody end of Chilean popular unity, the Venezuelan Allendistas – that’s what I think you could call them today after half a century – marched to the election with only half their hearts. The outcome of the Chilean trial seemed to prove that the Leninist and radical left were right: they would achieve nothing with the votes.
Almost all Allendists were active in a major split from the old Communist Party led by Teodoro Petkoff. With a moderate vocation, this group emerged on this side of Allende’s triumph in 1970 and was a natural fruit of the crisis of the world communist movement. It was thought at the time that with a bit of luck it would become a progressive social democratic force. That never happened.
The rest of the left, although also unarmed, remained Leninistically suspicious of “bourgeois democracy” and preferred to be vocal traveling companions of Rangel. Together, the two left-wingers did not achieve more than 9% of voting intentions.
All of them, including many moderates, were imbued with the vague idea that the group was accumulating and “preparing” forces, even if only for the “bourgeois electoral farce,” although it was not clear for what. Discouragement dominated.
In this period of defeated guerrillas, the certainty of a decisive class confrontation, which in an indefinite but unstoppable time would once again elevate the struggle to the “hour of the ovens,” did not let the Left down. They went to the damn elections “in the meantime and just in case,” as one union leader famously said.
Everything I said was nothing more than a reflection of the never-ending Latin American debate about the forms of struggle. Pinochet’s coup and Allende’s death immediately destroyed the arguments of both formations.
Of course there were expressions of rejection and there was no shortage of former guerrilla commanders offering to fly to Chile with their combat experience. But these extravagances, as well as the solidarity slogans, were drowned out within days by the final spurt of Carlos Andrés Pérez’s overwhelming election campaign. Less than a month later, the Yom Kippur War broke out in the Middle East.
The oil price boom, triggered by the embargo on supplies to the West agreed by the Arab OPEC countries in retaliation for their support for Israel, brought in more than $10 billion overnight in the first year of the Pérez government alone. This is how the non-partisan petrostate came into being, which so distressed the Venezuelan left that it became irrelevant.
25 years later, the entire Venezuelan left threw itself into the arms of Chávez, a renegade officer and coup leader like Pinochet, and merged forever with the civil service of a military and kleptocratic dictatorship.
From across the continent, the young people of my generation had chronicled the milestones of a decade that began with the Cuban Revolution and ended with the 1970 sugar harvest fiasco. In between, May in Paris, twice-shocking Prague, the death of Che Guevara and the Tlatelolco massacre. The wars in Central America had not yet broken out; We only had Chile to dream about and we traveled there in thousands. With Galeano, Serrat and Los supermachos de Rius, a great Mexican, in the suitcase.
I turned 21 and was locked up with almost a hundred young people in the Venezuelan embassy in Santiago, where curfews were still in effect. We waited for the military junta to authorize the arrival of a Venezuelan Air Force plane that would take us home. One of us turned gray overnight after being mistakenly shot twice while in custody at the National Stadium. The soldiers mistook his Caracas accent for Cuban and tortured him. There was talk of summary executions in Valdivia. Then, one very long evening, a girl from Maracaibo named Belén Atencio shared what was the first news of the Chilean mission for almost everyone, including me.
In 1936, Venezuela struggled out of darkness after 27 years of the barbaric dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. The general who took command surprised everyone with his willingness to lead the transition to political democracy. The young democrats who soon took over the scene made agreements with General López Contreras that were previously unthinkable.
One of these young people, the writer Mariano Picón Salas, after returning from a long exile in Santiago, proposed an agreement on technical assistance in educational matters with the socialist government of Arturo Alessandri.
Picón Salas admired Andrés Bello, the Venezuelan humanist and grammarian, considered the architect of Chilean republican institutions, founder of his university, great educator and legislator. He believed that studying the pedagogical ideas of Andrés Bello, who died in exile, was the best antidote to the toxic and militaristic Bolívar cult. In this region of tyrants, petty doctors, bad poets and epic historians, we must build and educate a country, he said in a letter to Rómulo Betancourt in 1932. At that time, less than 20% of the school-age population was enrolled in any school. School.
The visit of the Chilean educational mission took place in 1937 and became a historic milestone on the road to democracy. The Chilean educators stayed in Venezuela for more than four months and worked hard with the best Venezuelan social reformers – health doctors, school teachers – and in the end initiated the creation of the Pedagogical Institute of Caracas, modeled on the Santiago system, its nucleus quickly became the best public secondary school system we have ever had. At least ten generations of Venezuelans were forged in it until 1999, when a paratrooper commander arrived and ordered it to stop.
When I remember the night of the curfew in Santiago 50 years ago, Belén Atencio is an eloquent, thin girl wearing bangs. And he says: “The Chilean mission brought us back to Andrés Bello.” Completely.”
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