Deadly Party or the criminalization of Venezuelan writers

”Change of sign:
The suicidal stupidity,
Without even noticing,
Grasp of power.”

Patrea Mea A4,
Ana Blandiana

The people of Venezuela are suffering the oppression of the cruelest and inhumane regime that Latin America has ever lived: the Nicolás Maduro dictatorship. Venezuelans struggle to regain our freedom, our democracy, and the Rule of Law.

To exemplify our reality let me share with the readers, a recent event that might remind them of the recent history of these European regions, as I write from Romania. An unlawful and arbitrary arrest, that shows in a glimpse what Venezuelans are struggling against. Two Venezuelans, a poet and a writer, husband and wife, were arrested and spent the night in jail, accused by the de facto attorney general of the crime of hate speech.

María Milagros Mata-Gil, an endearing and wonderful talent for the Venezuelan culture, has the vitality of the young 70-year-old woman she is. As a writer and as a prestigious teacher in Spanish, literature, and Latin, she is a Member of the Venezuelan Academy of the Spanish Language.

Her good influence is reflected in the hymn – which she wrote- of the Municipality of Heres in the Bolívar State. María has had quite a prolific life. She has published many novels and essays and has dedicated an important part of her life to research activities in literature. I wonder if Ana Blandiana might perhaps enjoy reading some of María´s essays, like Eclipse Over a City With No Names, The Rebellion of the Fictions, or Heroes and Graves. Or maybe one of María´s novels, like The Manuscripts of Lyon, Memories of an Ancient Spring, or The House in Flames. María´s husband, Juan Muñoz, is a poet. His nickname is Moriche.

What María did a few days ago was to post a few words on Facebook which led to her arrest. One might ask: What was so atrocious in those written words that resulted in her and her husband´s arrest?. Please, let me tell you. The title is Deadly Party, a satire of an ostentatious wedding, amid the restrictions due to COVID19, to which that same de facto attorney general -who now feels the offended victim- went to.

• The central point of the writing is as follows: “The point is that the desire for social representation of the newly dressed is as great as their narcissism, a variant of stupidity. So, they sent and received 800 invitations. They hired 200 people to manage the catering, the bar and the service, ushers, security, bodyguards, ushers, decorators. And that’s not to mention the outside staff associated with the guests at the gargantuan event… They say the wedding planner, a well-known businesswoman, had COVID symptoms, but she was not willing to lose a six-figure high dollar contract… Let’s eat and drink, then we’ll die.”

Many people that attended the wedding are now being treated for COVID19, and rumors say already 19 deaths have resulted among the guests, and at least 3 deaths have been confirmed. Apparently, the general prosecutor´s mother has been hospitalized for COVID19 after also attending the coronawedding.

According to the Director of the prestigious Casla Institute in the Czech Republic, Tamara Suju, there are already 523 people who attended the coronawedding infected with COVID19. It is important to take into account that the health system in Venezuela is collapsed and no oxygen nor beds available. Furthermore, the Maduro regime has been blocking the entrance of 12 million doses of COVID19 vaccines that are reserved through the COVAX mechanism.

Blocking millions of vaccines for the people while the high ranking members of the Maduro hierarchy have already been vaccinated. There is an estimated that calculates the real figures of daily infected is 15 times the official number, that would put Venezuela in 27,000 infected per day while I write these words. The most conservative calculation done by the Institute for Metric Evaluation @IHM_UW is as of 8 times the official figures, which would result in at least 14,400 infected each day.

So as anyone can understand, the irresponsible behavior of the powerful is what María wrote about in a country that has had a Complex Humanitarian Crisis since before COVID19 hit the stage. For publishing her words, María assumes the duty to show what is happening in Venezuela in these times of pain, scarcity, and suffering –produced intentionally by the de facto regime of Nicolás Maduro.

She and her husband embark in the tradition of Václav Havel, when he reassures “the duty to tell the truth about the world where (the writer) lives, to talk about its horrors and its miseries”, in the same course as the one the great Romanian poet Ana Blandiana calls: to defend “those values that the authorities want to destroy in order to win”. In the Prolog of the Spanish Edition of Mea Patria A4, Viorica Patea refers to the writing of Blandiana as “a form of resistance before the nonsense of the world that surrounds her and between those forces that systematically annihilate the individual.”

Yes, in Venezuela our writers are living testimony of the atrocities and the Terror. Terror with a capital letter, as capital crimes have been and are committed over the Venezuelan people by a soulless dictator. Crimes Against Humanity the Fact-Finding Mission Report of the United Nations Human Rights Commission qualifies them. Our writers, like so many other Venezuelans, are now in the tradition of the culture of resistance.

In the meantime, María and her husband, writer and poet, were presented before the court and now they are now under restrained liberty. They are forbidden to write publicly and they took away their phones. The German political analyst Georg Eickhoff, who was the Director of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Venezuela, wrote from Ukraine: “I don’t think they wanted to suppress the story of the »crown wedding«, on the contrary. They want to show that they can do what they want and that they can imprison whoever they want and release them whenever they want.”

María and Juan are now at home. It is sad to say this, but it could have been the worst. Like the story of my dear friend Fernando Alban who was detained, tortured, killed, and his corpse thrown from the tenth floor of the building of the secret police. And the crimes against Fernando were covered by Tarek William Saab who falsely claimed it was suicide, the same de facto general attorney that is now offended for being called by María for being part of the Deadly Party. Because in Venezuela, decency and reason are criminalized and punished, and the grass over the graves of the innocent reminds us not to surrender.

NOTE: Mario Massone is the special Envoy of Venezuela to Romania appointed by the Legitimate Government of Juan Guaidó and the National Assembly