.- On
the fourth anniversary of the Venezuela’s politico-military crisis of
April 11, 2002, Archbishop Jose Baltazar Porras of Merida criticized
the government’s attempts to “re-write” the history of those “very
confusing events,” and said that both parties involved in the crisis
share responsibility.
The archbishop,
who was the mediator during the political crisis that edged President
Hugo Chavez out of power for a short time, recalled that the events
“were very confusing and the responsibility for good and evil falls to
both parties, but what we have seen since then is an epic re-writing of
the story with a desire to simply and unostentatiously make criminals
out to be heroes and victims and those had absolutely no responsibility
out to be bloodthirsty.”
In an interview
on Venezuelan radio, Archbishop Porras said he did not agree with the
manner in which the government celebrated the events of April 11.
“What it’s doing is making the breach wider,” he said, and making
people become emotional and irrational, “rather than bring the serenity
that a moment like this demands.” To celebrate and re-write the
events brings more hurt to some and makes others blinder, the
archbishop added. “This is the wrong path,” he warned.
“The right to
life is above any ideology, it is sacred, above any law,” Archbishop
Porras continued, and it is the focal point for putting things into
perspective again, “so that we don’t become a country of irrational
people acting simply and unostentatiously on our emotions and not on
what in reality things demand of us.”
The archbishop
said the events of April 11 show what happens when leaders act outside
the social and political order and when there is no balance of powers
to neutralize the normal tendency of those who are leaders to grasp for
more power. “We are reaping what we have sown,” he said.
Archbishop
Porras expressed regret at the “very high distrust” Venezuelans have
for public officials and called for autonomy between the country’s
different branches of government, warning that consolidating power in
one branch would in no way contribute to bringing the country back
together again.
He also
emphasized the need to recover the moral values necessary to overcome
the crisis facing Venezuela. The only way to reestablish trust, he
said, is to overcome what he called “cruel individualism,” which never
leads to peace.
Venezuela archbishop criticizes government attempts to distort truth about April 11th crisis
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