Armenian demonstration in Paris.
One of the many documentary sources of the genocide of which millions of Armenians were victims a little over a century ago, around this time of April, in 1915, is that of the Venezuelan military man Rafael Nogales Méndez.
His testimony occupies a prominent place in the history of the genocides of the 20th century because Nogales Méndez was a high-ranking officer commanding contingents of the Ottoman Imperial Army during World War I.
The massacres committed by the Ottoman Empire to an entire people at a time when many Armenians were also Turkish nationals, foreshadow the organized dehumanization that would be present less than twenty years later with the Holocaust.
All the more eloquent are the denunciations of the Armenian genocide contained in the autobiographical writings of Colonel Nogales in that they do not show any special sympathy for the Armenian people.
His Turkish comrades in arms dubbed him "the Christian dog" to extol his undeniable loyalty to the Ottoman flag during the war that Nogales fought with fierce efficiency in theaters as disparate as the Anatolian plateau, the Caucasus, and the Sinai Peninsula.
Just a few days ago, on the occasion that Armenians around the world dedicate to the memory of those April massacres, Washington, through the voice of Joe Biden, officially recognized the Armenian genocide, leaving behind forever the shameful American gimmicks about the issue.
Those gimmicks were originally founded on Turkey being a major NATO factor in containing Soviet Russia during the Cold War.
The so-called modern Turkey has always made loud diplomatic tantrums each time that the dark issue regains topicality when the big press raises it every cruel month of April for decades.
Proactively, the Armenian community watered by the United States and all of our America, as well as their organizations around the world, have not allowed those atrocities to be forgotten either.
On this occasion, Recep Erdogan's Angora has shouted its own thing again: that it was not an
ideological
plan
, that it was in no way a clear and cold “holy war” aimed at the extermination of a vast non-Islamic human group, but rather the fruit of excesses or omissions of very few military and local civil officials, dragged by a world warlike conflict.
One of those officers was my compatriot, Nogales Méndez, a fervent Catholic, a native of the state of Táchira, governor of provincial territories of the Ottoman Empire so ruthlessly subjugated by him that he came to earn the title of Nogales Bey.
A man of great literary gifts — go ahead — his book
Four Years Under the Half Moon
has fascinated generations of Venezuelan militarists, especially civilians, and lately, historians fond of Chavismo.
I suspect today that the trips and adventures that, whether true or false, figure in those memories, and the outspoken, Latin American cosmopolitanism "d'annunziano" that animate them, mitigated in the creole militarism, made of montoneras and cattle theft, the notion Venezuela being a fucking irrelevant oil camp at the mouth of the Orinoco River.
I now impart brief news of that Creole canagüey rooster that, like no one until today, managed to embody the ideals of our infamous militarism.
To begin with, Nogales Bey, born in the last quarter of the 19th century, was never, however, a man of montoneras. The scion of a wealthy family linked to German coffee marketing groups, from a very young age he trained in renowned military academies in Europe. At twenty he was accepted as an infantry lieutenant in the Spanish army and in 1898 saw action as a rifleman in the Spanish-American War. He drove boldly, he was decorated.
He hated - because of
rastacouere
, as he said - the dictatorship of Cipriano Castro and came to rehearse a guerilla war against Juan Vicente Gómez, but his thing was "real" wars, wars of movements, of great strategic decisions, and that's why At the outbreak of the First World War, he offered his experience to the France whose military glory he idolized.He wanted to be an active officer in the Battle of the Somme, but the French politely told him that for the South Americans they already had the Foreign Legion.
Germany treated him the same, but Nogales never wanted to renounce his nationality.
Eventually, one night in Sofia, a Bulgarian liaison officer put him in touch with General Otto von Sanders, the legendary military adviser to the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey fought in alliance with Germany, Nogales had a gift for languages and was
catire
— that's what Venezuelans call
Güeros
— so von Sanders judged, very racistly, that Nogales would shine among the Turkish officers.
They let him keep his Venezuelan nationality and sent him to Anatolia, the Caucasus.
Nogales actively participated in the siege and massacres of the citadel of Van, the Armenian enclave of a Christian minority that defended itself to the death of the Ottoman exterminating designs. In his memoirs he affirms what all war criminals affirm: that as far as he knew, his men never stooped to it, that his claims to superiority for the abuses against the Armenians triggered his relief and shipment to the Sinai Peninsula.
Nogales was the tenacious war supply officer in charge of the legendary Hijaz railway that Lawrence of Arabia and the Bedouins of Faisal I dynamited fortnightly. They respected each other from a distance and left a written record of it. By the end of the war, Nogales Bey had garnered many medals of valor, German and Turkish alike. In the twilight of his life, he returned to our America and, a soldier of fortune in Central America, fought, successfully and for a short time, the
Marines,
on behalf of Sandino.
As a young man, he had been a cowboy in Arizona, an arms smuggler in Mexico, and a gold digger in Alaska.
But he rebelled at the word adventurer and much more at the idea of the soldier of fortune.
He did not believe himself a mercenary.
He preferred to think of himself as a libertarian idealist, a follower, in cosmopolitanism and readiness for war, of Don Francisco de Miranda.
In a private letter, Nogales cites a phrase from Dr. Samuel Johnson as proof of this idea:
"Every man is less than a soldier if he has not been a soldier or faced the sea."
Nogales Bey died in Panama, forgotten by everyone, in 1936.
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