Chavista sympathizers commemorate the anniversary of the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez in Caracas on January 23. Matias Delacroix (AP)
"A collective emotion may not be ignoble," wrote Jorge Luis Borges, who said he was skeptical of politics, on August 25, 1944, the date of the liberation of Paris.
Comparable emotions, outpourings of joy and faith in the future filled the streets of a few Latin American cities on many occasions during the 20th century.
I was a child when Caracas went mad with the flight of General Pérez Jiménez, the cowardly tyrant who bloodied and plundered Venezuela during the 1950s.
Last January 23rd marked the 64th anniversary of the flight of the Douglas C-54 that, in the wee hours of the morning, led the infamous man and his retinue of uniformed thugs to seek refuge in Santo Domingo.
Gabriel García Márquez, then a reporter in Caracas, wrote insurmountable chronicles of the dawning days of our democracy, so vilified later and today apparently lost forever.
Chavismo-madurismo, spawn of anti-democratic coup plotters, has never known how to appropriate the anniversary.
And to tell the truth, lately, neither has the Venezuelan opposition.
Certainly, those events seem distant today, with nothing exciting and useful to say to the young people who, inside and outside the country, today suffer the tragedy that has led seven million compatriots into exile.
They will help me to comment on a book that I would recommend as complementary reading in any political science study plan.
It was written, already in his old age, by a Venezuelan politician, a former parliamentarian in the republic who was born in 1958 and who, in his youth, was a brave and selfless fighter against the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez.
His name is not remembered today and does not claim any paragraph in the dictionary of Venezuelan history of the Polar Foundation.
His name was Jorge Dáger, his ancestor was Lebanese and he was born in Guárico, the heart of Venezuela.
His story begins at dawn in October 1952. Dáger contemplates, stupefied and indignant, the pool of blood left by the murder, which occurred just a few hours ago and at the hands of the political police of the dictatorship, of Dr. Leonardo Ruíz Pineda, general secretary of the Democratic Action Party (AD), the social democratic formation founded by Rómulo Bentacourt in 1941. A military clique overthrew, in 1948, the constitutional president Rómulo Gallegos and established a bloodthirsty and rapacious dictatorship.
Ruíz Pineda was an extremely cunning conspirator and had assumed the clandestine leadership of the resistance to the military dictatorship.
His leadership skills and his contacts among the young army officers imposed an erroneous policy of "prompt return" that only led to failed military attempts and armed actions without hope of success, carried out by courageous civilian militants.
With Ruíz Pineda dead, the resistance continued to exhaust itself in violent actions that sought to relaunch the “AD will return” strategy soon.
Dáger's account, written many years after the events, reaches its climax in the insane action that sought to kidnap en masse the military junta and a group of its ministers.
The occasion is the inauguration of a large vehicle exhibition and sale room, very close to the University City.
The young resisters, including Dáger, plan to storm the room during the ceremony.
None, however, have stopped to think about what they will do once they manage to subdue the board and its partners.
To do this they must first prevail over a whole regiment of military escorts.
While reviewing the phases of the action, a few hours before the ceremony, each of the conspirators becomes aware of how crazy everything is and how bloody the outcome can be. But the macho fear of wrinkling in the imminence of what they know will be a massacre silences them. They are already raking the bolts of their insufficient weapons and preparing to board their vehicles when a young woman, respected by all for her courage in previous actions, stops them and with Homeric eloquence dissuades them from continuing with that madness.
From that moment on, Dáger narrates how the need to win “political allies, not followers of a suicide lodge” grows among the young people of the resistance.
The lightning protest and propaganda actions that they then coordinate with the Communist Youth are only the beginning of the slow, apostolic task of recruiting people from all walks of life: shop assistants, high school students, liberal professionals, construction workers, oil unionists, school teachers.
The "bad meeting" with the young communists is disapproved by the leadership in exile, including Betancourt himself, but the logic of camaraderie on the ground ends up prevailing.
This disposition to harmony between the factors dissatisfied with the regime and the gradual way in which, starting from the general desolation, these young people grow the collective spirit willing to reconquer democracy provides the most inspiring vignettes of
Witness of exception: in the resistance 1948-1955
(Centauro, Caracas, 1979).
They are “slices of life” of anonymous activists, recovered with elegance and wisdom by a Venezuelan democrat who in 1952, like many other young Venezuelans today, came to think that everything was irretrievably lost.
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