On Friday (Nov, 9th), while I was making some codes and organizing a bunch of information my boss gave me, I updated my browser and read the headlines “troubles at UCAB”(my university). The office right next to mine belongs to a former classmate so I quickly informed her about the headline and we immediately put our cell phones and the gmail chat (we’re not allowed to use messenger at the office, of course…) to work. We made a quick mental list of the friends that could be there in order to get some information about them and the situation.All we could see was some random images of National Guards walking against a bunch of students right at the doors of our beloved campus. Next, the students running away as they could, climbing the bars to get inside the campus again and that familiar white smoke (of the tear gas bombs) in the parking line. I imagine that just as the things looks on TV and pictures on the net, my dad’s office must be pretty much filled with that nasty smoke but luckily, he’s out of town at the moment.
First person who answered my messages was one of my best friends “I came back home before everything started, I’m seeing it on TV and just can’t believe it…”. Second, a guy who I worked with last year “I’m not at the university but I will tell you everything when I get there”- I answer back – “Have you seen what’s happening? Don’t go there now…”- But I know it’s useless to make such request. My once classmate, now co-worker and I would also wanted to go there and we don’t even know what for. I guess seeing our campus so vulnerable definitely touched a very sensitive nerve on us; because even considering this was not the first time our campus is surrounded by police or army forces, this was the first time the tension broke, and the violence started.
Back home, at night, I searched the internet and asked the few students from UCAB that I have online about the events. All I know now it’s some random stories about students running from tear gas after trying to block a street just outside my campus.
I’m convinced that the Venezuelan situation it’s so complicated plus there are so many people filled with desires to distort the facts (not only from the government) that you cannot possible know what really happened unless you were there, and even so…
With that been said, I will write here the opinions of two friends I talked over msn last night. One of them was insanely mad with the National Guard … “how dare they to treat us like that?” and the other, just felt sad and disappointed in general: his concerns goes way much farther than those repression episodes: “it all started because some silly radicals started to burn stuff… I’m so sick of radicalism everywhere”.
I did not knew what to answer to any of them, I tend to share that general pessimism that friend has lately, instead of just blaming the Chavez supporters group or the police or the army; I simply regret the whole situation that makes this kind of episodes possible.
About the picture: taken at the entrance of one of my university' cafeterias, it shows part of the students creativity when it comes to protest. Notice that the Che poster has a white hand on his forehead, and besides that it pretends to be an example of how our university would be like if the reform is approved and Chavez continues to play with the country: a campus filled with blind Che admires and lack of food, and free thinking.