No Country for no ethical people.
By Gustavo Coronel (former PDVSA's board of directors member, 1976)
There are cases of rapid evolution and admiration. A young Japanese could have seen the ships of Admiral Perry into Tokyo Bay and towards the end of his life, could have seen the act of surrender of the Imperial Army General Douglas McArthur, aboard the USS Missouri. Perry's visit took place in 1854 and opened the doors of Japan to Western influences. The surrender of Japan in 1945, led him to integrate the modern block, similar to the western world countries. In those ninety years Japan became feudal state into a modern, industrialized country. He abolished the shogunate and restored the Meiji dynasty, about the same time when warlords prevailed in Venezuela Monagas brothers and the cruel Venezuelan Federal War (1859-1863) was in the horizon. In that same 90 years, Venezuela progressed slowly and only in 1935, entered modernity due the government of Eleazar López Contreras and sanitarians and physicians as Tejera, Gabaldon, Baldo and Garcia Maldonado, who defeated the plagues and epidemics that characterize backward peoples.
A whole country, Japan had changed dramatically for the better, in the course of a long human life. A whole country, Venezuela, has been destroyed in just 15 years by a gang of thugs ignorant and inept. And the involution unfortunately takes place much faster than the way evolution. Build is a painful and long process, destroy a brief act of folly and wickedness.
I reflect on this and I think the act of building requires leadership and vision persevering in time while the act of destruction is usually carried out by a massive populated guided by the lower desires. In the case of Venezuela 1999-2014, the extreme rapidity of destruction and unprecedented magnitude required a bankruptcy of the Venezuelan collective ethics as never have thought possible. In the process of national destruction have been involved: (1) members called Chavez-Castro, a group of fanatics determined to go back to the nineteenth century in the XXI century; (2) a large mass of poor people, eager to get out of poverty quickly and ready to give allegiance to whoever makes a promise, not thinking that there is no way out of poverty than by way of education and work ; (3), a business and banking class of known names but rotten body and soul has been filled the pockets of oil money at the expense of the welfare of the nation; (4), the Armed Forces, which has been prostituted with an amazing facility, including the massive inroads in drug trafficking, turning the system into a narco-state; and, (5), a bureaucracy that has taken the ineptitude and complicity of the group of fanatics in power to loot the treasury with impunity, demolishing institutions and violating constitution and laws.
I think it's up statistically documented this great mass of accomplices, premeditated one another beset by the desire to quit taking shortcuts down, sometime constituted the majority in the country. Otherwise it can not explain the speed with which it has carried out the disaster. But rigged to this mass, we had large groups of Venezuelans who, without agreeing with the methods of the regime, have let the disaster take place for many reasons: indifference, laziness or desire to continue acting against theft of white gloves, as if we were under a democratic system. The truth is that Venezuelans who have defended democracy and freedom with vigor and determination, attached to the ethics learned in their homes and their teachers have been harassed by enemies and "neutrals", making it very difficult for the nation find its way to recovery.
We think of ethics as a compass, a guide to action: do not steal, do no harm, to add to the collective good, carefully manage the public purse, to be good citizens. Those who take up the banner ethics are a minority in Venezuela and it is necessary to face the terrifying reality. We can not keep paying him homage to the virtues of poverty, we can not keep excluding those who wanted progress for the sake of those who remain in the most terrible backwardness. The street children are not children of the fatherland and the victims are dignified. They are our people that needs to move from category to category of dispossessed citizens. Poverty is a disease, not a virtue. Ignorance is not a nice feature of our short cut, it is a terrible affliction that causes hunger, disease and crime.
Ethics must raise the flag held high in Venezuela, if we want to salvage the remains of this country and begin the long road to its reconstruction.
Gustavo Coronel.
