“Venezuela greets the university students of the world who are protesting in favor of Palestine…”, expressed this Sunday the constitutional president of the Bolivarian Republic, Nicolás Maduro Moros, from his first TikTok Live, and where he stated that the student actions against the genocide of Israel in the Gaza Strip is an example of dignity despite the police repression against them:
“University students of the United States (USA), my admiration for you,” expressed the head of state together with the first combatant woman, Cilia Flores, with whom he analyzed the brutal repression of the Joe Biden government against the multiple student demonstrations in university campuses throughout that country, where they peacefully demand the cancellation of shipments of North American weapons to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the total and definitive cessation of the massacres of innocent Palestinian civilians.
“In the US they raided more than 60 universities, they break in, destroy them, beat them, shoot rubber bullets, and the only thing the students do is asking the US not to support the genocide against the Palestinian people. And we join the voice of you, brave students, your voice is our voice and we feel represented by you. “Keep going!” said Maduro.
“What would they say if in Venezuela we forcibly removed students and teachers who were protesting?” asked the head of state, whose response came from the voice of Cilia Flores: “we would be accused of being a dictatorship and a regime.”
The first combatant woman recalled that, in Venezuela, this repression that American students experience now was also experienced during the governments of the fourth republic, when universities were raided, especially the Central University of Venezuela (UCV).
President Maduro confirmed this comment, recalling that both she and he, along with the youth of the 60s, 70s and 80s of the 20th century, witnessed these abuses of the Human Rights of Venezuelan students.
The head of state recalled how he lived with his family in the San Pedro parish (in Caracas), in an apartment in Los Chaguaramos neighborhood near the UCV, and since the age of 4 he has vivid memories of the shootings caused by the police and security forces armed forces that raided university facilities:
“I was a child and the memory is bullets, sticks, violence in the raids. I even remember the tanks, my mother protected us by crouching in the hallway, she closed the balcony, because there were gunshots for hours,” he pointed out.
Throughout his youth, even at the age of 14, around 1976, he experienced one of these illegal police admissions to the UCV. “And those were tear gas bombs, lead,” adding that at that time the “adeco” (belonging to the Right wing Accion Democratica party) president Carlos Andrés Pérez was governing, the same one who, during his second presidency in 1989, ordered the Caracazo massacre.
The national leader urged the new generations of Venezuelan youth to investigate this history of violations and repression, which ended in Bolivarian Venezuela when Commander Hugo Chávez Frías
