“This is the Pizarro pennant, a symbol that victory belongs to us, a trophy that the people of Cuzco gave to the Grand Marshal of Ayacucho, Antonio José de Sucre, and he sent it to our Liberator, Simón Bolívar, who decided to give it to Caracas on behalf of the Liberation Army, as a symbol of absolute victory over the Spanish empire 200 years ago, there in Ayacucho”. Thus wrote and showed this Sunday on his social networks the constitutional president Nicolás Maduro Moros.
Through a brief audiovisual testimony, from the Municipal Palace of Caracas, where the historical relic is located, the head of State, accompanied by the first combatant woman, Cilia Flores, toured the government facility to invite Venezuelans to visit and see the trophy that the Bolivarian Liberation Army received in Peru. The relic is the culmination of the definitive independence of that South American country in 1824 in a battle that definitively expelled the defeated Spanish empire from the Americas.
Previously, the national leader, through a telephone contact with the Venezuelan intellectual Pedro Calzadilla and national and international historians who participated in the closing of the International Colloquium Ayacucho 1824-2024, Sovereignty and Peace Unit, said that both the banner and the historical documents of the time must feed the daily battle for independence: “From 200 years ago and today, this Revolution must take new creative, beautiful paths.”
As for the Pizarro pennant, he considered it important to know it and see it in person, “because this great symbol of history is kept in Caracas by the will of Bolívar.”
He recalled that Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conqueror who repressed and murdered the last Inca emperor, Atahualpa, managed to destroy the Inca empire by fragmenting and dividing it, thanks to the advice he received from another Spanish torturer, Hernán Cortés:
“Studying Pizarro and his campaign of rapacious conquest, of colonization, one finds elements of the imperialist strategy of all times,” Maduro said. He said that the invader used and manipulated tribal differences and wars between these peoples, to achieve his divisions and enmities. And he even added to his ranks those who had opposed Atahualpa:
“And as he received advice from Hernán Cortés, to divide the tribes due to their differences and internal wars and then assassinate the main leader, because Cortés said that our native peoples saw their chiefs as gods and when they lost them they neutralized each other, and that was precisely what Pizarro did.”
“It took 290 years of colony to rescue the union and for the head of the Liberation Army to receive that banner,” he summarized, reiterating the invitation to visit the Municipal Palace of Caracas, to learn about the glorious history of Venezuela.
The head of State concluded that the Bolivarian project has been, is and will be invariable and deeply humanistic. “We are warriors of peace, warriors like those in Ayacucho, Junín, Pichincha, Bomboná, Carabobo. Let no one get confused with us, because we are also warriors.”
