Involvement in Venezuela

In the Fall of my Senior year at Wesleyan I took a course titled “Venezuela: The Effect of Oil Discovery on People, the Environment, and on Democracy”.  Throughout the semester we studied the cultural, political, social, and environmental changes that developed in Venezuela, and specifically, how these changes were influenced or caused by the discovery of oil in reserves around the country. I was struck by a particular article from the course, La Pérdida de la Institucionalidad en Venezuela, and how it examined the biases of historical consciousness.   

In this article, I was most interested in the idea of writing or rewriting history. We discussed how the ‘truths’ of history are often written by the winning side; therefore, what voices are we losing along the way? In asking this fundamental question, we need to examine how the media is currently being controlled in Venezuela. According to the article, “en la historia oficial los violentos están en la oposición”, meaning that ‘in the official history the violent ones are in the opposition (La Pérdida de la Institucionalidad en Venezuela, 424). While this ‘official’ history is being presented by the controlling government power, continued growth in social media, online networks, and journalism have given us access to multiple narratives as protests and marches unfold in real time. We discussed how the government combats memories of the opposition and how misinformation or propaganda functioned before the age of the internet as well. Today we have more resources and places to find and share information, but, historically with less accessibility and fewer sources, it is critical to consider the trust we have in history. I think these are incredibly important questions to ask, especially in thinking about how language affects storytelling. Having studied English and GEM at Wesleyan, the global coursework and global literature I have been taught has often come through English translations or western frameworks. It wasn’t until I had a grasp on the Spanish language that my sources opened up exponentially. Through my class on Venezuela I learned to recognize that in both literature and history, the sources we are presented with are the ones that are deemed ‘important’ or ‘valuable’ by English translators. In the same way that the ‘truths’ of history are often determined by the winners or controlling powers, the ‘truths’ of other cultures are often determined by western thinkers.