VenEconomy: Venezuelans Must Not Take Nonviolent Methods of Struggle to Extremes 
 From the Editors of VenEconomy
Latin American Herald Tribune
June 15, 2015

The barbarity that has prevailed in Venezuela for the past 16 years has led its population to use extreme nonviolent methods of struggle, among them, hunger strikes.

At present, opposition leader Leopoldo López, and students Raúl Baduel, Jr. and José Gregorio Briceño (the three of them political prisoners of Nicolás Maduro), plus over twenty other students, have been conducting a hunger strike for more than a week demanding: the release of all political prisoners; the end of persecution against those opposing the Government; that the National Electoral Council (CNE) sets a final date for the parliamentary elections this year; and that these are held in a transparent manner with the presence of observers from the OAS and the European Union.

World leaders, such as Mahatma Gandhi, have resorted to this form of peaceful struggle in the past. In 1918, Gandhi resisted the British domination through this method. Between January 12 and January 18 of 1948, he fasted for the third time to promote unity among Hindus and Muslims. The hunger strike influenced political and communal leaders to outline a plan to restore normalcy in a riot-torn India that accompanied the imminent end of the British rule. Or Golda Meir, the fourth Prime Minister of Israel, who in 1945 conducted a hunger strike to protest against the detention facilities where the British kept the survivors of the Holocaust.

In the Venezuela of the Bolivarian revolution, students, workers from the public/private sector, physicians and political leaders have undertaken this form of nonviolent struggle on many occasions, albeit only a few times were objectives met in the face of a government deaf to citizen demands and that only believes in repression and persecution as a method of dialogue. A tragic example of this is the case of Franklin Brito, a local agricultural producer and biologist who after six hunger strikes finally died of starvation in the Military Hospital of Caracas, where he was detained by the Government without it giving him back his expropriated land.

VenEconomy respects the decision made by López, Baduel, Briceño and all the students who took this path to demand the restoration of the many rights of Venezuelans infringed by the regime of Maduro. This is a sacrifice like no other for the sake of principles and values of democracy and freedom, as is characteristic of beings with great moral fortitude and determination.

However, VenEconomy also considers that this form of struggle would be valid if the opponent they are facing had respect for human life, something that is not the case of Venezuela's ruling elite, as has been amply demonstrated repeatedly -- a ruling elite that underestimates its opponents, who are crassly labeled and reduced to subhuman levels, much as Adolf Hitler did with the Jews and as the Castro brothers do with Cubans who dare oppose them.

Going on an indefinite hunger strike against the regime of Maduro is a lose-lose solution. The Government will not make any concessions to the strikers -- as it never did with Brito -- and those who are on strike will hopelessly see their health situation deteriorate as they risk their lives.

VenEconomy calls for the end of the strike since the lives of López, Baduel, Briceño, as much as those of every single one of the students, are valuable for their families and the country. The democratic struggle needs them and this struggle can – and must – take place in some other constitutional scenario.

____________________