21/12/2009

Latin America still pursues Bolivar's dream

Caracas, Dec 17 ABN.- On December 17, 1830 began a new stage on the dream that Bolivar always kept alive despite the obstacles: the splendor and greatness of a free Latin America, with political self-determination. A dream still in force thanks to processes like the Bolivarian Revolution.

Inspired on Bolivar's dream, Venezuela's Government, by means of a constituent process, referendums and communal councils, has completely changed the country's passivity in political matters.

Since the new Constitution was passed, there have been open ways of participation and people's power; missions were created to give answers to the excluded; and the teacher State and the cultural sector were vindicated as starting points to change Venezuela's society.

With these feats and many others, which have helped to spread a message of fight against imperialism around Latin America, we are getting more and more closer to fulfill Bolivar's dream.

179 year ago

At midday on that December 17, 179 years ago, all the inhabitants of Santa Marta city, in Colombia, kept watching over the end of the illustrious sufferer who was fighting dead. There had already been spread the bad news about that the Liberator was agonizing.

In the main room of the house that lodged him during his last days, everybody was on the watch for that labored breathing that gradually made way for a kind of infinite peace reflected in a face previously contracted with pain. Simon Bolivar was dying in someone else's place and with a borrowed shirt.

Santa Marta knew it immediately. The nearby villages acquainted with the news soon, then the most distant and, at the end, over the whole map of America was increasing the great shade, dense and firm.

From the Fortaleza del Morro, every half an hour, three cannonshots gave notice of the death of the first compatriot in the entire America. At the major church in Santa Marta, where he was buried, thousands of men and women expressed their pain. Men and women set free thanks to Bolivar, who internalized their agony and turned them from slaves into free people, owners of their destiny.

That conscience remains alive nowadays because we still have to reach complete freedom as peoples. It is a day to day fight against imperialism and its more powerful weapon: the capital.