The Minister of Defense of Venezuela, General-in-Chief Vladimir Padrino López, stated that the battle being waged today by the people of the South American nation is the same as it was 500 years ago, for self-determination, peace, equality, and social justice.

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In a message published this Sunday on the occasion of Indigenous Resistance Day, Padrino López recalled that five centuries ago, the original inhabitants of Venezuelan land faced the arrival of “a voracious empire, greedy for power and wealth.”

In this way, the conquistadors, with swords and arquebuses in hand, not only forged one of the most atrocious genocides that humanity has experienced, but also sank their teeth into the throat of this continent.

With this, he said, they intended, with the euphemism of “discovery,” to initiate the bestial looting of natural resources, snatch our identity, and turn the native population into slaves. However, those infamous weapons of oppression and supremacy could not break the will to fight, courage, and dignity of those who were born to be free, he emphasized.

The G/J highlighted that, in the times of the Bolivarian Revolution, every October 12th, “we honor the Day of Indigenous Resistance, reaffirming our irrevocable anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist vocation.” He also stated that, although in the course of history hegemony has mimicked itself, changing nationality, face, and forms, it maintains its predatory essence.

In this regard, he denounced that, under the protection of that arrogance, in the 21st century, governments like that of the U.S., “practitioners of the same logic of domination, exploitation, and death, intend to subdue sovereign nations with a modern arsenal.”

In this sense, he referred to the suffocating economic blockades, unilateral coercive sanctions, diffuse warfare, and the permanent threat of military incursion. The sectoral vice president of Political Sovereignty, Security, and Peace added that the current deployment of U.S. warships in the Caribbean Sea “is nothing more than a gross example of the re-edition of the old colonizing method: intimidation by way of force.”

But the Venezuelan people, he emphasized, with a high patriotic awareness, “have prepared and organized themselves in perfect popular-military-police fusion,” to prevent this noble land from being tarnished and the primitive dispossession of the invader from being repeated as in the past.

He emphasized that today, every patriotic Venezuelan, and especially the soldiers of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, embody the rebellious and Maroon spirit of Guaicaipuro, Terepaima, Apacuana, Tiuna, Urimare, Manaure, Paramaconi, Tamanaco, and so many other native heroes.

We are heirs to their courage, strength, and liberating cry, he stated, and indicated that “the battle we are fighting at this moment is the same as 500 years ago: the defense of the right to self-determination, the certain possibility of defining our own destiny; peace, equality, social justice, and respect for ethnic and cultural diversity.”

We are inspired by ancestral resistance!… No foreign power will ever desecrate this sacred land again!, he concluded.

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