Venezuela advocates historic struggle for abolition of slavery

The President of the National History Center, Pedro Calzadilla, said Tuesday that the historic struggle for the abolition of slavery in our country has been recognized and vindicated only by the Bolivarian Revolution in the last 18 years.

"On the eve of remembering the 1854 decree of abolition in Venezuela ... it is very important the historical memory of a people, which until now has been precisely to carry out the struggle to abolish those circumstances where racism and the exclusion of cultural belonging was installed as a dominant model," he said in an interview broadcast by state media on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, this March 21.

Calzadilla stressed the Bolivarian Revolution has achieved the abolition of that dominant exclusion that prevailed in the country during the fourth republic governments, and that is part of the policies that characterize the bourgeoisie.

The Liberator hero Simon Bolivar began a campaign in favor of the abolition of slavery in 1816, but it was only 38 years after, that slavery materialized, when the then President of Venezuela, Jose Gregorio Monagas, signed on March 24, 1854 the decree that gave at that time a conditional freedom to 40,000 slaves that existed in Venezuela 163 years ago.

In this sense, Calzadilla said that "despite years of having declared independence from Spain, we still remain prisoners of the colonization of our thoughts and values, that is why the decolonization effort to liberate our ideas, our ways of thinking, our values, all of this have been just the great reward (of the Revolution)."

He also said that for many years, it was established the idea that racism did not exist in Venezuela, that there was no separation or discrimination due to skin color, race, ethnicity, something that in real life was not totally true.

"Recognizing the existence of this racism was the great feat of Commander Chavez and the first step to overcome this condition was to recognize the problem and thereafter came the action of a political state to combat those deeply rooted problems, inherited by the European invasion of the continent," he said.

AVN 

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