5,000 Crimes

The number is overwhelming: 4,500 children were abused by U.S. officials on the border with Mexico. Their parents’ American dream turned into a nightmare.

The justice system of the “country of freedom” looked the other way. Human rights nongovernmental organizations meanwhile sniffed around developing nations. The U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy were looking after No. 1: toppling governments and swearing in puppets.

There are those in Venezuela who clamor for these rapists to enter the country, or better, to intervene militarily. The statistical source for sexual crimes against Latin American boys and girls is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the unit where these rapists work. The complaint made it to the House Judiciary Committee.

With this type of crime, real cases outnumber the reported ones, but those already made public are overwhelming. They were perpetrated between 2014 and 2018.

The victims are children unaccompanied by their parents; among these, thousands were abruptly separated from their parents under the zero tolerance for immigration order dictated by Donald Trump.

To the above, add the more than 1,000 sexual assaults against children that were reported to the Department of Justice.

The singers who whitewash the imperial aggressions against Venezuela and other countries with their concerts maintain a silence that pierces the soul. Several of these artists are Colombian, where about 50 girls have been sexually abused by military personnel stationed at the nine U.S. bases in their country. Not one verse for their little countrywomen rises from their privileged throats. Not one note from their complicit musical staff.

Andrés Eloy Blanco spoke about the children who “escaped from Herod to fall in Hiroshima.”* Nowadays, those who survive religious pedophiles fall victim to U.S. officials in charge of their safekeeping. The large media corporations maintain a collective silence that makes them worthy of the name given by a media communications professor during her years of active teaching: “mechanical Celestinas.”** In this case, they are more than go-betweens.

One must assume, except in cases of derangement, that those who ask for a military invasion of the country do not have children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren or anything. Anything.

*Editor’s note: This refers to a Venezuelan poem, “Los Hijos Infinitos” (“The Infinite Sons”).

**Editor’s note: Celestina refers to a character in a book by Fernando de Rojas who facilitates a liaison between a bachelor and a girl kept in seclusion.