Venezuelans more united after failed assassination attempt on President – Ambassador

The assassination attempt on the life of Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, has only served to unite the people of Venezuela even more.

Ambassador Francisco M Perez Santana, the head of the Venezuelan mission in St Vincent and the Grenadines, made this declaration on Tuesday, during an interview with SEARCHLIGHT.

On August 4, Maduro was addressing the celebration of the 81st anniversary of the Bolivarian National Guard in downtown Caracas when a drone exploded several feet away from the presidential platform, where the president was standing with his wife, Cilia Flores, military officials and government ministers.

“You know what happens with people in Venezuela…when they feel that we are being attacked, we unite more,” the ambassador said. “The consequence of the attack is that Venezuelans are more united.
So, they [attackers] are confused now, because they think that they are going to hit our revolution and what they did is produce more union between people in Venezuela.”

Santana told SEARCHLIGHT that a device that blocks specific signals is usually utilized by security at events where the president is expected to be present.

He said that the device helped to foil the attempt on Maduro’s life, as it disrupted the drone signal and caused it to malfunction.

According to Santana, another drone exploded in a nearby apartment building.

The Venezuelan ambassador said that his government believes that the Venezuelan ultra-right wing and Colombian oligarchy are responsible for Saturday’s incident.

The government of Colombia has since denied any involvement in the attack.

But Santana says that his government has arrested six persons who were responsible for Saturday’s attack. He said that the individuals have been talking and say that they were trained in Colmbia.

In a release dated August 6, the government of Venezuela said that it was aware of Colombia’s “explicit denunciation” of any involvement in the attempted assassination.

However, the release served to highlight five reasons of why Venezuela’s government was suspicious of the Colombian government as it relates to its involvement in the attack.

“For the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela, history has shown that the Colombian oligarchy’s obsession to interfere in Venezuelan matters knows no limits. The Venezuelan people in a civilian-military alliance has stopped its pretensions in the past and shall continue to do so in the future, and shall never submit to its whims and unsuspected purposes,” the release said.

It also stated that Venezuela’s government holds “the government of Colombia accountable for any new aggression or attempt to promote from within its territory or from the borderline spaces any provocation against the homeland of Bolivar”.

The last recorded assassination attempt on a Venezuelan president occurred in 1960; the then Venezuelan president being Romulo Betancourt.

Betancourt survived the attack, but received burns on both hands.

“More than 50 years after and only one attempt to our president,” Santana said, as he stressed that assassinations were not a part of Venezuela’s political culture.

Some hours after the attack on his life, Maduro made an address at the Simon Bolivar Hall in the Miraflores Palace and also expressed similar sentiments.

“Venezuelans solve our differences with words, debate, people’s vote,” Maduro said. “They are incorporating into the political life of the country, elements that are not Venezuelan; burning human beings one year ago, violence to impose reasons that they cannot impose by politics, coup d’état attempts. All of them avoided and defeated”.

Since the attack, many persons, governments and entities have come forth to publicly express solidarity to the country and people of Venezuela and condemn the act of the attempted assassination.
The ambassador expressed his gratitude to Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves, speaker of the House of Assembly, Jomo Thomas, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Garifuna Heritage Foundation, for expressing such sentiments.

A protest was held on Wednesday at the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to further denounce the attempted assassination of the Venezuelan president and demonstrate solidarity with the country.

Venezuelan Ambassador Francisco M Perez Santana