Venezuela, Cuba and Santería

Los Guayos in Carabobo

Bones of human corpses from the graveyard of Los Guayos, a town very close to Valencia, are being desecrated on a daily basis. About three tombs get opened every night. The vandals take away the bones of the lower extremities. This has to do with the massive rise in Santería since Cubans control things in Venezuela.

The rising vandalism is happening everywhere in the coastal region now. Cuba was supposed to become a communist or at least a socialist country. Believers of traditional religions were persecuted and discriminated. Religious freedom has progressively returned to Cuba in the last couple of decades, but it seems what a lot of Cubans were left with was a degenerated form of the most primitive rites of Santería. Now profiteers try to sell Santería rites to many in pauperised Cuba and a rapidly degenerating Venezuela as a form of getting power, money and sex/love.

I never heard of such acts of vandalisms in Los Guayos' history. I know the town very well: part of my family came from there. There were acts of savagery there during the Independence wars and before that perhaps in the first years of the Conquista but that was it.

Even worse: every month about 10 people get murdered in Los Guayos. That's 120 in a year. Los Guayos has a population of some 149000 inhabitants. It has, thus, a murder rate of 80 murders per 100 000 inhabitants. That's over 3 times the rate it had when Chávez came to power in early 1999.

And even if Madurismo is losing votes by the hour and the opposition will conquer a lot of the most populated municipalities in December, most Los Guayos voters will still go for Madurismo in this once beautiful town.