HABLA GABRIELA MONTERO

Este es un extracto, traducido por mí del Inglés, de las declaraciones de Gabriela Montero sobre Gustavo Dudamel. Transcribo abajo las declaraciones completas de Gabriela , a fin de que los lectores la puedan leer en su totalidad:  

Dice Gabriela Montero:

En Febrero 2014  le imploré a Gustavo Dudamel en carta abierta que cortara la mano que no solo lo alimentaba a él sino que le había desplegado un banquete ilimitado de centenares de millones de dólares en forma de propaganda oficial, completo con aviones del gobierno, viajes alrededor del mundo y, por supuesto, años de fiestas con la jerarquía chavista responsable por el colapso del Estado.

Le imploré porque era obvio que la mano magnánima con él estaba, al mismo tiempo, destruyendo a la Nación y yo no podía encontrar coherencia alguna entre  aparentar servir a Dios, por un lado, mientras se obtenían beneficios del Diablo…no podía aceptar que los músicos estuvieran en un nivel de prioridad por encima de una población víctima de abusos.

Mi tesis era que sin una nación segura y funcional no podía existir futuro para nuestros niños…. Hablaba yo de una solitaria flor en la mitad de un pantano.    Gustavo prefería enfocarse en la flor, no en el pantano. Yo predije que el pantano en breve tiempo contaminaría a la flor pero es ahora que un solo asesinato, el de Armando, ha generado la reacción de Gustavo…  

Esta es la declaración completa de Gabriela:

AN OFFICIAL STATEMENT
Gabriela Montero, May 5th 2017

In February 2014, I implored Gustavo Dudamel in an open letter to cut off the hand that was not merely feeding him, but had laid out a limitless feast of hundreds of millions of dollars in the form of a government-owned propaganda machine, complete with the perks of private government jets, five-star endless summers touring around the world, and, of course, years of partying and fine dining with the same Chavista hierarchy responsible for the state collapse that has brought about this statement.

I so implored him because it was patently obvious that the same magnanimous hand was simultaneously destroying an entire nation, and I could not find moral coherence in appearing to serve God on the one hand, while profiting from the devil - and propagandizing his insidious message to a global audience - on the other. I could not accept the utilitarian prioritizing of musicians above a suffering, abused general population.

Soon after publishing the open letter, I took my advocacy to an institutional level, by accepting to become Honorary Consul of Amnesty International.

My thesis, then, was that without a functioning and secure nation, there could be no future for Venezuela’s kids. We desperately needed to save our nation, not simply to prioritize our musicians under the illusion that the endlessly repeated, media-friendly, promoter-friendly, agent-friendly mantra of "social transformation through music" would miraculously overpower the degenerative social effects of this mafia regime. Some may recall my analogy of a lone flower being cultivated in a toxic swamp. Gustavo’s expressed antithesis was that he preferred to focus on the flower, not the swamp. I countered further by predicting that the swamp would soon intoxicate the flower.

The swamp, tragically, has consumed the entire nation state of Venezuela, and with it the flower of Venezuela’s youth. Since I wrote that letter to Gustavo in early 2014, an estimated 80,000 murders have occurred in a lawless Venezuela. This staggering violence has been accompanied by the crippling economic conditions that are now, finally, being reported in our newspapers. It is alarming to me, and to a vast section of fellow Venezuelans, that one murder alone - the tragic murder of a Armando - should finally catalyze Gustavo into words. Even in death it seems that our musicians are prioritized members of society.

Since 2014, the list of courageous, self-sacrificing, unrewarded men and women in Venezuela has grown long, and Gustavo is not on it: tireless warriors for democracy like Maria Corina Machado, Leopoldo Lopez (imprisoned for a fourth year now), his wife Lilian Tintori, Gustavo Tovar Arroyo, the Foro Penal Venezolano, the student movement, and the hundreds of thousands who have stood up to the water cannons and tear gas, defying the “colectivos” while looking death square in the eye. These men and women have sacrificed everything to denounce the regime. They have lost their freedom, their businesses, their careers, their mandate to run for office, and, in the case of young Armando and many others, the right to life itself. After all, it is not only the musicians who were caught up in an engineered climate of state dependency. Every word uttered by Gustavo in his statement has been screamed for years in far more damning terms by people who have lost far more than Gustavo will ever lose. The only shock to Venezuelans, if you examine their overwhelming online reaction, is how long it has taken him to say something. To many Venezuelans, his words will serve as nothing more than a weathervane, a cynical indicator that the coffers have run dry, the end of the regime is truly near, and it is time to wager on the future.

Venezuelans will not forget the many years Gustavo has willingly paraded himself as the incarnate symbol of "Revolution" on the international stage, side-by-side with the engineers of our state failure, from the state takeover of RCTV to the funeral of Chavez himself. As recently as last year, he appeared alongside Delcy Rodriguez at the UN Security Council. For those outside of Venezuela who do not know her, she is the former propaganda minister, and now Foreign Minister, the subject of a recent CNN investigative piece into the sale of Venezuelan passports out of our embassy in Baghdad, and the issuing of diplomatic passports to the convicted drug-smuggling nephews of Venezuela's first lady. Such alliances can not be erased overnight.

So, what can I conclude? I can conclude that in this game of extreme Monopoly, Gustavo has just played his "Redemption" card, calling in the world's press to issue his statement overnight, itself a demonstration of power hitherto unseen in classical music, the kind of power that only a state apparatus, through years of investment, can buy -- a power whose reach I always fully understood, the power of no "mere musician", which is precisely why I called on him to exercise it three years ago, at the peak of another deadly crisis.

I will not be drawn into a public judgement of Gustavo's conscience, since I am not in the business of reading minds and hearts. Nor will I ever claim that a conductor alone, even one with Gustavo's reach, could have toppled the regime and spared all of those lives lost. But I will continue to express my personal disdain for an outcome in which the people of Venezuela are scavenging for food from garbage cans and dying of medicine shortages while Gustavo enjoys unimaginable riches and prosperity, the tangible assets of a decade of state-engineered advantage. The people of Venezuela will reach their conclusions as to his actions, omissions, alliances and personal benefits during the Chavista era, an era in which we lost our nation to the soundtrack of Mahler and Mozart, like the ill-fated passengers of the Titanic swallowed by the deep to the strains of “Nearer My God to Thee”.

As a personal footnote, I must express that this fight has given me nothing but enormous sadness and regret, and will occupy the gravest chapter of my life. My childhood memories of making music with friends in Venezuela are among my happiest, and it is difficult to suppress a tear when I look back at the video footage of those musical collaborations. I never dreamed that it would become my role to disrupt the unacceptably utilitarian transaction of music-funding for state propaganda, nor did I ever envisage composing a work in "Ex Patria" so savagely condemning of my country's theft and degradation. But, in the "fierce urgency of now", they were the choices I made, stemming from my own conscience, a conscience that I can and must judge, and which I readily offer for judgement by the people of Venezuela.