The wealth of a country is measured by different parameters: food, education, quality of life, culture, and in the end many others. But for poverty, the true measure is the lack of freedoms.
A country whose youngest, the future of the country, have to go to extremes like hunger strikes in order to unplug the deaf ears of their leaders, that country is poor.
Right now in Venezuela more than eighty-three students have declared a hunger strike. They are living only on water and serum, some of them for more than fifteen days, others started a week ago and five more are planning to join them. What has motivated them to go to this extreme, where they put their own lives in play?
Worse of all is that the government has turned a deaf ear to their demands: freedom for political prisoners is one of them. Opposition to the refusal to allow the Secretary General of the Organization of American States to enter the country is another. Gentlemen, if you don’t need it, what are you afraid of. And I thought with so much oil it was a rich country.
February 22 2011
