La pianista Gabriela Montero responde a Simon Rattle, tras las declaraciones de éste sobre Venezuela
La pianista de origen venezolano Gabriela Montero, conocida por su pública oposición a El Sistema y su continuadas tomas de posición denunciando la situación social y política que atraviesa Venezuela, remitía ayer una carta abierta al maestro británico Simon Rattle, quien mantuvo un encuentro con la prensa en Santander, al hilo de sus conciertos de la pasada semana en la ciudad cántabra. Nuestro colaborador Enrique Bert estuvo presente, entre otros medios invitados. Resultado de las declaraciones de Rattle, el periodista Jesús Ruiz Mantilla publicó en El País un remedo de entrevista, con un sonoro titular: "Simon Rattle: `Cada vez que escucho lo que pasa en Venezuela me entran ganas de llorar ´.
En dichas declaraciones Rattle manifestaba: “Ocurra lo que ocurra, lo que hizo Abreu no dejará de ser un milagro. Pero la situación es terrible. Lo que tiene que soportar Gustavo Dudamel, una gran persona, un formidable músico, es demasiado para un joven de su edad. Con 35 años, los equilibrios que llega a hacer para mantener unidos a los músicos fuera son encomiables”. Y añadía además una anécdota personal, al hilo de su última visita a Venezuela: "La última vez que estuvimos allí mi familia y yo nos robaron todo de la habitación. Abreu me dijo que no me preocupara porque llamaría al número dos para resolverlo. Al día siguiente apareció todo en su sitio. No faltaba nada. ¿Qué tipo de amenazas lanzaría el número dos al personal del hotel para que fuera así? Era Maduro. Hoy el número dos aplica ese método de terror en todo el país”.
En 2017 Gabriela Montero ya había escrito una extensa carta abierta para Platea Magazine, reflexionando al hilo del papel del artista en nuestras sociedades. Reproducimos ahora a continuación -en su original en inglés- la carta abierta que Montero ha remitido a Rattle, a través de sus redes sociales y en la que la pianista venezolana arremete también contra Ruiz Mantilla, al que tilda de "cómplice con el chavismo".
Open Letter to Sir Simon Rattle: Beyond Rattled
By Gabriela Montero, 19/08/18
Hiding beyond the gaze of the English-speaking world is an interview in El País with Sir Simon Rattle, published three days ago, that is deserving of commentary and retort.
The interview is published by Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, a journalist known to be a long time Chavez sympathiser, El Sistema acolyte, and fervent promoter of Gustavo Dudamel in Spain. (The depth of complicity between certain journalists worldwide and Chavismo / El sistema are sure to emerge, when the right investigative, independent journalist steps up.)
In the interview, Sir Simon Rattle declares that he is moved to tears every time he reads about the state of Venezuela today.
He goes on to say:
"What Gustavo Dudamel has to endure, a great person, a formidable musician, is too much for a young man of his age. At 35, the balancing act that he manages to do to keep the musicians together is commendable."
He then goes on to reveal that the musicians are not, in fact, together anymore, since most of them have had to flee the country.
Sir Simon, the musicians who have had to flee Venezuela do so along with the millions of non-“great”, non-“formidable”, non-musician refugees who have also left, by air and boat if fortunate enough, otherwise by foot across Venezuela's land borders with Brazil and Colombia, generating the largest refugee crisis in the world, a crisis estimated to exceed even the Syrian refugee crisis.
A silent crisis.
The direct, undeniable cause of that crisis is Chavismo, with its death-throes overseen by the wholly barbaric Maduro.
For many years, the Chavez regime has appropriated El Sistema - not merely symbolically, but under a formal Ministry of the regime - as its primary propaganda tool abroad. It has paid hundreds of millions of petro-dollars for this laundering privilege, using an impenetrable "salvation narrative" as its most effective detergent.
Some, not many, refused to be part of the charade. They refused the sort of offers that Abreu - famous for asserting that “everyone has a price” - made to me in person, as long ago as 2004: “Enough money to take care of you for a lifetime, mi querida.” They refused to collaborate with the architects of our nation’s destruction. Some, not many, are not for sale.
Now that the nation has collapsed, those same collaborators are now reinventing themselves as victims, often with the help of loyal journalists and colleagues.
But Gustavo Dudamel is not a victim, Sir Simon, and it is preposterously insulting to the true victims of this crisis to claim otherwise.
Nor, at 35, is he a child that should be wrapped in cotton wool. He is a free, moral agent, whose moral choices are subject to the same public scrutiny as anyone else in a position of power. He “endures” nothing. He is a beneficiary. His is a multi-millionaire beneficiary, in fact, who willingly enjoyed the private-jet lifestyle created for him by Chavez, Abreu and Maduro. He willingly partied and dined for years with the monsters who have destroyed my country. He willingly befriended the cast of a mafia that now controls a narco-state of starving, fleeing, dying, murdered, tortured, deprived citizen victims. He is no victim.
And no, Sir Simon, he did not publicly repudiate Maduro.
On the specific instructions of the LA Philharmonic board, according to close and reliable sources within it, he issued the lamest of attempts to save face once his friends Nicolas Maduro and Delcy Rodriguez had usurped the legislative National Assembly and replaced it with the illegitimate Constituent version, protests against which claimed the lives of 158 civilians. He issued nothing more than a general call for the restoration of democracy. He has NOT publicly condemned his friends for their complicity in a regime of torture, arbitrary killings, drug-trafficking, illegal detentions, and human rights violations of every sort. Violations consistently denied, I might add, by his self-declared close friend Jorge Rodriguez, Maduro’s principal propagandist and key architect of Venezuela’s demise.
Your final paragraph, Sir Simon, demonstrates - unwittingly, perhaps, but efficiently nonetheless - the mafia structure you have been dealing with all these years:
"The last time we were there, my family and I were robbed of everything in the room. Abreu told me not to worry because he would call number two to solve it. The next day everything appeared in its place. Nothing was missing. What kind of threats would number two throw at the hotel staff to make it so? It was Maduro. Today number two applies that method of terror throughout the country."
You were robbed. You called Abreu, who called “Number 2”, and your property was immediately returned. You intended to demonstrate that Venezuela TODAY is governed by a brute, and that somehow Dudamel is a victim of that brutality. What, in fact, you illustrated is that he has willingly served a mafia system for years and years, and that Abreu was so powerfully connected to it that he could resolve your problems with a single call to “number 2”. This is the stuff of mafia novels.
Venezuelans know this. They have refused to listen to the “salvation narrative” for years now. In Venezuela, they have a saying: “No se puede estar bien con Dios y con el Diablo” (“you can’t serve God and the Devil at the same time”). Only dedicated propagandists, like Mantilla of El País, continue to propagate the palatable “salvation narrative” in the northern hemisphere. Only diehards cling to its odious, smokescreen of a mythology.
No, Sir Simon, Gustavo Dudamel will be just fine, with his millions in reserve.
The true victims - presuming that it should be the moral imperative of us all to identify and help the true victims - are the penniless millions of Venezuelans walking across the unforgiving South American landmass with their bundles on their backs. The true victims are people like Luis Magallanes, the young Venezuelan tenor living in my home since May 4th, whose harrowing story was published the same day in Spain’s other broadsheet, El Mundo. I humbly suggest you read it. (see below)
When you have read it, perhaps you could join me in taking action to create a fund for the other true victims - musical and otherwise - trying to find a better life elsewhere. They need urgent help. The last thing they need is wasted column space advocating for the wrong cause.
With the greatest respect for your eminence as a musician - which must not be conflated with your value judgements on matters relating to Venezuela - I urge you to examine the consequences of contributing to this narrative. It does nothing to set right past wrongs. It does nothing to advocate for the true victims of this horrific crisis, and it does nothing to encourage a profound analysis of the nature of complicity itself.
Sincerely,
Gabriela Montero
