Blame Venezuela's dictatorial regime.
By Boris Muñoz Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
I was born in Caracas and grew up there in the final years of a decades-long modernization that was fueled by Venezuela's oil wealth. |
One of my earliest memories is of a children's painting festival held in front of the Aula Magna (a great concert hall) of University City, the main campus of the Central University of Venezuela, better known as the U.C.V. |
I was no more than four years old, but my life was already connected to what many see as the country's most important work of architecture. I know its gardens, corridors, schools, auditoriums, and even its biology labs, as though they were my own home. |
My mother, a biologist, worked for the university, first as a researcher and then as a full-time professor. All of my education — from kindergarten through university — was in institutions associated with the U.C.V., a public university. When I graduated from university with a degree in journalism, the ceremony took place with the sculptor Alexander Calder's acoustic clouds floating above our heads in the Aula Magna. |
After earning my Ph.D. in Hispanic American literature in the United States, I returned to Venezuela as a professor at the U.C.V. School of Literature, where I taught until my voluntary exile in 2009. |
Built between 1940 and 1960, University City was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000. I'm proud of being a U.C.V. graduate, so it pains me to read the Venezuelan architect and novelist Federico Vegas write in a guest essay today that the U.C.V. is so neglected that it has become an archaeological ruin. |
The governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro have apparently punished what was once Venezuela's most vibrant educational and cultural center by denying it the minimum resources it needs to function. Indeed, the U.C.V. received only 3 percent of the budget it requested from the government this past year, which is not even enough to maintain its infrastructure. |
But physical ruin may obscure another, even more dangerous, form of decay. The Venezuelan educational system is degrading by the day. Since 2015 the country is estimated to have lost about half its teachers, and the high school dropout rate reached 50 percent in 2020. Perhaps the economy of a country in ruins but still rich in resources could be rebuilt in a matter of years, but rebuilding its educational system would take much longer. |
Two decades after UNESCO honored the University City by calling it a "masterpiece of modern city planning," it makes sense to declare it a World Heritage Site "in danger." But the truth is that all of Venezuela needs to be saved from a dictatorial regime that seems determined to turn everything to rubble. |
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