Gustavo Dudamel
After a concert with the Venezuelan Youth Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel at Carnegie Hall in New York the Human Rights Foundation criticized Dudamel for engaging in shameless propaganda and providing cover for the Venezuelan dictator Maduro.
Through a statement, HRF accuses the orchestra conductor of benefiting economically from the regime that has been operating in the South American country for 25 years.
« The children who play in this orchestra are individually innocent, but the collective entity to which they belong, El Sistema, is an effective and essential public relations organ of the Venezuelan regime and is well documented as a diplomatic instrument of soft power on the international stage. Gustavo Dudamel has personally benefited from millions of dollars in under-the-table payments from the dictator and operates as an unregistered foreign agent of the Maduro regime. Dudamel gently criticizes the dictator in public, while in private he serves as an unofficial ambassador for the Venezuelan tyranny. This is a person who has been silent in the face of years and years of repression and violence in Venezuela. Tonight is no different, » the organization said.
HRF also reminded the readers the silence maintained by the current conductor of the New York Philharmonic when the late former President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías attacked cultural spaces in Venezuela by closing several centers such as museums and the old Ateneo de Caracas.
« When Chavismo closed the Ateneo de Caracas, plundered and confiscated museums considered bourgeois and closed academies and institutions for not being sufficiently revolutionary, Dudamel kept silent », stated the organization. « Dudamel’s support to Chavismo’s censorship had its most public and unpleasant expression in 2007 when Chavez closed RCTV, an independent and privately owned television channel with five rich decades of cultural history that refused to submit to government censorship. The Chavez government seized the channel’s facilities and antennas and set up a sorry replacement, TVES. Gustavo Dudamel beamed with pride as he conducted the opening concert for this new propaganda channel at midnight. Dudamel’s disgraceful performance was the first program under the TVES banner, » recalled the Human Rights Foundation.
