The Names That Keep Marching

The Venezuelan protests of 2014 occupy a decisive place in recent history because they marked a turning point in the way broad sectors of society, particularly the youth, experienced politics, conflict, and the exercise of power. That cycle of mobilizations condensed tensions that had accumulated over years and left traces that still shape public memory and contemporary perceptions.

The sociopolitical context is indispensable for understanding their significance. Venezuela was undergoing an increasingly visible economic deterioration, accompanied by a pervasive sense of uncertainty that filtered into everyday life. Inflation, scarcity, and insecurity generated material distress and a transformation in the experience of time itself. For many young people, the future began to feel like fragile terrain, crossed by obstacles that were difficult to foresee. Within this climate, protest acquired a dimension that extended beyond the expression of immediate demands. Participating in the mobilizations meant asserting one’s presence in an environment perceived as restrictive and progressively unstable.

The centrality of youth revealed profound transformations in political culture. The university reemerged as a space of articulation, debate, and visibility, although its prominence no longer followed traditional patterns. Collective action became intertwined with horizontal forms of organization and with an intensive use of digital networks that amplified narratives, images, and interpretive frameworks. The street and the virtual sphere began to function as simultaneous arenas of contestation, where political experience was produced and circulated in decentralized ways.

Violence irreversibly altered the emotional density of that moment. The deaths of Bassil Da Costa and Génesis Carmona became inscribed in collective memory as markers of grief and vulnerability. Their names acquired a weight that transcended the individual dimension. In them was condensed the perception that protest entailed a radical exposure of the body, a tangible proximity to harm and loss. Public space ceased to be experienced solely as a site of deliberation or symbolic confrontation. It came to be felt as territory permeated by threat, where life itself appeared at the center of the dispute. It was there, in that place and at that moment, that Venezuelan youth, who had known only chavismo and no other political system or model, understood that this monster represented an existential threat.

Power does not operate only through direct repression. It also seeks control through the production of discourses, classifications, and regimes of truth that delimit what is legitimate and what is threatening. In 2014, the figure of the young protester became embedded within competing narratives. The “guarimberos” at the barricades, with plastic and cardboard shields, Molotov cocktails thrown into the air by young hands that were themselves burned. Within official discourse, protest could be framed as disorder or destabilization. For broad sectors of society, youth emerged as bearers of a moral claim, linked to the precarization of everyday life and the erosion of expectations.

The televised dialogue of April 2014 added another layer of complexity to the experience of the period. Its length, its highly mediatized character, and its institutional staging generated expectations of de-escalation amid the crisis. Public perception, however, was shaped by the tension between the performance of political exchange and the persistence of conflict in the streets. This contrast fueled interpretations of distance or disconnection between the formal rituals of politics and the concrete experience of social conflict.

From a historical perspective, the legacy of 2014 can be examined on at least three levels. On the political and institutional plane, the protests exposed the fragility of traditional mechanisms of mediation. The state’s response, characterized by intense repression and the judicialization of opposition actors, including leaders such as Leopoldo López, consolidated perceptions of authoritarianism and deepened distrust toward institutions. This cycle contributed to the sedimentation of a prolonged dynamic of confrontation between the state and mobilized sectors.

On the sociocultural plane, the protests transformed the political experience of an entire generation. For many young people, 2014 represented a moment of accelerated politicization in which collective action, horizontal organization, and the intensive use of digital networks redefined forms of participation. Protest began to be perceived as a sustained practice of resistance, articulated with everyday life and with strategies of adaptation to crisis.

On the symbolic plane, the protests altered the relationship between youth and nation. Youth Day ceased to function exclusively as an official celebration or school ritual and acquired a density traversed by conflicted memory. Each subsequent commemoration became charged with evocations of violence, deaths, detentions, and diaspora. Venezuelan youth came to occupy an ambivalent place in public narratives, associated simultaneously with hope for change and with the structural experience of precarity.

Furthermore, the protests of 2014 inaugurated patterns that would reappear in subsequent cycles of mobilization. The centrality of youth, the coexistence of peaceful protest and confrontation, and the articulation between street and digital spheres revealed continuities in forms of resistance. In light of these processes, 2014 is best understood as part of a broader historical sequence of sustained conflict rather than as an isolated episode.

These traces allow recent demonstrations called by university leaders to be situated within a historical and affective continuity. The university once again emerges as a space of political articulation, charged with memory and accumulated meanings. Each new youth mobilization reactivates previous experiences, reshapes perceptions of risk, and renews disputes over legitimacy and collective agency. The resonance of 2014 persists precisely through this capacity to structure the present, through the ways in which the memory of that cycle continues to shape how Venezuelan youth imagine, inhabit, and confront public space.

In the background of every new mobilization, a constellation of absences persists, one that recent history resists allowing to fade into silence. There remain the faces of 2014, of 2017, of 2019, young people who took to the streets carrying expectations, anger, hope, and a shared intuition that the country was crossing a threshold. Their names continue to gravitate in public memory. Bassil Da Costa, Génesis Carmona, Juan Pernalete, Neomar Lander, Armando Cañizales, Fabián Urbina, and so many others whose lives were abruptly cut short amid political violence. Each embodies more than a truncated biography. They represent the human dimension of a conflict that transformed public space into a terrain of risk, where civic participation could culminate in irreparable loss.

Those absences do not dwell only in the past. They speak to the present, traverse it, and unsettle it.

Yesterday, when young people called by university leaders once again occupied the streets, those memories also marched in a sense. The presence of many who for years lived under threat, who knew persecution, who learned to measure the cost of every word and gesture, introduced a deeply emotional dimension into the public scene. Their steps suggest that memory, far from extinguishing itself, can become momentum, a will to inscribe one’s own voice within history.

Within this same fabric lie other absences, less visible yet equally decisive. Political prisoners remain suspended in a temporality of confinement and uncertainty. Many, according to persistent denunciations by human rights organizations, endure torture, cruel treatment, or degrading conditions. Their bodies, though removed from the streets, remain inscribed within the conflict, reminding us that repression does not end at the moment of confrontation but may persist through quieter and more devastating forms.

Amid this weave of grief, courage, and historical persistence, the words of Rómulo Betancourt resonate with a force that crosses generations:

“Tell Fidel Castro that when Venezuela needed liberators, it did not import them, it birthed them.”