Venezuelans in the national capital, Caracas, burned effigies of dictator Nicolás Maduro and his Russian patron Vladimir Putin in public this weekend as part of an Easter tradition known as “the burning of Judas.”
The burning of Judas is a 500-year-old tradition in the country that has more recently morphed into a form of political expression, a response to Maduro’s socialist regime implementing state violence against political dissidents to silence opponents. While explicitly socialist and allied with communist atheist states like Cuba and North Korea, the Venezuelan socialist regime pretends to maintain the nation’s Catholic tradition and has also organized its own “burning of Judas” featuring effigies of Venezuelan opposition figures.
Organizers of the burning in Caracas this weekend chose to feature Maduro and Putin alongside the socialist mayor of Caracas, Carmen Meléndez, and Minister of Energy Néstor Reverol as a way to protest the nearly incessant power outages the nation suffers thanks to two decades of socialist mismanagement.
Part of the tradition requires participants to read a confession of the betrayal those presented in effigy allegedly committed to be branded the Judas of the Year. The Venezuelans organizing the event this year branded Putin “Judas Vladimir” and Maduro, Meléndez, and Reverol his “sons,” who, as part of the tradition, leave a final statement before their burning. Opposition community leader Carlos Rojas read the statement in the voice of a composite of the four characters being burned, who he declared “condemned to the eternal contempt of the inhabitants of Caracas, Venezuela, and all the world.”
The statement mentioned Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, for which it condemned Putin to forcing Ukrainians to endure “famine” and “the destruction of its history.” The statement condemned Putin for his role in the destruction of the Venezuelan state as well, however, as the composite figure claimed to “bathe in pools of dollars” while Venezuelans “have to find food in the garbage. And if they protest, as a good dictator, I apply hard repression.”
Following the final statement, the effigy burned.
Speaking to the Spanish news service EFE, Rojas explained the decision to burn Putin along with Venezuelan socialist leaders.
“Putin is the icon of war and is one of the pillars that keeps Maduro in power,” he explained. “We burned Maduro, for another consecutive year, because he is an icon of hunger, misery, repression, and torture – and, above all, of the high treason of handing over to foreign empires, like Russia and China, our resources so that he can stay in power.”
Putin’s Russia is one of Maduro’s most reliable allies and actively bankrolls the illegitimate socialist regime, similarly supporting leftist dictatorships throughout Latin America, including Cuba and Venezuela. At the height of the protest movement in the mid-2010s that nearly toppled Maduro, Putin extended billions of dollars in loans in exchange for crude oil and support on the world stage, largely helping Maduro purchase the weapons necessary to kill, imprison, or otherwise silence the opposition movement. A more stable Maduro regime promised to send loan payments back to Russia as soon as possible in 2020, helping keep Putin’s languishing economy afloat.
More recently, Maduro has become one of the most vocal supporters of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the world stage, supporting the measure even as powers like China stick to vapid statements calling all sides to engage in “dialogue.”
“The extremist right that has taken over the governments of Ukraine has never been interested in resolving conflicts via dialogue, has never been interested in peace, has never been interested in respecting Russia,” Maduro falsely proclaimed in February (Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ran a campaign of conflict resolution that resulted in opponents branding him too “pro-Russian”).
“That’s why Venezuela announces its complete backing to President Vladimir Putin in the defense of peace of Russia in the defense of peace in that region, in the valiant peace of his people and his fatherland,” Maduro continued. “All the support for President Putin, all the support for Russia.”
Maduro’s call to support Russia has prompted many Venezuelans to instead enthusiastically support Ukraine, many additionally recalling that Ukrainian protesters during the anti-Russian Maidan movement in 2014 published videos of encouragement and solidarity for the anti-socialist protests in Venezuela at the time.
Venezuelans have been burning Maduro in effigy to celebrate Easter since at least 2014, when the burning of Judas featured both Maduro and top henchman Diosdado Cabello, but socialists staged their own parallel event burning effigies of opposition leaders.
In 2018, the socialist establishment chose then-American President Donald Trump as its “Judas.”
Venezuelans, particularly in Andean regions, also burn effigies to celebrate the new year – and to protest Maduro. Maduro also surfaced on the eve of 2022 in piñata form in Peru, where participants traditionally beat a piñata rather than burn an effigy, although communist Peruvian President Pedro Castillo proved a more popular piñata.
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