In the village of Nikunja Sen in West Bengal, far removed from the geopolitical manoeuvring of Caracas or Washington, stands the Bagu Primary School. In 2005, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, during a visit that captured the imagination of Kolkata’s leftist intelligentsia, donated a significant sum of money to this modest institution.
In return, he requested that a new wing be named after El Libertador Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan military officer who led the defeat of the Spanish colonialists in South America in the early 19th century.
Today, an otherwise unremarkable structure of brick and mortar, that wing of the school stands as a testament to a vision of South-South cooperation that transcended the transactional. It is a bond built on the shared memory of colonial struggle and the aspiration for autonomy, a bond characterised by flashes of ideological intimacy, yet historically hamstrung by vast geographical and geopolitical distances.
On January 3, news broke of the dramatic American military intervention in Caracas and the abduction of the Venezuelan president. The brazen violation of sovereignty echoes the grim days of Operation Condor in the 1970s and ’80s, when the United States-backed military dictatorships in eight South American countries cracked down on political opponents.
New Delhi’s reaction has been characteristically...
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