Venezuela’s Musicians Rise Up
CARACAS, Venezuela — Armando Cañizales left his viola at home that day. Eighteen and talented, he was a success story of Venezuela’s state- run music program for the poor. But he decided it was time to join the street protests against the government that had supported his career.
As teenagers throwing rocks retreated from a line of soldiers, Mr. Cañizales moved forward alone. Then the fatal shots rang out.
“When he fell, I didn’t even know it was him,” said William Hernández, 19, a fellow musician a short distance from Mr. Cañizales during the protests last month. He never expected Mr. Cañizales, who had expressed no political views to him, to be at the march. The viola had seemed to be the only thing on his mind.
Venezuela’s political unrest is testing the loyalties of many who have benefited from the socialist- oriented government. Doctors and nurses at public hospitals hold marches to demand supplies for empty clinics. Police officers, themselves suffering shortages of food, now question the government’s battle with protesters.
Yet no group has been tested quite like Venezuela’s classical musicians, who have been drawn from the country’s working- class barrios. They belong to the Simón Bolívar Musical Foundation, known to Venezuelans simply as El Sistema. For four decades, the state-financed program trained hundreds of thousands of musicians. Its young prodigy, Gus- tavo Dudamel, leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
A source of national pride, the program was one of the few institutions that seemed exempt from Venezuela’s growing polarization. “In its 42 years, El Sistema somehow managed to keep an impartial position,” said Ollantay Velásquez, the director of Mr. Cañizales’s orchestra. “It has stayed that way until today.”
In Los Angeles, Mr. Dudamel dedicated a concert to Mr. Cañizales’s memory. “We must stop ignoring the just cry of the people suffocated by an intolerable crisis,” he said. “I raise my voice against violence. I raise my voice against repression.”
In Venezuela, orchestra members have played memorial concerts for Mr. Cañizales, using performances to denounce government officials.
On a recent afternoon, Wuilly Arteaga, 23, stood in a crowd of demonstrators, his violin on his shoulder. He played the national anthem. Explosions of tear gas canisters erupted between the notes. Finally, other protesters dragged him back from the security forces. “I remembered my friend Armando,” Mr. Arteaga said afterward. “I have spent ages now playing and living on the streets, and I see that so many talented Ven- ezuelans have had to eat from the trash.”
Around age 10, Mr. Cañizales took up the viola. Though he had planned to be a doctor one day, the instrument became an obsession for him — no less than “his life,” recalled Jesús Pérez, his El Sistema professor.
He loved Beethoven, said those who knew him. He practiced Georg Philipp Telemann, a Baroque composer whose Viola Concerto Mr. Cañizales once played in a recital, perhaps with a bit of stage fright, missing a few notes. “He played for the love of it,” said Mr. Velásquez, the orchestra conductor.
May 3 was tumultuous in Caracas. An armored vehicle drove into a crowd of protesters. Four opposition lawmakers were wounded. Even the leftist attorney general came out that day to condemn the police repression as excessive.
In another part of the city, young protesters were throwing rocks at national guardsmen. In a video clip, a lone figure wearing a backpack and a helmet appears, approaching the guardsmen from a distance with his arms outstretched. The man is Mr. Cañizales. There is no record of the shooting. The next clip shows the musician being rushed into an ambulance. “No, Armando, no!” someone screams.
Mr. Velásquez was protesting when he got a call. “They asked me if the boy was in my orchestra,” he said. “I felt impotent, like I had lost my son.”
Hundreds turned out for Mr. Cañizales’s funeral in May. Members of his orchestra set up their music stands in the cemetery to play. Mr. Cañizales’s mother, Mónica Carrillo, went up to Mr. Pérez, and handed him her son’s viola.
He recalled: “His mother said, ‘I want that Armando’s viola gets played today.’ ”