PSUV Community Leader Disappears in Merida, Venezuelan Government Urged to Act

San Francisco, June 4th 2014. (venezuelanalysis.com)- Last week, community members gathered in Mérida to draw attention to the prolonged disappearance of pro-government activist, Jonathan Hernandez.

“Jonathan Hernandez is not the TV actor or the well-known journalist whose disappearances have recently made headlines in the bourgeois press, but he is our brother in arms, renowned for his revolutionary grassroots work,” read a statement signed by many collectives and released by community TV network Tatuy. “It is time for the authorities of the revolutionary government to address the situation which today worries his family, friends, and companions.”

Hernandez was last seen on May 11th, in Andean city of El Vigia, near Merida. An active member of the Victor Jara collective and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Hernandez has been volunteering as an educator since 2004 through numerous governmental programs, including the widely successful missions to end illiteracy and provide high school education for adults. He was described by a neighbor as “one of the guys who sparked revolutionary thought in the Domingo Peña neighborhood in the past few years.”

The statement read explained: “Within the context of a continuous coup d’état being attempted in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, as well as recent events in the Andean states whose various urban territories are being assaulted by violent waves of organized destabilization, financed by the Venezuelan ultra right-wing, Colombian narco-paramilitaries, and US imperialism, we call upon the revolutionary people and the international community to recognize the suspicious disappearance of our comrade Jonathan Hernandez. We ask the region and national government to investigate immediately, to clarify the whereabouts of this comrade.”

Carlos Rivas, representative of the Bicentennial collective said of Hernandez, “He was a neighborhood prefect, member of the construction collective, a spokesperson for people’s power and a revolutionary comrade of the honest kind- those that fight tooth and nail but with clean nails.”

On Thursday grassroots organizers met with state government officials in Merida’s capital, while parallel investigations were conducted in the city’s major hospitals and morgues.

As of today, no further information is known.