Armando.info: At this university, they don’t speak ill of Maduro

That August afternoon in 2024 was like any other for O*. He had just finished his homework for the day and decided to take a short break at home. He sat down and started checking his phone to pass the time. Then he stumbled upon a detail that would break his routine.

He noticed that he had received a notification from Google on his phone warning him that the email address he normally used as a student at the private Universidad Arturo Michelena was faulty. He tried to log into the account to check the problem, but realized that his session had been closed due to a deactivation order from the university itself. He immediately checked his user in Terna (the platform that the institution uses to upload grades and process tuition payments) and found the same result.

Although O* could already guess why all this electronic veto against him was happening, he couldn’t help but get nervous. But as soon as he regained his composure, he began to investigate: then he found out that dozens of students from the Arturo Michelena University had the same problem.

“That’s when I immediately knew it wasn’t a mistake, but something deliberate,” O* told the reporter. Armando.info. Under this premise, several of those affected, like O*, coordinated to obtain both an official version and a solution to the incident. They asked the university authorities and did not get any response in those first contacts. The matter was not minor for the group of young people: while the disqualification was maintained, they lost the possibility of submitting assignments and taking exams. It could even cause the interruption of their university studies.

It took a few more days for the students’ personal phones to start ringing, or in some cases, those of their parents and guardians. The calls, made from the Legal Consultancy of the Arturo Michelena University, summoned them to a meeting at the recently inaugurated headquarters of the university in the historic center of Valencia, the capital of the state of Carabobo, in the north-central part of Venezuela. There they were to discover that the incident with their electronic access had not been accidental.

When S*, another of the students banned from the virtual sphere, went to the meeting, one of the teachers who received him asked him if he knew why he was there. S* answered with a blunt “no.” The answer served as a reason for Pedro Flores, academic vice-rector and legal consultant of the institution, at the head of the group of university authorities at that meeting, to begin to contradict him with “evidence” in hand. AS* was given a folder with four pages in front of him. Each of these pages contained a list of screenshots with comments that S* had exchanged a few days earlier through a group of students on WhatsApp. To the author himself, his posts seemed barely sarcastic; but, from what he was told, S* now found out that the university authorities found them offensive.

They asked him to sign a “warning document.” He did not hesitate to do so. According to the document, S* was obliged to present a public apology to the Arturo Michelena University from his social media accounts, as well as to stop issuing criticism against the institution or messages that its directors could classify as “offensive expressions.” If he did not comply with the stipulations, the document warned, there would be consequences.

More details at Armando.info.

* Way to protect people’s identity.