RAFAEL SA ́NCHEZrather than being a virtuous martyr, Anderson might have been simply a crook, the hub
of a clandestine network of blackmailers secretly extorting great sums of money from the
accused in exchange for having their names removed from the list of those allegedly
involved in the plot to bring Cha ́vez down. In light of these accusations, the reasons for
Anderson’s killing would have been chrematistic rather than political, his assassination
ordered by some big banker or some other fat cat unwilling to pick up the tab the accusers
were putting on his or her head.
Whatever truth there may be in these revelations—and some argument concerning
their merit is still going on in Venezuela—the fact is that, ever since they started to
emerge, the official commemoration has stopped dead in its tracks, with a stony silence
filling the void that the receding official rhetoric has left behind—so dead, in fact, that, at
least according to some media reporting, all the busts that at a considerable cost the
government had commissioned in order to commemorate Anderson were rapidly and
surreptitiously melted down.^65 Even if they had just been paid for but not yet actually
made, or simply put aside until some hypothetical vindication of Anderson takes place,^66
the fact is that at least for now the dead prosecutor has dropped far down the list of topics
that the government wants to see addressed in public. I will leave the reader with this
image of melting official busts, which, even if not factually true, in light of all that I have
said about Venezuela’s monumental governmentality and the role of statuary therein is,
at the very least, poetically so.^67 The state’s inability even to lastingly canonize its martyrs
is a paradoxical monument or reminder of the continuous retreat of the political theologi-
cal in Venezuela today.
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