• CONSTRUYENDO UN FUTURO DE LIBERTAD

ECHOES OF FREEDOM FOUNDATION

Building a Future of Liberty

HISTORICAL DOCUMENTARY

“THE GENERAL AND THE MARK OF THE BEAST”

Author and Original Concept: Brigadier General (Ret.) Antonio José Rivero González
Production by the Ecos de Libertad Foundation – Echoes of Freedom Foundation
Miami, Florida – United States of America (2025)

“Why has this happened to Venezuela? Why, in a democratic and free land, rooted in anti-communist values and rich in resources, was the seed of 21st-century socialism sown? How has this power structure endured so long, despite the immense harm inflicted on its people?”
These questions do not arise from curiosity, but from heartbreak. They are wounds that open in the soul of the man who saw his homeland transform into a laboratory of ideology. And from that search, from that pain that demands answers, this project is born: an investigation, a testimony, a warning.
With time, I understood that what happened in Venezuela was not a coincidence or an isolated political deviation. It was the manifestation of a transnational project carefully designed, a strategy that, since the Cold War, had singled out my country as an ideological beachhead in the South American continent, destined to challenge the Western order and lead a bloc in opposition to the United States.
This documentary—and the literary work that accompanies it—seek to decipher that plot. A network that links the history of ideas, geopolitics, and human experience. A journey that spans from the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the Communist Manifesto to the digital present, where ideology disguises itself as technology and control takes the form of algorithms.
In 1750, man discovers he can dominate nature. In 1848, man also discovers he can dominate man. Since then, history has become a struggle for the human soul: between those who believe in freedom and those who believe in control.

Today, seeing myself directly involved in that history, not as an observer but as a witness, I recognize that my life and my country were caught in that conflict. From the events of February 4, 1992, my destiny became tied to Venezuela’s. But even amid exile and trials, the values learned in my family home, the faith of my family, and the teachings of my parents sustain my struggle for truth and freedom.
“What is shown here is not a foreign history. It is the history of all peoples who have suffered under the power of an idea that promises justice and delivers chains.”
The filmmakers who accompany me have woven my personal story with historical investigation, in a narrative that crosses times and geographies. My voice travels between archives, ruins, testimonies, and landscapes. Each frame, each image, is a fragment of that truth I have sought for decades.
Communism is the central line of this investigation. From it unfolds a network of linked themes: capitalism as an antagonistic system, the Catholic Church as a bastion of the spirit, oil as a weapon of power, the wars that reordered the planet, propaganda and media as instruments of manipulation, culture and art as trenches of resistance, totalitarian regimes as expressions of dogma, victims and dissent as the moral conscience of the world, and finally, industrial and technological development—that new field where ideology seeks to control everything.
Because today war is no longer fought with rifles. Power no longer needs prisons or firing squads: it only needs screens. Networks, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are the new weapons of global control. What was once censorship is now distraction; what was once repression is now dependence.
“Technology, born as a promise of freedom, has become a surveillance mirror where man offers his soul in exchange for comfort.”
This documentary and this work do not seek only to narrate a history, but to awaken a consciousness. Because what was lost in Venezuela—and what the world risks losing—is not just democracy: it is the consciousness of the free man.
There is no ideology that defeats truth. There is no mark that erases memory. As long as there is a man willing to speak, freedom still breathes.”

Antonio Rivero G.