Simón Bolívar, dead nearly 200 years, rallies Venezuelans against U.S.

CARACAS, Venezuela - It’s easy enough to imagine Simón Bolívar, the great Liberator who freed several South American countries from Spanish rule, exhorting Venezuelans to arms against an invader.

But José Gregorio Hernández, the 20th-century healer to be canonized a saint this year by the Catholic Church?

“God is calling me to defend my motherland with love and courage,” an artificial intelligence-generated image of the beloved physician tells social media users. “I am ready.”

As Venezuela braces for what President Nicolás Maduro warns is an impending U.S. invasion, his authoritarian government is sharing videos resurrecting the country’s historical heroes to urge civilians to join militias.

The AI avatars of military and political leaders, artists and activists are part of “Yo Me Alisto,” the government’s campaign to prepare the country to fight. The Spanish phrase can mean “I am ready,” “I prepare myself” or “I enlist.”

Already strained relations between Washington and Caracas are growing more tense. The Trump administration, which has indicted Maduro and other Venezuelan officials on charges of narcoterrorism, has dispatched eight warships to the waters off Central and South America for what officials have said are counter-drug operations.

Maduro has sent 15,000 troops to Venezuela’s border with Colombia and called on civilians to join militias. President Donald Trump last week ordered a U.S. strike on a boat he said was carrying drugs from Venezuela to the United States, killing 11. Two Venezuela jets then buzzed a U.S. guided-missile destroyer.

To rally Venezuelans, the government has drafted figures ranging from fighters Francisco de Miranda, Ana María Campos and the Indigenous Cacique Guaicaipuro to the journalist Aquiles Nazoa, the singer-songwriter Alí Primera, and the scientist Humberto Fernández-Morán, inventor of the diamond scalpel.

In clips of several seconds each, AI renderings of a dozen such figures, many of them animated from well-known paintings or photographs, look directly at the viewer, deliver a line describing their commitment to the country to the tattoo of a martial drum and declare themselves ready.

In two weeks, Maduro says, more than 8.2 million Venezuelans have volunteered for the militias.

“That will give us the capacity to mobilize to guarantee peace,” he told reporters last week. The militias are known for signing up women and elderly men with little or no training.

Officials at the Laboratory of Peace, an independent rights group in Caracas, say they have received reports of government workers being forced to enlist. “The complaints we received were from public institution workers,” director Rafael Uzcátegui told The Washington Post. “In one of them, they told us they had been forced to record a video supporting the recruitment campaign.”

Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow on Venezuela and Colombia at the Atlantic Council, said the force isn’t only for defense. “Maduro is clearly thinking of a plan B here, one that involves sparking an internal armed conflict if he is removed from power,” he said.

Notably absent from the AI lineup is Hugo Chávez, the founder of Venezuela’s socialist state and Maduro’s mentor. For this purpose, one analyst said, the polarizing leader is probably best left unexhumed.

“Chávez remains a source of inspiration for a hard-line sector,” said the analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the government. “But Chávez is no longer revered, but rather seen as the source of the population’s problems.”

The government has chosen instead to present broadly popular figures capable of rallying Venezuelans against the United States. But even that approach has proved problematic.

The most controversial draftee has been Hernández, a devout Catholic who is said to have treated the poor free of charge. He was killed in a motor accident in Caracas in 1919, where he was risking his life caring for patients of the influenza pandemic. He’s due to be canonized in Rome next month by Pope Leo XIV.

Hernández’s inclusion in the government campaign is “an example of desperation,” one user wrote on Instagram. “Only someone desperate and spiritually poor would come up with such an atrocity.”

Maduro said Hernández would have defended Venezuela.

“Our José Gregorio Hernández was not only an eminent scientist, an eminent layman of the Catholic Church, a man of Christ, but at the time of his death, as we say here, he asked for his rifle,” Maduro said last month, before the videos were released. “He saw no colors, no differences, no parties. He saw the homeland, our homeland.”

The historian José Juan de Paz, a Dominican friar who served on the canonization commission for Hernández, disagreed.

“There is no accuracy in affirming that José Gregorio Hernández ever touched a weapon,” Paz told The Post. “It makes no sense to involve the memory of a saint in a situation like this.”

Hernández was a pacifist who was “deeply moved by the First World War,” Paz said. “He would solve problems with dialogue, not weapons.”