Birds represent freedom

starlings above a graveyard in Mayfield Heights Ohio

In Uruguay 1973, the president, Juan María Bordaberry in response to a general labor strike, dissolved government, became a dictator and appointed the military and police to run the government. The generals removed him in 1976, the people removed the generals in 1984-5. The dictatorship came with a general strike, and left with a general labor strike.

The writer Eduardo Galeano describes an incident in a new and special prison for those the new government imprisoned:

One Sunday, Didako Perez, school teacher, tortured and jailed “for having ideological ideas” is visited by his daughter Milay, age five. She brings him a drawing of birds. The guards destroy it at the entrance of the jail. On the following Sunday, Milay brings him a drawing of trees. Trees are not forbidden, and the drawings get through. Didako praises her work and asks about the colored circles scattered in the treetops, many small circles half-hidden among the branches: “Are they oranges? What fruit is it?” The child puts her finger to her mouth: “Shh.” And she whispers in his ear, “Silly, don’t you see they’re eyes? They’re the eyes of the birds that I’ve smuggled in for you.” 

The recently deceased president of Venezuela gave the president of the United States one of Galeano’s books, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Las venas abiertas de America Latina ).