In 1917, Salvador de la Plaza wrote his diary, essentially political, with some personal touches. It was not yet about the great communist militant, but about a patriotic young man who struggled to organize the student body into associations with the ultimate goal of combating the backwardness established by the Gómez regime.
Although it is important to emphasize that this was his pre-Marxist stage; therefore, within the framework of the conceptual binomial "civilization and barbarism", the former student of the old university of Caracas not only denounced some characters linked to JV Gómez, but also fought to establish a modern national State.
For example, on August 11, 1917, he wrote two singular items: “Today I have pleasant news. The Cárdenas family, Venezuelan ministers in France, have been declared persona non grata by the French government, for being considered German spies—they were sending German correspondence in the Legation's briefcase—(…) The other news is that César Zumeta is imprisoned in New York for being a German spy; it seems that a trial will follow (…) Thus we will get rid of a harmful man (…) We should be clear that only the government is pro-German and that, being tyrants, they are not the representatives of Venezuela but of their own particular interests.”
José Enrique Rodó, Leo Tolstoy, Manuel Ugarte, and Jules Payot ideologically influenced Plaza's political and moral vision, though it was permeated by a profound love for his country, which he sought to regenerate through the student movement. He hated, with sincere fervor, the Andean leaders in power (from Castro to Gómez). Like his entire generation, he detested the culture of strongmen and machete-wielding thugs. He considered them enemies of the necessary "civilization" of Venezuela.
Therefore, he also focused part of his analysis and political aspirations on the notions of “race and nationality.” “I would like (…) the existence of Venezuelans with ideals of race (…), not mere material well-being.”
Clearly, for him, the ideological and political role of the "student" consisted of liberating the country from the obscurantism established by the enemies of Simón Bolívar's ideals, but under a clear anti-Yankee sentiment. Although later, in his Marxist phase, he would focus the utopia of national liberation on the working class (along with other sectors of society, since he was not a dogmatist).
