Welcome to Venezuela

Don’t get me wrong… I love my country. When I have a chance to get away for the weekend and do a bit of national tourism I am always taken aback by the raw beauty of our beaches, the power of the rivers that carve their path through clusters of green mountains, the height and density of the trees that line the winding roads. I love the fact that my sister goes fishing for the weekend and returns with a live video of her petting an anaconda that was sunning itself on a branch by the river bank, that you can land on a beach and have it all to yourself for a day or the entire weekend, that patches of thick rainforests are no more than a stone throws away. Yet today’s Venezuela is not the place I remember in my infancy, or even the country I moved to in 1999. The most important and beautiful tourist spots are now owned and run by foreigners, Europeans, who set their prices in dollars, making them inaccessible to the majority of the native population. I admit that everything works more smoothly than it used to, some places even with the timeliness of a Swiss watch, but at the expense of the Latin warmth, camaderie, anarchy that made those Europeans set their eyes on this place. Our beaches are no longer ours, but a European oasis within this chaotic jumble, where blond men and women come to sunbathe, topless, while everything else falls apart.

Yet today I wonder what will happen to these Europeans, how will they run their businesses, survive in a country that (in spite of all its wealth) lacks basic foodstuff like milk, eggs, sugar, cooking oil and soon pasta? And for us, it is no longer a matter of keeping our best tourist places in-house. Slowly but surely we are less citizens of our country, Venezuela, as we (productive men and women) leave our parents behind to make a better life somewhere else, as foreigners. It is obvious that Venezuela needed a change that, for once, included the needs of the majority of its impoverished population. We all wanted to make the change. It was a beautiful idea; it would have been an incredible dream come true if Venezuelans had prospered as a country, if social class lines had not been turned into the trenches of a civil divide which has taken us from fear, to hate, to madness, to loss.