It happened more than ten years ago, but I did not forget the scene for what revealed me about a problem that today affects the lives of millions of people: how Venezuelans see ourselves and how we believe others see us.
More than a hundred passengers from a flight from Caracas made the immigration row at the Miami airport. They still did not consider us hostile aliens, but our hands sweat with Latin American stress before the unpredictable nature of the sentries that groped our passports. Then the row began to take – and the tension to climb – for something that passed in front of one of the windows, where an older man raised his voice.
– I am retired from Petróleos de Venezuela! – Republic in Spanish, with a straight back and an almost challenging air. The guard did not understand it and, fed up, called a Latin colleague, who spoke with the passenger a couple of seconds and translated his partner: “Retired”There I understood: the guard had asked the man what his occupation was and he, instead of saying“not working” o “retired“, Assumed that this American official who did not speak Spanish should know not only what” retiree “wanted to say, but what Petroleos de Venezuela, a public company from a Latin American country, such as YPF or Petrobras.
There they let him pass and the row moved again, but the pride with which this man pronounced “Petroleos of Venezuela”, as an emblem of privilege and an identity signal. He talked about what had been, until two decades ago, one of the world’s greatest oil companies. How was it possible, should he think, that an American did not know her?
Like those elderly Japanese soldiers who were still hidden in the Filipina jungle decades after Hiroshima, this man did not accept that his kingdom had succumbed a long time ago, and that he was never as powerful as he believed.
Oil as predestination. That passenger belonged to the generation of my parents, who was more fortunate than anyone who preceded it and that followed. He saw how in a rural country, automations, highways and autocines sprout overnight. when he was a child they vaccinated him and gave him a white shirt and a glass of milk to go to school, while his grandfather and his father could have touched a field at that age, even if they were sick. Most likely it came from a poor family, to which a well -paid job in the public sector catapulted a comfortable middle class.
If television turned on, he contemplated a proud and optimistic country of maidens who won the Miss World and Major League stars, which was put on the side of Argentina in the Falklands War and helped resolve conflicts in Central America. If he was traveling to Curacao, Colombia or Florida herself, he noticed that his currency was strong. If a government was bad, it was replaced in the following elections.
Just as Argentina was the barn of the world, Venezuela was one of the countries of the highest annual GDP in the mid -twentieth century. Only Argentina and Uruguay received more European immigrants in South America than the Venezuela of the 60s. In the 70s, when my generation was born, it was a democracy with a huge cash flow, a neighbor of dictatorships that were impoverished.
Thousands of Argentines lived among us. They were engineers in state steel; People of culture such as Tomás Eloy Martínez, Rodolfo Terragno, theatrical director Carlos Giménez or actress Juana Sujo; and influential advertising and television executives. We called them pedantes without going through our heads to think what they could be saying of us the millions of Colombian, Peruvian or Ecuadorian immigrants to those who looked over the shoulder.
That democracy so confident in itself confused consumption with development, abandoned its efforts in educational and health coverage, and let its young institutions soften under the torrent of Petrodollars. In 1989, a terrible social outbreak taught us the blows that we were not the egalitarian and stable society that we believed. In 1992, the coup attempt of Hugo Chávez forced us to meet again with what we had not ceased to be: a country that still believed in leaders. In 1998, the military who promised to put order and re -founded everything defeated effortlessness in the elections to candidates who defended a system that nobody wanted anymore.
The lie became true, the symbols were replaced, the past was rewritten and everything was literally painted red. In the socialism of the 21st century, one of whose slogans was “Venezuela Country Power”, the redeemed people used subsidized dollars to combine their Che cap with good Nike Air Jordan or a Louis Vuitton portfolio. There in heaven, Chávez said, flies a satellite that we bought, called Simón Bolívar, and in the rest of the world they admire or hate us because we are defeating imperialism for the first time since Columbus appeared to enslave us.
Then the commander died. The last thing that remained to be re -elected to send forever was spent, when in reality I was convicted. As soon as they finished their funeral, people noticed that the factories did not produce, the fields were razed and the money was worth nothing.
– And the power? Asked the people.
Chávez’s heir responded to the shots.
The irresistible charm of lost illusion. From then on, more than a quarter of the population of Venezuela undertook the march between the ruins of the false Chavista utopia. In the Orinoco ports, gabarras are filled with the pieces of the basic industries, which today are shot as scrap. Among the industrial cities of Maracay and Valencia extends the high structure of what was going to be a railroad: it looks like the spine of a half -digging mythological monster, which only serves to paint propaganda or graffiti, and so that the black vultures dry the wings after a downpour. In the vestiges, already taken by El Monte, from sugar centrals, urbanizations and stores who never finished building, children whose parents emigrated try to capture parrots to sell them as pets on the roads.
So many young people left, in working age, that we lost the demographic bonus, that unique window in the trajectory of a nation, just when we reached him. Now Venezuela is an old country and empty -handed, who spends time regretting what he was about to achieve, as a striker who lost the World Cup for a evil criminal.
Despite so much evidence about the magnitude of the catastrophe, the frustrated dream of the first world does not finish clearing. It will be because it beats in us from the very foundation of the Republic. The idea of guaranteed national wealth, arising from the apparent soil fertility one hundred years before the picos of American geologists undress the subsoil, created curious coincidences between Venezuela and Argentina. The first president of the independent Venezuela from both Spain and Gran Colombia, José Antonio Páez, was a friend of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and was convinced that if he invested on earth, the qualified immigration was encouraged and the population was educated, our country would be of the most prosperous of the globe.
Páez lived in fact two of his last years in Buenos Aires, protected by Sarmiento; A century later, a Perón exiled in Caracas thought how Páez would return to perform the national destination. In the early 90s, both countries had charismatic presidents that came from statist parties with a privatization agenda, the Tocayos Carlos Andrés Pérez and Carlos Menem. Later, the narrow Chávez-Kirchner alliance and the investment of immigration history would come: Venezuelans leaving Argentina, and not vice versa.
Everything happened and more, but we do not finish digesting the hallucinogen cocktail with which they breastfeed us.
We express it through different symptoms. We deviate the responsibility of our self -destruction to Cuba or the United States. Or we direct anger to ourselves, through a narrative, a theater and a cinema that accentuate the national defects that made the first world chimera absurd. Before, that bitter condemnation of the real country behind the hypnosis of hydrocarbons came mostly from critical artists and intellectuals who ended up as obedient Chavista officials. Now, those who claim that Venezuela would never prosper hold in many cases that we were too left or had too dark skin to make the historical jump.
Another symptom, no less serious, is the tenacity, the resistance of that illusion. The one that says: we can still be that great country, if we corrected that historical accident, if we wake up from that nightmare, if we close that parenthesis that has been Chavism. After all, there is oil still, underground. At this time, the most influential leader of the opposition, María Corina Machado, tries hub energetic that will barely return democracy.
At the same time, throughout this diaspora that does not stop growing and stretching, thousands of Venezuelans who say nothing about the hunt for Venezuelan migrants in the United States react indignantly on social networks when one of them is the victim of an act of xenophobia in Latin America or even when a famous comedor is whistled by the public in Viña del Mar. It is common to hear that the “Indians” are common. Mallowed when it was the Caracas Bolívar who “freed them”, and that the “blacks” of Trinidad or Guyana should remember when we gave them work, as servants, in the Venezuela of the 80s. The superiority complex, like everything that has to do with oil, is not easy to wash.
Everything indicates that Venezuela will take decades to return to the development highway, if it ever does. Several of their conquests of the twentieth century were dismantled, several of the diseases that had controlled returned, and today is a country where half of the people live in misery, without a health system worthy of that name, with energy deficit and parts of the territory under the control of irregular armed actors. Chavismo, which administered the last oil bonanza, made us return to that Polvarheda that had left behind that retiree of Petróleos de Venezuela.
Hopefully we at least learn that there are collective dreams that should be awakened, and that we will not go anywhere if we do not look frankly in the mirror, we admit our responsibility in our ruin and do what we must do.
Venezuelan writer, based on Montreal since 2014; Chief editor of Caracas Chronicles. His most recent book is Venezuela. Memoirs of a lost future (the cataract books, 2024).
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