CARACAS – Venezuela, my home country, has it all: beautiful and breathtaking landscapes, abundant resources, even unique wonders of nature like the Angel Falls or the Catatumbo Lightning.
Yet if you’ve heard our name in the news recently, it’s as the subject of tragedy: toilet paper shortages, desperate people scavenging through garbage to find food for their families, bread lines, a systemic failure of our public utilities, dogs flayed in broad daylight for meat, corruption, lack of propermedicine and health access, weighing stacks of cash, and so much more.
It saddens me to say that it’s true, all of it, a product of 20 years of socialism.
I was barely eleven years old when Hugo Chávez began his first term in 1999. When this “Bolivarian Revolution” started to change the constitution and morph our laws I was just an introverted child that had just moved to the capital of the country, fascinated by video games, cartoons, and Power Rangers and with an overactive imagination.
This perpetual revolution has laid down a status quo in the country that often forces you to lose your personal aspirations, to cast away your future, hopes, and dreams; it changes you in many ways until you’re no longer a citizen — you’re merely a survivor.
Today, here I stand, more or less that same introverted kid — but with 20 years of ever-increasing hardships upon my shoulders; a lesser version of what I could’ve been, clinging to those memories where everything was simpler and all of it made sense.
This is a personal account of what has my life become after twenty years of Bolivarian Revolution— 20 years that comprise two-thirds of my life.
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See Also:
(1) Three Nations That Tried Socialism and Rejected It
