Venezuela: Nights Most Dark

Blackouts are something that happens regularly in my country, it was one of the few constants in our lives, such as how the sun rises and the moon falls, the lights of the country, or the state, depending on the level of disrepair of our power plants, would be extinguished like candlelight.

The loss of electricity, even for the briefest of moments, always made me both angry and scared, one of the reasons was because the WIFI would take an obscenely long amount of time for it to come back and we all ran the risks of our electrical devices to be ruined because of the fluctuation in electric power. Phones, computers, game consoles, all ran the risk of becoming obsolete because of the blackouts, it wasn’t a matter of if, rather than when.

A blackout was going to come when we least expected it and when the situation was at its most delicate, say if virtual homework was due or if we needed to research for a last-minute essay. It came to the point that we would start estimating the trends of blackouts, sometimes they would all start coming at 6 pm, sometimes they would be at 10 pm, all I knew was that they were “rationing out the light,” but I was wondering why they would need to do something like that, which my mom and dad explained to me; Enchufados.

Supposedly, after the rise of Chavez into power, he gave plenty of money to a lot of people. He would then send them into foreign lands to buy things for the country, things like rice, or mechanical parts for electric plants. They would, of course, never come back and keep the money for themselves, setting themselves up with really nice homes, eating steaks every morning while some back in my country had to massacre and eat their pet dogs.

The term also applied to people that had deep connections with the government and were given money for whatever purpose as stated above, these people, when given that badge of shame, would fall into certain categories, at least according to the things I have heard.

One; “They are quite nice, but I hate that they are Enchufados.”

And two; “They are Enchufado trash, stay away from them.”

The latter came because, if they had such connections with the government, then it meant that they condoned the draconian, heinous, and deranged crimes they committed upon the populace, I could draw certain comparisons and talk about it more in-depth, but this blog isn’t about that.

Some of the blackouts, I believe I have experienced two, were in fact country-wide, no one would have electricity for days, weeks, but we all knew that the first one to get it back would have to be Caracas, mainly because it was the capital and mostly because the president surely lived there and of course, it was a priority.

Some of my friends had their own experiences as well, some would not come to school even, being so disheveled and filth-riddled and some would never fill up their empty, plastic water bottles using the water filters at school to take them home.

At one point when the generators at the school started to fail, one half of the school would work while the other didn’t, because the mechanism the generator used to prevent overheating was useless from not having the necessary parts that, well, you know where this links back to.

But the hospitals, the sick and decrepit were the ones that had it worst too. It is not hyperbole, or exaggeration that there is no such thing as being a doctor in Venezuela, you are a combat medic, that title perfectly encompasses your chances of success and the material you have to work with. Some of the old people at shelters would die of heatstroke from the lack of air conditioning too, it all weighed heavily on me, especially after I visited them for extra credit on one occasion and got to play and drink with them, it was like staring at an open wound, you want it to heal, but you know it will just open itself back up eventually, so why bother, you think.

I talked to them a lot and they told me of the most bizarre things, an idea so out of this world that it had only ever been brought up once by my father and was met with complete disbelief on my part: a prosperous Venezuela. They talked about how back in the 70s and 80s, the country was overflowing with fortune and luck, “the Switzerland of Latin America” they would say, my father would use those same words too.

It was like they were describing some sort of paradise, a place rid of diseases, where every man was a king with their own castle, a country that earned the envy of the world, whereas people from Venezuela take vacations to the US now, in these ancient, unknowable times everyone flocked to Venezuela for the most wondrous of raptures, laughing, dancing, a perfect Utopia on South America.

They were right, in the usage of the word that is. Sir Thomas More (1477 – 1535) was the first person to write of a ‘utopia’. He coined the word from the Greek ou-topos meaning ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’.

A perfect, unachievable, place.

Image is taken from Tomorrowland (2015)

Going into that place felt like Crossing The Threshold into an imaginary world, a self-contained story fitting into a grander narrative, or rather that’s what I like to call it, that’s just my book-obsessed mind. After leaving that place, I never went back, selfish, I know. But what I saw in the place changed me forever, because I never stopped thinking about how they might be or how the blackouts were affecting them, it forced me to look outside of my own home more so than before.

I heard that one of them died from a heatstroke, that many of them were abandoned by their families, who took what they could and left the country, it angers me, but I cannot blame them for suffering the universal woe of desperation, something that’s all too powerful.

The blackouts themselves were the source of stress for many of my friends and family too, some not even being able to go outside or going to school with the temperament of a stick of dynamite lit from both ends, and I couldn’t blame them for that, how could I? When something so important, so crucial in this day and age is out of your control, it isn’t only angering, but debilitating.

Then came the day when everything in my house failed, my parents got divorced, all devices in that house were short-circuited because of the blackouts and became completely and utterly obsolete.

I would go on to see another face of my country: a face full of embers, fire, and rage.

Thank you for reading my second installment in the Venezuela series, and thank you for your time.

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