Venezuela: The Burning

Demonstrators clash with the riot police during a protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas on April 20, 2017. Venezuelan riot police fired tear gas Thursday at groups of protesters seeking to oust President Nicolas Maduro, who have vowed new mass marches after a day of deadly unrest. Police in western Caracas broke up scores of opposition protesters trying to join a larger march, though there was no immediate repeat of Wednesday’s violent clashes, which left three people dead. / AFP PHOTO / JUAN BARRETO (Photo credit should read JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images)

The act of protest is defined as “a statement or action expressing disapproval of or objection to something”. Such an act is something that humanity has done and will continue to do for as long as it can when they perceive that a massive injustice has been dealt to them. It is a right, after all, to stand up for what one believes in, even if it might offend the entire world, so long as those defending that perceived truth, believe it to be, well, the truth.

Protesting is a complicated matter, we all have our rights and when we feel those rights are being trespassed and disregarded, we react. Because the worst thing one can do against evil is be apathetic towards it, because that unwillingness to confront it, to denounce it, makes others tolerated, and then it is accepted. And in the end, when it has festered long enough, it becomes wrong to stand up to it because it’s what we define as “normal” or “acceptable”.

Because of my family’s advantageous position, we’ve always had someone to take us to school that wasn’t my mom, it wasn’t because of laziness but more because she didn’t like to drive, and now that I’ve experienced driving, I can say that while I don’t agree, I understand her point of view. Our chauffeurs served the family as best they could, and I will always be grateful for what they did for me and my siblings.

I started seeing weird and hellish sights. Tree branches cut and laid in the middle of the street, blocking it and set ablaze with gasoline, garbage, and plastic, giving off a sulfuric smell, as if the gates of hell had opened before my eyes. At some point I also saw the sight of hundreds of thousands of thousands of people, walking around in unison, like an army of Persian soldiers, an infinite opposition against an ebony platoon of armored puppets, brandishing guns, batons, and tear-gas.

I do not care about your politics, be it left or right or whatever, there is no subjective point of view here. They were starving, they were poor, they saw their country go from the peak of South America to the abyssal bottom of it all. And believe me, I have heard hundreds of people whine about how wrong I am, and I don’t care, those people never had to live under Maduro’s regime, and yet they claim to somehow know better than me.

Protests were never in the forefront of my life, but they were always present, always there, like a pair of eyes watching you without you knowing, something in the back of my head, knowing that people were going to be imprisoned, be killed through extreme brutality or worse, because they could, and would, do worse, so much worse.

My father was someone who participated in those protests, I remember always telling him the same thing when he told me he was going to go participate: “Dad, I love you, be careful.” Because people would be gassed and beaten and stoned by the guard if they went there and did it, in a way, kind of similar to the protests I see around me in this country today, but with radically different contexts of course.

It wouldn’t be until long that I would start to research those protests and saw the videos that people took with their cellphones and cameras. They honestly reminded me of those war movies I saw in class, the disorientation, the thin line separating the two sides, like rival packs of dogs trying to kill each other. It reminded me of the things I read about Trench Warfare and how it was a constant struggle to gain ground, to push back, to resist, but the people were radically different from the stories I had read.

My father and I often disagree in our views regarding evil, he believes that there are simply those that are irredeemable monsters, people that want to harm others for the sake of harm, while I debated with myself that there was no such thing as evil without reason. I never excused the things that tyrants and monsters did, they had their reasons, those reasons didn’t make them better people or excuse their actions, it just made them human, and that is scary. The fact that we are a species that can willingly ignore our own sense of mercy and commit such atrocities upon anyone for our own reasons scared me, and I guess to an extent, I and my dad are both right, that’s scary too.

I looked from one side to the other and only saw one thing, something that didn’t need to happen.

On one side I saw mothers, fathers, young adults that had their future stolen from them, who cried and fought in desperation for something better. They wanted a life where they wouldn’t be afraid of their child dying because they couldn’t feed them, a life where their children wouldn’t have to live in fear for thieves looking in every corner and corrupt officials seeking to beat, bludgeon and massacre those that went against the party and criticized their ‘glorious’ leader.

A life that would go back to those normal years, the years of a nation that wasn’t suffering. I’ve often heard the idea of The American Dream and what it means. To build a business, become successful, do better than your parents, and settle down. I like to think that other countries have their own “Dream”. The Venezuelan Dream is to leave Venezuela, for something, anything else, at least that’s what it seemed for all the kids I would interact with.

They were scared, hungry, and cold, they had to do something, even if everyone thought it was pointless because fighting against a storm is more admirable than letting yourself become a passive victim of it.

And then there are those on the other side, puppets on strings, be they willing or ignorant, who I never managed to understand, though I can’t help but try to reason their position. I know that a lot of people in the military get special privileges, more food, and such, that way they don’t starve, so why bite the hand that feeds them for some revolution that might just replace a tyrant with another? It’s a cynical, horrible way to look at things, and maybe I am wrong, maybe they are just doing these things because they can, at this point all I know is one thing about this situation:

That it should have never come to be. That no one deserved to be pushed this far. It got to the point that we would look at protests like daily anecdotes, even our teachers would participate which only exaggerated the presence of said in my life. I just wanted to shut it all out, I just wanted to not be for a minute, to simply be able to get that ignorance of my countries circumstances back, because while I had privileges and advantages that others didn’t, the idea of seeing your father off and them possibly never coming back scared me, the sheer idea that my country was a prison, or some sort of decaying wasteland kept me awake.

The slow deterioration of your life, your birthday parties getting smaller to ration money, to the fact that I lived the final months I spent in my country sleeping in an office in my grandmother’s house, God bless her soul until I graduated and left that place and never looked back.

Here is a picture of me and my father. Look on and admire how beautiful we are! Look!

My father went to those marches and protests because he believed in something far away from his reach, but knew that through our willpower, our gift from God, we could reach it, all we needed was one chance. All that any man needs is one chance to change everything.

I remember cutting myself by accident with a razor a long time ago and my father comforting me by saying that he cut himself with a razor too by accident, the picture you see above. That was a lie, a lie I believed for a decade. He didn’t get that from shaving or playing, he was shot. He was getting mugged, his car stolen, and the bullet dug its way past his throat grazing it. He has other scars too and it often scares me to think how he got them.

A country in upheaval, a home that I desperately wanted to reject but still somewhere deep down loved for what it represented.

Today I still see my country burning, always the same as before. One night when I was staying with my grandmother, the lights went out and we stared out of a window seeing how a patch of land near our neighboring building lit itself ablaze. I could hear the wood cracking, the smoke rising like wingless birds, and all I could do was go back to bed

“There’s the future, right there.”

I never hated my country I just…

I just wanted things to be different, and as a kid I would always go to bed, saying: “I can’t wait to leave this place.” And yet I want to return to it, I want to be able to walk down the street, say hello to the neighbors, stay out late and do all the stupid things I couldn’t or wouldn’t do because I feel like millions of kids were robbed of something.

And yet, despite all that, I truly love my country. I still long to return to that old home of mine, just so that I could lay it to rest, one last time, but writing about all of this works, it’s like I’m writing letters to myself, hoping to reconcile, and I think…

That wound might finally close one day.

Thank you all for your time and thank you for reading, take care.

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