American could be on the road to Venezuela
In 1989, Caracas, Venezuela, was loud and angry and joyful. It was the cosmopolitan heart of the most successful and stable economy in Latin America. At night the lights of mansions perched across the mountains that wreathed the capital’s sunken center shone like a manmade constellation.
But so too did the glow of TV screens in the homes of rancheros, shacks built of salvaged tin and metal and wood planking that housed the country’s poorest citizens in unsanctioned cities along the Cerro El Avila mountains (the northern edge of the Andes), where the industrious but largely unemployed inhabitants risked their lives to loop steel lines to the live wires above to illicitly access TV screens.
As a 20-year-old intern at El Nuevo Pais, a crime-focused probusiness tabloid aimed at the city’s supposedly growing working class, I noticed that middle-class neighborhoods were few and far between. The poor were so numerous and desperate that supermarkets needed to be guarded by soldiers armed with assault rifles.
I owed my internship that summer to my aunt, Patricia Poleo, who at 23 was already a newspaper managing editor and co-host of a weekly feminist radio show. Patricia seemed to have sources in every corner of the capital.
So I was thrilled on the day I got to shadow the newspaper’s Congressional reporter. I couldn’t wait to sit in the press area and witness debate. Patricia made sure it was a day hot-button issues were on the agenda. We did experience drama that day, but it was not the kind she had anticipated.
When we arrived, journalists from other venues were gathered outside the entrance to the floor of Congress, gesturing wildly and clearly upset. Patricia made her way to the center, as the Congressional reporter explained that the government had decided just that morning to bar reporters from the floor of the legislature and require them to remain in the press area.
This didn’t seem unreasonable to me, but she assured me that this was not how things were done in Caracas, where reporters were accustomed to interviewing legislators as debate was ongoing right on the floor. “No one ever actually uses the press seats,” she said. I looked up at empty seating in the balcony.
From there we walked with about 20 other reporters to the office of the leader of Congress and waited to speak to him. By now, Patricia had become our de facto leader. The other reporters seemed happy to allow her to do the very fast talking for all of us. We sat on the steps of the office waiting for the leader of Congress to hear our complaints. The reporters took photos of one another while we waited. Hours later, the government reversed its decision.
The next morning I appeared in a newspaper photo, in the front row of a gaggle of reporters waging a sit-in for press freedom. My mother, a U.S. diplomat’s daughter raised in Latin America, was furious with me. Didn’t I know they shot protesters and reporters in Latin America? Didn’t I know the rest of the world wasn’t safe, like the U.S.?
But this was Venezuela, I reminded her, the wealthiest, most stable democracy in Latin America. I was nearly as safe in the halls of Venezuela’s Congress as I would have been in the U.S. Capitol building.
Never mind that both countries had long been divided into economic and racial castes. Never mind that long-running class resentments were becoming increasingly untenable as wealth continued to accrue to a small cadre of elites in both countries, that wages had stagnated as globalization diverted manufacturing jobs to the poorest regions on the planet.
We are now decades down the road, and Venezuelans are starving under authoritarian rule. One-third of Venezuela’s population struggles to meet their nutritional needs, according to the United Nations, and at least 4.6 million Venezuelans are refugees and exiles, including my step- aunt, Patricia Poleo, now a digital journalist living in Florida.
In the United States, the top 1 percent has controlled more than 33 percent of the country’s wealth since 2016, up from the 25 percent they held in 1989, according to the Federal Reserve, with most of their gain accruing from an erosion of middle-class wealth. This is no more sustainable than guarding food from the masses at gunpoint.
When wages stagnate and good-paying jobs become scarce, the thirst for strongmen wielding simple answers to complex problems flourishes and populist passions are apt to boil over, endangering the lives of those who govern, inform and protect us.
Will we address the sources of grievance that fueled this conflagration? Thirty years ago, no one thought Venezuela would be the site of widespread famine and authoritarian governance. The mechanisms driving us toward a similar fate have already been engaged. Now we must endeavor to reverse them.