Caracas Chronicles

My new column for The New Republic – a personal meditation on the drama of Tahrir Square as seen from a Venezuelan exile’s perspective – is now up behind their paywall: an excellent reason to subscribe! (Or, buy the dead-tree version…)

A taste after the jump…

It was not easy for me to watch the drama of Tahrir Square; and I cannot imagine that it was easy for any of my fellow Venezuelan exiles to watch, either. To the millions of us who marched our hearts out in the anti-Chávez protests of 2002 and 2003, the sight of those huge, hopeful crowds in Egypt set off an instant shock of recognition. In late 2002, a steady build-up of massive marches—usually numbering in the hundreds of thousands—brought Caracas to a standstill for days on end. All of us who marched—and marched and marched—back then can instantly summon that heady exhilaration, so visible in the footage from Cairo, that a crowd gets when it feels itself invincible while trying to achieve the impossible.