Bringing it Home
For the Washington Post, Moisés Naím and Quico try to bring home the real scale of the tragedy Venezuela is sinking into. It's a story you know well, retold for a public still struggling to grasp it.
This is what happens when Moisés Naím and Quico sit down together to try to bring home the sense of urgency about what’s now happening in Venezuela.
Today, Venezuela is the sick man of Latin America, buckling under chronic shortages of everything from food and toilet paper to medicine and freedom. Riots and looting have become commonplace, as hungry people vent their despair while the revolutionary elite lives in luxury, pausing now and then to order recruits to fire more tear gas into crowds desperate for food.
Not long ago, the regime that Hugo Chávez founded was an object of fascination for progressives worldwide, attracting its share of another-world-is-possible solidarity activists. Today, as the country sinks deeper into the Western Hemisphere’s most intractable political and economic crisis, the time has come to ask some hard questions about how this regime — so obviously thuggish in hindsight — could have conned so many international observers for so long.
The full scale of the social and economic meltdown in Venezuela, its moral and human dimensions, are so thorough the real challenge is how to make it vivid. What did you think?
Caracas Chronicles is 100% reader-supported.
We’ve been able to hang on for 22 years in one of the craziest media landscapes in the world. We’ve seen different media outlets in Venezuela (and abroad) closing shop, something we’re looking to avoid at all costs. Your collaboration goes a long way in helping us weather the storm.
Donate
