Catia Chronicles
Home made Baygon, pre-kneaded masa, repurposed vegetables...to survive the crisis, people in Catia are having to dig deep into their reserves of ingenuity.
Politics
Los 10,000 Muertos Que Firmaron: X-Ray of a Dirty Trick
Jorge Rodríguez's propaganda claim — ¡10,000 muertos firmaron el revocatorio! — has been repeated a million times in official media. But how did they come to that figure? We take you on a tour of one of chavismo's most nausea-inducing dirty tricks of recent years.
10 Olympic Sports that could win Venezuela the Gold
Venezuela has a history of sucking hard at the Olympics. Maybe we’ve been participating in the wrong disciplines.
Could killing the 2016 recall break the chavista coalition?
We tend to overestimate chavismo's room for maneuver. But killing the 2016 recall puts huge strain on the pro-government coalition. If it didn't, they would've done it months ago.
Tibisay Drives a Stake Through the Heart of the 2016 Maduro Recall
Today's announcement kills the prospect of an early presidential election following a recall vote, since a late January 2017 recall would leave Maduro's vice-president to close out his term.
Confronting El Caracazo
There are two options when confronting Caracazo: digesting it, or spitting it out. Either we see it as an Estallido Social of shortsightedness and savage chaos, or as the awareness-creating moment of a massive political movement against imperialist neoliberalism. Two readings, two Venezuelas.
The Annotated 1989 PROVEA Report
We walk you through PROVEA's 1989 report into the Caracazo, underlining the parts that somehow didn't make it into our collective recollection of events.
A Sunday Lunch in March
A few weeks after el Caracazo, Ibsen Martínez went to lunch at Moisés Naím's house. After a 27-year process of digestion, he looks back.
What was El Caracazo? Part III
27F filled our homes with ghosts, with espantos. The faces of the dead, which some tried to erase from memory. The sense of what it's like to lose any trace of the rule of law. The voices of the prophets who told us that other tragedies would come. We were never the same after those days in 1989.
States of Emergency, then and now
As a lawyer, what strikes me is how much we've forgotten so much since 1989. Like, for example, what a state of emergency is. And what it is for.
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