The new Venezuelan normal: September 2021

Month eighteen of Venezuela’s COVID-19 lockdown is done. Onwards, to the nineteenth month of our own version of The New Normal.

By this point, the ‘lockdown’ is, in essence, a symbolic status at best, and in many regards, a palliative measure for the country’s ongoing gasoline shortages and other problems. That is not to say life is back to what it was before March of 2020, as in our ever morphing reality, we’ve never been able to go back to how things used to be before it all started to collapse and all that.

For the country, it was your run of the mill month, completely stagnant and without improvement despite the apparent facades built by imported goods that say otherwise. Nothing has really changed for the better in the grand scheme of things, and there’s no reason to believe that it will — you just carry on with your lives to the best of your ability, dancing around the nuances of the flexible and radical lockdown weeks whenever these have an effect on your life (for example, having to go to your bank’s office or to any public office, which you can only do on the ‘flexible’ weeks).

The regime and opposition continue their collaborationist dance, attending faux negotiation meetings, fighting over who gets to suck up from the teat of our foreign assets, and gearing up for yet another sham elections. I am glad that I deliberately made it so that my vote doesn’t count for this upcoming elections, because even if it did count there’s no one who I’d vote for.

I may be beating a dead horse here, but despite what some (including the regime) claim, the country is far from being fixed. Just recently, ENCOVI (a project that seeks to assess the livelihood conditions of Venezuela’s citizens in lieu of official government data) published their latest report, where they determined that now 3/4 Venezuelans live in extreme poverty, and from an income perspective, 94.5% of the country lives in poverty.

Venezuela’s migrant crisis, second only to Syria’s, hasn’t ended, it has simply been slowed down due to COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions, that’s about it. No amount of US imported goods, foreign digital payment processors, and greenbacks circulating in the streets can change that cold fact. The only reason I’m still here is because of these restrictions, from which new obstacles have arisen that I’m, slowly but surely, on track to overcoming.

As for the COVID-19 situation here, it all continues as it has been. With most of our public and private healthcare infrastructure collapsed and crumbling, it is extremely difficult to get proper access to health — and the pandemic makes it all that much more complicated.

COVID-19 took the life of another of my eldermost neighbors, as well as the life of a close friend of my family, both of which had pre-existing conditions that threw a wrench at any chance for a smooth recovery. While I don’t show it much, the death of the latter really affected me, as he was a good person and was always so kind to my mother, aunt, and rest of my family. From what I was told, he started to feel ill after a lengthy gasoline line which included a small protest at the sight of that ever so present blatant corruption that’s par for the course in these lands. Not much I could do beyond offer my condolences and prayers.

Vaccination in the country continues as a snail’s pace, and under the same schema: Russia’s Sputnik-V for the elderly, China’s Sinopharm for everyone else. The way things are shaping (and deep down I always knew this was going to be the case), I will have to stop dancing around it and get the Sinopharm shots if I want to travel, as come November this will be a mandatory requirement that I will not be able to overcome. It is what it is, I’m neither bummed nor thrilled about it, it’s all for a white piece of cardboard paper with a stamp on it, that I’ll now need alongside my dying passport and that visa that I keep working towards attaining.