The rest, as they say, is history, a tragic history…

Like the pied piper of Hamelin, Chávez managed to convince enough people in the country that only he and his “Bolivarian Revolution” could solve the woes that had befallen upon Venezuela after roughly four decades of uninterrupted but objectively flawed democracy that, as the second law of thermodynamics dictates, began to suffer from entropy, had left things the way they were in the 1990s.

That is why the politicians of that era have their fair share of the blame to bear, because they messed up so bad, and people were so fed up that well… you know…

It didn’t take long for some to realize that Chávez’s promised remedy would end up being worse than the disease it promised to solve — like the piper of the fable, his song, slowly but surely, led my country to an untimely demise that presently continues more than a decade after his death. 

Chávez, posthumously referred to his followers as the “Supreme and Eternal Commander of the Revolution” (I’m not making that title up) left behind an authoritarian regime that has wrought upon terrible political, ideological, societal, and economical consequences that stretch far beyond Venezuela’s borders and which continue to have disastrous consequences all around even to this day. 

Many around the world continue to be allured by socialism’s promises. This allure can come in many forms, languages, and styles. It has been presented by men and women of different shape, size, and color, but it is ultimately the same false song, one that offers you salvation from the inequalities of life, one that promises you a just, fair world but leaves ruin, entropy, and pain instead.

Many fantasize daily about a socialist utopia — I sadly had to live through one for a quarter of a century.

It is very easy to be seduced by these promises, even in first world countries like the United States. Like I said, no country is perfect, and every country, no matter the political or economical system it employs, has and will continue to have its problems — life will never be fair, it simply is what it is. You can live the most righteous of lives, follow every tenet of your faith, and life will still find a way to kick you in the nuts. Meanwhile, less righteous men will live better lives than yours no matter how much pain and misery they’ve inflicted upon others — that much I’ve come to learn at a personal level.

But at some point, those that so fervently yearn and clamor for the socialist dream to descend upon their nations need to wonder themselves: Why, given this gift, this “blessing,” do the inhabitants of these socialist paradises so desperately end up fleeing to other nations? Why forsake utopia in a bid to live in that which these socialism-yearners claim is a dystopia?

This series is about the consequences of socialism, a malignant concept that refuses to die. This is a personal account of twenty five years of my life, lived under Venezuela’s “Socialism of the XXI Century,” a song that pushed my country to the brink of complete ruin, and which pushed more than eight million of my brethren — myself included — to flee to other nations across all four corners of the world.

Come think of it, that’s about the same number of people that voted for Chávez + those that abstained from voting on that day… funny, isn’t it? 8.1 million people, between voting or not voting, the consequences of their actions can be felt in almost every country of the world.

I’ll go through many events in these entries, from the mundane to the bizarre; from the deadly serious to the comically absurd. I want to give you an account of the past twenty five years of my life, which I lived under a “Bolivarian, Socialist, Anti-imperialist, and profoundly Chavista” Revolution — words that took so much from me and my people, from time, sanity, happiness, to loved ones. 

The consequences of socialist regimes are felt in all areas of human activity, even for me, who lived an atypical life, one that despite not being considered “normal,” was not exempt from being scarred by socialism. Mine is but one story out of roughly 30 million other Venezuelans who, regardless of their skin, size, shape, preferences, and faith, have also suffered through the inexorable consequences of socialism.

I want you to take the words that you will read through these entries as a warning, in the hopes that this colossal mistake is never repeated again.

 Allow me to avail myself of one of those fancy narrative techniques known as in medias res and let’s start this up with the events transcurred at the end of March 2018 — the worst days of my life. These events, which perhaps left me permanently mentally scarred, are a microcosm of the final consequences of socialism