RECORD OF A VENEZUELAN PARIAH
IV: VENEZUELA, THE SOCIALIST DARLING
2006, the absolute point of no return, the year when Hugo Chávez was reelected under the banners of one promise: Socialism of the 21st century. The year where the “pink tide” began to fester more and more throughout Latin America, the consequences of which continue as a plague to this day.
For my family, that year began with the aftermath of my grandmother’s passing. The feud between my uncles over the fate of their shared business, the basketball team — the one thing that I still controversially insist is what caused my grandmother’s death — reached a kind of an armistice. But most importantly, the matter of my two young cousins, orphaned after my uncle and grandmother died, had to be settled.
Ultimately, and now that I look back into it, regrettably, they ended up staying with my aunt, who unlike my mom, had the financial means to sustain them. My two other uncles made a sort of “peace” and agreed that they should stay with my aunt.
That year started with another family emergency, my brother had a seizure one January night, which led to him requiring Carbamazepine for about a decade. The school he was enrolled at at the time was very understanding of his condition. That small school was located within a walking distance of our home, sadly, it no longer exists, having shut down at some point after the collapse of Venezuela
While most of my family briefly traveled to Maracaibo to sort out our grandmother’s possessions and the small house she lived at the time, I spent those first weeks (in which I also turned 18 and thus became an adult) finishing up my first semester at school and dealing with the aftermath of a server-wide money dupe drama in the new Ragnarok Online server we had set up camp at. I will neither confirm nor deny that I engaged in such illicit actions, as none of my accounts were banned, wink wink.
English classes were part of the academic pensum, this is where I felt like a rock star. Don’t ask me how or why, but English language is not something everyone speaks here, people often get surprised when they find out you do. I’ve never had many skills at my disposal, I have zero social skills, zero self-worth, I’ve always felt like a fat pariah kid; but there I was, wielding a power I didn’t know I possessed. All those bootleg cartoon VHS tapes, all those hours watching bootleg cable as a kid, and all those video games had finally paid off.
Chávez at the time had for the first time a National Assembly 100-percent under his control, virtually all courts on the palm of his hand, private media crippled and partially censored and/or self-censored through the RESORTE law, and growing international renown. Most importantly, he had an ever-growing amount of resources at his disposal, as the 2000s oil boom — giving him a virtually limitless amount of money to do as he pleased, and money is power.
One such example was PetroCaribe, an initiative launched around the time that gave Caribbean nations access to Venezuelan oil at highly preferable prices, very low interest rates, and absurdly long grace periods. There was a tacit catch, of course, one not written in any of the contacts: In exchange, those nations had to be loyal to Chávez’s revolution through silence and diplomatic methods which I will explain later down the line.
It was through Petrocaribe, ALBA, and other organizations that Hugo Chávez, cunning as he was, spread his tendrils and obtained the loyalty of several of the region’s governments, something that greatly paid off for him as time went on — even to this day.
He must’ve felt like the world’s topmost leftist celebrity at the time, calling George W. Bush “Mister Danger,” and calling him the devil at the United Nations in his “crowning” speech at the international scene. No one could touch him locally, his allies throughout the region began to consolidate their respective rules, and the surging oil prices gave him the resources to spread his influence as far as he wanted.
There was one thing, though, he was up for reelection that year.
He capitalized on Anti-U.S. sentiments to essentially claim that the election was between him and the United States, that he needed “more time” to finish the work of the revolution — and thus, he presented the one word that was needed to make that promised utopia a reality: socialism.
The opposition presented Manuel Rosales, a disreputable man that I have the displeasure to say is an establishment politician from my birthplace, Zulia. Some people love him back in Zulia (or used to love him), for some inexplicable reason, and my grandmother once told me that he was one of the few people who would go to her home to get something to eat, because that’s how my grandmother was.
My personal opinion is that he is a chimeric plague, a mold that just won’t go away, a weasel that will do anything and everything towards his own interests, even if it means selling the nation’s future. Many such cases in the Venezuelan “opposition,” I have to say.
Be that as it may, Rosales was no match for Chávez, and even went as far as to offer populist promises such as La Negra, a would-be black debit card in which people would directly receive welfare stipends coming from the then vast oil bonanza that Venezuela received (and wasted).
This was my first election ever, and look at what wonderful choices I had. Suffice to say, I didn’t vote for Chávez and reluctantly voted for Rosales because I had to pick something in the ballot.
One of Chávez’s own personal goals was to earn more than 10 million votes in an election, something he never achieved, and which Nicolás Maduro only ever did in 2023 through a completely rigged referendum, so it doesn’t count. Nevertheless, Chávez was reelected in December 2006 with allegedly some 7.3 million votes against Rosales’ 4.2 million.
I spent much of that year just minding my own business, studying, playing video games, and one day stumbled upon Kamen Rider Kabuto by means of a stream channel posted on 4chan’s infamous /b/ board, back when it was good.
Whereas my fellow classmates would go to parties, drink beer, and in one case, become a father at an early age — hell, I never did “normal social” things during high school either, I’ve always been a social outcast with self-worth and self- image issues.
I would just go back home to watch my anime, play my video games, and post on imageboards. I’d also talk to my online friends, those in America, those in Europe, they’d tell me about all this stuff out there, Eurodance, the cool stuff they learned in college, and the latest anime shows.
I was now more acclimated to College, but I never did those things that you’d expect from a College student: parties, hanging out with friends, etc. Throughout the year, I started to make money on my own through computer repair gigs and tech support here and there, basic stuff like reinstalling Windows, troubleshooting hardware, things like that. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but it was enough to give myself a treat here and there.
And then, one day, two of my cousins enticed me to join them in purchasing the game I’ve played the longest for, the one with the largest love/hate relationship of it all, and one that, for better or worse, contributed (directly or indirectly) into my present reality: World of Warcraft.
PC gaming wasn’t much of a thing back then outside of staples such as Counter Strike. Most of Venezuela’s gamers gravitated to Playstation consoles due to their low cost and ease to mod, which allowed you to play pirated copies which you could get virtually in every corner at a low price. There wasn’t much of a physical PC game store culture, and like pirated PlayStation discs, you could find pirated PC games and software everywhere.
Because of the CADIVI currency control restrictions, credit cards needed government authorization to use a yearly allotment for online purchases. My mom, while she had a credit card, she did not have said authorization, she only had the travel expenses. This was the main reason why I wasn’t able to play Star Wars Galaxies, a game I really wanted to play a lot, and the reason why I didn’t play WoW at launch.
But then people started selling WoW cd keys and game time codes locally — not officially, of course, but it worked just as well. Come think of it, now that I look back, it must’ve been quite easy to send remittances to Venezuela without going through normal channels. Someone could just buy the game codes abroad, send them via email locally, and they’d sell them at a surplus.
I grabbed a copy of the discs from The Pirate Bay, burned them and, together with the purchased codes, I began my journey towards Azeroth — eleven years later, my WoW antics made it all the way to Fortune and news websites around the world.
My mom retook her international trips after tests showed that my brother’s health was stable. She travelled across several countries for medical conferences, she was always a great and passionate spokeswoman when it came to medical stuff. Around the time, she also enlisted to participate in foreign assistance programs that the Chávez regime funded. The pay was also in U.S. dollars, and my mom received a service passport during that time. For a single mother of a sickly child and a barely functional adult, any extra income was godsend.
Although the regime’s goal was to spread its influence and accrue reputation through good deeds, my mom and several other doctors like her did help impoverished people in some Central American countries.
During those times she was abroad, she’d leave some money for me to buy food for us, or sometimes one of my aunts would visit and cook for us. She left me strict instructions as to how and when to give my brother his pills, and I’d follow them to the point.
At some point during 2006 I accompanied my mom to a medical conference trip to Maracaibo, that was my first time returning to it since 2000 — the thing is that the city felt much different now. I had long since lost my Zulian accent, and a lot of places felt foreign, I was a stranger in my own hometown.
My father, I assume due to pressure from his partner and family, retook the divorce process in a very conflictive way after years of not progressing with it. My mother had enough of it and pushed the process forward, but my father would always obstruct the process once things weren’t going as he (or his family) wanted, even though he was the one that was desperate to get divorced in the first place.
Christmas of 2006 is one of those periods that I can no longer remember, maybe because nothing of interest happened. I certainly must’ve spent it playing WoW and enjoying vacation time, that’s as far as I can assert. I do remember going to a Christmas faire in one of Caracas’ main malls with my mom, aunt, and cousins, but that’s about it.
But the following year, 2007, man, that was some real stuff.
With the matter of his reelection over and done, Hugo Chávez now had all the pieces on the board to execute the next step of his master plan: Crashing this country, with no survivors — I mean, socialism, same thing, really. But first things first, the opportunity to get rid of RCTV, Venezuela’s largest television channel and Chávez’s main media nuisance presented upon him at the worst possible time.
Long story short, like any normal-functioning country, tv and radio operators need a broadcasting license. RCTV received a 20-year renewal of its license in 1987, which was set to expire on May 27, 2007. This presented Chávez with the opportunity to shut down RCTV without actually “shutting down” the channel by simply refusing to renew the broadcasting license.
Historically, the Venezuelan regime has maintained that stance, that RCTV was not “shut down,” but rather, its broadcasting license was not renewed in accordance to the norms and regulations of blah blah blah — even though, by all intents and purposes, it was a functional shutdown of its main media rival.
But fear not, the Revolution stressed, as they announced that the void left by RCTV and the channel 2 that it occupied in the airwaves was to be occupied by TVes, a brand new state-media outlet that, government officials claimed at the time, would be of the same caliber as the United Kingdom’s BBC, make of that what you will.
Since Chávez’s Fifth Republic Movement had already served its purpose, he reorganized its core and merged it with other smaller Chavista parties into what is today known as the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), the grotesque red entity that has ruled Venezuela since.
PSUV built upon MVR’s nascent cult of personality towards Chávez and dialed it to eleven. Not all leftist parties agreed to the assimilation process, such as the ever so irrelevant Venezuelan Communist Party, which drew the ire of the now socialist dictator, but they eventually kissed the ring while retaining their “autonomy.”
The impending closure of RCTV led to a roughly month-long intense period of protests in Venezuela. National and international campaigns condemned the blatant violation of freedom of speech, but none of that deterred the socialist regime’s campaign, not one bit.
Around the end of April 2007 I had nasal surgery to correct my deviated septum which came bundled with a nosocomial infection that almost killed me, by the time I was fully recovered from it RCTV had been closed down in May 2007. College during this time was as tumultuous as it could get, protests almost every day of the week, some were really violent.
Under the premise that “they are not going to need them,” the regime seized RCTV’s broadcasting antennas and other equipment, cannibalizing the infrastructure so that TVes could operate.
RCTV ceased its regular operations with its staff singing the national anthem and shots of pro-RCTV protests. The channel continued to operate in limited capacity through cable and on international venues, but it eventually faded away as the years went by. RCTV was made an example to other private channels whose licenses were up for renewal in the following years: fall out of line and suffer the same fate.
Having survived yet another period of protests unscathed, Chávez made his next move: the socialist constitutional reform.
In August 2007, Chávez formally presented a constitutional reform package that he claimed was necessary in order to transition into a socialist state and continue his socialist agenda. He needed to reform the selfsame constitution he pushed in 1999 because, according to him, those changes couldn’t be done at the time.
Following the RESORTE law playbook, the regime sprinkled some “good stuff” to obfuscate the real hardcore changes such as changes to private property, the introduction of “social” property, remove presidential term limits, and granting the president direct power over the central bank, more control of regional governments, to name a few.
In contrast, the reform also introduced some “palatable” proposals such as removing discrimination on sexual orientation, reducing voting age fro 18 to 16. Both the “progressive” reforms and the hardcore socialist stuff where spread across to groups (A and B) to be approved via a referendum.
You know how in cable TV operators you are sometimes forced to get a bundle that has a bunch of channels you don’t want if you want that one channel you do want to watch? Yeah, same thing here.
Just like with the 2006 presidential election, the socialist regime launched a full fledged media campaign. They had people with charts explaining how removing presidential term limits was actually good, how “social” property and allowing the state to “provisionally occupy property slated for expropriation before a court has ruled” was in your best interests, etc.
Preparations for this referendum took place as Chávez launched a widespread nationalization of basically everything and expropriation campaign of almost everything else. I think it’d be quicker to say what didn’t got nationalized or seized, because almost everything important did.
Political discourse during those college days became as tense as it could get, for obvious reasons. What was once playful and innocent political discourse through my high school days was now a serious and often unavoidable subject among college chatter. Pick a side and be ostracized by the other, choose neither, and risk being ostracized by all.
In any case, I was more interested in just doing my college assignments, going back home to my video games, anime, and tokusatsu. I had bosses to kill in Kharazan, heroic dungeons to tank, and arena ELO ratings to climb during those Burning Crusade days. At the same time, I kept failing at passing math classes despite having stellar grades in every other assignment, this would eventually bite me in the ass in ways more than I could’ve anticipated a the time.
Convoluted as things were at home, the international leftist community was enamored with Chávez because at last, they finally had proof that socialism “worked” (it doesn’t but yeah). Caribbean countries continued to suck the metaphorical Petrocaribe tit.
Intellectualoid figures like Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, or Michael Moore continued to sign praises.Hollywood celebrities such as Sean Penn, Danny Glover, and Oliver Stone went to visit the nascent socialist utopia, to see it with their own eyes — and to get their own slice of the oil checkbook cake.
I want to believe, in a pragmatic sort of way, that Chávez got too cocky and pushed that socialist constitutional reform too early. The referendum took place on December 2, 2007. Both reform blocks failed to pass by a hair’s breadth.
The regime was furious, Chávez most of all, to the point that he deemed it a “shitty victory” of the opposition. It was the first time Chávez saw his plans ruined ever since the failed 1992 coup attempt.
2008 was, for better or worse, a year I remember as the most “business as usual” one of that time period, although this was around the time when the price controls began to inevitably malfunction, leading to sporadic shortages of some basic goods. The regime continued with its nationalization and forced seizure of companies, I kept with my college studies but knowing that I wouldn’t be able to graduate unless I solved the dragged math problem, but I just kept going because I foolishly thought I’d be able to solve that problem later.
The national currency, the Venezuelan Bolivar, was rebooted into the “Bolivar Fuerte,” axing three zeroes off its scale as a symbolic sign of a new era for socialist Venezuela. It was during these years that everything became “stable,” so to speak. The CADIVI currency control system? Normal, to the point that exploiting for your own benefit was highly common practice.
The idea was to go through the torturous process to get your credit card approved for foreign use, be it travel or something, but so long as you didn’t spend your allotment, you’d find ways to bring the remaining amount in cash, and then resold on the black market at a higher rate than the official one. You’d use the proceeds to pay your card debt (at the official exchange rate), and pocket the rest, rinse and repeat.
It was very common to see commercial establishments in other countries offer “card swiping” services, in which they’d use their point of sale systems to swipe your card for an amount, they’d pocket a commission, and they’d give you cash. I’ve always maintained the stance that the Venezuelan crisis was, is, and will continue to be good business for too many actors, this is but one of the earliest examples of it.
And to think I was at risk of getting banned from gold duping in Ragnarok Online but here you have, a real life dupe glitch…
The regime clamped down on it by establishing per-destination limits, fiercer post-travel regulatory measures, and knee-capping online purchase limits.
My aunt, who had by then worked four years as a lawyer in the Foreign Ministry, was offered a diplomatic position at Venezuela’s embassy in Suriname, so she left with one of her sons and my two young cousins. In some ways, we all thought this could lead to a better life for those two fellas, but no, it didn’t.
My brother was a bit rebellious towards me at the time, maybe because I used to tease him in a harmless way at times, and with my cousins gone, I kinda had less people to talk to outside of college hours. I knew sooner or later I had to come clean with my mom and tell her the truth, that I wasn’t anywhere near on track to graduating in 2009 because I hadn’t passed Math I, which meant I couldn’t take Math II and the rest of that subject tree line. It didn’t matter how well my grades were, I was short of passing credits by a lot.
Nevertheless, I kept going, and even did the now mandatory community service hours that you have to do to graduate. I did them by being part of a project presented by a friend of mine who also lived nearby. He managed to convince the tech institute to let it use their shanty PC lab to teach elderly locals how to use a computer. Basic stuff like the internet, email, word processors, things like that.
Chávez’s then growing alliance with China was something I experienced through a brief side job that my mom took. At the time, the local government of Caracas implemented a rudimentary “911 with extra steps” program in which doctors would have access to a cellphone line to be used on guard day to coordinate efforts between medical facilities in case of emergencies. My mom briefly worked on this as an extra gig.
After community service was over and we filed our reports, it was finally vacation time. Everything after that was either the best or lowest point of that era for me. I didn’t know what to do, and the depression I had been dragging for yeares made me, at times, contemplate ending it all. I kept to myself, my video games, side gigs, and just trying to be helpful to neighbors so as to distract myself from my own failures.
But hey, that was around the time I got my Hand of A’dal legacy title and Zul Aman bear in WoW.
My mom finally finished the divorce proceedings, and she felt relieved to finally put all that behind, better yet, she got to keep full custody of my brother, who was a minor at the time. Our finances were stable for the first time in a while, and we finally were able to partake in eating out at restaurants every now and then — but deep down I knew I had failed.
That feeling exacerbated after my mom returned from a trip to Mexico and surprised me with a new video game console. Like, how was I going to break her heart after that. I just isolated myself further and further.
The time when I was supposed to begin my graduation thesis proceedings came, and I just kept lying. I had this routine, this perfect alibi, in which I’d get dressed to go to college, go out so the building janitor would see me going out, walk around the area, and then go back, entering the apartment building through another basement garage. I almost got caught a few times.
Then, my remaining cousin went to this fancy Europe with his girlfriend that they had been saving for a while. He had a fish tank, and he recruited me to take care of the fish. I accepted it because this allowed me to enter my aunt’s apartment and just nap on a couch, and then “return” to the building at noon if my mom was around that particular day.
For my assistance, I was given a copy of Fallout 3 for the PlayStation 3 that my cousin bought in France, so it came in French, making it near impossible for me to actually play it.
I started to completely regret my career path choice during those days. I didn’t get to learn anything cool like my friends did through CompSci, I didn’t do anything meaningful other than teach some elderly people during community service, and now most of my friends have moved on. I was almost 21 years old at the time, overweight, with no friends left, no relationships, and devoid of a reason. All I had was a decent grasp of the English language far beyond that of my fellow classmates, I was good at video games, one of the best Protection Paladins in my WoW server, and that was about it.
Suffice to say, I got even more depressed, and tried to end it all. Still, all my inner demons aside, we had a good Christmas period that year.
2009 started good, with sort of hope and a fresh air to it. One of my remaining uncles, who lived in Maracaibo, began to suffer some health complications stemming from diabetic neuropathy. My mom did several trips throughout the year to treat him, which did wonders to his health.
She did one such trip shortly after I turned 21. I declined going claiming that I had some stuff to do, but the truth is that I just wanted to be alone, watch my anime, Kamen Rider, and video games.
I thought so much during those lonely days, since I was finally alone. To this day I still ask myself how different — how better I’d be as a person had we all remained in Maracaibo. If I had studied in that Marist school all the way through high school with those kids that were the best friends of my life, with Maria Antonietta, who was the closest thing I had to a childhood love. Alas, I can’t change the past.
I did eventually accompany her in some of those trips to Maracaibo, and the change in environment and routine did wonders for me. There I was, back in our beloved home city once more, but not it was even much different than in 2006. Seeing familiar places made me feel good, but also too long for what it could’ve been had we never left it.
My mother noticed the seeping depression that I tried my best to keep hidden for years, in addition to my brother’s continued isolation in school. She took us to a psychologist friend of hers in the hospital she worked at. She specialized in children though, it helped my brother more than me.
This is the only period of time that I had been under anti-depressants, and they didn’t help me much, in fact, I felt so numbed that my video game performance suffered as a result.
With the main nationalizations and other related stuff done, Hugo Chávez had one bone to pick: the failure of the 2007 socialist constitutional reform. The results of the election wouldn’t stop him, and he ended up implementing most of it through executive decrees and laws, all of which technically achieved the same results in the end: a socialist state, with some exceptions here and there.
The matter of his term limits, though, that had to be solved asap, as he only had four years left at the time — simple matter for the regime, which abolished all public office term limits through a February 2009 referendum. That oil checkbook sure paid off, because he used it well to buy votes left and right.
In March 2009, Chávez signed an important decree many don’t know about, or have completely forgotten about: The Austerity Decree.
The oil bonanza was reaching its end, and that meant that the drunken spending spree of the socialist state was starting to become unsustainable and would lead to its inevitable bankruptcy. This was the earliest sign of the collapse that befell upon Venezuela some years later, it wasn’t an overnight thing, but a slow crack until the foundations succumbed to the weight of the gross mismanagement.
Eventually, I came clean with the psychologist, and told her the truth that I had been hiding for so long about college, and how I had flunked. She offered to assist me in disclosing this to my mother, who basically responded that she knew something was up with that.
She was extremely upset at me, and with good reason, I deserved it all for being such a failure. That wasn’t the first time I had failed her at school, because I did it a few times during high school, eighth grade being the worst case of it.
Family restaurant days were cancelled, suffice to say. I completely shut down, but in a weird way, felt relieved of being free of that burden. While all of this occurred, my aunt, who served as a counselor in the Venezuelan embassy in Suriname briefly visited Venezuela, and stayed back at her place.
Those days were like a brief reprieve from the tense mood in my home due to my failures. My aunt told us a lot of interesting tales, many of which involved a corruption scandal that hit the embassy and which she helped uncover, leading to the departure of the ambassador and her temporary assignment as Charge d’ Affaires right as she was preparing to return.
Everything after that is like a blur to me, I know I played WoW here and there, ate food, and watched Kamen Rider Decade while getting my brother into the series by means of Den-O.
On September 10, 2009, my mom presented me with an ultimatum right before going to an event: Go to my appointment with the psychologist and figure out some plan to study or work, or start packing my things up and go to my dad or whomever wants to take you in.
She closed the door, and my head just kept spinning. I went to my appointment, and talked to the doctor, yes, but I just kept nodding at everything. She offered some suggestions that I could consider, so I wrote them down and headed back home.
In what is perhaps an act of fate, right as I arrived I got a phone call from a cousin that was in Suriname. There was this English language course he was about to enroll in, and was wondering if I was interested in — seeing as I had no choice, I said yes.
My mom returned shortly afterwards, and demanded an answer to her ultimatum. I first presented what the psychologist suggested, and she said no. I then used my last card, and told her about the offer I just got from my cousin. She immediately called my aunt to verify, who confirmed it and said she’d help me with the plane ticket since my cousin had to briefly visit for some affairs.
In a way, that saved me from my own mistakes and from getting kicked out of the house, but at the same time, it ended up being a four-year “sentence” working at a Venezuelan embassy, which is what I ended up doing instead of studying.
My brother was aware of what was happening to a certain extent, and he had a calendar of days before I’d left since he was still rather rebellious at me in response to my childish but harmless nuisances. He never knew I knew, and I don’t think he even remembers about it anymore.
I still don’t know if that was the right call to do at the time, but I took it. A month later, on October 10, 2009, I left for Suriname, a South American nation most people don’t even know exists.