Caracas Chronicles

Quico and The Wall Street Journal editors made some gross mistakes in writing and editing the essay “Another U.S. Attempt to Topple Maduro Would Be a Disaster.” Not that I completely disagree with some of the warnings that come within, and if I didn’t it wouldn’t matter because it’s his opinion, but the whole argument of the piece hangs on the fact that the measures imposed during Trump I, the infamous “maximum pressure” strategy that included economic sanctions, caused the mass migration of Venezuelans. There’s a bunch of asterisks and disclaimers throughout the piece, but that’s the bottom line that supports his thesis. He dedicates a paragraph to remind us that Maduro is the biggest baddie in this story, but journo pieces and opinion articles are not contracts. No matter how much you want to cover your ass with words, what’s important is what comes across.

I can understand the circular rhetoric of the argument he wanted to make: President Trump wanted to create conditions that would make the people topple Maduro, instead those conditions were so intolerable that people left and many ended up in the U.S. Trump is now blaming Maduro for a problem he created. 

It’s punchy, bloggy, and it’s got cadence. But the argument is deeply flawed because not only does he seem to be getting the timeline wrong, but there’s a misrepresentation of the facts over the causes that led all those people to leave. Or even worse, there’s zero nuance. The one thing we’ve always strived to keep at the center of what we do at Caracas Chronicles, and the reason why we’re able to piss off people from the whole Venezuelan blogosphere (or however you want to call it).

In early 2019 we brought in Rafael Osío Cabrices as editor in chief. I rode the whole Guaidó affair, the PDVSA sanctions, the blackout, the migration crisis, and the informal dollarization with him and a team of editors and writers that at the time were all living in Venezuela (Rafa and I were abroad). 

We divided our team to cover different angles: the ongoing migration crisis, the political crisis, the economic crisis, and state violence at the time enforced by the FAES. And then, it was March, and the country went dark. The power was out for several days in Caracas, and for weeks in other cities. Places like Venezuela’s second city, Maracaibo, suffered from blackouts for over a year. We built a network of over a dozen collaborators from all over the country to get a first hand grasp of what was going on in their communities. At the same time we were able to send two reporters across the border to cover migration and the humanitarian aid shit show in Cúcuta. It was a messy year, hard to cover, hard to endure, but incredibly exciting too. Not easy to explain, I guess you had to be there.

Perhaps Quico is remembering the coverage of 2017 and 2018, the years of starvation that ignited the third wave of migration of the chavista era. By December 2018 we were already looking at the phenomenon of the Venezuelan caminantes, the people who decided to leave the country on foot walking as far South as Chile. Folks were leaving their children behind in the hopes of getting established abroad and then sending for their families. CECODAP reported around 600,000 children left behind. By that time, as the numbers of Venezuelan migration rapidly crossed the 3 million mark, the UN launched an emergency plan for refugees and migrants from Venezuela. Betilde Muñoz Pogossian wrote more than a dozen pieces on migration in 2018, including this one in which she talks about the three waves of migration during the chavista era. (First post of 2019: Kafka on the Guaire: The Nightmare of Getting a Passport Amid a Migration Crisis.) 

But why am I doing this cathartic exercise in recounting all this stuff when you could simply log on to Caracas Chronicles and read? 

All before the 2019 PDVSA sanctions—please do not listen to that insidious little devil over the shoulder that will tell you that economic sanctions started in 2017 because bondholders were blocked from trading. La cama estaba hecha.

And of course, migration in 2019 grew. And yes, the failure of the Guaidó strategy and sanctions themselves add to the bill, but just think about all that we had gone through up to that point, the country felt like a dead end—even more so than today. How did we land there? 

In 2015 the country decided it was time for change, chavismo lost the legislature in a landslide. It was the perfect moment for the smoothest transition possible, one that could integrate every single political actor in the country. At that moment Maduro & Co. decided that it wasn’t going to happen and that they would never lose an election again. They hijacked the National Assembly and whatever independence remained in the other political institutions and Maduro re-elected himself in an illegal election (the result of the 2024 presidential election was a mixture between a local social movement led by Machado, and an uncomfortable negotiation led by the Biden administration leveraged on Trump’s sanctions: nuance). The year prior, 2017, saw the last massive protests in the country and the most brutal repression we had seen up to that moment: 163 people murdered by government security forces and armed colectivos between April and July.

All before 2019, plus the economic debacle that Hugo Chávez started and Maduro ramped up (if you want to dive into it, go for broke). By the end of 2019 I returned to Caracas to try to get a first hand grasp of how the country had transformed during that crazy year and found an economy that started to get some oxygen because the government along with its exchange and price controls had disappeared. Enter the Pax Bodegónica.

In 2022 we did a four-part special called Los Migrados, covering the different angles of Venezuelan migration. We wanted to understand the reasons why Venezuelans were leaving and how to classify us. Forced migrants, refugees, displaced. We found that the reasons were a mixture of all of the above. Some left because of street violence and government persecution, others because of the economy, and others because they didn’t want to live under a dictatorship. 

Then the pandemic happened, dollarization accelerated as xenophobia in the destinations where Venezuelans were landing ramped up and suddenly, the news spread like wildfire on TikTok that if you were able to get across the U.S. border, you were safe. We covered this too, btw. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans recalculated the route and walked North from countries all over the continent. And that flow continued, even when the Venezuelan economy got a little better and the maximum pressure campaign was lifted. 

We could’ve done a better job than The Wall Street Journal editing and fact checking that piece

But why am I doing this cathartic exercise in recounting all this stuff when you could simply log on to Caracas Chronicles and read? 

Maybe because as Rafa said in a piece that we published a few days ago, Venezuela can’t be explained in one liners. Every single bolt and turn in this story requires a long explanation, and it’s dangerous to deal in absolutes. Except that chavismo sucks, of course.

Venezuelan independent media outlets have been struggling with audiences and to get our stories out there. Journalism in our terms, by our people. We could’ve done a better job than The Wall Street Journal editing and fact checking that piece. I’m sure the point he was trying to make would’ve come across, and not be buried under a pile of garbage.

Because yes, there’s every reason to believe that the aftermath of what’s going on in the Caribbean will be a mess, or that Maduro won’t leave. It makes sense to raise the alarms. I wouldn’t trust Trump with a one Dollar bill, there’s a chance that María Corina will end up scapegoated. The Joe Pesci to Trump’s Goodfellas. Analysis, opinion, el papel lo aguanta todo. But not for facts, man. And it was so easy to turn and ask, or drop by and say: hey, I’ve been out of the loop for five years, what do you think about this? 

In the meantime, we’ll still be here. Trying to explain Venezuela and working to make sure that our history doesn’t become fiction.

Anyway, que no se pierda la vieja costumbre de tirarle coñazos a Quico Toro en este blog. Con amor.