Caracas Chronicles

For the past four years, I’ve taught a course called Environment and Sustainable Development at a university in Chile. Because the class is taught in English, it tends to attract exchange students, mostly from Europe, North America, and occasionally other parts of Latin America. 

The syllabus covers poverty, economic growth, environmental protection, the Sustainable Development Goals, public policy. In general, big themes where the discussions are often intense, idealistic, and deeply moral. They are also revealing, not only of what students believe, but of what kinds of explanations are considered legitimate, and which ones are quietly ruled out.

Certain patterns repeat themselves every year.

When we discuss the root causes of poverty, European students almost invariably point to colonization. Chilean students, understandably, emphasize dictatorship. When we talk about development and environmental protection, activism is framed as the primary solution, corporations as the main villains. When I ask what makes them angry about sustainability, the answers tend to cluster around the same targets: multinational companies, billionaires, “the rich,” or the latest celebrity caught flying a private jet.

What rarely makes the list are authoritarianism, institutional collapse, censorship, human trafficking, organized crime, or forced migration. Human rights violations in countries like China or Russia are mentioned cautiously, if at all. The destruction of economic institutions is treated as a technical detail rather than a political choice. And when Venezuela comes up, it exists less as a lived reality and more as an ideological case study.

I’ve had the privilege of teaching remarkably bright students. Many have gone on to pursue master’s degrees at some of the most prestigious universities in the world. Yet explaining Venezuela to them remains one of the most challenging parts of my job.

The problem is not lack of interest. It’s the dominance of explanations that leave no room for Venezuelans to speak for themselves.

Not because the country is incomprehensible, but because the narrative space around it is so crowded.

I first encountered this problem more than a decade ago. In 2012, I attended a summer school at the London School of Economics on conflict and democracy. One session focused on Venezuela. The discussion portrayed the Hugo Chávez government as a democratic success story: a country that voted frequently, reduced poverty, and empowered the poor. There was no mention of inflation, no discussion of institutional erosion, no reference to restrictions on the press or early signs of authoritarianism.

I remember arguing, armed with data, reports, and personal experience, while several European classmates passionately defended the “Bolivarian Revolution” as one of the best things that had happened in Latin America. Venezuela, to them, was not a country but an idea. A symbol. A rebuttal to US foreign policy.

More than ten years later, that framework has proven remarkably resilient.

In my classroom today, Venezuela still raises an extraordinary number of questions. Once I open the subject, it’s like Pandora’s box, there’s no closing it back. When I share data on media censorship, students ask how people inform themselves. When we discuss the food crisis, they genuinely worry about how families ate during the worst years, particularly around 2017. They ask how daily life functions in a country with hyperinflation, collapsing public services, and mass migration.

These questions are genuine. They come from empathy, not ideology. And they point to something important: there is a real appetite to understand Venezuela better. The problem is not lack of interest. It’s the dominance of explanations that leave no room for Venezuelans to speak for themselves.

There comes a point when constantly defending one’s lived reality against people who have never visited the country, never read Venezuelan sources, and never spoken to those who endured the collapse becomes exhausting.

Venezuela is often discussed through frameworks imported from elsewhere, dependency theory, anti-imperialism, critiques of neoliberalism, while the data produced by Venezuelans is dismissed as biased, exaggerated, or politically motivated. Inflation figures that reached 1,00,000% are questioned. Hunger surveys that show 90% of poverty in the country are treated with suspicion. Migration numbers are downplayed. Reports on institutional collapse are framed as opposition propaganda. 

But Venezuela is not a country lacking data. It is a country whose data has been systematically silenced with the regime’s propaganda even echoed in the most prestigious universities around the world. 

For years, independent universities, NGOs, and research centers stepped in to document what the state refused to measure: poverty levels, food insecurity, public health outcomes, migration flows. Much of what we know today about Venezuela comes not from international institutions, but from Venezuelans collecting, analyzing, and publishing data under conditions of censorship and intimidation.

This is the data that rarely makes it into global debates.

Instead, Venezuela is often reduced to a morality play: a noble project sabotaged from abroad, or a cautionary tale stripped of agency. In both cases, Venezuelans themselves disappear. We are either victims of external forces or footnotes in someone else’s ideological argument.

There comes a point when constantly defending one’s lived reality against people who have never visited the country, never read Venezuelan sources, and never spoken to those who endured the collapse becomes exhausting. Ignorance, after all, is not always innocent—it can be a choice.

But there is also a responsibility. For those of us who have migrated, who now teach, research, or work abroad, there is a duty to keep explaining Venezuela, not as an abstraction, but as a country shaped by deliberate political decisions. The elimination of central bank independence was not an accident. Expropriations were not symbolic gestures. The pursuit of total state control over the economy was not an unfortunate side effect of good intentions. These choices produced hunger, poverty, and mass migration.

Explaining this does not require abandoning concern for the international rules-based system. It requires intellectual honesty.

But many others are willing to listen. They ask questions. They want to understand how a country with immense natural wealth ended up with one of the largest displacement crises in the world.

Recent events have shown what happens when Venezuelans reclaim the tools of documentation and accountability. When María Corina Machado and others insisted on preserving electoral records, the act itself became political, not because it was partisan, but because it challenged the monopoly over truth. Data, in authoritarian contexts, is never neutral.

Not everyone will be willing to reconsider their views. Some people remain deeply attached to narratives shaped primarily by hostility toward the United States, projecting that conflict onto Venezuela regardless of evidence. For them, the country serves a symbolic function, and symbols are rarely surrendered easily.

But many others are willing to listen. They ask questions. They want to understand how a country with immense natural wealth ended up with one of the largest displacement crises in the world. They are capable of seeing Venezuelans not as ideological placeholders, but as millions of people who have resisted, adapted, protested, voted, migrated, and survived in pursuit of something very simple: the ability to live freely in their own country.

Venezuela matters not only because it is our history, but because its future challenges a narrative that has gone largely unquestioned for too long, the idea that anything framed as anti-US is automatically virtuous, and anything aligned with self determination and power to the people is in our best interest. This binary leaves no space for critical thinking, and even less for evidence.

In defending old ideological frameworks from the comfort of distant classrooms and safe democracies, some fail to reckon what they are actually defending: mass human rights violations, institutional destruction, and prolonged human suffering. Whether through ignorance or willful blindness, the cost of that defense is paid by Venezuelans.In his book Animal Farm, George Orwell’s final chapters tells the story of how the new animals in charge end up proclaiming “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”.  In the global conversation about Venezuela, some voices are still treated as more legitimate than those who lived through the collapse. Reclaiming Venezuelan data, and Venezuelan narratives, is not about winning an argument. It is about restoring the basic right to explain our own reality.