The Venezuelan diaspora has a vital role that isn’t often mentioned. Sending money, food or medicine, is only part of it. But our diaspora can help by offering moral support, advice, words of encouragement and a virtual shoulder to lean on, too.
Those who went to that march to Miraflores, like me, or those who saw it happen on TV, didn’t know back then what we know now: that April 11th, 2002 was going to benefit chavismo, ironically enough, and change the country in profound and perhaps irreversible ways.
Beneath the “buena nota” veneer, Venezuelan society has a deep streak of self-loathing. Could the exhilarating experience we shared on Sunday help change that?
Virtually everything you think you know about the revolt in Caracas on April 19th, 1810 is wrong. Then 207 years from now nobody will be able to make heads or tails of today's protests, either.
We don’t have a single name for this thing lurking just around the corner. El vainón is vaguer than that: an image, a metaphor, mixed with fear, anger, and hope.