I asked my friend Edgardo Tenreiro, back in the US, to give you readers an idea of what Venezuela under socialism has been like. He’s from there, and is now a senior corporate executive in the US. He’s been gathering information from friends back in Venezuela. He sends this, saying these are quotes from friends and family back there. Many of them chose not to participate, fearing that somehow, the regime would find out and persecute them. Even though the people below spoke anonymously, they are still taking a risk by talking. Edgardo says about twenty people contributed — some in Venezuela, others in the exile community known to him.
I’m presenting this to you exactly as Edgardo sent it to me; I don’t know when the voices become that of a different person. The material outside of quotation marks is Edgardo’s own words. I cannot thank him enough for giving the rest of us these testimonies about what socialism has done to his homeland. Never, ever forget this!
Let’s begin:
“I was born in a country that no longer exists. I do not mean that Venezuela disappeared from the map. I mean that the Venezuela I knew, prosperous, generous, imperfect but alive, was slowly dismantled under the weight of a dictatorship that hollowed it out from the inside. I was fortunate enough to experience its abundance, and unfortunate enough to witness its dissolution.”
“It was 1998, I was 22, and it was the first time that I voted. My family already knew what would happen if Hugo Chavez was the winner. I listened to my parents and voted for the opposing candidate, Salas Römer, hoping to avoid what they all told me: If Chavez wins this will become Cuba.”
“At the time, those warnings sounded exaggerated. Chávez spoke of justice, inclusion, and dignity for the poor. A lot of people had hope. But over time, that illusion turned into a daily nightmare that we are still living.”
“More than twenty-seven years later, we struggle to convey the scale of what followed. Venezuela did not collapse through a single dramatic event. It was dismantled incrementally, in plain sight, while much of the world observed in silence.”
“Imagine that one-third of the population of the United States, 120 million, were forced to flee— without nuclear war, without natural catastrophe, without invading armies—but solely because of the actions of its own government. That is what has happened to us as Venezuelans. As impossible as it may seem, evil can—and did—carry out such an anti-miracle before the stunned audience pompously called ‘the international community.’”
Learning to Adapt
“It’s like boiling a frog: that’s what happened to us we adapted to the ever increasing temperature and now too weak to jump we are dead. Adaptation meant accepting shortages as temporary, then normal. It meant lowering expectations, redefining stability, and learning to live with constant uncertainty. By the time the danger was unmistakable, leaving was no longer easy—and for many, no longer possible.”
“For a period, adaptation looked like prosperity. Strict currency controls and oil revenue produced what many now call the “golden years” of Chavismo. There were subsidized loans to buy homes and cars, and an expanding web of state programs known as “missions.” “It sounds unbelievable to people outside,” the speaker admits, “but it was real.” The difference between the official dollar and the parallel market let people travel,” a high school friend recalls. “We’d swipe credit cards in Aruba, Curaçao, Panama, Miami. They charged the card and handed you cash. Travel felt like it was almost free.”
“It was also false. What appeared to be abundance was the rapid consumption of capital. Institutions weakened. Professional standards eroded. Cubans impersonating medical doctors or nurses and dressed in white who I later learned were “santeros.” Loyalty mattered more than competence. Over time, expertise itself became a liability.”
The collapse of professional life
“In 2005 I worked as a petroleum engineer for a JV between PDVSA and a U.S. oil company. When It was taken over by Chavez, they made us wear the Chavista uniform, red shirts and go to his rallies, etc. I signed the famous “Lista de Tascón” which was a petition to remove Chavez from power and which eventually became an official black list. A couple of weeks later, I went to work like I usually did and company security, whom I personally knew, told me: you can’t enter the building. I showed the letter that the then President of PDVSA himself had signed saying that those who signed the Lista de Tascon were not to be discriminated against, but security told me that was not valid, and to “stick the letter up your nose.” With that phrase, my world crashed in front of me. After much economic belt tightening (I remember not being able to buy gifts for my kids), and despite many professional colleagues in the oil industry wanting me to work for them (I am a mechanical engineer with a PhD corrosion, an essential expertise for oil production), all the doors were finally closed and all I could do was leave Venezuela and come to the U.S. where the oil industry welcomed me as a consultant and the country gave me the opportunity to thrive not only in the U.S. but internationally, when my own country had rejected me. One of the hardest things is to know that while my eventual outcome was happy, I still have close friends who are to this day, in prison, for taking a stance against Chavez.”
“After 10 years teaching at a university in Venezuela, I left in my early 30’s, and by the time I finished my PhD in Spain, I realized I didn’t have the social connections to open opportunities in higher education. In Europe is totally different than in the U.S. Without a network, I had to start from scratch. So here I was, almost 40, and I had to restart like I was 20. That was very difficult because I had a bright academic professional future in Venezuela and now in Spain I had nothing, because getting a PhD is mostly personal work with books and your advisor, plus I had two daughters to look after, so I wasn’t, I couldn’t, develop a network. So at 40, you’re competing with 20 something’s…for 20 something type work. That was a profesional blow for me. I wasn’t a nobody, a zero”
“My decision to leave Venezuela and emigrate is directly tied to the tragedy of governance we have endured for more than 26 years, a dictatorship disguised as democracy. For many years, I ran a successful marketing and design company. We worked hard, built something honest, and believed in our work. But the same government that claimed to support its people made it nearly impossible for small businesses to survive. Endless bureaucracy, arbitrary regulations, corruption, and constant uncertainty turned daily operations into a battle. Eventually, we grew exhausted from fighting a system designed to wear you down and left Venezuela for the U.S.”
Leaving Without Leaving
When people began to leave, few believed it was permanent. “We left sixteen years ago, when it was already clear the country was collapsing, but we thought leaving didn’t mean losing Venezuela. From Miami it’s only a three-hour flight. How wrong I was.”
Today, there are no direct flights from the United States to Venezuela. “You can’t enter with a U.S. passport,” she explains, “but you also can’t renew a Venezuelan passport inside the U.S.” Visiting home now requires indirect routes through third countries, high costs, and months of planning. “Visiting your own country takes emotional preparation.”
“When I left, my intention was to come back in five years. I’ll study, get a doctorate, but practice in Venezuela. I took me 7 years to realize that I was never coming back. That was the year when the student protest movement reached its height, with tens of thousands protesting nationwide, but tragically, many were killed and thousands ended up in jail. Why take the risk of going back, now with two young daughters? What was Venezuela going to offer them?”
Families Pulled Apart
“Dictatorships do not only destroy institutions; they dismantle families. I watched ours scatter across the world. Some stayed. Some left. Some went to Chile, others to Spain, others to Argentina. We learned to celebrate birthdays through computer and phone screens, to mourn through phone calls, to mark time by distance, to communicate by CHATS. A country once known for welcoming immigrants became a factory of departures.”
Distance reshaped family life in irreversible ways. This is difficult for Americans to understand because families here are so geographically dispersed. But growing up in Venezuela, I not only knew my uncles and cousins but was close to grand uncles and great uncles and so my second and third cousins, on both sides of the family. It was a vast network of hundreds of people.
“The first thing is the family. We are seven brothers and mom and dad, and we have almost 20 years that we don’t see each other together, let alone our kids. Some are in Venezuela, others in Spain, others in the U.S., others in Chile. It is economically and logistically impossible for us to get together. And this separation is directly related to the Chavismo we suffer from, because each one of us, in our attempt to survive economically, searching for a better life, have had to go to wherever the opportunity is. This has made my mom and dad’s life, now in their 80’s and alone in Venezuela, extremely harsh. Imagine, 7 children and 25 grandchildren, and living alone! This is one of the most fundamental damages that the dictatorship has caused. This is the worst damage Chavez inflicted on Venezuela. He destroyed the families of 8 million Venezuelans. So each one of those 8 million beings are emotionally broken.”
“All Venezuelan families have been separated. None are complete. A grandmother who has never met her grandchild. A son who hasn’t seen his mother in more than ten years. Not a single family is unaffected. We are all incomplete. A grandmother not knowing her grandchild, a niece not knowing her uncle, a son not seeing her mom for more than 10 years. Some forced to leave by requesting asylum, others Temporary Protection Status.”
“I own nothing from before leaving. No furniture, no photographs, no objects passed down. What I have, I carry within me: memory, accent, longing.”
In tears someone says: “I haven’t seen my grandchildren in two years, who now live in Venezuela with my son’s ex wife. Imagine how painful it is for a grandfather to not see his grandkids, and now imagine how painful it is for my son to not be able to see his daughters. Incredibly painful. My son can’t go—he is 100% U.S. citizen, born here—if he goes, the regime can capture him and use him as a pawn for negotiation.”
“You know my dad, he is 110% Venezuelan, he disagreed with all of us who left. How painful was it for me to constantly say ‘no’ when he asked me to return? As a mother, I now know how many sacrifices he made for me, yet to have to tell him no, for the sake of my own daughters, and for my mom and dad have to continue to be alone in Venezuela, while I’m in Spain, that is unbearable.”
“I never imagined my life would unfold so far away from the people I love. I never imagined my children would grow up without knowing the country where I was raised, where I met their father, where my memories live. Over time, you learn to numb the pain of distance and to quiet the guilt that comes with leaving. But you leave for a reason. To give your children what you know they would not have back home. Safety, freedom, and the possibility of a future. Living abroad while knowing that your parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews are merely surviving under those conditions is something you can only endure by giving it spiritual meaning. By trusting that God holds everything in His hands. Because, from a human perspective, it is truly heartbreaking.”
Those Who Stayed
“For those of us who stayed, it hasn’t been easy. We would march and protest, we would filled streets with millions nationwide and every year we would tell ourselves, this year we are going to be free. Staying did not mean stability. “
“My 12 years old stepdaughter, as she was helping to cook dinner, was shot by a stray bullet by her kidney. We went to several emergency rooms to no avail and finally they accepted her in one. She was operated on but caught an infection and the hospital did not have the medicines she needed, nor some of the basics, like linens, food, diapers. Everything we had to bring from the outside in the middle of the scarcity of products everywhere. I remember the names of the medicines and going from pharmacy to pharmacy in the city unable to find them. She eventually passed and I will never forget that my husband himself had to take her daughter in the hospital ward to the morgue. Her case is not unique. Many children started dying for absurd reasons and lack of healthcare. I will never unburden myself the horror of those days.”
“With my own eyes I saw children on the streets, without parents who had emigrated, come together in large groups to hunt for food from trash trucks and share it with one another. “
“Hyperinflation erased wages. The bolívar lost almost all value while prices exploded. The same product could cost sixty-two dollars if paid in bolívares and twenty-five if paid in dollars.”
“Scarcity defined daily life. Standing in line for hours just to buy food became normal.”
“My dad does not want to leave Venezuela. It’s so hard for that generation who developed professionally in the 60’s and 70’s, at the height of the Venezuelan economic boom, a country with a bright future. And now, 50 years later, it is gone, and everything that they had built.”
Her dad is an architect, mine a civil engineer. And she’s right. It’s all gone.
“It’s a strange phenomenon, my dad has not been able to enjoy the fruits of what he built during his career. I’m not talking about the economics, but the fruit of your work, the buildings you designed, the roads you built, the students you taught for 30 years at the university. And with that, the future is also gone. How do you live with yourself when you know the future does not exist, no projects to imagine and build?”
Loneliness of forced emigration
“Loneliness is the other major theme for me. I was so close to my mom and my dad. We used to shop together, go for coffee together, pop-in at their house early in the afternoon…We’ll all of that is over. That loneliness has been difficult to take. That immigration to Spain paralyzed me. It took me a long time to reactivate. To recognize I was never going back and that I had to rebuild my life here and not in Venezuela and to reintegrate myself in the labor market was difficult. Without my mom and dad to help me with my daughters, the reintegration was even more difficult. And of course, what I remember in Venezuela as a child, big family reunions with cousins, parents and grandparents…my daughters never had it because here, well, we don’t have family, just the four of us.”
“Exile is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is quiet, administrative, stretched across years of postponed trips and unanswered questions. You learn to explain your absence with short sentences. You learn not to hope too loudly. You learn that time does not freeze simply because you are waiting.
I chose exile. I chose to live. I chose to raise my children in safety, far from the fear, the shortages, the silences imposed by a regime that turned daily life into survival. But every choice has a cost. Mine was distance, geographical, emotional, ancestral. I had to learn how to live as an immigrant. How to start again without history being recognized. How to explain myself. How to be grateful and grieving at the same time. I became something like a gypsy, moving where opportunity allowed, adapting, translating myself constantly. Reinvention was not romantic, it was necessary.”
“Going to Venezuela to visit my mom and dad is also an odyssey. First financially. The plane tickets are very expensive. Logistically is even more difficult. And then from a legal perspective.”
I agree with her. I have dual citizenship but don’t have a Venezuelan National ID, without it, I can’t get a Venezuelan passport, without that, I may be able to get in, but who knows if I can get out. To renew all those documents, with no Venezuelan embassy in the U.S., I would have to go to Mexico or Canada for a week to attempt to get all of that done there.
She continues, “Last time I was in Venezuela in 2023 I tried to get the national ID for my daughters, who were born in Venezuela, so they could get a passport. I spent a week trying and we couldn’t. The dictatorship does everything possible so that if you live abroad you can’t come to visit. If it was easy to visit, I would be somewhat happy, but not even that is possible.”
“We left at a moment when it was clear the country was collapsing, sixteen years ago now. Even then, we believed leaving did not mean losing Venezuela entirely. We thought visiting would be easy. After all, from Miami it is only a three-hour flight. How wrong I was. Today, there are no airlines that fly directly from the United States to Venezuela. Traveling there has become an ordeal. Indirect routes through other countries, tickets more expensive than flying to Europe, and endless logistical hurdles have turned a simple visit into a nearly impossible task. You cannot enter Venezuela with a U.S. passport, yet you cannot renew a Venezuelan passport from within the United States. The only option is to travel to a third country and attempt to process documents there, if you are lucky. Visiting your own country now requires months of planning, saving, paperwork, and emotional preparation.”
Living the death of your loved ones from a distance
“My uncle and godfather died in Venezuela and I couldn’t say my goodbyes. Others have had to live the death of their parents thousands of miles away, unable to travel.”
I imagine she lives, like many, in fear that she will not be able to be present when her mom or her dad’s health fails.
“When my mother could no longer stay in Venezuela, I brought her with me. She died here, away from the land that formed her. I could not bury her. My father’s ashes are still in Venezuela, and in my heart I know they should be together there. Death, like life, became fragmented by borders I did not choose. Even grief was displaced. I do not know where home is anymore. Home used to be a place. Now it is something I carry. I own nothing from before, no furniture, no photographs framed on walls, no objects passed down through generations. Everything remained behind, in a house we lost, on land that was expropriated, claimed by a state that decided ownership was optional and power was absolute. What I have, I carry within me: memory, accent, longing, resilience.”
Fear as Daily Atmosphere
Everyone who remained in Venezuela and chose to contribute to this testimonial, asked me for anonymity “for obvious reasons.” Some sent audio recordings and deleted them immediately. Others erased messages, wiped phones, or refused to keep copies of what they had said. Fear is not abstract.
“About a year ago, my husband got a judge’s citation for a comment he made on Instagram alleging that it was an incitement for hatred and violence. Incredible but true. We were able to resolve the issue by bribing someone in the courthouse so that he would not be arrested. We live in daily fear that the police can take your phone on the street, open WhatsApp, search for Trump or Maduro or intervention and take you away.”
“After the election results of 2024 were the real results were made public, the repression was fierce. 10 to 30 years in prison or disappearing for the wrong message on WhatsApp or the wrong clothing. I now always leave my phone at home if I have to leave.”
The absence of names in this article is not only editorial caution. It is itself part of the testimony. And so is the silence of those who decided to not speak.
What Dictatorship Leaves Behind
Although Maduro is no longer in power, those I spoke with say the machinery he built remains. “We still live under psychological terror,” one voice says. “We’re still separated from our families.”
“And still, I wait for the day I can walk its streets again. Not as someone returning home, but as someone paying respect to the life that was possible there, to the parents who should rest together in that soil, to the version of myself that learned too early what it means to lose a country without ever leaving it behind completely. This is what dictatorship does. It does not only govern. It fractures. It displaces. It leaves you with a suitcase that never fully unpacks, and a heart that lives in several places at once.”
“What hurts most is not only what was lost, but what will never be recovered. Too much time has passed to say I will “go back.”
That sentence belongs to an earlier version of me, one who believed exile was temporary. Now I say something else: I hope to visit. The difference is subtle, but it carries the weight of acceptance.”
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Whatever you think of what Donald Trump did to Maduro, and what is to come, understand that there are real people, who have suffered and continue to suffer, immensely from the Chavez-Maduro dictatorship. That dictatorship is still in place, but now, for once, there is the possibility of liberation. Thanks to the United States.
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Hitler Surprised By Student Anger
I’m reading an advance copy of Weimar: Life On The Edge Of Catastrophe, a book by the Anglo-German writer Katja Hoyer, out later this year. I’ll be writing a lot more about it when we near pub date, but you can pre-order it at that link. Hoyer looks at Weimar Germany through the lens of the town that gave the Republic its name. It’s a fascinating book so far, one that brings real intimacy that I hadn’t yet encountered in my readings of the time. You come to understand how very, very hard life was for ordinary, non-political Germans during World War I and in the aftermath — and how the Nazis were thugs from the beginning. In the mid-1920s, they had a big conference in Weimar, which is a culturally important town in Germany — middle-class and largely conservative, but not radical. They brawled and knifed and shot people.
I just read yesterday something startling. In 1927, Baldur von Schirach, a young man from Weimar whose family were culturally distinguished, and who had been an early supporter of the Nazis, went down to Munich for university studies, so he could be near Hitler. He ran into Hitler on the street one day, and asked him to come speak to a group of his fellow students. The future Führer didn’t want to, because he thought those intellectuals wouldn’t respond to him; he was used to speaking more to the common man. Hitler was afraid of being embarrassed by a half-empty venue, or being heckled by the students. Von Schirach assured him things would go well.
Turns out the Hofbräuhaus was packed on the night of Hitler’s speech. Writes Hoyer:
The room was ‘so packed out that students sat on the tiled stoves’, as he recalled. Hitler had clearly underestimated how much political anger there was among the student body. Their parents had lost status and wealth in recent years, leaving many of the students fearing for their own future. Many were also deeply antisemitic…
Von Schirach went on to become leader of the Hitler Youth. He was tried and convicted at Nuremberg, and served a prison sentence.
What leapt out at me was the eagerness of those students to be radicalized. Their parents had lost money and status because of the war and the hyperinflation, resulting in their own fear of the future. What does this have to say to us today? We have not had in America anything remotely resembling the material traumas that hit Germany during the final years of the Great War, and in the aftermath. Nevertheless, it has been well-established that the Zoomers suffer from unusually high levels of anxiety about their future, for other reasons. And as we have seen more recently, they are becoming antisemitic, on both Left and Right.
When I have talks about the Weimarization of America, skeptics point out that pre-Nazi Germany had suffered economic crisis incomparably worse than anything America has gone through. This is certainly true! But it’s ancillary to the main point. Remember Arendt’s analysis (and Mattias Desmet’s more recent one) about the psychological conditions that lead to radicalism and mass formation. A society does not have to have endured the shocks of losing a war and deep economic crisis to nevertheless achieve those conditions. We have them now!
I think it is difficult for we older people to grasp just how liquid and uncertain the world looks like for young people who have grown up knowing as much uncertainty, even amid relative prosperity, as Gen Z Americans today. Part of that uncertainty has been induced by their psychological formation by the Internet. Part of it is because of the collapse of institutional authorities. Part of it has to do with the high divorce rate and the instability of family structures. And yes, part of it, at least with white males, has to do with the loss of status and opportunities for educational and professional advancement imposed on them ideologically by progressivism within institutions.
Nick Fuentes is a clown, not a Hitler. The idea of being drawn to such an obvious fool as Fuentes is hard for us older people to grasp. But we are looking at him from the vantage point of people who were formed psychologically in a more stable society. The charismatic Fuentes feeds off the anger and fear of a generation, especially of young men. He is not Hitler, but the fact that Fuentes fills his online beer hall nightly with hundreds of thousands of faithful viewers is a sign.
Islamoeuropa
If you are wondering why the Trump administration doubts Europe’s long-term stability, take a look at this clip of the president of Austria, saying that the day is coming when non-Muslim Austrian women will be asked by the state to wear the hijab to show solidarity with Austrian Muslims suffering from Islamophobia.
Also today, the UAE has limited government funding for its citizens to study in the UK, citing fear that they will be radicalized by the Muslim Brotherhood there. Think of it! A Gulf Arab nation fears its people will become radicals by studying in the UK!
I had coffee this morning with a Hungarian friend whose sister is a liberal feminist working in the NGO world. The sister recently told her, after a big meeting with NGO colleagues — one in which anti-Semitism was openly and repeatedly asserted — “I think these people really want to destroy our civilization. I’m closer than I’ve ever been to seeing the world like a conservative.”
Rod Dreher
