I got my editorial in The Guardian, though not until it had been put through some aggressive editing. But the games were just beginning.
Only a few days later, Venezuela held a referendum that abolished presidential term limits. Up until then, terms were five years and nonconsecutive: a president would have to take a term off before running again. The 55 percent yes versus 45 percent no results came in on the day I was flying from London back to New York for good, initiating my divorce from my English husband. I was checking in at the American Airlines counter at Heathrow Airport when I got the call.
“I’m Colin Pereira, a producer on BBC Newsnight. Would you like to come on the show tonight to discuss the referendum in Venezuela? You would be on opposite the Venezuelan ambassador to the UK.”
I was surprised they had reached out to me, but then I was probably the only Venezuelan in the British public eye. In 1999, the British tabloids had nicknamed me “the Cracker from Caracas” (“cracker” in Britain means “hot chick,” not “racist” as it does in the US) when they revealed I was dating Mick Jagger, whom I had known since childhood, as he was our neighbor on a Caribbean island. The celebrity frisson launched a lot of interest in my life, just at the time I was pursuing my doctorate in political philosophy at Columbia University. The departmental secretary was none too pleased with the incoming calls. Over time, I steered the press attention into opportunities to write for newspapers and magazines. My first forays were about what it was like to be a Latin American living in London society; then I turned to writing about politics, Venezuela, and justice—which was, after all, what my dissertation was about.
My brush with British tabloid quasi-celebrity was not the only reason I understood the power of the media. I had already been on both sides of the journalistic fence—predator and prey—as both a journalist and a fixture of society pages. I knew how the media shapes political discourse. I also knew BBC Newsnight wouldn’t ask me twice.
“Yes, I’ll do it.”
My dog had already been checked into the cargo hold, and I could barely walk due to a horse-riding accident I’d suffered a couple of days before that had never been treated. The pain was excruciating, but I just wanted to get home to New York. It turned out later I had a compression fracture in one of the vertebrae: it was crushed by the impact of landing on my head and my spine collapsing like a closed accordion. I was lucky to be alive, never mind walk, pain or not. I called my mother to go pick up my dog for me when the plane landed at JFK, then I took my suitcase and turned back to my London flat to change for the television interview.
In the studio, I sat pin-straight, my high heels belying the pain. Under the white, hot lights, my heart thumped in my ears. The Venezuelan ambassador and I were quite friendly, despite being on opposing political sides. Since I was the best-known Venezuelan in the UK, Ambassador Samuel Moncada had come to my engagement party in London, and I respected him: he was a true believer in reducing inequality and in greater political inclusion. I just didn’t like his boss, President Chávez, and he was okay with that. In our earpieces, the producers egged us on to argue vigorously for the cameras, and we did.
“The people have spoken. The Bolivarian Revolution has taken hold. People are tired of the inequality. The days of the old oligarchy are over. Now power is really devolving to the people.”
“No, it isn’t,” I countered. “This ‘democratization’ is really a centralization of power: the poor get handouts of food and medicine directly from the executive branch on condition that they sign an oath of fealty. They get paid to wear red T-shirts at the rallies. He bribed them for their vote—and by the way, Chávez also personally controls the people who count the votes. Furthermore, in the ten years Chávez has been in power, poverty has grown along both dimensions: there are more poor, and the poor are poorer. The Gini coefficient of income inequality is bigger now than it was when the Chávez supporters railed against the system, supported a man who has no respect for democratic institutions (which we know, because he made his name attempting a military coup), and signed away their rights to a populist despot. The Venezuelan people will regret this.”
To the producers’ surprise, though, when the cameras stopped rolling, we hugged Latin style and chatted amiably before wishing each other a good evening. In retrospect, of course, I was right—the Venezuelan people did come to regret their choice. The well-meaning Ambassador Moncada was briefly Venezuela’s foreign minister in 2017. Prior to that, Moncada served as ambassador to the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., and railed against foreign intervention in Venezuela, whose ruling elite operates as a drug cartel and where the citizens are starving.
MEDELLÍN: THE LAND OF PABLO ESCOBAR AND NARRATIVE OPERATIONS
In April 2009, my spine mostly healed, I was on my first tour of Colombia to see the changes under President Alvaro Uribe and his then-minister of defense (and now Colombian president), Juan Manuel Santos. Since 1948, Colombia had been racked by Conservative-versus-Liberal violence, known as “La Violencia.” Since 1964, the violence had been explicitly leftist guerrilla versus right-wing paramilitary; it’s the year FARC was founded and basically took over the violence. FARC is a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary guerrilla organization whose stated aim is agrarian reform and the overthrow of a political system dominated by an oligarchy of latifundistas (owners of latifundios, huge rural estates). There were other guerrilla organizations (including the number-two group, ELN, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional), creating an alphabet soup of insurgencies.
In response, the landowners set up their own right-wing paramilitaries, which coalesced as the United Colombian Self-Defense Forces. (Their Spanish acronym is AUC.) The civil war was on, and it has raged until now, as President Juan Manuel Santos struggles to pass a peace deal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Colombian drug cartels sprung up, of which Cali and Medellín were the most powerful. They fought each other and used the other various insurgent and paramilitary groups and rival cartels in temporary and shifting alliances. They all trafficked drugs, set off bombs, assassinated leaders, kidnapped civilians. I arrived in 2009 to see the progress then-president Uribe was making in fighting them all. Several other political commentators and I were shipped in under the aegis of the newly set up national branding office; their motto was: “Colombia: the only danger is not wanting to leave.” Not exactly Madison Avenue’s greatest brainchild, but certainly to the point.
It was then that I heard my first narcocorrido, a song that glorifies the exploits of the drug cartels, in the popular Bogotá restaurant Andrés Carne de Res. The huge steakhouse looked like a nightclub, and pumped out local dance music. As I stood in line for the bathroom, listening to the sounds of people in the stalls snorting what undoubtedly was very pure cocaine, I could hear lyrics about how the Colombian drug capos ran drugs into Venezuela with the protection of their friend, President Hugo Chávez. Not only did it gall me as a native Venezuelan, but I wondered if the people snorting their lines were aware of the contradiction between their drug consumption and their railing against the conflict those drugs had funded, which had been tearing their country apart for half a century. Not to be a pedant, I kept my opinions to myself.
Narcocultura, the criminal culture of the drug cartels, has hit the mainstream in all drug-producing countries (the “White Triangle” of Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia) and in the transshipment countries of Central America and Mexico—and even across the US border. It is part of the information operations waged by these criminal groups. The narcocorridos are sung by popular groups that are closely affiliated with the cartels; the groups are often in the cartels’ direct employment, serving as their own latter-day troubadours. The ones most explicit about their patrons’ marvelous exploits—Secret Airstrip, Coca Growers of Putumayo, and The Snitch—were corridos prohibidos: the radio stations refused to play them, lest the broadcasters get caught in the ego-driven crossfire of rival cartels. They were right to be afraid: later, in August 2010, drug-funded terrorists set off
a car bomb at the headquarters of Radio Caracol.
The highlight of our tour of the wonders of the Uribe administration’s brutal-yet-effective tactics against narcoterrorist insurgents was a tour of Medellín: the original “Cartel Land,” famed for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellín cartel during the cocaine craze of the 1980s. Cocaine made the terrorists powerful, but it all started when they were mere service providers to the Cali and Medellín capos, including Pablo Escobar. Escobar is still regarded as the “King of Cocaine” and is the wealthiest criminal in history, with an estimated net worth of $30 billion at the time of his death in 1993 in a violent shoot-out in Medellín by the combined forces of his enemies: Los Pepes, an ultraviolent group based on the Spanish acronym for “people persecuted by Pablo Escobar”; the Colombian military; US Special Forces; and the US Drug Enforcement Administration. His death is considered to mark the end of the Golden Age of the Colombian drug cartels and the start of the Golden Age of the narcoterrorists.
The beginning of the end for Escobar was his brazen terrorist attack on a national airliner: he ordered the blowing up of Avianca flight 203, bound from Bogotá to Cali, on November 27, 1989, killing all 107 people on board. Hours later, a man called Radio Caracol saying Los Extraditables (“The Extraditables”) were behind the bombing,1 referring to the list of drug capos that the United States wanted extradited from Colombia for trial and imprisonment.
Pablo Escobar was at the top of that list; the Extraditables were protesting the Colombian government’s signing of the extradition treaty with the US, as the capos knew they could influence Colombia’s law enforcement apparatus, but not the Americans’. So they couched their protest in a manner that got a lot of popular support: as a violation of national sovereignty. The narrative of the imperialist ravager of the native resonates deeply in Latin America. Why not use it to get the people to support the cartel’s power play? It worked for Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and for the FARC narcoterrorists in Colombia. Why not for the Medellín cartel?
In short, the criminal group was using another terrorist recruitment tactic: the manipulation of a group identity’s grievance narrative—the narrative in this case being the Colombian people’s humiliation by the imperialist and manipulative United States. It had millions of supporters across Colombia. But the purpose of the narcos’ use of this grievance narrative was clear: to retain the power they had over the citizens they exploited so they could continue making money with their criminal activity and keep operating in an environment in which they were given latitude by a government they already had on its back foot.
When we arrived in Medellín, the animals from Pablo Escobar’s zoo had long ago escaped and his home (we were told) was in decay. No, we could not go visit it; no, it was not a tourist attraction. What was on display were all the wondrous new libraries, the aquarium, and the cable car that linked the slums to downtown, part of the program to integrate the urban poor to the mainstream economy and to the educational system.
The mayor of Medellín was a left-wing hippie intellectual, a mathematics professor who both understood the need for redressing economic marginalization—a prime recruitment angle for both insurgent and criminal groups that Colombia had long been battling—and had a very metrics-based approach to economic development programs. It all sounded and looked great, but it didn’t work as well as advertised: there has been some regression as the criminal gangs (bacrim) have returned to their old drug trafficking antics. But the violence is still less than it was in the old days, when both the cartels and the terrorist insurgents were setting off bombs. Lest the locals forget the bad old days: an exploded sculpture of a bird by world-renowned Medellín artist Fernando Botero stands in the central square as a reminder.
FLYING HOME
The H1N1 avian flu pandemic was in full swing in Colombia by the time my 2009 trip was over. All the passengers and airport security at Bogotá’s El Dorado Airport were wearing surgical masks when I boarded my flight to Caracas to visit my brother. My face was hot from the mask and my head was full of frustration that the country I had grown up viewing as the troublesome neighbor was getting its act together and emerging from violence, while my birthplace fell apart.
The entrenchment of the dictatorial regime that has riven Venezuela and threatens to destabilize the entire Western Hemisphere was made possible by the world’s consumption of Venezuela’s oil. In the US, it is American consumers filling their cars at Citgo gasoline stations that have funded them: Citgo is wholly owned by the Venezuelan government’s oil company, PDVSA (Petroleum of Venezuela). The Chavista regime used the oil wealth to buy regional influence and line its own pockets—and later, to buy the guns that would shoot protesters demanding canceled elections and food.
“It’s incredible,” I said to my brother when I arrived at his Caracas apartment. “Medellín. Medellín! The poster child for drug and terrorist violence, what was once one of the most dangerous cities on earth, is now better than Caracas. Where did we go wrong?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
I wanted some answers, so I began asking questions of anyone who would meet with me and be trusted not to rat me out to the Venezuelan government for being overly inquisitive. Not to embroil my brother, I turned to three childhood friends, one of whom had dated my cousin, the other two who were now involved in the political opposition.
THE REVOLUTION’S TRUSTY STEEDS
Maria Elena, my cousin’s childhood sweetheart, called me up.
“Want to go to the show-jumping competition at the country club today?” We were both riding enthusiasts, and our families have been multigenerational members of the Caracas Country Club—the “old school,” as we call it; the “oligarchy,” as the Chavistas call it.
“I’d love that! What fun!”
We arrived suitably underdressed in jeans. While Latinos have a reputation for flamboyance, it’s a hallmark of the upper class to act and dress in the understated manner of the American WASPs of the US Northeast—minus the pastel ginghams, of course. We waved to the guard as he lifted the gate without asking Maria Elena’s membership number, parked under a shady tree near the stables, and went straight to the stalls to pet some of the horses: gleaming, muscular bodies, legs wrapped in bandages that coordinated well with the horse’s chestnut, bay, or gray coloring.
The stables of the Caracas Country Club are built into the foothills of the Ávila Mountains, the trailing off of the Andes that separate Caracas from the Caribbean and give it its perfect year-round weather. Cascading stepped fields separate the stables from the bar, and the bar from the outdoor stadium competition ring. As we watched the show-jumping from our bleachers, a little ripple emerged among the audience as a dark-skinned, broad man with a scar on his face approached. One by one people rose to greet him. He didn’t look like your usual Caracas Country Club member.
“He’s a Chavista,” Maria Elena explained. “Alejandro Andrade, a military commander very close to Chávez. The story is that they were childhood friends and Chávez nearly took out his eye in a game of baseball. Chávez rewarded his loyalty. He is the wealthiest new member of the country club and owns at least ten horses, all champions, bought on the international market. Welcome to the Bolivarian Revolution.”
“I thought they hated all we stood for and that the Caracas Country Club was the very symbol of our evil,” I quipped.
“Oh, my dear. They want to be us. And what are we to do? If we don’t let them in and play nice, they really will destroy us. Besides, they’re the only ones who can afford the club dues anymore.”
In the lobby of the main clubhouse entrance, there used to be a list of members who were delinquent in their payments and how much they owed. The list got to be so long the club had to take it down. I had heard of these changes and accommodations taking place in African countries. I had never imagined I would see it happen in my own.
So I started pulling the thread a bit, as we say in my business, to find out the underlying story of how this had come
to pass. I sought out two of the more vociferous analysts and critics of the changes Venezuela was undergoing.
My first stop was Diego Arria, a former governor and UN ambassador and a failed Venezuelan presidential candidate, about whom more than one colorful story of how he had made his money swirled. I knew him very well: I had grown up with his stepchildren. He was all over traditional and social media, well ahead of the curve, opining on the finer points of Venezuelan constitutional law and how the Chavistas were subverting them. As we chatted, we sipped coffee, brought in on a silver tray by his uniformed maid amid the dark colonial furniture of his home just across from one of the holes of the Caracas Country Club golf course.
He was exceedingly well informed and made compelling arguments, but I did wonder whether he was the most credible voice for this message. If the Chavistas had risen on a sea of anger about inequality and elitism, Arria perhaps might not be the best messenger for a more inclusive alternative.
I kept looking.
Next, I went to speak to Teodoro Petkoff, a former Communist guerrilla who was the editor and cofounder of Tal Cual, the anti-Chavista paper he had started with my grandfather Hans.
“You have to understand, everyone is guilty in this,” said Petkoff. “This was foreseeable. The forces of the MBR-200 [the military-founded political party that backed Hugo Chávez] were well known to many, but either they accommodated them or discredited them. Chávez’s forces were trained in guerrilla tactics to combat the Communists; that the military should turn in their sympathies [away from liberal democratic capitalism and toward Cuban-style communism] was surprising, but they had more in common with their [Communist] enemies than their elite commanders. The Caracazo of 1989 was the turning point.”
When enraged commuters and students flipped over the little por puesto buses (jitneys) that transport most urban workers, then set them on fire (after their owners had doubled fares and refused student discounts in response to a hike in gasoline prices), riots spread across nineteen cities for a week, riots that were termed “the Caracazo.” The military was called in to protect private property from the looters streaming down from the hillside slums.
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