Viva Venezuela, A Champion At Last

For almost my entire life, Venezuela has been a punching bag, a nasty joke couched in fake concern. I used to participate in some of that punching, to be clear. But as I grew into political consciousness, I struggled to reconcile, both within myself and whenever I was asked about the country where I was born and partly raised, the conflict between my slowly burgeoning leftist beliefs and what I had been told socialism did to Venezuela. I mainly took a "Eh, what can you do?" stance, if not an outright hostile one towards Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. That hostility only felt more correct when Nicolás Maduro took over following Chávez's death in 2013. It was around that time, however, that I began to realize that Venezuela wasn't a rogue state, or some evil dominion in dire need of outside intervention. It wasn't, and still isn't, perfect. No country is, and this one was born of the imperialist context that has threatened to completely subsume Latin America. What I mean by that is that the United States decided to do its best to try to dominate Venezuela, and to make an oil-rich country subservient to the world's biggest oil consumer. The realization that Venezuela serves that purpose for the U.S. helped me understand why it was in the state it was: It needed to be beaten down by American economic and military pressure, so that it could become both a cautionary tale for the American right and a cog in the broader neoliberal enterprise. Venezuela became less a country in the American collective hivemind than a boogeyman, a place that could be pointed at as a failure whenever someone tried to consider a better way. I was not immune to this framing, which was so common growing up in the U.S. and away from Venezuela. It has been hard, throughout my life, to feel the pride I should want to feel for my homeland, because I have had such a confused political understanding of both Venezuela and Venezuela's place in the world, and in this hemisphere specifically. Put another way, I was ignorant and unwilling to question the narrative that I had been fed. The slow process of correcting that ignorance only left me more confused on how to feel about Venezuela as a whole. I'm still working on it.