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I could feel the panic attack set in the second the suggestion was made. “Would you go cover the No Kings protests on the 18th?” my editor asked, reasonably enough. My heart started pounding, my palms sweating. “I’d rather slit my wrists,” I wrote back. Because in my head, 25 years had vanished. I was back in Caracas, in 2000, planning to go to the very first pro-democracy, anti-Chávez protests, and things were about to go very wrong indeed.
It wasn’t quite the first time. Reading American news these days, everything feels like a flashback. Or a callback. You see “Trump tells Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute enemies ‘now,’” I see Chávez in 2004, doing the exact same thing. You see FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatening ABC, I see Diosdado Cabello moving to shut down opposition broadcaster RCTV in 2010.
I’m always mentally slotting the latest outrage into its Venezuelan timeline. It’s all echo.
And of course that’s not a proper basis for analysis. America is its own country, its trauma is its own trauma. It doesn’t exist as an echo other than in my head. But in my head the echo is so loud it’s overwhelming, deafening, paralyzing. I’ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends. It’s awful. And then this sense that it’s going and you can witness it but you can’t stop it. It’s all flashback, but worse than that—it’s only flashback.
“I’ll write you a thing,” I said, “but only if you publish after my flight back home to Japan is in the air.”
Faced with the kinds of news America is cranking out, my amygdala has completely run away with my journalistic brain. I can’t find my analytical voice in all this. I can’t even breathe right.
Of course I know the details are different, but everything rhymes. The news has the feel of a recurring nightmare. Every day the newspaper brings new stories of outrages that all start to jumble together. Each was unthinkable until ten minutes ago but now, apparently, it’s just the way things are.
American news stories aren’t the same as ours were, but they feel the same. That staggered feeling as we see one guardrail after another give way, each with the realization that you and the autocrat are learning at the same time that maybe none of the taboos are really taboo, that none of the guardrails can really pen them in. That desperately exposed feeling, that terrifying sense of being entirely naked in the face of a power that could not give two shits about any of the principles you hold sacred. That nauseated sense of facing a power that takes pleasure in your humiliation.
The collapse of Venezuela’s democracy is something I don’t talk about very often anymore. Because I don’t know how to convey the depth of the loss. Because all the metaphors feel contrived, or self-pitying. It feels like the loss of a child. The pain fades as it recedes in time but it doesn’t end, not really. Or it’s like a phantom limb, an absence that hurts in a way you can do nothing about because what hurts is what’s missing.
Chávez took power in 1999 and gradually, very gradually, wore away the institutions of the Venezuelan state until no democratic safeguard was left standing. He aggressively politicized everything, denying in principle that those who opposed him were legitimately entitled to do so. He blurred the lines between the state, the government, the party, and himself, until all that was left was a personalist blur. By the time he died in 2013, the constitution was a dead letter. And under his successor, Nicolás Maduro, the wheels fell off altogether, both for our democracy and our society.
We lost everything. Millions of us. Our future, our home, our place in the world. We spent 20 years fighting as hard as we could to stop it, a whole generation of us did. And we failed, and that failure is what our lives will always be about.
When I look back at what I wrote at the time, what burns me is how naive I was. I had this feeling all through that exasperatingly slow drip-drip drip of democratic backsliding that what we had were Third World problems. That of course our institutions were going to shit because they were flimsy little things with a scant 40 years of history, that our democracy was frail because it was young, that shit like this could never happen in a proper democracy. That Britons and Americans and Germans couldn’t understand us because they were so far past this level of development. It was embarrassing to have to explain what was happening to Venezuela. I got so bashful about the shithole-countriness of the story. Throwing away a perfectly good democracy at the behest of some authoritarian narcissist seemed so throwbacky, so embarrassingly anachronistic. Proper countries don’t do that.
It never once occurred to me that Venezuela was a forerunner, that the authoritarian playbook Chávez and Maduro were enacting could play out one day in a place like the United States. Kristi Noem making a partisan rant in a video to be shown at all airports. A duly elected opposition congressional delegate refused her seat for no reason at all. Every day brings new outrages that either rhyme with what Venezuelans went through or just repeat it outright.
Now America seems ready to attack Venezuela, but the country getting poised to strike looks more and more like the country about to be struck.
Democratic backsliding ain’t theory to me. I saw my own democracy throw itself off a cliff. I protested, wrote, organized, got tear gassed, and lost. I saw, with horror, that being 100% right on the merits made zero difference of any kind. I don’t know what to say to Americans now, because my fear is too loud for my thinking to break through.
And I don’t want to write from the amygdala. Nobody wants to read that.
But right now, amygdala is all I’ve got.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion, the founder of Caracas Chronicles, Director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute, and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter.
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Nobody in comments gets it. Which makes sense. You can’t get it. Your experiential basis is too different…
I’m not seeing the commonality you constructed. The current administration is a counterrevolution against leftism. while imperfect as all administrations are, they’re still fighting the good fight against socialism, Marxism, communism and more. As a Democrat, I’ll take that any day over what we were progressing towards. I hope my party kicks the PMS wing (progressivist Marxist socialist) out of the tent, they’re parasites.