I recently reconnected online with a friend who was born in Venezuela and still lives there. We met on Twitter many years ago. He is a college graduate, an interpreter, and a writer. We recently started an email exchange about what life on the ground is like right now, and he agreed to let me post his responses. He did mention that he recently got married and is working full time, so I am grateful for anything he is able to write.
This is the first in what I hope will be many updates from Venezuela. I am sharing his words so readers can get a firsthand sense of how he sees the changes happening around him. The views below are his own, based on his experience and perspective from inside Venezuela.
In our latest exchange, I asked him about the new leader, gas prices, daily life, political changes, and the public mood in Venezuela. Here is his response.
Diego wrote:
The new leader is called Delcy Rodriguez. We all hate her. She’s a part of that same cancer that riddled our nation for over a quarter of a century. In fact, she’s much worse in many ways. She’s a communist rat and an ally of the worst criminals in our world, just like Maduro. He’s in prison in NYC. He yells and yells all night long, apparently. He says he’s still the president of Venezuela, but the investigations have proved he’s actually Colombian. He cannot be president of my nation if he’s from another nation! That is unconstitutional, so he technically never was.
His regime is still in place, yes. He also yells he was kidnapped by the USA. He was not, he’s an enemy combatant, and was taken prisoner as such. And like I told you, the drugs and the fentanyl were the least of his crimes. He fully supported Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese. He’s an enemy of the state, yours and mine. He allowed them a platform and base of ops in our continent, and he’s going to sing. He’s going to give so many details. I think he had an audience scheduled for today, I will check and get back to you on that.
Things are improving though. The Pentagon is substituting chavista military leaders with their own. The economy is doing better in some regards, worse in others. The city is experiencing a sort of slow revival. It is like coming out of cryo-stasis, it will take time.
And of course, honesty and accuracy are of paramount importance. I’d write from the heart as an op-ed writer, but with the lens of a ground witness of events as they unfold here.
Things will keep improving, and we Venezuelans have President Donald J. Trump to thank for this. We all love him, I have to say. He’s really REALLY popular down here. He’s changing things. Gas is going up. It used to be 50 cents for a liter. Now it is 1 USD or more. People don’t really enjoy those sorts of policies, but it is necessary, it was too cheap how it was before.
To summarize and conclude, it has to be said that we are all really grateful for his treatment of chavistas and their ilk.
I really enjoyed his comment about Venezuela beating Japan in baseball, and the hint (or prank) at us becoming the 51st state, maybe haha.