Then as now, hunger in the streets of my Venezuela

Back then, I had left feeling full of gratitude for all that I had experienced there. This time, upon leaving, I took with me the image of a gray city with an oppressive atmosphere, not only because of the memories from this sad trip but also because of the sadness of the people in the streets, their faces wearing the strain of their overwhelm. Caracas held so much personal history for me that the idea of ever returning to live there as it had become was unbearable. I made a mental map of places I should not go as a way of dealing with nostalgia.

I was having breakfast at the bus station shortly before starting my return trip home and thinking of the medieval Spanish poet Jorge Manrique’s saying “any time gone by was better” when a young man interrupted me with his heartbreaking request. With it, his personal maelstrom was added to the misfortunes of my country.

“Can you give me something to eat?”

His question reminded me of what had become of the country of oil, the country of women who win beauty contests, and one of the countries with the happiest people in the world. For a few years now, my homeland has been in the spotlight of international news and social networks for a less happy reason: the huge wave of people desperately fleeing the socialist paradise. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 7 million people have left the country.

In 2017 people began rummaging through the garbage looking for something to eat. Several times I had been confronted with this painful image, and although it is embarrassing to say it, the sight of it had become a normalized postcard of our misfortune. Even though on several occasions as I walked the streets, I saw people so desperate to eat they were picking through trash, the biggest emotional impact came from the young man standing in front of me begging for food.

“Yes, of course. I’ll buy you breakfast.”

I ordered for him the same thing that I was eating: arepas, fried egg, cheese, avocado, and a cup of coffee with milk. None of the people in the coffee shop would ever have thought that this fellow was in an extreme situation. About 28 years old, younger than I but not so young as to be my son, he was not wearing dirty or torn clothes, nor did he have the gestures of disconnection from reality that people living on the streets sometimes have. His clothes were respectable. He had a beard that looked to be about two weeks old, and his face was tired. His weariness looked ancient. He was a normal person, someone who should be living a normal life, but he simply had nothing to eat.

Before they brought the young man’s breakfast, I asked him to sit down and started asking him questions. His name was Roberto. He told me that he was an engineer working for the IT department of the mayor’s office, but I suspected that he was lying, because he could not elaborate.

“Drugs?” I asked. The question surprised him. “No. Never. I just don’t have money to eat.” I asked if he was married, if he had children. “No, and I thank heaven for that,” he said. And when he said it, he smiled for the first time.

I told Roberto what I had seen just a few days earlier at the bus terminal: To my amazement, the taxi drivers were accepting only food as payment: a kilogram of rice or flour, a liter of cooking oil, anything. I’d had to buy a kilogram of rice to pay my driver. The value of the currency was plummeting. A few months later, the country would be plunged into hyperinflation.

And then, as my unexpected companion’s breakfast arrived and he began to devour it with genuine relish, the full extent of the disaster hit home. The revolution that had come to build a world of social justice, progress, and prosperity for all was reducing its citizens to the infamous condition of beggars and walking corpses. I knew that my country had been in a process of destruction for years because I, too, had learned to cope with the burdens that afflicted so many in my country on a daily basis. We were all living with shortages of food, water, and gas, with power outages and a general sense of insecurity. But this young man begging for food reminded me that anyone could be the next person thrown out on the street by the crisis. You didn’t have to be from a humble background. You just had to live in this country.

A few weeks after my short stay in Caracas in 2017, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets in the capital and other cities to demand new elections and to protest the shortages that had reduced their lives to a daily struggle. Since then, the humanitarian crisis in my country has only deepened.

Carlos Villamizar holds a degree in political science from the Universidad de Los Andes, in Merida, Venezuela.