I arrived right on time to witness the breakneck-speed collapse of Socialism of the 21st Century. The events of the following years would put my resolve and resilience to its breaking point.

It only took a few steps through the corridors of the Simón Bolívar International Airport to meet the new Venezuelan reality. Grim-faced officers from the Venezuelan Tax and Customs authority, decked out in uniforms of red shirts and equally red caps on their heads, demanded proof that the devices inside my luggage were indeed for my personal use, and that I wasn’t concealing any items among my clothes to evade import taxes.

The devices in question, none of which were new, were my worn 2011 laptop that still works to this day, my Xbox 360, my phone, and headphones. After a few minutes of explanation, including a visual demonstration of my banged up laptop’s dent (proof that the machine wasn’t new, and thus more valuable), I was granted passage into the country. 

These measures were taken in response to a common trend amongst travelers seeking to take advantage of the lucrative and ever-growing Venezuelan black market. Those with the money to do so bought phones, tablets, laptops, games consoles, and other electronic hardware during their travels to resell at a profit. Even in a country full of poor people, those who succeeded in evading the regime’s eye-watering taxes could return a tidy profit. 

I met my mother and brother outside the airport. My brother had grown drastically since I last saw him – almost as tall and chubby as me, with a peculiar mullet-like hairstyle, that he used to avoid taunting at school for the scars of his brain surgery. My mother was radiant, and her hair flowed with grace. Unlike the final days of her life, she was smiling and happy—memories of her smiling like that are worth so much to me these days.

As we drove home from the airport, I spotted new buildings. There was a new sinkhole in the middle of our street. It lay at the center of an intersection, close to our house, gaping and unrepaired. This mini ‘Grand Canyon’ had become an attraction of sorts, with visitors to the neighborhood stopping by to gawk. 

I was surprised to see such a huge hole so close to our house. It seemed it would be easy for a careless vehicle to tumble right into it, especially at night. The streets were poorly lit and growing ever darker due to increasingly unreliable lampposts. A darkening street, in a darkening country. 

At that time, the only “work” that officials had done was to put up a fence made of sticks and red band. It would be years, not weeks or months, before it was fixed. The only ‘work’ that had been done to it at that time was to put up a fence made of sticks and red band. Some bold members of the neighborhood would eventually adorn it with a protest sign: “Made in Socialism.” 

In my mind, the hassle from the regime’s airport commissars, dodging sinkholes on the streets of Caracas, and the general feeling that I had left a comfortable life in a stable country to return to a socialist clown world was all worth it, because I was finally reunited with my family. 

At a first glance the streets of Caracas looked just as they were in 2009, with less commercial advertisements and with remnants of political campaigns of the past years on its walls. Gone were the ruins of the landmark Auto-cinema that were located a few steps away from our home—replaced now by a new supermarket and two tall and brand new and fancy apartment buildings.

From that precise moment, and before we hadn’t even arrived in the city proper, a new goal was established between my mother and I that I can best resume as, “let’s get the hell outta this failing country.”

The plan was simple: Wait for my brother to finish high school, I’d work on something in the meantime while my mother’s retirement was accepted and my personal belongings were released by customs.  Quite simply: we were to start the long pilgrimage to get our documentation in order to migrate out of the country—a torturous road riddled with corruption that many Venezuelans had walked and to this day continue to walk.

Panama, that was the first prospective destination that my mother had glanced over, largely in part to the recommendations of some of her colleagues and a prospective job offer that seemed most enticing to her. 

Beyond the sinkholes, there was the crime. Caracas in the days of my youth had been relatively calm and peaceful. As of 2013, I was warned to think twice before flashing a cellphone in public. I heard that car batteries, which had become one of the many hard-to-obtain supplies in the country, were being unscrupulously stolen in broad daylight.

After the airport and the sinkhole, my next encounter with the “new” socialist Venezuela was exchanging my foreign salary to Venezuelan bolivars. In a normal country, exchanging currency is a straightforward process. You just go to a bank or an exchange service, pay the market fee, and that’s that. But since 2010 it was outright illegal to hold or trade with foreign currencies of any kind. There was also the risk of getting assaulted or robbed if the wrong person were to be tipped about those greenbacks that you were carrying.

At last I was finally back at our humble, and still unfinished apartment. My old TV, my old desktop computer, it was all just as I had left them—yet, I first felt like a stranger in my old bedroom, even the weather and water felt too cold for me, a sensation I had not felt since we moved to Caracas in 1999.

As sleep deprived and exhausted as I was, I was indeed happy to be back with my mom and brother, and most ecstatic to finally be free from my my aunt, cousin, and their ‘peculiar’ nature—thus, I could finally put those embassy years behind, years that I could consider as a colossal mistake, had it not been for what modicum of good I managed to do for others during those four years.

After successfully brokering a deal through the black market, along with its corresponding commission fees, I received a chunky stack of cash that might make you feel like a millionaire — as long as you pretend, they didn’t belong to a hyper-inflationary currency like the Venezuelan Bolivar. Today, the cash that I withdrew would have effectively zero monetary value, beyond a collector’s item. Had that particular series of banknotes still been in circulation, they would be worth less than the stacks of Monopoly money that you can get from Amazon.

The first order of business was to get a new cell phone sim card, since you can’t be a proper citizen without one these days. With that taken care of, the next thing I did was to go to a restaurant that we used to visit in the past, and treat both my mom and brother to a nice, well-deserved family lunch.

Certainly, either I was blinded by nostalgia of simpler times or the food’s quality had drastically declined—regardless, we were together, and that’s all that mattered. I also went ahead and got my brother and I a pack of video games to play together, something we hadn’t done in so long.

Those days were certainly peaceful, and I consider them a calm before the storm of things that would then unfold in both the nation and in my life. While shortages of products such as toilet paper were already part of Venezuela’s idiosyncrasy and a recurrent slice of the global news cycle, I still hadn’t immersed myself completely in the ongoing collapse. I would go as far as say that October of 2013 was my lull pseudo vacation period—everything afterwards has been one nightmarish marathon.

As part of my mother’s ongoing efforts to assist my uncle and his failing health, she had planned another trip to the city of Maracaibo, my birthplace. This time, she suggested that we all would travel as well, family trip and all that. It wasn’t until that trip that the depth of the country’s deterioration became apparent. 

Caracas, being the capital city, experienced the collapse somewhat later than other parts of the country. No such luck for Maracaibo. By the time we arrived, the city had already accustomed itself to severe, repeated power blackouts. The water shortages — which already existed when I was a kid, albeit in a more manageable state — had become a serious problem, one that would soon reach Caracas too. 

Not just Maracaibo, but the entire state of Zulia was already facing gasoline shortages and rationing, more than a decade before the problem spread all through the country. Almost every vehicle in Zulia had a barcoded chip that was scanned by gas station operations to log your refuel and to make sure you weren’t exceeding any quotas. 

Then there was the electricity rationing. Our hotel room in Maracaibo was no Hilton – it had two beds, but zero ceiling lights, because the hotel had to do its part in the regime’s “efficient power consumption mandates.”

During those days, everyone was coerced to stay within a certain “green” power consumption range that depended on the area they lived and the type of commercial activity they carried out—going above those thresholds meant hefty fines. 

“Soy consciente, consumo eficiente,” was the slogan of the regime’s electrical campaign, which roughly translates to “I’m conscious, my [Electrical] consumption is efficient.” With it, the regime tacitly placed the burden of their lack of maintenance and expansion of the country’s electrical grid on the citizens. Mind you, the Bolivarian Revolution was supposed to have built a series of thermoelectric plants that would reinforce our electric grid by the time it began to fall apart circa 2009.

These plants were never built, and the money was simply embezzled out. One of the companies that was supposed to build these plants was Derwick Associates, a Venezuelan energy company with deep ties to the Chavista regime that would then be probed by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2014 on charges of bribery and banking infractions.

Despite my shock at the drastic deterioration of the city I grew up in, walking through the streets of Bella Vista, and seeing places from my youth such as the church where I had my First Communion and the Our Lady of Chiquinquira Marist School where the best of my school days took place in filled me with joy and nostalgia for simpler times. 

Hearing the accent of my fellow “Maracuchos,” an accent I’ve tried my best not to lose in its entirety (but one that has been tainted by Caracas’ accent), was heartwarming. “Maracucho Spanish,” as it is known, is the region’s unique way of speaking the Spanish language; it is uncouth, vulgar, unfiltered, and politically incorrect — traits that are also shared by my own people’s culture, the Zulians. But despite our quick tempers and tendency to curse like sailors, we Zulians are a friendly, respectful, and God-fearing people. 

We would certainly need our religion in the years to come. As we departed Maracaibo for Caracas, it was impossible to ignore the signs that the collapsing Venezuelan reality we had witnessed in Zulia would soon reach the capital as well. 

At first it was all quite the shock. To have to be ready to go at a moment’s notice to be among the first to get one of the coveted, hard-to-find items such as toilet paper, cooking oil, or our staple corn flour, is something that you’d best get used to quickly. During those days, hyperinflation hadn’t reached grotesque proportions, and the Venezuelan Bolivar was still functional as a cash currency, dying, yes, but functional. Finding what you need to buy with it, though – that was a different story. 

I guess you don’t really get to say you’ve lived the Socialist experience until you find yourself in the middle of a skirmish for some kind of basic item or another. In my case, my first real clash was over a twelve-pack of toilet paper—and boy, you don’t forget your first time.

The Battle for Papel Sutil took place on a Saturday morning, inside the premises of that brand new supermarket that’s within a walking distance of our home. Dozens upon dozens of people were crammed inside the narrow corridors of that supermarket. The rumor was that toilet paper was going to be put out for sale soon, and word spread faster than the most sizzling gossip.

My mother asked me to get some and I dutifully complied with the request. I, along with every other customer inside, awaited for the toilet paper to make its appearance. A skinny supermarket employee struggled to drag a worn out dark green pallet cart that had the precious soft white stuff on its top. He had no idea of the chaos that was about to unfold.

Everyone flocked to the prized toilet paper like a swarm of locusts, ready to secure a pack for themselves. I was pushed, elbowed, stepped on, and had it not been for my robust and obese build, I would’ve been trampled on — I suppose this is how Black Friday feels in America, not that I would know.  And so, with my stern elbows and wide frame as my weapons, I did my best to become an immovable object as I made my way through the crowd, managing to pluck two packages of toilet paper from so many hands, tossing them in the air towards a cousin, who secured them, one for him, and one for me.

The chaotic frenzy halted only when there was nothing left to grab, and only the empty dark green pallet remained. Those who were fortunate or bold enough to brave the storm had received their “limit one per customer” twelve-pack of toilet paper, while those empty handed became envious and wrathful vultures, hoping to seize one from unwatched carts, hoping that someone would leave one along the aisles, or at last instance, that they’d leave one at checkout.

I had been back in Venezuela for fewer than two months, and I already had a crash course in socialist grocery shopping, an invaluable first lesson that would be most instrumental for the many adventures that were to come. Sure, I got a lot of angry faces and insults thrown at me, but that was a meager price to pay in order to have a clean butt.

It didn’t matter where you’d go; you would most certainly cross paths with a huge line for a specific product, be it medicine, food, or toiletries. It was a pattern that was repeated everywhere, and the only way you wouldn’t meet head on with a huge line was if there was nothing left in the store worth fighting over in the first place.

Skirmishes like the one I described became a common occurrence all across the country, many of which spread throughout social media for all the world to see. They serve as evidence that the collapse of Venezuelan socialism had slowly but surely spread through our society. We were no longer citizens, but rather, survivors, fighting against each other to secure supplies and sustenance for our loved ones, wasting our time and fortitude away in endless lines.

People would look at each other’s shopping bags while walking on a street to see if they had any of the hard to find items, and if so, they’d ask to see where they got it, and how much they were allowing people to purchase. In more drastic cases, walking with a semi-transparent bag full of flour was just an invitation to be robbed of your goods.

Bachaqueros, a slang term that rapidly became part of our idiosyncrasy, became the biggest booming industry in the country. This name is derived from the Atta Laevigata leaf cutter insects, and it was given to people who would acquire or scalp large amounts of the hard-to-find items, sometimes via contraband or smuggling (often across state borders) in order to flip and resale for a profit, away from the eyes of the regime and its economic and social controls. 

The premium cost was the price you’d pay for not having to waste your life in queues, or hunting those items from one place to another. In other, more extreme cases, you would see these Bachaqueros smuggle their goods out of the country and into Colombia, selling the products and getting foreign currency (which was illegal to have at the time), then exchanging the Colombian Pesos into Venezuelan Bolivars for a profit. 

Extreme price controls and regulations always pave the way for black markets and clever entrepreneurship. Curiously though, there are stories of Bachaqueros rising up and becoming proper entrepreneurs — my former “meat dealer” being a glaring example. Even in the wake of socialism’s inexorable collapse, capitalism finds ways to naturally flourish.

The regime continued to blame the shortages on private business and hoarders, who they accused of “hiding the food of the people” and all sorts of just-so leftist slogans. They slowly ramped up the rhetoric until it all exploded in one early November night, when the regime strong-armed consumer electronics stores to sell their products at a steep loss, starting with the Daka retail chain.  Those events became known as the Dakazo.