The year was 2020, whose February marked the 21st anniversary of the arrival of the “Bolivarian, Socialist, Anti-imperialist, and Profoundly Chavista” revolution to power. A “jubilous” celebration preceded by the 20th anniversary of the Fifth Venezuelan Republic and the 1999 constitution.

We, as a society, had gone through things I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. Two decades full of strife, tragedies, the erosion of our collective sanity, rising suicide rates, hunger, poverty, despair, and now we were going through the worst migrant crisis in the region. What more could possibly happen to us now?

A global pandemic, of course.

2019 had an intense start in Venezuela through the constitutional crisis, Maduro usurping power, and Juan Guaidó’s legitimate yet useless, symbolic presidency. Since my birthday is on January 9, I have this thing where, functionally speaking, the year doesn’t start for me until the 10th. I suppose it’s because Christmas, New Years, Epiphany, and my birthday are so close to each other.

That aside, though, 2020 started rather lull, as the protests had pretty much died down by the end of 2019, with only small ones here and there, and the ever present peaceful protests of teachers, elderly, and other groups demanding their rights. My dad was caught up with the aftermath of his brother’s passing and dealing with a bunch of legal hurdles derived from it.

I used proceeds from my first professional writing gig to get my brother and I new phones. Nothing spectacular, but my old 2012 phone had died and I was running on my mom’s jury-rigged phone from that era, a gift from me to her, while my brother was using an equally-old phone that my mom bought for him. Those mid-tier phones, which we still use to this day, were a vast upgrade, and a much needed one to boot.

The first weeks of the year were shrouded in uncertainty from what could happen in the country with our political crisis and with the news of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collective anxiety grew as more and more countries shut down air traffic, closed its borders, and enacted lockdowns.

Venezuela was among the last ones in the region to declare a pandemic emergency, not because we’re cool like that, but because with all the stuff that had happened in the country, and how unsafe it all had become, who in their right mind would travel to those dangerous lands? Still, it was only a matter of time, and in mid-March 2020, Nicolás Maduro declared a state of emergency due to COVID.

The news hit me like a truck because I was in talks with someone towards a possible job offer abroad, and all that was left was to sort out my brother’s situation, finding a legal way for him to tag along with me. All that instantly crumbled the moment air travel was restricted and the lockdowns began.

A collective panic and hysteria instantly took over everyone. I went to the supermarket to get supplies and the line was massive, an instant callback to those days of 2014-2018. People rushed to get toilet paper and other items, leaving aisles empty just like the “good old days.” 

Most people were already wearing masks, and although I was initially allowed into the supermarket after waiting outside, I was told to leave, forcing me to go back home and scramble through my mom’s leftover medical supplies for masks.

Prior to COVID, my only experience with self imposed quarantines was limited to the days of the H1N1 outbreak, where a possible case was suspected in the Perez Carreño Hospital where my mother used to work at. She isolated herself in her room and wore a surgical mask during those days. Thankfully the situation was just a false positive, and things rapidly went back to normal.

The quarantine didn’t really change much of the dynamics of my normal day-to-day life, if at all. I am a social recluse, so staying at home is my natural habitat. I had been shunned throughout my youth for never going out on parties or being social, but now everyone was living similar to how I had lived, and some were starting to lose it.

It must’ve sucked, really. To be extroverted and reliant on socializing so much, then suddenly have your social life stripped from you so abruptly; to wake up one day and feel like you’re basically a pseudo prisoner in your own house due to this pandemic. The opposite can be said for people like me, who life and force majeure threw us into that open world we sometimes don’t understand or can make sense of.

Leaving Venezuela with my brother was still my topmost priority, but it’s not like I was going to be hopping on a plane anytime soon during those days, right? I was rather bummed that I had already failed at legally migrating for two years in a row, and my closest breakthrough shut down in March. An acquaintance of mine tried to compare COVID with the Spanish flu, and more or less nailed down how many years it’d take for things to go back to normal.

I probably didn’t panic like most of my neighbors did not because I’m a paragon of stoicism, but because I was bummed and burned out after those migration failures, having failed to save my mom, and other personal demons. What really stressed me was the fact that I had to go through great lengths to get a two-year passport extension, and now it is wasting away. I would eventually get a second extension and one for my brother, but they were ultimately for naught.

I always let my brother choose what to eat for lunch, and due to his nature and proclivities for routine, I knew exactly how to plan ahead and arrange our supplies. I’d take weekly trips to the supermarket to minimize the amount of time wasted and just make one big purchase rather than small ones throughout the week. My “meat dealer” continued to deliver beef and chicken, I’d go out with a mask to get other supplies, and it all became routine once more.

Unfortunately, whatever progress my brother had achieved at coming out of his shell and becoming more outgoing was washed away by the 2020 lockdowns.

This “social quarantine,” as Maduro called it, was an authoritarian’s wet dream, that goes without saying. Whatever protests people had planned, whatever political rallies, they were all swept away by the lockdowns.There was this quasi-ethereal yet unnerving tranquility in the area. Barely any people outside, no kids running and playing in the nearby buildings, no music, no loud weekend parties around, nada.

The streets were quiet, with so few cars passing through — adding to the fact that in addition to the lockdowns, Venezuela was facing a severe fuel shortage, you know, the one thing we’re known for, our one gimmick as a country: oil, and yet we didn’t have gasoline. Maduro had to get help from his buddies from Iran to help palliate the situation and repair Venezuela’s once world-renowned refineries, brought to the brink of ruin by decades of socialist mismanagement.

Whereas once the tensions between Venezuelans were political, those days it was dictated by social distancing and masking. People who walked around without a mask were scorned and barred. My neighbors, most of which were elderly men and women, became distrustful of one another, and would rat you if you dared take out the trash without wearing a mask.

I know some may have “overreacted” when it came to COVID, but without condoning or condemning, can you really blame my neighbors and other Venezuelans for acting as such? It’s easy to downplay medical stuff when you live in a country with a functional healthcare system — unlike Venezuela, where you don’t even have proper access to running water.

I’d spend my days talking to my friends online, as they were all locked down in their respective countries, as it’s not like there was much else to do those days.

Everyone rapidly resigned to that new lockdown reality, or so it would seem. My internet service, from the state-media company CANTV, was barely functional those days, and it completely died in the whole area around July 2020. They first said that an old important cable had died, and that we had to wait for it to be found, nevermind the fact that those cables could be found on local online marketplaces, and weren’t exactly expensive if some in the community chipped in.

The problem was that communal councils, which are loyal to the socialist party, are the ones that handle problems such as those public utility ones, and our local communal center wasn’t exactly staffed by the best and brightest. One of my cousins asked for solutions to one of the council’s leaders because she really needed internet for her studies, and the response was “go read a book, we didn’t have internet in our times.”

Service was restored sometime in July, only for it to break down again in 2021, leaving us without internet for over a month.

Social distancing, lockdowns, and quarantines do not stop the collapse of socialism, though. The country continued its entropic march towards oblivion, with hunger growing by the minute, fuel becoming rarer and rarer to get, and a ruined healthcare infrastructure now pushed to its limits due to the pandemic. 

The regime didn’t stop either, and found in the pandemic ways to further repress Venezuelans. There were cases of people getting arrested for simply daring to question the regime’s official COVID cases and death statistics, for going out of curfew, and for not being “good citizens” and not complying with the quarantine. Heck, Maduro would personally show photos of people caught without wearing a mask, and chastise them for doing so.

People weren’t allowed to freely transit through the streets unless they had a special “safe passage” document if the nature of your work required it. Unless, of course, you knew a guy that knew a guy that could hook you up with that important document — for a price. Such is the nature of corrupt bureaucracy, a universal malady in this planet that transcends ideology, yes, but which flourishes so easily under socialism.

For better or worse, I didn’t have to suffer through the fuel shortages and transit restrictions because my mom’s car had broken down prior to the pandemic, and it’d take years to get the stuff to have it sorta working again, only for it to start malfunctioning again. A lot of places didn’t survive the pandemic, they closed their doors in March 2020 never to reopen again. A nearby elementary school, where my brother graduated from 6th grade, was already limping before the pandemic, and didn’t survive through it. Its facility, a large house, would go on to serve as an undisclosed storage for who knows what store. Other ventures flourished, such as restaurants and food delivery services, which flourished hand in hand through the pandemic.

Since selling food was an essential service, many stores around the country bypassed the lockdowns through a loophole, it became quite common to see clothing stores in Caracas’ center suddenly having a food section, even if it was just a tiny corner with rice or flour, that was enough to allow them to open their doors.

The socialist regime “modified” the quarantine a few times, especially during the first year. Around June 2020 it started doing a “7×7” schema that involved seven days of a “flexible” quarantine in which some places were allowed to operate and some activities were allowed, followed by seven days of a “radical” and harder lockdown. During those “radical” days, regime officials would clamp down hard on places that’d open when they were not supposed to. A nearby bakery, which I didn’t usually frequent, was forced to close even though they had bread, leaving me empty handed that day.

While I managed to stay safe and healthy throughout most of the pandemic, COVID did claim the lives of three of my elderly neighbors: A dermatologist and her sister, and another man that lived on the topmost floor. Others had some close calls, such as my adjacent neighbor, Mr. Pinto. My aunt and cousins went through COVID after one of my cousins caught it at a party, forcing them to stay indoors throughout Christmas and New Years.

2020 was basically a wasted year, all things considered, and 2021 wasn’t exactly better for me. Although I couldn’t leave the country due to the lockdowns, I started to reach out to prospective projects that could perhaps, in the future, lead towards work opportunities or even a visa to another country. One such thing happens to be this book project, which I started pursuing with the help of a friend, an absolute king, who hooked me up with some important people.