This is the part where the record scratches and the frame freezes, right? This is where I’m supposed to ask you if you’re wondering how it was that things ended up becoming that bad, right?

For that, we have to rewind some thirty years, but not before some introductions.

I was born in Maracabo, Zulia, to a middle-low class household on January 9, 1988, about eleven years before the beginning of the end of the Fourth Venezuelan Republic. I’m a son to two doctors, my father a forensic pathologist, and my mother, who in life was an anesthesiologist with a handful of specialties such as pain and palliative care. Unlike them, I lack an actual professional career and university studies of that caliber – a self-inflicted wound stemming from years of bad choices taken during my adolescence and early adulthood.

My dad’s family was entirely composed of Italians that arrived in Venezuela from Calabria during the 1950s and settled in Punto Fijo, a small town in the northern state of Falcon and one of the “hubs” of the Italian diaspora that arrived in Venezuela after World War II. One of my father’s brothers also pursued a medical career, while his youngest followed the family business and worked at La Franco Italiana, a long-extinct large supermarket where my father’s family helped build from the ground up from its initial location, a small warehouse.

My mother’s family, though, was much more picturesque, with her father, a military man, having some degree of Spaniard ancestry and her mother some degree of Dutch from my great-grandmother, whose family settled in Perijá. I wish I could tell you more about their histories, but unfortunately, my mom’s family destroyed all family records – all I have is a digital photo that I’ve been meaning to restore.

My grandmother, a humble but wise nurse, managed through trial and tribulations to raise my mom and her five older siblings, of which only two remain alive. My uncles and aunts, of varied skin tones and hair colors, ranged from lawyers, military to even a once renowned “genius” strategist in the world of Venezuelan basketball, specially in Maracaibo — largely in part due to his career as coach of Maracaibo’s flagship basketball team, which he eventually ended up co-owning with one of his brothers as a sort of “unofficial” family business.

By the time I was born, the halcyon “golden days” of Venezuela, where families such as my mom and dad’s could flourish from nothing, were over. 

Some will tell you that said days would be the eight years of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, an era yearned by some, but reviled by others who would perhaps tell you that the best days where those before the “black friday” of 1983, where the currency collapsed and the country simply limped on since.

Be that as it may, nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to what happened in the past decade.

Like pretty much everyone else, my first experience involving Hugo Chávez occurred on the night of February 4, 1992, the day he tried to take over power through a failed coup against the administration of former President Carlos Andrés Pérez. 

Now here’s the thing, I was four years old at the time, and Coup d’état translates to Golpe de Estado in Spanish. Four-year-old me, who had no concept of what a State is, thought that someone had punched (Golpe) the state, whatever that was.

At the time all of that happened I was living with my mom and dad in Punto Fijo. My dad’s 3-bedroom house was far from being luxurious, but I had my own bedroom, with the third one temporarily inhabited by a cousin of mine that was enrolled into military school due to reasons that elude me.

Those were simple times, as simple as they could be for a four year old, who, like every other kid, had none of the economic, political, and societal worries that come with being an adult. Unfortunately, I was also oblivious of the fact that my mom lived her own little hell in that city courtesy of my dad’s Italian family, who, for some reason, did not accept that their son, who lived all of his life in Venezuela, married a Venezuelan that he met while studying in a Venezuelan university.

Other than that, everything seemed normal, and I was, for the most part, just like any other kid, playing with toys, watching cartoons, and learning how to do number two in the toilet on my own — with one exception: I was deemed “smart” for my age, to the point that I already knew how to read and write by the time I was four and therefore, I “did not need” to go through pre-school.

I wasn’t good at sports, nor was I the fastest — in fact, I only won a race once when I was five, and that was only because the kid I raced against tripped over, but man, when the other kids cheered at me, it became an instant all-time memory. That race is one of the things I can vividly recall in clear detail. Supposedly, I was also a rather mischievous kid, reckless enough to break my head and chin out during those days, which is how I got the scar I have on top of my head.

That selfsame mischievousness almost got me killed when me and one of my cousins stumbled upon our uncle’s firearm, which he aimed at me but thankfully didn’t fire off. He stupidly managed to fire it off when he was putting it back in the drawer. My mom almost died out of a heart attack with how freaked out she was, it’s one of those things I remember even after 30 years have passed. That was the first time in my life I dodged an actual physical bullet, with many more metaphorical ones later down the road.

Where I started to noticeably differ from the other kids, though, was in video games and the English language, of all things. My gaming “career” began with a hand-me-down Atari 2600 that one belonged to some of my older cousins, and then I got upgraded to a NES after they moved onto a Sega Genesis, which I was able to use every now and then before getting my own Super Nintendo.

As for English, that’s a rather peculiar tale. Punto Fijo is a very short distance away from the Paraguaná Refinery Complex, Venezuela’s flagship oil refinery, and the world’s second largest – a shadow of its former glory these days. Venezuela’s oil industry, at its heyday, attracted a lot of foreign workers, many of whom spoke English.

Unlike the present post-smartphone civilization, which is full of streaming services, Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions, or the massification of internet access for that matter, things were much, much simpler back then. Some of those foreign workers had huge Parabolic antennas that allowed them to watch English-language based channels such as HBO, Disney, and others.

If you had a simple household antenna you could actually leech from that signal and watch all of it, for free. While my parents enjoyed watching Autopsy on HBO, I would watch Disney shows in English, unwillingly getting a grasp of the language as if it were second hand smoke.

The Italian language, which I’m frying my brain trying to jam in my brain these days, was not taught to me by neither my dad nor his family. Allegedly, his family would sporadically use it to deride my mom and her family without her understanding.

About a year after we moved from Maracaibo to Punto Fijo my mom got pregnant with what would’ve been, her second child, Brian. Unfortunately, preeclampsia caused her to miscarriage. I remember her crying in the company of her family in a rather somber clinic room, but I was not capable of understanding the full extent of the tragedy.

Perhaps, that loss, is what drove her to pursue more and more academic accolades, such as the Pain and Palliative Care specialty that she was more known for in life. After her miscarriage, I remember spending some time back in Maracaibo with my parents while she recovered, during which I engaged in all sorts of mischiefs, such as flushing the toilet while my uncle was taking a shower.

She began her Algology studies to become a pain and palliative care specialist in Caracas sometime after she recovered, so she used to travel back and forth a lot. Every now and then, she would bring bootleg VHS movies that often came in English. So between that leeched antenna signal, video games, and those VHS movies, I had a pretty robust English foundation at such a young age, for better or worse.

As I said, things were no longer great in Venezuela during that decade, but things were still good enough for, say, my grandmother on my mom’s side, by then a retired nurse, to be able to afford family trips to the United States and bring stuff for us here and there. Today, it is essentially impossible for a Venezuelan nurse to afford food, let alone traveling. Case in point, my young cousin, who is studying to become a nurse and is working part time at a hospital in Caracas. She earns  a little over a dollar per month as base salary, and while the socialist regime gives her “War bonuses” and other stipends, these don’t even bring her total salary past $100 per month

Special weekend 12-hour shifts are paid to her at a rate of roughly $1 per hour, slavery wages by any other name.

In 1993, my grandmother organized a Christmas and New Years trip in Miami, Florida for me and some of my other cousins, the only ones that hadn’t really travelled anywhere. Good times, and hell, my mom even got a job offer at the Jackson Memorial Hospital, and was close to accepting it, had it not been for my father accusing her of “stealing” me. To make matters worse, the 1993-1994 bank run of Banco Latino left my grandmother without any of her savings, crushing any American dreams they had at the time, faint as they were.

Regardless, it was an exceptionally great vacation time for me, one of the last ones I’ve had to boot. I got a bunch of Super Nintendo games, Street Fighter figures, and a Toys “R” Us train, one of the wagons I still had in my possession before I left Venezuela in 2024. That vacation allowed me to catch a glimpse of Power Rangers, and suffice to say, gave me my very first introduction to Tokusatsu.

Weeks after our return to Venezuela, Venezuela’s late President Rafael Caldera had the brilliant idea of pardoning Hugo Chávez and others involved in his failed coup, roughly two years after February 1992. On that day, he vowed to bring his MBR200 political movement to the streets, with the eventual aim of taking power through elections after failing to take it by force.

I eventually started first grade in El Niño Don Simón, a school that at the time, only had up to second grade. I had a small group of friends, one of which was as passionate about Mega Man as I was back then. I never knew what happened to Antonio, nor do I even remember his last name anymore, but I sincerely hoped he and his family lived a good life.

Unfortunately, during those days that my mom was travelling to Caracas to further her studies, my father availed himself of her absence to cheat on my mom — and even once suggested to me if I wanted to replace my mom with someone who is now his lifelong partner. That person worked as a cashier in La Franco Italiana.

My dad, and his family, were as Italian as they could be, and as such, the football schedina was almost a holy ritual to them. My dad, a diehard AC Milan fan, and his younger brother, a diehard Juventus fan, were the biggest culprits of it. Even if I knew nothing of football or Italy’s teams, I’d root for Juventus just to be a contrarian, much to my dad’s dismay — same during the 1994 World Cup Final, which Brazil won against Italy.

I eventually graduated from second grade, but since that school had no further educational levels, it was time for me to do something that would then become commonplace for me: switch schools. As such, my dad had me enrolled in the John XXIII Institute, one of the several Marist Brothers schools that exist, the same school he and his brothers went to when they were younger.

The change hit me at first, larger classrooms, kids who I had no idea who they were, and all at least 1-2 years younger than me because I had skipped ahead and started first grade at 5 instead of the normal 7 years, but I eventually adjusted. 

Not all of it was bad, though, and I found common ground with the other kids through Power Rangers, the then-controversial Mortal Kombat, and other things. Most of my friends were “rich” and had better toys and luxuries, such as Alfonso, and this one other fella that was among the first to have a Nintendo 64.

Those days also saw me become further “trans-culturized,” as some Venezuelan socialists would say, from watching some of my longtime favorite shows such as Spellbinder and Ocean Girl, all in English language.

My mom got pregnant with her third child, Christopher, my brother, who was born in July 1995. The Power Rangers craze was full on in Venezuela, and with a movie incoming, you can imagine just how much seven-year-old me was hyped.

A few months after my brother was born, we took our one and only trip to Aruba, where I finally got my own copy of Super Mario RPG, a game that I cherish much – maybe that’s why I started replaying it around the time I pushed this entry on my website.

I experienced all of these good childhood memories unaware that my mom was not happy due to the mistreatment of my dad’s family, cousins, and others who would demean her, with some relatives of my dad going as far as to suggest she left him “for his good.”

Enough was enough for her, and she decided to return to Maracaibo by means of a job offer at the city’s military hospital in mid-1996. This necessitated that me and my then-one-year-old baby brother moved back to Maracaibo, and with it, I went through the best two and half years of my life so far. I wrote about it a couple years ago, if you’re interested in knowing about that era of my life.

At some point during this, my dad got that other woman partner pregnant with someone who is my half-sister. Although I’ve spoken with her via phone and messaging, I’ve never actually met her in person. I’ll most certainly only mention her here and there so as to respect her privacy.

But just as I started a new life in Maracaibo with my mom, brother, and my mom’s family, the end of Venezuela as we knew it was in sight.

Hugo Chávez, now as the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) launched his full nationwide campaign ahead of the 1998 elections. His offer, long story short, was that of a Bolivarian Revolution for Venezuela, the one and only thing that, according to him, could fix Venezuela’s decline caused by the “rotten domes” of the bipartisanship that ruled Venezuela for 40 years.

Evil and ugly as he was in life, though, one cannot deny that Chávez was a man of a silver tongue, and knew how to use that charisma of him to further his political goals. Yes, Venezuela was not all that it could be during those days, and what it once was, it no longer was. Perhaps some were fully charmed by his words and promises, but perhaps others were justifiably tired of 40 years of entropy. I was ten years old at the time, so it’s not like I myself could give you an actual assessment.

According to my father, who I vividly remember me saying this as he drove the streets of Maracaibo with me on the back, his family fiercely opposed Chávez, with some of his cousins actually moving their businesses out from the very moment he won.

My mom’s family was divided on the matter. My grandmother, a diehard Accion Democratica member (many such cases when it comes to her generation), did not like Chávez, same with my eldest aunt. My other aunt, a diehard Chavista, differed, while my uncles I could not say, for I do not remember clearly, their political stances would change as time went on, be it by force majeure or by actual changes of heart. 

As for my mom, she was thankfully a rather apolitical person for most of her life, and abhorred the eternal and unending political noise of it all. One of the reasons she once told me for this was that back when she was younger she was denied jobs in Maracaibo because she did not participate in political rallies – that much my grandmother found out through her acquaintances at some point before I was born.

As an unapologetic AD member, my grandmother voted for Luis Alfaro Ucero in the 1998 presidential election, that’s something I’ll never forget because she used to have this big cooking pot with the brand name “Alfaro” written on it. The logic of my 10-year-old self deduced that there had to be a relation between the candidate and the pot, so I cracked a few childish jokes to my grandmother on the matter.

One thing that struck me as odd during those days (but which clearly doesn’t nowadays) is the fact that Chávez’s name, and that of the other MVR candidates, were scrubbed off from the preview ballots that were placed across the Maracaibo Marist school, which also served as a voting center. Perhaps that echo chamber-esque practice didn’t help the anti-Chávez camp, come to think of it.

Hugo Chávez won on December 6, 1998  with 3,67 million votes against Henrique Salas Römer’s 2.87 million. 4.45 million people abstained from voting on that day. Some cheered, some lamented, and some (correctly) warned of the calamities that were to come over the next 25 years.

Just as the country was readying itself for what was to come, my mom, brother, grandmother, and I were getting ready for a new change in our lives. Our finances weren’t exactly in a good spot at the time, and we were staying in a room at our grandmother’s place, but then an offer, spawned from the very changes that unfolded in Venezuela, presented upon my mother just as I turned 11 in January 1999 the final year of the Fourth Venezuelan Republic.