Venezuela and the Rare Skill of Holding Conflicting Views |
There are moments when the news reaches straight for your nervous system. For me, news from Venezuela does that.
I was born and raised there, in a country I still carry with pride, even after decades of watching its social fabric erode. Venezuela offered my family refuge after escaping the Holocaust and after the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba. It felt like a welcoming home until stability began to unravel with Hugo Chávez’s rise to power in 1999. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, the country that had once offered safety and opportunities descended into anarchy, chaos, violence, and despair.
So, when reports described the military raid in Caracas that led to Nicolás Maduro being taken to the U.S. to face criminal charges, it landed painfully close for me in a way it likely wouldn’t for someone watching from afar.
A crisis such as this one tempts us to compress the story and to pick a side. To decide, as quickly as we can and with very limited information, whether the whole thing is heroic or catastrophic. And searching for certainty is tempting because it calms the nervous system. The cost, however, is that our perception narrows, our judgment hardens, our curiosity dwindles, and it becomes easier to sort people into reductive categories. When we rush to a neat resolution, we often lose the capacity to see nuance, tradeoffs, and consequences that don’t fit into a single storyline.
One frame centers on accountability: Maduro has long been accused of serious crimes, and for the millions of Venezuelans who lived through the repression of his regime and watched their country hollow out, the idea that he might finally be held to account brings a complicated sense of relief. I felt that on the morning of January 3rd, as WhatsApp messages full of videos and speculation flooded my........