Home from the Dark Side of Utopia by Clifton Ross

Author:Clifton Ross
Language: ara, eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2016-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen: The Election

I watched the election results that Sunday evening, April 14 from a dark room smelling of Pinesol in a cheap hotel in Cúcuta where I fell asleep with the television broadcasting live updates. Sometime around midnight I woke to discover that Maduro had won the presidency. The vote had been very close, just over 200,000 votes, a 1.5%, margin. Capriles was calling for a recount, and Maduro promised he would have one.

And so, I thought, the process that Chávez had initiated would continue in some form, somehow, for some time. But with such a close margin, I knew the country was in trouble. Only in the morning, when I finally crossed the border, would I have the faintest idea of just what that meant.

The day started early for me. I was up at six to get to the border, but I didn’t manage to leave my room until seven. I went to the terminal in Cúcuta to change money and prepare to cross the border. Although the prices vary somewhat between the money changers, I settled on a friendly woman who took the time to explain the mathematical logic of the change to me; to write the numbers down and do the calculations a few times so even this mathematically-challenged poet would have some clue to what the numbers meant. I had traded millions of pesos for thousands of bolívares, but I still felt rich.

I asked her how the border closing had affected her and she replied with anger in her voice, “well, imagine losing a week of work. You see from the calculations I make that we work on small margins. I’m not wealthy. And this closing really hurt bad. Thank God I was able to get over here [from Venezuela] today.” I asked her what she thought of Maduro winning and she volunteered, “Look, [the PSUV] is ruining Venezuela. People are afraid to invest there because they’re afraid they’ll lose everything and that the government will take it over. And look at what happens when it does take over: it doesn’t take care of the businesses it nationalizes. It runs industries like PDVSA in the ground. And people are suffering. Imagine losing nearly half the value of your money in devaluation, and then having the highest inflation in the world. My aunt was going to buy a house here in Colombia and she went to Venezuela and bought a business and two houses. It shouldn’t be that way. It wasn’t that way before. Venezuela was doing well. It’s gone to hell and Maduro is going to continue the destruction.”

I thanked her for her opinion, stuck twelve thousand or so bolívares in my pocket, and returned to my room to pack and head to the border.

The line between Colombia and Venezuela is invisible but dramatic. The streets of Cúcuta bustle with activity but there’s a clear order to things, unlike Venezuela, which always feels chaotic, and yet relaxed; where the motorcycles ride with or against traffic

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