"Abrazé! Quiero solamente salir de Venezuela pronto. Este pais es el peor en el mundo. El gobierno es fascista, el Presidente es un dictador, todos los Venezolanos son hijos de putas y ladrones, y cuando el genocidio empiece aqui, no habrá nadie en el mundo a ayudarles."
I'm sure my control of grammar let me down. I'm sure the accent slipped a couple of times. I'm sure the sentiment could have been better expressed idiomatically. But I'm also sure that I got the message across loud and clear. There's a certain universality of sentiment expressed by stamping feet, a purple face, and steam exiting the ears - given the level of incandescence of my fury at that moment, I suspect I would have been quite capable of expressing the gist of my feelings in any language under the sun.
"Fuck you! I just want to leave Venezuela as soon as possible. This country is the worst in the world. The government is fascist, the President is a dictator, all the Venezuelans are thieving sons of bitches, and when the genocide happens here, there'll be no one in the world to help you."
Sure enough, she got the picture, and stamped my passport. She refused to take my tourist card, however, meaning that should I ever return to Venezuela, large bribes will be required to secure my entry. I can assure you that prospect is unlikely in the extreme. I think I'd rather walk through Sadr City, Baghdad wrapped in a stars and stripes flag, wearing a George W Bush facemask and singing "America The Brave". I suspect, however, that even were I to take that suicidal course of action, I would feel only marginally less safe than wandering the streets of central Caracas at four in the afternoon.
Before I write off an entire country and its people, however, I must stress that I did have some great experiences in Venezuela, and I did meet some incredibly friendly and hospitable people. The afternoon I shared a taxi wıth two Venezuelan soldiers returning home and got caught in a mudslide will remain long in the memory, despite the obscene quantities of brandy we consumed in the early afternoon deluge. Equally memorable was the hospitality and friendliness of the people of Caracas - on the three separate occasions I asked passers-by for directions I was not only greeted courteously and helpfully, I was eventually escorted to my destination. Of course thıs mıght hint at the inherent lack of safety on the streets of Venezuela's capital - never before have I had random people approach me with whispered warnings to "be careful". Despite these highly positive experiences, however, my overall impression of the country was not positive.
The first hint that I might not be quite as enamoured with Venezuela as with her ill-renowned neighbour to the West came with the slow realisation that the country is overrun with Western tourists. Not such a horror in itself, granted, but it is something of an irritant to learn it's impossible to do anything in Venezuela without a white Toyota Landcruiser, a US$150 a day per person local guide, and a group of 18 year old gap year students from the Home Counties. One hundred years ago, in the glory days when the sun never set on the British Empire, the Crown sent its best and brightest to rule the colonies, bringing civilisation and the civil service, cricket and Kipling, to the world. In the early years of the 21st Century, Britain dispatches legions of Saskias and Sebastians, Jocastas and Jeremies to get drunk and listen to The Eagles in Irish bars from Bangkok to Buenos Airies. Venezuela, unlike Colombia, is well and truly on the "Gringo Trail", and thus awash with pink rugby-shirted hordes making idle chitchat about UCAS points and the relative merits of Bristol and Edinburgh Universities. After a couple of hours of listening to this inanity, I soon tired of the border town of Santa Elena de Uarien, and decided to skip the well-known charms of Angel Falls and Roraima in order to find the real Venezuela. In a case of life imitating art, I was headed to a fabled remote beach, largely unknown to travellers, in search of solitude, authenticity, and an escape from Clapham exiles. Just like in Alex Garland's seminal novel of travelling, The Beach, however, paradise would prove an illusion.
I sat in the back of a converted Ford pick-up truck hurtling round the winding mountain roads of rural northeastern Venezuela, surrounded by housewives, all manner of livestock scattering from the dirt track as we passed, Vallenato music pumping out of a forty year old speaker roped to the roof. The views were spectacular. For a few glorious moments I thought paradise was found as we rounded the crest of a hill and gazed down on the incredible prospect of the sun setting on a bay sheltered between two wooded peaks, a palm-lined white sand beach fringed with aquamarine sea, wooden fishing boats bobbing on the tide. Yet the tiny fishing village of San Juan de las Caldonas might serve as an apt metaphor for the whole country. For all its undoubted inherent natural beauty, the people are unfriendly to the point of outright hostility, and the aesthetic wonder of the environment is being vigourously despoiled by the rampant pollution. I don't think I saw a single trash can in my entire time in Venezuela - piles of rubbish litter every street, every patch of open ground, and every watercourse.
Yet my time in San Juan was undoubtedly relaxing, and I had the pleasure of meeting some Venezuelan holidaymakers, from whom I learned much of the real story of what is happening to the country under the Chavez regime. In the Broadway musical (and subsequent Liza Minelli film) "Cabaret", the rise of the Nazis is the backdrop to a story of the increasingly desperate attempts of 1930s Berliners to continue their everyday existence and ignore the mounting evidence of the horror engulfing them. In many ways, Venezuela in 2007 feels a lot like "Cabaret". There is a real sense that something truly terrible is happening here, that things are getting progressively worse, and yet everyone tries desperately to continue going about their business quietly ignoring the obvious. The cult of personality that increasingly surrounds the leader of the "Bolivarian Revolution" is evident all over Venezuela. Graffiti, billboards, posters, tv adverts: the face of Hugo Chavez is everywhere. And everywhere his grinning visage is accompanied by pithy slogans with varying degrees of insidiousness:
"Ooh aah Chavez no se va" ("Ooh aah Chavez isn't leaving")
"Chavez hasta 2021" ("Chavez until 2021")
"Socialismo o muerte!" ("Socialism or death!")
The military government's suppression of freedom of speech is growing with every day - in addition to the well-publicised control of TV and radio stations I was informed by a couple of sources that non-approved literature is becoming increasingly hard to obtain, and that bookshops are mysteriously closing in droves in Caracas. Anyone with money or an education is desperately trying to leave - anyone with any hereditary link to Europe is scrambling to secure an EU passport any way they can.
So desperate is the economic situation that the government has imposed emergency exchange controls to maintain the tumbling currency. Officially, US$1 = 2100 Bolivares. On the thriving black market, however, the rate is closer to 4000Bs. As my meagre supply of cash dollars dwindled and I was forced to use ATMs at half the real exchange rate, I grew to loathe this system with a passion. The final insult, on the final morning, came when I searched for over an hour for a functioning ATM to withdraw 150,000Bs to pay the cash-only departure tax. Upon arrival at the check-in desk, however, American Airlines informed me I had already paid the tax upon purchase of my ticket. "No problem" I thought, I'll just change the Bolivares back to dollars at the official rate at the official Cambio booth in the airport. Guess again. The exchange controls mean the Venezuelans will only sell their currency and won't buy it. (A more damning indictment of the economy I couldn't imagine) I had to use the black market. In 15 minutes I had effortlessly turned $70 into $30. I was apoplectic with rage. I unleashed a torrent of abuse, in Spanish, at anyone within earshot. When the immigration official (erroneously) accused me of overstaying my visa, she felt the full force of my vitriol.
Something terrible is going to happen in Venezuela, and I for one don't care. It's often said that electorates get the governments they deserve. Shallow, vacuous, celebrity-obsessed Britain had ten years of Tony Blair's intellectually-empty spin. Backward, insular, fundamentalist America has had seven years of George W Bush, with God as his Secretary of State; a man who believes that war in the Middle East is desirable as it brings us closer to the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ. The rude, thieving, wasteful people of Venezuela can look forward to many decades of Hugo Chavez. They deserve each other.
