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“Hello, Papi, I am in Brazil.”
A text message I received sitting in my home office after nearly a month of silence signified Victor Arellano’s nine-month battle had just been won. Arellano escaped Venezuela with a bullet in his spine, fleeing across violent and treacherous terrains, to have a chance of survival in a place providing no guarantees of a better life.
Early last year, when the pandemic first began its lethal assault upon the world, Arellano, a 30-year-old gay man, was walking home from a friend’s at dusk. He was shot point-blank in the face and was left with a bullet lodged between the joints of his cervical spine that missed his spinal cord by only millimeters.
Venezuela’s Queer Future
New York Times that Venezuela was failing. It has only gotten worse.
Hugo Chávez’s once grand idea of a Bolivarian Revolution has collapsed by whatever measure you choose. Inflation reached 800% in 2017 and now remains the highest in the world at 8,900% according to www.tradingeconomics.com. The BBC reports that inflation is expected to hit 13,000% later this year.
The country has also been hemorrhaging people. Caracas-based sociologist Thomas Paez estimates around 1.5 million people left Venezuela between 1999 and 2015, a flight some have dubbed the “Bolivarian diaspora.” In a country of 32 million, that is approximately one in twenty; scaled to the United States, that is nearly the entire state of New York. And the exodus has only quickened since Nicolás Maduro assumed the presidency in 2013.