An ailing father, bitter because of the limitations ill health imposed on him; a son, yearning for the solitude he had long chosen for himself and trying to have an identity of his own; the memories of a relationship that was marked by estrangement and reconnection. Such is the thread of this story.
San Francisco de Yare, a semi-rural city just over an hour from Caracas, is one of five in the Valles del Tuy region. Every year, hundreds of tourists visit the place on the Feast of Corpus Christi to watch the ritual dance of the Diablos Danzantes de Yare.
The back-to-back deaths of loved ones and the ending of a various romantic relationships led Anyiseth Sequera to a state of mind so grim that, more than once, she considered taking her own life. Well, she is now an independent activist that raises awareness about suicide prevention.
There, at the age of 27, she spares no effort in helping young people in her community see for themselves that they can have a less bleak and barren future.
The night of the July 28th election, hundreds of thousands of people saw the actas, and not only the opposition’s witnesses who kept copies. Two PSUV witnesses and a chavista community leader share their experiences.
That of July 28, 2024 was not just another election. Organized citizens, in defense of their votes, proved that Venezuela has a robust social fabric. This text weaves a thread into three testimonies of the gearwheel that was set in motion that and the following days by the citizens themselves to collect the tally sheets printed by the voting machines and make them available for the world to see. But there are more than three, for sure.
On April 30, 2019, the day when the final phase of the so-called “Operation Freedom” was set in motion in Caracas, Luisana Escobar and her neighbors were forced to leave their homes in Valencia, Venezuela, after a teargas canister exploded in one of the apartments of the building where they lived, setting it on fire.
María Laura Silva always wanted to be a doctor. She was presented with many an obstacle as a student of medicine, some of them posed by the crisis facing the country, but that didn’t undermine her determination to graduate. Still, one day in 2018, while at work as a medical intern at a hospital, she began to ask herself whether she should stay the course.
Having just earned her degree as a medical doctor from the Central University of Venezuela, the protagonist of this story felt she could not find a reason to stay in the country any longer. So, she planned to move to Spain to practice her profession there. On November 24, 2019, she left Valencia, state of Carabobo, for the United States, from where she would be heading to Europe months later. That was the beginning of a journey that she would have to revise more than once.
In San Simón, an expanse of open ground located in the state of Bolívar, in southern Venezuela, Gregoria Zapata and Jesús Manuel Umbría grow peppers, beans, and corn. They also had three horses and one mare that they used to work the land and for transportation. But one day, when they woke up in the […]