Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

Prologue: Mene Grande

Venezuela’s first oil well sits on top of a low hill in a town called Mene Grande, near Lake Maracaibo, in the far western state of Zulia. The well was drilled in 1914. It was still pumping oil when I was there in 2014, a few weeks after the government held a celebration marking a hundred years of Venezuela as an oil-producing nation. The well had been spiffed up for the ceremony. There was a small pumpjack, painted in the national colors, yellow, blue, and red, with eight white stars. It nodded up and down, patiently measuring out the national diastole and systole. A pipe that carried away the oil was painted a shiny silver. The well is called Zumaque 1. A century ago there were sumac trees here—zumaques—but I didn’t see any on my visit. The pumpjack stood behind a metal railing in the center of a newly paved parking lot. Shadeless under a punishing sun, the black asphalt absorbed and radiated the intense heat.¹

The history of Venezuela and oil flows through Mene Grande like the crude oil through the silver pipe. The first oil workers’ strike occurred here (and was put down here) in 1925. In 1976, during the country’s first petro-delirium, when oil prices quadrupled, President Carlos Andrés Pérez came to Mene Grande to declare the nationalization of the oil industry. Three decades later, in the midst of an even bigger boom, President Hugo Chávez came here to announce a second nationalization, changing the terms by which foreign oil companies operated in Venezuela and giving the government a controlling stake in everything that happened in the oil fields. There were information boards at the edge of the parking lot commemorating the dual nationalizations; in their telling, Chávez got all the glory.

Chávez had died a year earlier, in 2013, after fourteen years as president. A former soldier, he called himself a socialist and a revolutionary and he delighted in thumbing his nose at the United States, the imperial power to the north, to which he sold most of his country’s oil. His successor was Nicolás Maduro, a less talented politician who styled himself as the ideological heir of the man he called the eternal comandante. In Maduro’s short time as president, there had been waves of protest, the economy had begun to contract, inflation was soaring, and shortages of food and other goods were becoming acute.

The word mene, in the name of the town Mene Grande, comes from an indigenous word for oil seep, a place where oil bubbles up naturally from the earth. That is typical of Venezuela’s oil. It is so close to the surface in many places that it seeps out of the ground on its own. Or you poke a hole and out it comes—like the opening credit scene in The Beverly Hillbillies, when Jed Clampett shoots at a varmint and misses, striking oil instead. Mene Grande has numerous oil seeps. The oil surges up, and over time it congeals and becomes a mound of something like tar or asphalt.

Behind the tricolor park with the first oil well was a barrio, tumbling down the back of the hill, where people lived in hovels. Wandering around the barrio, I came upon a woman who was probably in her thirties or forties, but she looked twice that age. Her bones showed under the skin of her arms. She wore a housedress so threadbare that it was almost sheer, and whatever color it once had was gone. She seemed faded too in the white-hot sun, bleached instead of burnt or tanned. She lived in one of the worst hovels I’d seen in Venezuela or anywhere else, a teetering collection of corrugated metal, cardboard, and wood. The most striking thing of all was that it had been assembled on top of a mene. Shiny slicks of oil stained the earth all around. To keep themselves out of the muck, the woman and her family had built up a kind of midden, maybe three feet high, from chunks of hardened oil residue and debris. It was like a big, broad pitcher’s mound with a shack on top.

Using a rectangular metal can for a stool, she sat in front of her hovel, on top of this mound of oil in its various states of coagulation, spooning rice and beans from a tin plate into her mouth. She told me that her name was Ismara Barrios. She lived there with her husband, three daughters, and a cousin. Her husband sold soft drinks and fried plantains in town.

The sun was a hammer. I stood on the spongy ground, between puddles of oil, and squinted up at her. I tried to strike up a conversation. Venezuela was a country of extroverts, but Ismara cut against the grain. She seemed mistrustful of a stranger asking questions.

Things are going really well for me here, she said, as though wary that someone might suggest otherwise.

I asked what she thought about the government. She told me that the government gave people what they needed. This was a Venezuelan truism, whether or not it was true in practice: Venezuela was a petrostate, and in the eyes of its citizens, it existed to parcel out the riches pumped from the ground.

What did she think about Chávez? She said that he was her comandante.

And Maduro? The son of the comandante.

That was all.

AS ISMARA AND I spoke in September 2014, the country was poised on a fulcrum, like a pumpjack about to tip downward from the top of its cycle. For most of the year, oil prices had been close to $100 a barrel—continuing a historic run of high prices. But now the price had begun to fall. By January, oil would have lost half its value—spelling disaster for Venezuela, which depended almost entirely on oil exports for its economic survival.

I lived in Venezuela from 2012 to 2016, when I was the Andes region correspondent for The New York Times. After my stint as correspondent was over, I kept returning to Venezuela, sometimes to cover the news and sometimes to visit friends. I was back in 2018 to report on Maduro’s reelection in a tainted vote—to ensure his victory the government had barred most opposition parties from running a candidate against him. I returned again the following year after a young opposition legislator named Juan Guaidó, recently chosen to lead the National Assembly, mounted a challenge to Maduro by declaring himself interim president, with the support of the United States and dozens of other countries. By then Venezuela had slipped into permanent crisis and economic free fall: hyperinflation, joblessness, hunger, and a massive outflow of refugees second only to Syria, which was undergoing a civil war. Venezuela sat on the world’s largest reserve of oil. It had once been one of the richest countries in the hemisphere. Now it was being compared to Syria and Haiti, the poorest country in the region.

ON THAT DAY in Mene Grande, with the country’s collapse still beyond the horizon, I said goodbye to Ismara and stepped around the patches of sticky oil that slicked the muddy track in front of her home. Two men came walking along the path, and I greeted them.

Without prompting, one of the men pointed at the puddled oil, in the Venezuelan manner, by pursing his lips and turning his head. Look at the riches of Venezuela, he said.

PART ONE

1

Blackout

On a typical Thursday afternoon, before the crisis, before the collapse, before hyperinflation, before the bottom dropped out from under the price of oil, before the bolivar was worthless, before your whole monthly salary went to buy a chicken and then just half a chicken and then some chicken parts, before cash disappeared, before everyone left, before the refugees, before doctors and nurses and engineers and managers and workers with skills and time on the job started leaving the country, before the stampede to the exits, before all of that; simply put, before—on a typical Thursday afternoon there would have been three or four operators watching the computer screens in the central control room in Caracas that monitored the electrical grid for all of Venezuela. But that was before. Today, on this Thursday afternoon, March 7, 2019, there was just one man watching the computer screens at the National Center for Power Distribution: Darwin Briceño.

Darwin Briceño has a calm, understated demeanor, which is useful in his job, because when things go wrong, it can get stressful in a hurry. He has thick black hair and a closely trimmed Abe Lincoln beard, a long oval face with a strong, prominent nose and big deerlike eyes. He uses a styling product that makes his hair shine in the light.

Light is Darwin’s business. Light and power, in the form of electricity.

And on that afternoon, he was the only person in Venezuela in charge of making sure that there was a smooth flow of electricity to every city and town and millions of homes and businesses, with their air conditioners, refrigerators, televisions, and appliances, and all the airports and seaports, government offices, oil wells, refineries, and everything else in the country that used electrical power.

Venezuela has one national control room because the country is composed of a single integrated power grid. About three-quarters of Venezuela’s electrical generating capacity resides in three large hydroelectric plants in the far eastern part of the country, in what is known, for the purposes of the electrical grid, as the Guayana sector. Those generating plants provide virtually all the power used in Caracas and a large portion of the electricity used in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second- largest city, all the way across the country, close to the western border with Colombia. There are smaller regional control rooms that collect information and feed it into the national center in Caracas.

At forty-two, Darwin had been working nearly half his life in the central control room. He’d gone through the merger, after 2007, of the country’s regional electrical companies into one government-run company called Corpoelec. He’d been through the electrical emergency, declared by Chávez in 2009 and 2010, when a severe drought caused the water level in the reservoirs behind the big dams to drop. More recently he’d watched as his coworkers disappeared. Your salary wasn’t enough even to buy food for your family. Some drifted off to find other work in Caracas. Others had taken jobs with electrical utilities in Chile or Colombia or Ecuador.

But Darwin and a few colleagues had stayed. No one wanted to leave Venezuela. Your people were here—your family, your parents, your friends. It was the life you knew. There was a kind of light in Venezuela that you didn’t find anywhere else: the honeyed light of a Caracas evening, filtered through the dark green leaves of the mango trees, against the eternal backdrop of the forested Ávila mountain that stood like a guardian between the city and the sea; the intense white light of the Caribbean littoral, which makes you squint and washes the world clean of color. And the warmth of the people. You couldn’t find that anywhere else. Leaving was a last resort. You had to be desperate to leave, and Darwin wasn’t desperate, not yet. He also felt a sense of responsibility, to the electrical company and to the country that relied on his work. And to the Revolution. Darwin was a member of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela; he believed in the dream of a better, fairer Venezuela for everybody.

There came a time when we had to choose between leaving or assuming responsibility and working hard, Darwin said. We decided to stay and make our bet, to say, ‘We’re here and we’re sticking around.’

The control room used to be a busy place. There were three or four operators on a shift, with three shifts a day. Now there were only six operators left. It used to be that you’d come in and see your friends and you’d have someone to talk to, joke around with. Now you worked alone, on a twenty-four-hour shift.

On any given day, all sorts of things could happen—a brush fire under a transmission line could cause a spike in current, a transformer could blow—and then you had to think and act fast. And if it occurred at peak consumption, you had to scramble to keep power flowing. It was like being the pilot of a jet plane when an engine goes out in flight. You had alarms going off and split-second decisions to make. These days the whole system was under strain, held together with chewing gum. Equipment was going longer without being replaced; less maintenance was being done. You felt the weight of responsibility. The whole country depended on you. And now that it was just you, all alone, for twenty-four hours—well, it was even more stressful.

The central control room looked like a low-budget movie set. A line of desks, arranged in an arc, faced a wall on which a big screen showed a schematic of the electrical grid, with the generating plants and the transmission lines. Each desk held four computer screens that displayed a constant feed of data from all the components of the system.

On that Thursday, March 7, 2019, Darwin was less than halfway through his twenty-four-hour shift when a series of alarms flashed on the screens in front of him. It was 4:50 P.M. In that instant, the lights in the control room blinked and went out. That in itself was unusual. The control center was on a priority circuit—it wasn’t ever supposed to lose power, even when other areas of Caracas went dark. Darwin didn’t know it yet, but this wasn’t a local problem. Power had gone out all across the country. From one moment to the next, as though someone had thrown a switch, all of Venezuela had no electricity. In some places it would stay out for five days. Millions of people would run short of food and water. Hospital operating rooms went dark. Banks and grocery stores couldn’t function. In a few days the looting would start. Two weeks later the lights would go out again. And then again less than a week after that. And again in early April. The system was falling apart.

But that was all in the future. For now, at the central control room, the building’s backup generator kicked in and the lights blinked back on. In that brief span between light and no light the computers had remained on because they had a separate backup battery system. But now Darwin noticed something that he’d never seen before. Although the computers were still on, the screens were frozen. The steady stream of data from power lines and generating plants was not being updated. It was the first of many holy shit moments for Darwin as afternoon shaded into evening and a deeper darkness than usual descended on Venezuela. No new information was coming in. Sitting there at the brain center of the country’s electrical grid, Darwin was isolated. He was in every sense alone.

He picked up the white telephone on his desk and started calling around. Or he tried to.

First he called the Corpoelec headquarters in Caracas. The number was busy. He called the regional control room in Guayana, where the hydroelectric plants were. Busy again.

Darwin felt a kick of adrenaline. He called the other regional control centers. One after another, they were all busy. (Investigators later discovered that many of the backup battery systems designed to keep communications open and computers running at Corpoelec facilities around the country were disconnected or no longer working, because of a lack of maintenance or the failure to replace aging equipment.) At last he called the control center in Zulia state, in the far west of the country, and someone answered the phone. "I asked them, coño, holy shit, what’s going on there? And they tell me, ‘The whole system here is down.’"

Finally he got through to Guayana. They told him: We’re down here too.

By now his phone was ringing as well. Headquarters was calling. They wanted to know the same thing he did: What was going on?

Everywhere it was the same: no one had power, the whole system had crashed. And he knew what that meant. Okay, he told himself, now it’s up to me to bring back the electrical system for the whole country. He felt the fear rising in him. He told himself to stay calm, to remember his training. Your nerves are a little bit on edge because it’s an emergency, Darwin, always prone to understatement, told me when we spoke a few months later. It’s a heavy situation.

Darwin’s colleague, Carlos Sánchez, had worked the previous twenty-four-hour shift in the control room. Now Carlos was driving home, listening to the radio, when the signal went out. He changed stations, working his way along the dial. No signal anywhere. Then he noticed that the traffic lights weren’t working and there were no lights on in the stores. When he arrived home, he found that his house too was without power. He took out his cell phone and called Darwin, but the cellular lines were overloaded. Eventually he got through and Darwin told him that there was a nationwide blackout. Carlos turned around and headed back to work.

When Carlos arrived at the control room, it had been about three hours since the blackout hit. Carlos and Darwin were close friends. Years ago, they’d done their training together, graduated together, and been hired on the same day. Now Darwin explained what he knew, which still wasn’t much. The first alarms that had come in, the ones that had remained frozen on the computer screens, pointed to a problem with the high voltage lines that made up the spinal column of the nation’s electrical grid, connecting the hydroelectric plants in the east with the center of the country. Transmission lines are divided into segments, each with a kind of circuit breaker that is automatically triggered in case of trouble, such as a sudden increase in current. The idea is to isolate the problem to the segment where it occurred and keep it from spreading to other segments. In this case, it appeared that something had happened to trigger a chain reaction, knocking out segments up and down the power grid.

Darwin hadn’t paused since that first flickering out of the lights. Now, with Carlos there, he could take a minute to catch his breath. He went into a break room, with a large window, and looked out over the city.

Night had fallen, and the valley of Caracas lay before him, plunged in blackness. There was no twinkle of a thousand bare lightbulbs in the shantytowns climbing the hillsides, no lights from the giant housing blocks, no yellow glow from the wealthy enclaves to the south, no lights in the middle-class neighborhood that spread out below his window, no tangerine-tinged streetlamps. There was only darkness. The headlights of cars slashed white channels through the night, but that only seemed to accentuate the blackness all around.

I go out there and I see everything in darkness. You couldn’t see a thing. It made a tremendous impact— Darwin’s eyes grew wide and he made an asthmatic, suffocating sound, eeeeee—the sound a vacuum cleaner makes when something is stuck in the tube and the air is forced to go around it. That sound, the sound of Darwin’s deepest fear, has stayed with me, and the look on his face: the doe eyes enlarged into big circles inside the elliptical halo of the Honest Abe beard and the thick, pomaded hair. He said, I went back immediately, I mean, I didn’t catch my breath. I went back inside right away because, just imagine, the capital without—the nation’s capital without electricity. It really hit me.

He sat down at his console and said to Carlos, "Vamos a darle. Let’s do this."

2

The Shouting Country

In 1989, I was living in Mexico City, and I watched on television as Caracas was swept by riots and looting. Police and soldiers opened fire on the looters and hundreds of people were killed. My Mexican friends were stunned. For them, Venezuela was a place apart, a country touched by the blessing of wealth. Mexico had oil too, but nothing like Venezuela. La Venezuela Saudita, people called it: a Latin American Saudi Arabia. The chaos on television belied all that. It was like the crushing of a dream. The riots exposed Venezuela as a hollow fantasy—a pretty bauble on the outside, with rolls of money and shopping trips abroad, while inside, there was pulverizing poverty and the usual curse of promises never kept. The rioting came to be called El Caracazo—which roughly means the Caracas blow, as in the blow of a fist. It had that kind of impact: a gut punch. During the oil boom of the 1970s, money had poured in and politicians spun fairy dreams of a country rocketing out of underdevelopment. The slogan then was La Gran Venezuela. A Great Venezuela in the making. Other countries had similar aspirations, but Venezuela seemed poised to achieve them. Instead it woke to a familiar tale of debt, mismanagement, pauperism, and corruption. The 1980s were a lost decade; the rioting in 1989 was the bitter coda.

Three years after the Caracazo, a young lieutenant colonel named Hugo Chávez led a coup against Venezuela’s democratically elected government. The coup failed, but Chávez became a celebrity. In 1998, he ran for president as a change candidate and won.

By the time I moved to Venezuela, as a foreign correspondent, in January 2012, the country was deeply divided. You could say that division is what defined it. Pro-Chávez versus anti-Chávez. Poor versus well-off. Red T-shirt versus any other color T-shirt. You were for or against. On one side or the other. The division was obvious everywhere I went and in nearly every conversation I had. In interviews with poor people standing in line at a government store to buy subsidized food. In conversations with rich people over dinners served by maids in fancy houses. In interviews at pro-government rallies and anti-government demonstrations. People were talking across one another, over one another; they were full of anger and incomprehension; they’d given up trying to understand one another. They were frustrated and pissed off, and when they talked about it, the words often came out at top volume. The causes of the division were historical, but the rift deepened with Chávez. He had mined it and encouraged it until it became part of the landscape, something that people took as a given.

I thought of Venezuela as the shouting country. Venezuelans were like two groups of people facing each other on opposite sides of a street, shouting at the top of their lungs: insults, arguments, slogans. And each of them was shouting so loud, and with so much intensity, that they couldn’t hear what the people on the other side of the street were shouting. Meanwhile, the street itself was a ruin, full of potholes and debris and trash. And no one cared. All they wanted to do was keep shouting at one another. Maybe once, long ago, someone had shouted about the bad condition of the street: that something should be done to fix it, maybe even that they should work together to get it done. But by now the street wasn’t the point anymore; the shouting was the point.

I HADN’T BEEN in Venezuela long when I went to see a politician named Ismael García, who was the head of a small party called Podemos. He’d started out as an ally of Chávez and then broke away and joined the opposition. He was an old-style pol, a brawler in the trenches who’d paid his dues. The party headquarters was in a leafy middle-class Caracas neighborhood called El Bosque. Big trees hung over streets of one- and two-story houses tucked behind walls topped with broken glass. He had a crowded office with too much furniture and too many people. I had the feeling that he didn’t spend much time alone, that he was always accompanied by an entourage. Acolytes. Aides. A driver. A bodyguard. Hangers-on.

García came across on this morning as a man bursting with barely constrained energy. He was in his late fifties, with a mustache that pushed his mouth into a frown, wire-rim glasses, and graying hair in full retreat behind the dome of his head. I recall a dress shirt, open at the collar, and a soft brown leather jacket. He seemed impatient, a man for whom time was a fast-food sandwich to be eaten as quickly as possible, in big bites. We sat in low-slung chairs at opposite ends of a small coffee table.

Let’s get down to it, García said. The recording goes on for forty-one minutes. Mostly we talked about the politics of the moment. Chávez had been treated for cancer and was about to run for reelection, although there was speculation that he was too sick and would make way for another candidate. García dismissed it as nonsense: Chávez was a messiah to his followers and irreplaceable. That’s a part of Venezuelan politics that we need to look at, he said, not just on the Chavista side but on our side too. We’ve gotten used to creating messiahs. What stuck with me about the interview, however, wasn’t what García said, the specific catalog of grievances and predictions, but how he said it. García didn’t talk to me. He shouted at me. He gave me a forty-one-minute tongue-lashing. I started to wonder if he was angry at me. Had I said the wrong thing? Had I done something to offend him? I asked questions, but they hardly mattered before the verbal enfilade, the percussive sentences delivered without pause at full volume, as though he were standing on a stage and wanted to make sure that the very last guy in the very last row could hear him.

García began in the 1970s as a member of a small leftist party called Movimiento al Socialismo, or MAS. Long before Barack Obama popularized the phrase during his first candidacy for president in the United States, the slogan of MAS was "Sí podemos, Yes we can!" The MAS supported Chávez when he first ran for president in 1998, but over the years the party repeatedly split, with factions coming out against Chávez and breaking off. Through it all, García stuck with the pro-Chávez wing until he decided to create his own pro-Chávez party, which he called Podemos (he took the MAS slogan, Sí podemos, with him). But nothing lasts forever. In 2007, García finally made his own break—he objected to a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed Chávez to be reelected indefinitely—and he took Podemos over to the opposition. At the time that I spoke to García, Chávez was in the process of wresting control of Podemos away from him in the courts and handing the party over to a loyalist; soon García would be a political orphan.

What meaning was there in all this splitting and changing sides? Ismael García had spent ten years shouting from one side of the street, but now he was shouting from the other. In his view, he was the one who’d stayed consistent. It was Chávez who’d lost García’s trust. But what insight had García brought with him, what nuanced understanding of his former companions? He’d added his bugle voice to the choir. The change was geographical, Sidewalk A to Sidewalk B, and chromatic, the color of the T-shirt. The problem was always on the other side of the street. The solution? Maybe if we shout a little louder …

I sat and listened to him haranguing me from three feet away, across the little table. The volume squeezed the meaning out of the words; like water wrung from a washcloth, it trickled down the drain. What had I done to invite his anger? Then it occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t angry with me after all. Maybe he was hard of hearing. Maybe he spoke loudly because he couldn’t gauge the volume of his own voice. He didn’t know that he was shouting. It was like texting with your mother, who doesn’t realize that she’s WRITING IN ALL CAPS. I took a deep breath. It seemed a likely explanation. Not angry. Just deaf.

I waved the white flag and thanked him for the interview.

We stood up. He grabbed my hand and, out of reflex, repeated the old shibboleth "Sí podemos, Yes we can," a phrase uttered a thousand times, devoid of meaning.

It was the first thing that he’d said in forty-one minutes that wasn’t shouted.

I stumbled out into the sunshine, Caracas’s great blessing. A blue sky. Green trees.

LATER THAT DAY I had another interview scheduled, with Luis Britto García, a prizewinning writer of short stories who was one of Chavismo’s house intellectuals. I would see him often on television, presenting the government side of things in a soft, confident, educated voice that said: reason resides with me. He came across on television as both self-effacing and supercilious, the distracted, disheveled egghead.

Britto García (no relation to Ismael García) lived on a street with a wide, park-like divider in the middle, shaded by tall trees. His house had a high stucco wall separating it from the street, with a black metal door. I pushed the doorbell button and waited. No answer. I pushed again. Again nothing. I waited some more, not wanting to be rude or overinsistent. I called Britto García’s number on my cell phone. There was no answer.

A newcomer to a country always wonders whether he’s missing some social cues that everyone else is attuned to. There’s a note of doubt, like a distant bell struck just within the range of hearing. As a foreigner traveling in Latin America, I try to observe and match my behavior to those around me. I don’t want to be the clueless gringo barging in. As a newspaper reporter, you have to strike a balance between being pushy—get that interview, ask that question—and hanging back, observing, not assuming that things are as you expect them to be. These are countries where the brassy directness of a New Yorker won’t get you very far, where people often prefer to talk around a subject, skirting it, avoiding it, before they’re ready to discuss it. Sometimes you’re more likely to get where you’re going by taking the long way around.

Still, in this case, I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. I’d confirmed with Britto García the night before. Perhaps he’d been called away on an emergency. Or gotten stuck in traffic. I was determined to wait. I’d made a decision when I’d arrived in Venezuela not to accept received wisdom, not to adopt the opinions of others who had been there before me. I wanted to see and understand for myself. Above all, that meant speaking to people from all sides.

So I waited. The street was quiet. I sat under a tree in the green strip in the middle. Every once in a while I would call the phone number or go over and ring the bell—just in case he somehow hadn’t heard it before. Finally, after more than an hour, I called the phone number again. This time Britto García picked up.

I told him who I was.

Who?

The journalist. From New York. We had an appointment.

Ah! Yes! How are you?

I’m fine. I’m outside your house.

Excellent. I was asleep. He said it as though it were the most natural response in the world. As though what you did when you had an appointment was take a nap and wake up an hour later. I’ll let you in.

I went to the black door and waited a while longer. I heard a movement on the other side and the metal door scraped open.

Luis Britto García was short and thin, about seventy years old, with soft white hair that encircled his face. There was a tall domed forehead with a thin beach of white hair above it and then a beard of the same color completing the circle below. He had a white pencil mustache and untrimmed eyebrows. He had on a much-worn white T-shirt, loose white pants, and black sandals. His thin arms stuck out of the shirt sleeves like pink drinking straws. He glanced at my face without meeting my eyes, and then he looked down at the ground. He never looked at me