When I awoke to the news alert from the Financial Times that President Trump had announced a U.S. invasion of Venezuela resulting in the capture, seizure and removal of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, presumably to some U.S.-controlled location, I was not totally surprised. I then watched this morning as Trump and Secretary of “War” Hegseth, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio standing behind nodding, spoke about the unprecedented aggressive military action. Something Hegseth said still rings in my ears. He said that no one should doubt that the U.S. can “enforce its will anywhere and at any time that it chooses.” Ay Caramba!
I looked back over my last seven years of writing this blog. That’s 2,688 stories over 2,531 days. Of those stories, my Dropbox search algorithm tells me that 121 of them (4.5%), a very significant portion, make some mention of Venezuela. Of those, 15 of those stories, the ones the search algorithm deemed most relevant, were written in the last six months. That got me wondering about how much my writing reflects my life experiences. Obviously, since the largest category of my stories is called “memoirs”, I very much admit to and own the reality that I incorporate my life into my writing in almost any way I can. But I’m wondering how much of my psyche and the places where I lived factor into my storytelling. I ran down the major places where I lived and tallied up the stories that make mention of those spots. The result was interesting. Working chronologically, this is what it looks like:
Venezuela – 121 (age 0-4)
Costa Rica – 114 (age 5-6)
Wisconsin – 138 (age 7-11)
Maine – 881 (age 12-14)
Rome – 278 (age 15-17)
Italy – 335 (age 15-17, plus many trips back)
Ithaca – 316 (age 18-22, plus early-age visits and throughout adulthood)
NYC – 331 (age 23-65, including the suburbs and three City Boroughs)
California – 582 (age 66-72, plus 6 mos. In 1958)
As I analyze this, the obvious outlier is Maine, which, for reasons I cannot easily explain, seems to figure in an inordinately large number of stories, at least in passing mention. If someone asked me which locales had the deepest impact on me, I would tend to say, in this order, Rome (love of the classics, foreign affairs and antiquity), Ithaca (the life of the mind and my mother’s history), the Tropics (lumping Venezuela and Costa Rica with my fatherly heritage), NYC (my life’s work) and California (my spiritual base and place of reflection). Neither Wisconsin nor Maine, while not absent from my consciousness and make-up, seem particularly impactful to me, despite the number of mentions. And Venezuela is far more important to me than the numbers imply.
Venezuela is where my parents met. It was the place where my mother escaped to and created the life that gave me the history I have and the adventurous spirit I think I embody. It was the way-station that my father used to transition from the old world of northern Italy to the new world of Southern California. It holds my connection to Latin America (I actually still have cousins there who I only barely know), a connection I got to explore extensively during a ten year stint in my career as an adult. The juxtapositioning that Venezuela represents with its political turmoil of wanting to be democratic and free and always falling prey to strongmen dictators and wanting to be modern and affluent and still sitting way behind in the overall development cycle, make it a panorama of all the economics and political studies that have consumed much of my education and adult career.
When I graduated college in 1975, Venezuela was Ranked the 25th strongest economy in the world (and arguably the wealthiest in Latin America). It has the largest reserves of oil of any country in the world. Today it is ranked 75th economically. It represents one of the starkest reversals of fortune in economic history. It is what makes it a piece of over-ripe fruit, available to be plucked by the likes of Donald Trump in all his autonomous hubris. Ay Caramba!
During my undergraduate college years, the courses that stick out most vividly in my mind were a survey course in Economic Anthropology, an upper-level economics course called The History of Latin American Economics, and a graduate government seminar in Modern Revolutions. I had gone to college to be an engineer and wanted to study Chemistry, but found myself drawn to economics and government instead. Its funny, because I was very non-political in those days and completely uninvolved with the student anti-war movements. I didn’t like the war in Vietnam, and I knew I was a liberal at heart, but I was simply not an activist and was far more interested in learning about the underlying causes of these social forces that had so much impact on my heritage and the world we were living through. The Economic Anthropology course got me thinking about how man as a species thought about his wants and needs and the resources that governed his lifestyle. To this day, I am fascinated by the concept of limited versus unlimited wants as a driver of social change. My 72 year lifespan has seen world population go from 2.7 billion to 8.2 billion souls. The median age in 1954 was 23 where today it is 31 years old. When I was born, life expectancy was 48, and it is now 73. The birth rate in 1954 was about 5.0 where it now approaches the ultimate replacement rate of 2.1. I think all of this change just makes the notion of economic anthropology all the more interesting and relevant to mankind and our future. From there, I learned all about the history of the continent of my origin in the context of the economic development that drove its conversion from indigenous, sparsely populated tropical land of 35 million inhabitants to a densely populated (670 million) modernizing but turbulent and somewhat impoverished behemoth. This population growth is 10X the growth of the global population, with much less economic growth than the rest of the world (except Africa), so is it any wonder that it was a hotbed for and place to study revolution and the swings between dictatorship and democracy?
I am well aware of the U.S. history of intervention and self-interested meddling in the various countries of the continent. I consider myself particularly well-versed in Chile’s history of political swings and economic development. I’ve met some of the dictators and progressives that have tried to lead the continent for the last fifty years. Nicolas Maduro was not one of them, but he fit the pattern of self-interested pseudo-populists that trampled personal liberties and gave little to the collective to justify the pain and suffering. Few outside Cuba, Russia, China and Iran supported his regime…and those who did (other than Cuba), did so for anti-American balancing reasons. He is the Juan Peron, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, Sadaam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad of our moment today. No one is sorry to see him dethroned and everyone hopes for a better future for the oppressed of Venezuela. But must America yet again flex its muscles in the hemisphere in a way that reminds the world that we are transactional and greedily self-interested in our blatant ethnocentric worldview? It’s our oil and we know best how to run the country. Venezuelans…stand aside. Ay Caramba!