Bloomberg’s Venezuela bureau chief: Why I moved back to my home country

Patricia Laya, who is Venezuela bureau chief for Bloomberg News and currently a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, writes about her decision to move back to her home country.

Laya writes, “Moving back after eleven years away wasn’t an easy decision, and it involved convincing my family — mainly my mother — that I would be okay in a country where food shortages are the norm, access to healthcare is increasingly complicated, and power and running water are a luxury. I couldn’t really sugarcoat it because they knew what I was getting into. In fact, like millions of others, they had spent the last decade trying to escape it.

“But the truth is, I was working as an economics reporter for Bloomberg in Washington, D.C., but my mind was elsewhere. For months, I had woken up to shaky video footage of protesters clashing with security forces under clouds of tear gas. I had fallen asleep swiping through photos of homemade shields and shallow graves. I was helplessly watching my country’s demise and desperately wanted to be in the middle of it. So, legs shaking, I packed my bags and returned to my hometown of Caracas.

“It’s no surprise I found a very different place than the one I’d left. In the late 1940s, Caracas was the city of infinite opportunity that my maternal grandparents called home after escaping the Spanish civil war and Franco’s military dictatorship. In the early 1970s, it was the city where my parents could walk to school and hitchhike to the beach. But this was not the Caracas my sisters and I grew up in. Instead, due to my family’s relative privilege, it was one that we mainly experienced through car windows or from behind tall fences wrapped in barbed wire. In 2017, I returned to a city that mostly just felt empty and abandoned.”

Read more here.