MOTHERLAND

A Venezuelan reporter who left her home country in 2010 chronicles the traumatic fate of her family and her broken nation.

Ramón (b. 1981), a Los Angeles–based reporter for Agence France-Presse, takes us from the heyday of Venezuela’s booming oil industry and bloated welfare system of the 1970s, when her parents first met, to the tragedy of a bankrupt economy in the wake of Hugo Chávez’s “revolution.” She describes how the “mirage made possible by oil” sustained her country through the decades, but there was little accountability for the government and wealthy citizens, who squandered the country’s riches in gross mismanagement, corruption, and embezzlement. The youngest daughter of a Spanish-born entrepreneur who had come through the Nazi concentration camps and resettled in Venezuela after the war, and a hardscrabble teacher who retired early because of arthritis, Ramón was her father’s favorite, largely insulated from the turbulence of Venezuelan politics and economy. Growing up in Maracaibo, the hub of the once-booming oil industry, the author evokes the early optimism of her mother, who bought a two-story house for the family that would become a kind of curse in later decades. At first, writes Ramón, “we lived in a country where taxes were rarely collected and dreams were the daily currency.” In 1998, Chávez was elected president. Despite the hope for a popular revolution, after his 14 years in power, there was little to show but an economy tied to exports, a broken-down supply chain, elevated crime levels, and huge devaluation of the currency. Ramón brings readers directly into Venezuela’s social and economic disintegration by showing the struggles of her widowed mother, who was ill, alone in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood, passing her days in long lines for dwindling food supplies, and beset by power outages, among other crises. Throughout, the author vividly portrays the unfolding tragedy shared by all Venezuelans.

The collapse of a nation told through the poignant story of one family.