Alejandro Velasco

And that was the first thing that people felt, the Monday that the policies went into effect, the hike in the price of fares.

And people started to protest.

And then the government first deployed the police, which was very quickly overrun, and then deployed the military.

They called the curfew, and everybody has to stay home.

And again, this is all happening during that Monday.

This is February 27th of 1989.

And so we get home, and we don't leave home for two weeks.

And during those two weeks, you're like trying to watch the news, but you're also at the same time hearing gunfire from the military that's trying to quell these protests.

Later on, we discover that what had happened was what the Inter-American Court of Human Rights called a state-sponsored massacre.

Hundreds of people died, upwards of perhaps as many as a thousand.

You know, mass graves were discovered later.

And so this really, you know,

As an 11-year-old child, the primary thing you worry about is, am I going back to school?

But then you realize something seems very different.

The state of anxiety of my parents, of my friend's parents, of the adults in school, it's very different.

sense of a stable country that had enjoyed, even if it was under some kind of economic duress during the previous almost 10 years, that seemed no longer tenable.

Example one.

Example two.

So it was 1992, in February also.

There's something about February in Venezuela history, which is kind of curious to think about.