Alejandro Velasco

Of course, I did everything that I could to convince my mom and friends, we got to go and got tickets to go.

Then we organized this group of us to get to the concert.

And, you know, we went and there's all sorts of speculation.

Is Axl going to show up?

Is Slash going to play with his back to the audience?

How late are they going to be on stage?

Like just eating it up.

Show was amazing.

Unbelievable.

So fantastic.

You know, I still get chills thinking about that.

So, you know, we basically kind of sleep through the whole next day.

And then the day after that...

we wake up to another coup.

There's another coup attempt, and this one was far bloodier, far louder, far scarier, also unsuccessful.

But I think for me at that moment, I realized, and I'm sure my parents made the same calculation, which is why even then they started making plans to leave, which we did a couple of years later.

This isn't just a flash in the pan.

Now we had this thing that happened in 1989, which was eventually known as the Caracazo, which if you think about it in social scientific or historical terms, you can really think that it ruptured the social pact between the government and the population writ large.

And then you have the coup of Chavez in February of 1992, which gives the sense that, okay, the government itself is not stable.

And then this additional coup while Chavez is in jail, right?