PJ Vogt

What is the topic that I know very little about that I now have to rapidly fashion myself into a pseudo-expert on just to be a citizen?

Last year, for me, one of the stories I chose not to dig into was Venezuela.

It was there in my peripheral vision, Trump complaining about Venezuelan migrants, actively targeting them for deportation.

I noticed, of course, when we launched missile strikes against Venezuelan boats.

I could tell something weird was going on, but this is America under Trump.

Lots of weird things are always going on.

And I was just more worried about other parts of the front page last year.

But then, a couple weeks ago, our country sent troops to arrest their president and his wife, and Trump announced we were now in charge of Venezuela and that we were taking their oil.

And that was the point where I really felt like, okay, I need to understand this.

Not Trump, but Venezuela, this country we just got into a much more entangled relationship with.

So, I read some books, I talked to some experts, and I have to say, I kind of wish I'd started this earlier, because the history of Venezuela is just, as a story, so compelling, so fascinating.

So, without further ado, I just want to introduce to you the person who will guide us through that story today.

Alejandro's family moved to the US, to Miami, but he would return to Venezuela later, on his own, to study the place.

He wanted to understand the complexities of what had happened there, the complexities that had caused his family to leave.

He began his graduate studies in the year 2000, when Hugo Chavez had just entered the political scene.

How do you...

This is such a broad question to ask somebody who's gone so deeply into a country, but what do you think makes Venezuela unique?

How do you understand it as a country in your own mind?

So you're saying if I was in Caracas, I would look around and I would see these grand attempted pieces of architecture, different moments where there was a boom time and somebody was in power and they were like, this is my vision of the future.

They don't work out.