PJ Vogt

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.

They're still there.

And part of what makes, like, this is a feature of human nature, but you're saying a feature of human nature that gets particularly expressed in Venezuela is, like, the ability to, like, have illusions, have them fail, and just, even if they're in your sight line, block them out and keep believing in the next thing.

Completely.

Alejandro and I ended up talking for hours.

I found he did the thing I'm always hoping writers can do for me.

He both told the story in a cinematic, compelling way, but also along the way, he could explain what it all meant.

So that's the conversation I'm going to let play out from here.

It is a more dense story than some we tell here, but it's worth it.

I'm going to present it to you with as little interruption as I'm capable of, and we're going to break it into two episodes, which is how I heard it.

Hanging over everything you'll hear is this phenomenon that political scientists call the resource curse.

Countries with something valuable in their soil, whether it's diamonds, copper, or oil, instead of that resource being a good thing, with very few exceptions, it ends up bringing devastation, a monkey's paw wherever it's found.