Hello, I resist.
Twenty three days have passed since my country lived through the most violent moment in its history in the last hundred years: a bombardment by the United States of America.
For years we have seen bombings by military and economic powers on television, in faraway or nearby countries, sometimes in our own. But I had never lived through one. We know unilateral military attacks exist. We know what it means to see spaces once inhabited by people—universities, hospitals—reduced to ashes in minutes. We have seen it in reports and on social media, the material violence captured in digital formats. When we read "twenty people have died," we are horrified. Perhaps some think, "at least it wasn't more." A hundred people are killed in a day in Gaza by a genocidal army, in front of the eyes of international bodies, in front of our eyes through a phone screen.
It is estimated that a hundred people were killed in a day in my country. They are still conducting forensic analyses on the remains of the soldiers guarding the presidential residence. But civilians also died. People who were sleeping in their homes, on whom the wreckage of their houses collapsed. Others died in hospitals days later. Someone's heart was stopped by fear.
So how do you return to normal? Twenty three days have passed and the children have gone back to school; I have gone back to teaching, to studying. But we have not really returned, not completely, not like before. I struggle to read, to focus on anything, on so many routine things that now feel alien. I think of friends, family, and hundreds of people who lived through the terror of seeing missiles fall near their homes. Fifteen thousand people were evacuated at three in the morning from residences near a military zone in Caracas. They say they thought dawn would not come soon, because the smoke covered everything. The descriptions speak of sensations: the smell of smoke, the sound of missiles slicing through the sky, the continuous blasts.
The dialysis treatments were destroyed when a missile hit a hospital warehouse in La Guaira. A building of the University of Technology was destroyed. The peace of mind of millions who now wake up in the middle of the night, among nightmares, died. The peace of mind of my daughters died, who now have nightmares about bombings in this remote place where we live, from where the distant hum of destruction could still be heard.
Venezuelans are tired of reading geopolitical analyses on social media and in the news. Not because we think they lack value, but because our lives do not change because of them. We read, searching for clues about what will happen in our country, and all we find is uncertainty.
Meanwhile, the dove of peace, held captive in a cage called the Nobel Prize, was handed to María Corina Machado, who slit its throat and gave its head to Donald Trump. Perhaps the most flesh-and-blood manifestation of fascism since its very origin.
They are killing us everywhere: in Gaza, in Somalia, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Iran, in the Caribbean, in Venezuela. They kill us wherever, whenever, for reasons we do not understand, because we do not understand that way of living by hating each other.
From here, the world seems to be trying to resist that wave of hatred and destruction led by powerful governments and their billionaire allies. It is now normal for me to wake up every morning disheartened. I allow myself a limited ration of news and then set the phone aside to try to go about daily life. I ask myself: is anything I do worthwhile? What is the use of trying to change my reality if a vaster, more uncontrollable reality is altering everything around me? I can't help it; that is how I feel.
Yet, I also feel alive. I am surrounded by love, even though fear has invaded us. So I tell myself: I must keep pushing to change the reality around me, and find others who want to do it with me. Because we cannot give up.
Because we resist.
PS: This post is only intended to share with you what is born from my emotions—embodied, of course, in a body that is not neutral. It is not a geopolitical analysis nor an attempt to show you a single reality. I just want to share my reality. I do not intend to share images of what happened in my country; those can be found in any international media outlet. That is why I only share an illustration of mine with you.
