We Said Farewell: Lessons from the Venezuelan Diaspora for Today’s America with Amanda Quintero Aguerrevere

[0:02] What lessons about authoritarianism can we learn from reading the novel We Said Farewell by our guest, Amanda Quintero?

[0:14] I’m Doug Berger. And this is Secular Left.

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[0:39] Welcome to Secular Left. My name is Doug. I’m your host. And before we get to our guest today, Amanda Quintero, I just wanted to initialize a new segment that I’m going to have in each episode, most likely going forward. And basically, it is a segment where we further reiterate how Donald Trump is a liar, a bigot, a sexual assault perpetrator who hires people who are not qualified to run a garbage truck, not alone the federal government, and how he has allowed Elon Musk to slash and burn money that’s already been appropriated through acts of Congress. And the current Republican Party in Congress just sits on their hands and lets it happen. And so they should all resign. Trump should resign. Everybody involved with that administration should resign. And until that happens, we do not have a United States of America at this time. It is 583 days until the midterm congressional elections. Hopefully we last until then. And now let’s go on to the guest. This…

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[2:12] Today, our guest is Amanda Quintero. She is an author. She wrote a book called We Said Farewell about her experience and her friend’s experience in the authoritarianism of Venezuela and how they had to leave the country. And she’s joining us today to talk about it. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me, Doug. It’s great to have spaces to talk about this study case of what happens when you let democracy crumble.

[2:47] Now, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you to write this book?

[2:53] For sure. So by training, I’m an economist, and my background has been in finance and tech. I graduated from an economics background in Venezuela, And then when the situation got pretty uncomfortable, I left in 2016 to France up until last week. So total nine years where I did a study master’s degree in international relations. And I made a life working in finance and tech. I have been writing just kind of like an independent author. And back when blogging was a thing, before podcasts came around, for a very long time, eventually that led me to be a ghostwriter for a politician. And when I moved, I started to kind of like try to process my own experience and to document. I wanted to document what was going on because I found that it was so poorly recollected and recounted outside of Venezuela. So I was basically trying to create fiction out of my own frustration. And I had a few friends who had quite iconic stories. So what I did was I did a mix of autofiction with their stories, plus research, and we said Firewall came to be.

[4:21] Okay. Yeah. I was going to ask you about that. You know, it is, this is a novel. So these stories are fictionalized, but they are based on real experiences of friends of yours or people that you know, correct? Correct. So technically, it’s five short stories. It’s not one novel because the stories go in chronological order, but they are not intertwined. So you finish one, you start something else. But it is a long read. It is 300 pages long. So it does read like a novel because it exists in the same universe. However, they are about 80% true story. Right i took stories that were very real and i just fictionalized them for the purpose of entertainment for making the the reading more pleasant but yeah i would say the bulk of the information is true story now you said you recently moved from france but you lived there for many years were you involved was there like a venezuelan community expat community that you got to know there? No, there’s not a very big link between Venezuela and France.

[5:31] Of course, at the end of the day, you find each other just because, you know, someone is a cousin of someone or someone is a friend of someone. So I did have my small community of Venezuela and France, but for the most part, there’s not even a very big Latino community in France. The majority of their immigration comes from their former colonies, which is Africa and somewhat in the Middle East. Yeah, that is weird. That’s strange because France does have a big presence in South America. So that’s weird. Commercially, my, my, but not politically. It’s not a, it’s not a close tie. Which of the stories that you wrote about in your book were the hardest to write from a personal standpoint? And were any of them close to your own experience?

[6:19] I would, I think, so it’s, there’s five of them.

[6:24] Number two and number four were probably the hardest to write because, actually, because they were so distant from my own experience. The first, the second one is the Chronicle of a Kidnapping. So it’s a minute to minute recount of a kidnapping for ransom. So it’s extremely violent. That one was excruciating to write because you have to place yourself in the skin of someone who is kidnapped and how would you face the situation although the person who recounted the story in person remembered a lot of detail so it saved me from from fictionalizing a lot and the fourth one i think it was the most painful because that one is about a political prisoner that ends up in a torture center so it is a heartbreaking story of a person that I knew long before he ended up in that situation. And I would have never imagined that something like this would happen to him. And it was so difficult for him to tell the story that I had to come up with ways to tell it that were from second sources. So like reading in the newspapers or looking at a lot of documentaries in trying to capture that. So there was a lot of trying to imagine being in prison unjustly.

[7:51] Actually without due process. And that was so difficult to write, honestly. That was the one that took me the longest time.

[7:59] Okay. People don’t have an understanding that in a lot of these authoritarian regimes, people disappear, is what they call it. That’s funny. In Chile, they did it. In Argentina, they’ve done it. Yeah. You know, all these oppressive regimes, they disappear people. Correct. And so that’s pretty much what happened in Venezuela, that people would just disappear, or did they actually know that they were— Yes. So this, the fourth story that I’m talking about is titled, Hugo is the name of the character. That one is about a person who disappeared. Actually, they didn’t disappear in the sense that their family knew that the government had taken them because they went into their home at four in the morning, abducted him from his house, and then didn’t tell anyone where he was for weeks until they bribed enough officers that they found out where they were. But this became a standard practice and also taking people from street protests. So, yes, they haven’t been understood as desaparecidos, which is what you call that. But it is exactly what was happening at that point. And I think it calmed down mostly because people got so scared that they’re no longer protesting the way they used to. but probably if people went out and tried to confront the government again it would happen again.

[9:27] And I think there’s a lot of Americans that believe that they’ll be protected if they get arrested protesting. It’s like it can happen, you know, like that. You mean in the States or elsewhere? Because in the story, there is an American who, for whatever reason, went and married a Venezuelan woman and found himself in this prison. And it took years before the American government could take him out. Right. And Americans just think that due process is everywhere. And it’s like, nope.

[10:01] Yeah. Well, the due process part is very key in this part of the story. Because the study case that you could take from my book is that an authoritarian regime came in and dismantled the rule of law bit by bit. And 15 years later, which is when this story happens, the fourth one that we’re talking about, due process is no longer existing. So this guy spends, I don’t know, six months in jail and eventually a friend of his realizes that there’s not even a case against him. He’s just been abducted and he’s kidnapped by the government. But there is no due process. Therefore, there’s nothing to do with lawyers. Lawyers have no resources to take him out of jail, and it becomes a political negotiation. And he actually ends up leaving jail because there is a pact that happens with the opposition party.

[11:06] And then we juxtapose that with Rubin’s story, the first story, where the protesting gets him put on a list. Yeah. Basically, he can’t work. Sorry, yeah, the book is in escalation. So the first one is going to be Ruben, who is a young guy who’s in college. Very typical that college kids are going to be very present in protests, anti-government protests everywhere around the world. Students tend to be quite left and liberal anywhere in the world. Things are happening and he signs a petition to impeach the president and this gets him blacklisted for life and he discovers later down the line that he’s never going to be able to find a government job like he gets blacklisted from federal jobs he gets blacklisted from the oil industry which Venezuela is a national industry, and he was studying in petroleum engineering. So imagine a petroleum engineering person who will never be able to work for the state. It just becomes impossible for him to imagine a future in Venezuela. And then that’s one of the first building blocks. It just escalates throughout the book into the dismantling of the state.

[12:27] Which one of these stories that you wrote, which one is your favorite, if you have one, that you really enjoy? I think the most moving one is the third one. The third one, first, she’s a woman, so it’s very easy to identify with her as a woman. She starts, like, on the first page, she tells you that her son died out of something that has happened in regards to illegal gold mining.

[13:00] And she’s the only person that believed in the revolution. So you could compare it, just to make a very, very large parallel, to the people that vote for some sort of change. Even though this political candidate is already known to be problematic but they were in a situation where they were stressed out and they wanted things to change so they vote for this guy and not only she votes for him she works for the local government on behalf of the government and she lives through the dissolution of seeing her convictions.

[13:46] Be treated like a stepping stone for these powerful men.

[13:52] So the closeness with how malicious the regime was onto people like this is very heartbreaking, but also it makes it so that the story has a very large crescendo. At the beginning, you’re excited. there’s a revolution you know she’s super into making things change actually she works for indigenous populations because she has indigenous roots and so she goes to the jungle it’s very exotic she finds herself in in the amazon jungle and eventually she realizes that they were they will never get the changes that she thought they were going to get they will never even get the funding that she thought they were going to get, they’ve been used all along. And not only that, I mean, if it was only being used, that would have been heartbreak. But the horror of it is that the government allows the major cocaine cartels to enter her region and take over and enslave the population’s round, displays the population’s round, and she is just, she becomes a phoenix in the story. She transforms her alliance and goes after the regime after that.

[15:19] Yeah, it sounds like it’d be a good movie. Yeah, it’s a redemption arc right there. Yeah, definitely, definitely.

[15:27] For more information about any of the topics covered in this episode, check out our show notes at secularleft.us.

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[15:40] Now at this time this time period where these where this was happening did the venezuelan government let people leave or did you or did they always have to do it through illegal means uh no i actually a lot of people went through legal means so when people started leaving at first.

[16:01] The very first wave is with the first story, which is people who worked for the oil industry and similar. A lot of those people ended up moving to other petroleum hubs. So there’s a lot of Venezuelans in Houston, Texas. There’s a lot of Venezuelans in Calgary, in Canada, a lot in the Gulf. So that was the first immigration wave, mostly legal. Then eventually in 2016, there was a default and people started pouring out. So a lot of middle class went out kind of like me to do a master’s with the excuse of getting a job, but most of it was legal. And then within Within the South American continent, it was also legal because Venezuela used to be part of MERCOSUR.

[16:54] I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but it’s kind of like one of those regional organizations. And one of the things that they had was immediate work permits as soon as they immigrated. So a lot of people, when they left, they were legal migrants because they were within the Mercosur. Then MERCOSUR invalidated Venezuela because they didn’t pay their dues. And of course, like the whole authoritarian regime, et cetera. And that’s when the illegal immigration started happening, basically because since the economy collapsed…

[17:31] The economy shrunk by a factor of five, something like that. So the real impact was a famine, an unrecognized famine. When I moved out, we were seeing people like families foraging in the parks, just like going to parks and picking fruit or going to garbage cans and picking out food rests because there were not enough. Supplies out in the market. And so people had a choice between staying and basically facing hunger or leaving. And at that point, when it’s that violent, people must leave. And so that’s when it started to be a humanitarian crisis. You have a background in economics. And one of the drivers of political upheaval is income inequality between the country’s business people and the government leadership and the regular people. Do you have any insights on how best to address that kind of inequality for other people? Inequality is, it looks different in every country.

[18:51] So it’s very difficult to give like a one silver bullet answer. The bottom line is that the reason why Chavez got to where he was The president got to where he was Is because there was a lot of inequality And a lot of people felt that something had to change Because no matter what they did They were falling back And no matter how many jobs they had How many aides they had They couldn’t afford basic living And the promise that was made, as some other people have made, was very similar. We’re going to lower the price of eggs, and we’re going to lower the price of milk, and we’re going to lower the price of this and that. And for a time, it happened, but through very controversial means.

[19:46] And a problem that’s faced with this kind of soviet left socialism which is what they attempted to implement very like a soviet style of of central planning is that they they broke the market they broke market mechanisms and with that, On the moment, as soon as oil prices went down, which is what was feeding, the redistribution mechanism went out, the entire thing collapsed. And whatever gains were done in trying to reduce inequalities were magnified. Because now you had tons and tons and tons of people fully depending on a system that was unsustainable. And just left in free fall. Basically, they were left in free fall in a crash that was extremely similar to the fall of the former Soviet unions in East Europe. The parallels when you study the economics are very similar.

[21:05] Inequality is not the same everywhere, but it always creates a political problem because the majority feel that no matter what they do, they don’t have enough. And that fuels this sensation that you need a strong man to come and fix it. Yeah, especially when you have somebody that is lusting for power and uses that to their advantage, right? Absolutely, because it’s very easy to make promises. It’s extremely easy to make promises. However, once they get to power, at least in majority of cases, they usually don’t do the only thing that truly changes the situation, which is raise taxes on the richest people. That is, I mean, there’s a limited amount of resources. There’s a whole discourse about this, et cetera. But when you have enormous inequality and you have to buy social peace, you have to get that money from somewhere. And that somewhere is usually taxes. And if the richest people are not paying taxes, there’s no way for redistribution. And it’s a myth that the bottom 90% are going to be able to make it through market mechanisms.

[22:24] So it’s very easy to come and say, yes, we’re going to lower the prices, but yeah, exactly how, how is it? Are you going to make transfers? Like, are you going to, are you going to pay the eggs? Are you going to subsidize things? Because if you’re not, then there’s very little evidence that you’re going to be able to do it. Yeah. Um, I just did, um, um, a different, uh, podcast episode talking about the price of eggs. And I explain, at least here in the United States, I don’t know how it works everywhere, is eggs is a commodity and was used by the grocery stores to bring you into the store. So a lot of times they sold them for a loss because they wanted to bring you in the store. So you’d come in the store and get, I don’t know, 89 cents a dozen. They’re taking probably a 10 cent loss on that. So because they’re thinking you’re going to buy a roast, you’re going to buy this, you’re going to buy that, and they’re going to make that money up. Now they have to pay the actual costs of the production. And people are like, what?

[23:28] Yeah, it’s very different. But one thing that has, well, at least it was the experience that we had in Venezuela. Venezuela tried a Soviet style of redistribution, nationalization, we’re going to operate things in a centralized operations way. And that was a disaster because very soon you had this number of greedy bureaucrats everywhere.

[24:00] Who soon left those, I don’t know, milk plants, eggplants, whatever, you know, like whatever factories there were, whatever farms there were, they were very quickly forgotten.

[24:13] Abandoned, and we started depending more and more on imports.

[24:17] And when you start depending more and more on imports, you better have a positive trade balance. If you don’t have a positive trade balance, you get yourself in debt and that is one like that is exactly the case of the united states as well the united states doesn’t have a positive um trade balance in in in net so that is being financed by trillions and trillions of dollars of of debt and it’s very difficult to see how it happens outside of the market mechanism and uh have since you left uh venezuela have you been back no no not at all is it that you’re not allowed to come back or you just don’t feel like you need to go back well for a very long time i couldn’t afford it um partially because after the default one of the one of the big groups that were that did not collect payments were the airlines so a lot of airlines just left there were maybe i think two operating um no not directly from france so it was super expensive to go to venezuela then my family moved out so when your family moves out then then there’s hardly another reason to go back um and also because after so much heartbreak there’s not really much to go back to you know it’s a.

[25:45] It’s a very different place now. And yeah, I haven’t felt like I wanted to go back. And what do you want readers to take away from their time with your stories and your book? Well, I would love for them to be entertained. If you’re someone who likes a thriller, those are thrillers.

[26:05] But also, I think anyone who has appetite for political content, And this is definitely a study case of how can you dismount a democracy step by step and the disastrous consequences that come with it. Venezuela went from being a functional democracy, even though there was inequality, there were problems, whatnot, but it was a functional democracy in the 1990s to being a failed state in the 2020s. So in the span of 20 years, the state fully crumbled, the economy fully crumbled. So it is a lot faster than you realize. It can happen very quickly. And I think nobody who has not lived through a similar process can grasp how fast things can go down. I mean, once you enter a constitutional crisis, it is very, very quick to start, you know, making exceptions here and there. Due process no longer matters. Why do we have to follow the Constitution in order to legislate?

[27:15] How about we appoint the, I don’t know, lawmakers instead of having elections? And, you know, it’s this edifice of checks and balances that once you take them out, they look more, they resemble more a feudal or a monarchy system than a democracy. And it can happen, I mean, in my lifespan. I’m not even 40s.

[27:43] Are you working on anything new? Is there anything new coming up or is this pretty much it for now, this book? Well, that one took me five years to create. So actually, I do have another one and that one’s going to be very different. It’s kind of 50% there, but those are travel stories. It’s like humorous, nothing to do with political content. So that one’s going to be purely entertainment. and Instagram to short stories type of content.

[28:16] Okay, Amanda, I really appreciate you joining us today. And again, the book is called We Said Farewell and it’s available at the usual online bookseller. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Doug. Have a nice day. Thank you for listening to this episode. You can check out more information, including links to sources used in our show notes on our website at secularleft.us. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Send us your comments, either using the contact form on the website or by sending us a note at comments at secularleft.us. Our theme music is Dank and Nasty, composed using Amplify Studio.

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