Of Diapers and Dictators in Venezuela

“Welcome to the Maiquetia Simón Bolívar International Airport,” said the stewardess with a metallic voice as our plane touched down on Venezuelan soil. The excitement of a family reunion and anguish over the situation in the country shook me out of a brief sleep after eight hours flying from Paris. I was coming back to my country after three years of absence, in the company of my almost-2-year-old daughter and her father. The two most important people in my life were going to depend on me for 15 days traveling in Venezuela, a place increasingly unknown to me and radically distinct from the country I abandoned a dozen years ago when I moved to France.

For the first time our daughter would meet her grandmother who, because of the price of air tickets (about $3,000), had been unable to come see our baby when she was born. This was also the first visit to my homeland by my husband, who was interested to discover this country made famous by the iconoclasm and logorrhea of the late Hugo Chávez.

We’d been preparing for the trip for weeks, and every day I’d gotten WhatsApp warnings from friends and family: “Bring medicines for fever because you can’t get them here”; “Do not forget extra diapers because there aren’t any”; “Why not come another time? Things are very difficult”; “Find some mosquito repellent because there’s Zika, dengue, and chikungunya all over the country”; “I do not want to scare you, but bring milk for the baby and be discreet about the journey, don’t publish anything on social networks because it’s dangerous.”