Drama in Venezuela

Hola a todos! I hope everybody is doing good dentro de lo que cabe.

I am not sure what I want to talk about specifically so I am going to go with my writing flow. In the Regulations lecture, Dr. A talks about the coup that there was in 2002. I have talked a lot with my sister about that coup in the last few weeks because, in a way, it resembles the situation we have right now. While the coup was going on, my sister was 12 years old and I was 3 and since the whole country was stopped, she had to have classes online for 2 months. Also, throughout the years as protests were on and off, my classes got postponed often and I wasn't allowed to leave my house. I guess that prepared me to be alone in my house right now. 

I think one of the biggest shockers that we have lived throughout the dictatorship is when they closed RCTV. I was little so I wasn't very aware of what was going on, but I remember seeing all my family sitting in front of the TV. RCTV was having a goodbye with all the famous people from the channel, all of a sudden the screen goes black at midnight, and the national anthem video starts playing on-screen, my sister and my mom started crying immediately. The national anthem video is something that Chavez used to play whenever he was going on a 'cadena nacional' which is when he stopped all the public media to talk for hours. 

Ever since then the government has slowly taken control of all the media. As years passed, they were fewer newspapers that were not controlled by the government. My dad used to buy all the newspapers every morning since I was a baby, he bought like 10 newspapers, and before I moved to the USA he was only buying 2. Now, he reads the news online or he watches daily news through youtube, the ironic thing is that some of those youtube reporters of the Venezuelan news are not even living in Venezuela. Some of them had to escape due to the government wanting to censor the news. Another issue is that the internet in Venezuela is extremely slow and they are currently having a lot of power shortages. In my city, the power goes out for 12+ hours on some days. This makes it extremely difficult to keep up with all the not censored news online. 

I remember when my nana was watching La Mujer Perfecta and La Viuda Joven, which according to the graphic in the lecture, it was when the telenovela industry in Venezuela was dying. I also remember when I was little, my religion professor used to say Telenovelas, Tele No Veas.  This follows the stereotype that Dr. A talks about a lot of how telenovelas are considered trashy. I was in a religious private school at the time and you couldn't watch telenovelas because they promoted sin. If I watched a telenovela with my mom, which I did often, I couldn't say anything to my friends because I was ashamed... as if they were illegal. This is the kind of message that Maduro was trying to share as he was killing the telenovelas industry. To be honest, considering that Venezuela is a religious country... I bet a lot of the people supporting him believed his message.

It is pretty sad that my love for telenovelas did not start until I was older and the industry was already dead... but I know that at some point in my life when we are out of this dictatorship, it is going to come to live again. 

P.S: If you are bored and want to try some Venezuelan food, here is the recipe of how to make arepas, they are extremely easy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvdLHU92glU