It was the day before the violence started – the violence that would later be known as guarimbas, where rightwing street blockades saw 43 people killed and hundreds injured over a period of three months. It was 13 February 2014, and I was down the road from my home in Merida, taking photos of young men in balaclavas stopping buses at gunpoint. Three of them came up to me, and each put a gun to my head and said they would kill me if I didn’t give them my camera. The next day, two other journalists in Merida received gunshot injuries at that intersection.
The violence was part of the chapter that followed the death of President Hugo Chávez in March 2013. Chávez had been in power since 1999 and had utterly transformed the country, using oil revenues to pursue what he called the Bolivarian Revolution (after Latin America’s 19th-century liberator, Simón Bolívar) – taking state control of the oil, electricity and telecommunications industries and pursuing pro-poor policies, including key healthcare and literacy initiatives. Despite a rightwing coup attempt in 2002, Chávez maintained his electoral dominance right through to his death from cancer.
