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Great Translations: Terror in Caracas
A Review of: It Would be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo
Stephen King would be hard pressed to come up with a story more terrifying than this one because it’s based in reality. Our story begins with a young woman, an editor who works online, whose mother has just died. We follow her as she deals with the daily violence, chaos and societal disintegration that’s been going on in Venezuela since 1999.
The Setting: We’re in Caracas, Venezuela. The woman lives in an apartment in the heart of downtown so she has a bird’s eye view of the street demonstrations and daily violence.
I’ll start with some facts that aren’t in the book about recent events in Venezuela. We don’t hear much about the tragedy of what is going on in Venezuela because other world tragedies, like Ukraine, have pushed Venezuela off the front page or out of the media entirely.
Venezuela’s economy, society and government have largely disintegrated. This began under Chavez in 1999 and has continued under the current President/dictator Maduro.
People are starving: By 2017, a UN report said hunger had escalated to the point where almost 75% of the population had lost an average of over 19 pounds in weight. A UN report in 2019 estimated that 94% of Venezuelans lived in poverty.
