It Would Be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo
Fascism seems simple to sell to the populous. Witness its explosive expansion as it swept the world before WWII. Central and South America fell into that same drainpipe and the US teeters on the brink at this moment.
This timely novel is an eye opener.
It could happen anywhere.
EXCERPTS:
When the money to fund the fleet dried up, the state decided to compensate members with a little bonus. While they would receive a full revolutionary salary no longer, they would have a license to sack and raze with abandon. Nobody could touch them. Nobody could control them. Anyone with a death wish and an urge to kill could join their ranks, though in truth many acted in their name without any connection to the original organization.
They ended up forming small cooperatives, collecting tolls in different parts of the city. They erected tents and spent the day nearby, lounging on their bikes, from that vantage spying their prey before kicking the bikes into life and hunting them down at gunpoint.
I went down the seven floors on foot. A woman started weeping loudly upon arriving in the ER. Her father was the man with the gunshot wound that two nurses had pushed past me earlier. He had died before reaching the operating room. They cut us down like trees. They killed us like dogs.
Mountains of boxes, sticks, mattresses, and almost twenty government-logo-stamped boxes of food. The people who were given those packets had certain obligations: to show up without question at any event or demonstration in support of the Revolution; and to deliver simple services that went from denouncing neighbors to forming commands or groups in support of the Revolution.
What began as a privilege for civil servants spread as a form of propaganda and then of surveillance. Everyone who collaborated was guaranteed a box of food. It wasn’t much: a liter of palm oil, a packet of pasta, another packet of coffee. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they gave out sardines or Spam. But it was food, and hunger had a tight hold on us.
The sewage had risen far above our heads. It had buried us. Him, me, the rest. This was no longer a country. It was a septic tank.
I glanced around the room one last time. My mother and I were the last inhabitants of the world that fit inside these walls. Now both were dead: my mother, my home. My country, too.
If she wants to live, Adelaida must leave Venezuela, and her old self, behind
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