Born into a prosperous middle-class Venezuelan family, Diego felt he had no choice but to flee his homeland. Credit:Tim Bauer Diego has big brown eyes and a broad smile. He speaks fluent, though heavily accented English, and moves with the unhurried air of a man for whom hurrying has never reaped any discernible benefit. I first got to know him in the late 1990s, through my wife, when he was working here as a translator and Spanish teacher. Back then, he had a mane of dreadlocks and about 15 kilos less body mass. He's bald now, slightly stooped and looks decidedly more worried. The decision to quit Venezuela for good, he says, was relatively easy. "I had to make a life for Miguel, give him the opportunities I had." Thousands of professionals and wealthy families had already fled the country, but for ordinary people like Diego it was considerably harder. Thanks to Venezuela's hyperinflation (700 per cent this year), airlines only accept payment in American dollars, which, like everything else in the country, are rationed by the government. The only way of getting access to extra dollars is to be well connected, which Diego wasn't. The solution, then, was for my wife and I to buy Diego and his son their tickets to Australia. They arrived with little more than a change of clothes and Diego's university degrees. Another old friend collected them from the airport and put them up in her house. My wife and I caught up with them days later, in an Indian restaurant. Diego choked up when he saw us. Miguel, meanwhile, took photos of the plates of steaming rice and meat as they arrived at our table. "He's never seen this amount of food in one place," Diego said. Unless you've been to Venezuela, he continued, it's impossible to comprehend. He promised to tell me all about it: "But believe me, some of the things I will tell you, you will not believe." Anti-government demonstrators at a candlelight vigil last month in honour of those who have been killed during clashes between security forces and demonstrators in Venezuela's capital, Caracas. At least 125 people have died in street protests in the past four months. Credit:AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos

The third of five children, Diego was born into a prosperous middle-class family in Caracas. His father, Lorenzo, owned coffee and avocado farms. His mother, Luisa, looked after the home. When Diego was 16, Lorenzo sent him to England and then France to study. "I wanted to learn languages," Diego says. From there he roamed Europe working as a fruit picker and kitchen hand. In the late 1980s he found his way to Sydney, where he met and began living with the woman who is now my wife. Diego visited Venezuela throughout the 1990s to see his family. "I had sisters there, and I missed my parents." The country was by and large safe, the economy stable. One could walk the streets, buy things, get jobs. "You could be happy," Diego says. By the late 1990s, however, Venezuela's star had waned, with growing inequality enabling the rise of a charismatic former army officer called Hugo Chavez. After winning the 1998 elections, Chavez implemented an uncompromising socialist agenda, handing factories over to their workers, nationalising key industries and establishing health, housing and literacy programs. "He used Venezuela's oil sales to fund this vast social welfare experiment," says Carlos Eduardo Morreo, a researcher at the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University, who worked for the Venezuelan Ministry of the Environment in 2008 and 2009. "People were grateful for that, but it was all dangerously dependent on the oil price." In 2002, Lorenzo had a stroke. Diego returned to Venezuela to help care for him, moving into the family home, "a big house," as he calls it, "with a gate and patio". His mother and two sisters also lived there, along with 13 tortoises, a garrulous parrot, and a German shepherd guard dog named Sasha. Leaving Sydney had not been easy, but as the only son, his duty to family was implicit and unquestioned. "That's just the way it is in a Catholic society." Diego's family was initially impressed by Chavez's stand against corruption. By the early 2000s, however, the president's policies had become increasingly radical. He launched a controversial strategy of land expropriations, "recovering" millions of hectares of farmland, Lorenzo's included, and "re-distributing" them, often to government supporters, or Chavistas, who had little idea how to run them. "The army would just come in and confiscate them," Diego recalls. "You couldn't do anything about it." His family's other farms were sabotaged, their irrigation pipes torn up or their sheds burned down, in an attempt to make life so hard for Lorenzo that he would walk away.

The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez used the nation’s oil wealth to fund his socialist dream, which began to unravel when global prices tanked in 2014. Credit:Getty Images Nobody wants to treat old people in hospitals … They have no medicine anyway. The doctors said the best thing we could give my mother was egg white mixed with sugar, and spoon that into her mouth. Before long, Diego met a woman named Lydia, with whom he had Miguel in 2005. Lydia lived in Coro, a colonial city 10 hours' drive west of Caracas. Diego went to live there, moving into Lydia's parents' place, a cramped three-bedroom house in the suburbs. He enrolled in a three-month hospitality course, part of the government's Vuelvan Caras (About Face) program aimed at providing hands-on skills to those with little formal training. He soon discovered few of the students seemed interested in hospitality, or anything else for that matter. "They had only enrolled because the government paid them to study." The payment amounted to $US10 a month – the cost of perhaps four or five standard items in the supermarket. To get the money, the students had to attend pro-Chavez rallies. "Every classroom had a supervisor, and there were special buses; every time you got on the bus to go to a march, the supervisor would tick your name off a list." Chavez described his government as "21st-century socialism". In fact, it was modelled largely on Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution, complete with a cult of personality. Chavez instituted a weekly talk-back television show called Aló Presidente, which broadcast live from 11am on a Sunday for as long as Chavez felt like talking – sometimes six or eight hours. During these, he addressed callers' queries in a fatherly tone, occasionally singing, sometimes reciting poems, invariably attacking the US, which he blamed for everything. ("At first when I saw it, I thought it was a comedy show with an impersonator," Diego says.)

At the same time, Chavez set about consolidating power: he stifled dissent, arrested political opponents, and drafted a new constitution that gave him unprecedented executive control. There were elections, in 2000 and 2006, but many Venezuelans regarded the results as largely predetermined. "I voted once, in 2006, but when I gave my ID card they told me I'd already voted," Diego says. "Even people who had been dead for years appeared as though they had voted." After graduating from the hospitality course in 2006, Diego got a job as night clerk at Coro's Santa Ana Hotel. He earned 840,000 bolivars a month, enough for two weeks of groceries for a couple. On the weekend, he and Lydia would take Miguel to the nearby port or the mountains around town. "I liked living there," he says. "It's a nice city, with lots of beautiful old buildings." The Santa Ana was the most expensive hotel in Coro; it was close to the colonial district and attracted, for the most part, an upscale clientele. But within six months of starting there, Diego began noticing an increasing number of visits from high-ranking government officials, mostly on Friday and Saturday nights. "We had more and more problems with them," he says. "They'd just come in and I'd have to do whatever they asked. They'd get rooms, have drinks, meals, then leave without paying." Security was also deteriorating. Travelling back and forth to Caracas to see his family, Diego's bus was routinely stopped on the highway and its passengers robbed, usually by off-duty soldiers. Diego began folding his bolivar bills into origami-like squares, and hiding them in a special belt. "But I always left some money in my pockets for them to take," he says. The cities were no better. One afternoon, while standing in line at the Banco Occidental in Coro, Diego heard gunshots. Turning around, he saw a businessman, dead on the steps outside. "He'd been carrying a box of bolivars out of the bank when he was robbed." He adds: "I realised then that things were starting to get out of control."

When Diego and Lydia got together, he had money and a job. "I was feeding everyone in her family," he says, "including her bloody father." Still, Lydia complained that he wasn't earning enough. Diego soon began to feel he was being taken advantage of. They fought bitterly and, in 2009, agreed to separate. Diego then returned to Caracas, where he moved in once more with his parents and sisters. Miguel stayed mostly with his mother, in Coro. Thanks largely to his English skills, Diego got a job editing the international pages at The Daily Journal, a small, English-language newspaper aimed mainly at expats. He had his own office and a secretary. "It was great," he says. "The only problem was the pay." To make ends meet, he taught English in the evenings at two government military colleges, UNEFA (Universidad Nacional Experimental de la Fuerza Armada) and UMIT (Instituto Militar Universitario de Tecnologia), both of which were Chavista strongholds. UMIT students were conscientious, but those at UNEFA were more or less guaranteed a degree. "If I failed people I'd be called in and told to pass them." His pay was often delayed by months. If he complained, he was told that "real revolutionaries are patient". The newspaper, meanwhile, was coming under increased government scrutiny. A group of censors moved into the paper's office, vetting journalists' copy. Chavez had by now taken over not only the country's farmland but its food-distribution channels; he also nationalised several supermarket chains. In short order, Venezuela became a nation of queues. "You'd wait for five, eight hours," Diego says. "Even then, you wouldn't know what product would be available. One day it might be bread, the next it could be shampoo." People slept outside shops; they brought bottles of water and pillows. The queues became so long that people began paying other people to wait for them. "Then people started taking pictures of the queues, which was bad publicity," Diego says. "So the government changed the system so that only one representative of your neighbourhood could go to the supermarket. If there was food there they would tell you, and you went and picked it up." Diego saw Miguel on holidays and weekends. They kicked a soccer ball around or played marbles on the patio. Going out was risky, even in broad daylight: they sometimes witnessed kidnappings and carjackings: "I just told Miguel they were filming a movie." Sometimes they ventured out to the beach, or to McDonald's where the playgrounds were enclosed or, when it seemed safe, to the top of El Ávila, the heavily forested mountain above Caracas.

"It's a magical place," Diego adds. "Miguel loved looking down on the buildings from so high up. From up there Caracas looked like a normal, peaceful city." One afternoon in 2011, Diego heard a knock at the door. Normally visitors were required to telephone ahead, "otherwise you just wouldn't answer it. This day, however, I stupidly opened the door." It was a small group of officials from INTI, the land distribution bureau. They had tape measures and clipboards. They recorded the dimensions of the property and asked how many people lived in the house. They were clearly disapproving. "They didn't directly tell us to get out, but they insinuated that the space was too much for us and that they might need it." The officials left, but other families were not so lucky. Stories abounded of whole households being evicted, in the dead of night, by pro-government groups. "You go to bed and when you wake up there's a different family in the flat next door." Unfinished apartments and empty homes also became fair game. According to Chavez, whatever the ruling class owned had been stolen from the workers, who were justified then in taking it back. Thus Chavismo became, in the words of another exile I talk to, not a revolution but a "robolution". To guard against this, Diego built a gatehouse at the family home. By 2012, he was sleeping there every night, together with an axe, a couple of knives, his guard dog, Sasha, and a bazooka-like gun that a friend fashioned for him out of plumbing pipes and "bits from motorbikes". Diego hid the knives in different corners, then practised finding them in the dark. In late 2011, his father Lorenzo suffered a series of minor strokes, and was told he needed a brain scan. Diego set off around Caracas, searching for an MRI machine, to no avail. Medication was equally elusive. "You'd find gold before you'd find an aspirin." Once a pillar of the revolution, Venezuela's health system had largely disintegrated. Many senior doctors had left for overseas; most who remained were trainees from Cuba. (In the 2000s, Castro sent thousands of doctors to Venezuela in exchange for discounted oil.)

Lorenzo needed to be admitted to hospital but was repeatedly turned away. "Nobody wants to treat old people because they don't have the equipment to keep them alive," Diego says. In the end, Diego came across one of his former English students working in the emergency department of a public hospital in the city's north. They managed to get Lorenzo admitted, but he died days later. When Diego went to collect him, he found the hospital morgue in disarray. "It was filthy and smelled," he says, pausing. "The bodies were piled up, one upon the other, the Hitler way." Anti-government demonstrators protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas last month. Credit:AP Some of the things Diego tells me seem hard to believe – his comment about the morgue, for instance. Then there's his assertion that corrupt doctors would sell corpses to practitioners of santería, a type of voodoo. This seemed ludicrous, until I came across a raft of stories, including from The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, about Venezuela's thriving black market in human bones. In one month alone, according to reports, inspectors at the Cementerio del Sur in Caracas found 475 coffins had been looted. Skulls were a popular target, apparently. "This is why most people choose to cremate their loved ones," Diego explains. In 2013, Chavez died of colon cancer at the age of 58. (Government officials claimed the US had poisoned him.) A date was set for fresh elections, with Chavez's chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro, campaigning against Henrique Capriles, a 40-year-old former tax lawyer and state governor. The state-owned media had previously attacked Capriles, who is of Jewish descent, suggesting that he was homosexual and a Zionist. Maduro, meanwhile, told voters that he had been visited by Hugo Chavez's spirit in the form of "very small bird". At one stage, he called down a centuries-old Indian curse on anybody who voted for Capriles. Diego found the spectacle depressing. "I was hoping that the whole rigged poll would go wrong and the opposition win."

It didn't go wrong, at least not for Maduro, who won, albeit narrowly. Diego's newspaper had, by this time, gone out of business, leaving him high and dry. He'd also lost his job at UNEFA, the military college, after he complained too loudly about not getting paid. He then complained at UMIT, the other military college he taught at, where he was also owed money. He wasn't holding out much hope, but when he raised the issue, the head of the college, a colonel, summoned him to a private meeting in his office. The colonel told Diego he was pleased with his work and acknowledged that he hadn't been paid. He then explained that the government gave him a sum of money each month, to spend at his discretion. "He said that his superiors thought he was a Chavista, but secretly he wasn't, and he knew I wasn't, either." The colonel handed Diego a bag of cash, the equivalent to all his back pay – three semesters' worth. It was the first bit of luck Diego had had for years. As it happened, it would soon change his life, and that of his son. In 2014, Diego's mother, Luisa, was diagnosed with heart problems. ("Too much fried bananas, fried fish, fried arepas," Diego says.) She had an operation, but the surgeon punctured her lung, something Diego regarded as less a mishap than an inevitability. "Having surgery there can be a death sentence," he says. "But what do you do?" He found another job, as an assistant and interpreter for a company that managed the port at La Guaira, north of Caracas. This, together with income from his sisters, both of whom worked in the city education department, kept the family afloat. He kept visiting Miguel when he could; at other times, he practised kickboxing, to blow off steam, or got together with friends to drink guarapita, a type of fruit rum, and listen to Led Zeppelin. Then, in mid 2014, the global oil price plummeted, from about $US110 a barrel to below $US50 a barrel. For Venezuela, which depends almost entirely on oil revenue, this was the worst possible development. Food queues worsened, sparking mass protests. Some demonstrators were detained for days by SEBIN, the secret police: according to Human Rights Watch, some were kicked in the testicles, tortured with electric shocks and threatened with rape. The government charged opposition leader Leopoldo López with inciting the violence, and sentenced him to nine years in jail. The crisis went into hyperdrive. People started hunting cats and dogs for food. Animals in Caracas zoo starved to death. When a drought exacerbated the already meagre power supply, which is largely hydroelectric, Maduro suggested women stop using hairdryers. ("I always thought a woman looks prettier when she combs her hair with her fingers and lets her hair dry naturally," Maduro said.)

In 2016, inflation topped 800 per cent; The Wall Street Journal reported that the government, unable to print enough money to keep up with prices, had flown in jumbo jets packed with billions of bolivar bank notes that had been printed overseas. Diego didn't go to the protests, focusing instead on keeping his job at the port and caring for his mum, who had never fully recovered from her botched operation. In 2016, she suffered a stroke and went downhill. Diego couldn't get her admitted to hospital. "They had no medicine anyway," he says. "The doctors said the best thing we could give her was egg white mixed with sugar, and spoon that into her mouth." Luisa died at home on October 31, 2016. Her death was a defining moment for Diego in more ways than one. His parents were the reason he had returned to Venezuela in the first place. Now they were gone, he felt he could leave. "I had to make a better life for Miguel," he says. Diego explained to Miguel's mother, Lydia, that he wanted to take their son to Australia, a proposal she initially opposed, before relenting. "She knew it would be good for Miguel," Diego says. "And anyway, she had met another man, and he wanted a family with her. Miguel didn't fit into that." Diego set about organising the paperwork: Miguel's Australian passport; the permission from Lydia; securing the tickets. "I also had to get a police clearance, to make sure I wasn't wanted for anything." (Police clearance is obligatory for every Venezuelan leaving the country.) "But the police kept putting me off, and so I never got it." By February this year, Diego had the tickets, but without the police certificate he wouldn't be allowed on the plane. With two days left before his flight, he organised a meeting with airport officials. He put together a garbage bag full of cash – the money from the colonel at UMIT, his savings from the past 10 years and some cash his parents had left him. ("I couldn't take it with me anyway; it's worthless.")

That night, he met the officials in a small room in the airport's basement. He explained that he didn't have the police clearance but that he needed to leave for an operation. He said he wasn't against the revolution, that he had taken part in all the Chavista rallies, that he had even worked for the government, teaching at UMIT. "But they couldn't have cared less about that," he says. "They were just watching the garbage bag, just staring at the bag. So I put it in the middle of the table. They opened it up, looked inside and said, 'Todo esta bien.' " It's all good. Diego and Miguel flew out the next day. Lydia came to the airport but showed little emotion. Diego heard later that once the departure doors closed, she burst into tears. The flight was long: Caracas-Miami; Miami-LA; LA-Auckland; Auckland-Sydney. Diego didn't mind. He was out. At every stop, Miguel went around the cafes, taking photos on his mobile phone of the ham and cheese croissants and chocolate muffins. Diego and Miguel are living in Sydney's inner west, house-minding for an old friend. He works odd jobs: cleaning, child minding, car washing; he's already saved $4000. Miguel, who is now 12, goes to school and plays soccer in a local team. "Miguel is over the moon to be here," Diego says. "The only thing he mentions is that he would like to see his old school friends." Diego's sisters remain in Caracas. They email frequently, calling him hermanito, little brother, and sending him muchos besos – lots of kisses. Diego is investigating how he might bring them to Sydney. One sister is particularly keen to escape; she was thinking about slipping over the border to Colombia, but that is heavily guarded by the army, so she's now looking at walking through the jungle, to Peru.

"We are trying to plan it," Diego says. "I tell her that Peru isn't the best place to go to, but right now, anywhere is better than Venezuela." *Diego Hernandez's name and that of his family members have been changed.