“Crow” a painting by Kristen Haskell (used w permission)

Crows

In February of 2019, Juan Guaidó, president of the Venezuelan opposition, hatched a plan with U.S, Colombian, Brazilian and Chilean officials.

They would force humanitarian aid into Venezuela in a globally televised stunt that they believed at the time would lead to mass-mutiny among Venezuelan armed forces and collapse the Maduro government.

Thousands of journalists from around the globe descended upon Cucuta for the pageantry, an over-sized and shrieking flock of crows come to feast on carrion.

At the time, I was hopeful — though I considered it a stunt. “A fucking circus,” one Red Cross Worker told me at the time. Surely, Venezuelan forces wouldn’t shoot their own people trying to deliver food?

It turns out they would, and they did. The gambit failed miserably. Hundreds were wounded and the trucks were accidentally set ablaze by protesters on the Santander Bridge during the bloody melee (though no one would be sure of that for months).

By nightfall, Venezuelan militia, known as Colectivos, were responding with live bullets to protesters throwing rocks and fire-bombs.

After the attempt failed, the flock of crows flew back from whence they came, off to report on other stories in other corners of the world. I was the only foreigner yet again.

But the fighting wasn’t close to being over. Skirmishes continued all along the border. Venezuela closed the frontier, and Colectivos murdered anyone trying to cross illegally, assuming they were traitors from the protests over the weekend.

The Venezuelan wolves were on the hunt.

“They have an open license to kill,” one Colombian policeman told me at the time.

The next week was difficult. I saw someone shot for first time, and it wouldn’t be an isolated incident. It was only the first of a score that I witnessed as border skirmishes raged on.

Kids with rocks and molotov cocktails faced off against heavily armed Colectivos and Venezuelan National Guard. The result was predictable; lots of wounded and an unknown number of deaths.

I didn’t witness the worst of the violence — that was taking place in the smuggling paths known as “trochas”. Not only were the Colectivos shooting Venezuelans in the paths, Colombian paramilitaries and local gangs were shooting at the Venezuelan militia. It was a nightmare.

Refugees in the region stopped allowing me to take their pictures because they were worried about reprisals.

The blood kept flowing, but the world moved on. Some protesters in the States, spent a considerable amount of time defending a regime that I was watching murder people with my own eyes. This confused me.

Skirmishes Feb 25th on the Santander bridge in Cucuta (photo-collage: Joshua Collins)

I stayed on the border for another 6 months, writing about immigration, about smuggling, and about violence.

I interviewed a survivor of political prison in Caracas. She described sexual torture and serial beatings at the hands of guards and a justice system based more on bribery than due process.

I remember hearing a story about Colombian paramilitaries lobbing the decapitated heads of Colectivo leaders into Ureñas, a Venezuelan town just across the border.

I shrugged. As far as gruesome stories went, it wasn’t even close to the most shocking I had heard. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the border was changing me. I was becoming desensitized to horror.

I traveled north along the Venezuelan border to Maicao, where I was arrested and detained by Venezuelan intelligence, who threatened to charge me with espionage.

I managed to escape (that’s a story for another day) but that was the final straw. I was losing myself, taking too many risks. Being exposed to so much violence and so many stories of suffering had changed me for the worse.

I thought a lot about a Nietzche quote:

“He who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster himself. For when you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

I needed to escape the chaos. I was becoming a monster, not committing acts of atrocity, rather losing my humanity by being exposed to too many horrors. Violence, poverty, rape, hunger and criminality had all become normal aspects of my daily life. It was no longer shocking, simply details as inevitable as the weather.

I was constantly on edge, stressed out, cynical and taking too many risks. In the environment in which I lived, life was cheap, and my own didn’t seem like an exception.