I was five when a mob invaded our family farm. I remember my mother taking me by the hand to the back gate, where a footpath led into the hills. “We’re going to play a game,” she told me. “If we have to come this way again, we need to do it without making a sound.”

In the end, my father and a security guard fired shots into the air, and the crowd broke up. But not everyone was so lucky.

Farms were occupied all over the country. Mines and fishing boats were seized without compensation. The currency collapsed, investors fled and the middle class emigrated – to Venezuela in many cases, then the wealthiest country in the region.