Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

I lived in Venezuela for two years as a teenager. My dad was part of an international team offering training across South America on sustainable land and water resource development with a focus on agriculture. This program was created by the Organization of American States. Maybe you don’t know that organization, but it is among the oldest regional multi-national organizations in the world, first conceived of 1889 at an international conference in Washington DC. It still exists today with 35 members across North, Central and South America. OAS members include the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. Its purpose:  to achieve “an order of peace and justice, to promote their solidarity, to strengthen their collaboration, and to defend their sovereignty, their territorial integrity, and their independence.”

Its headquarters is in Washington D.C.

I had many firsts in Merida, Venezuela, a university town high in the Andes mountains where we lived. A boy first kissed me. I heard The Doors music for the first time. I heard and learned to dance to the fabulous rhythms of cumbia music. I learned Spanish. I fell in love with a musical ballad “Caminando Por Caracas” (“Walking in Caracas”) performed by an Argentian singer, Piero. I remember feeling like he did walking down that city’s wonderful Sabana Grande: “Ya lo siento mio.” (I already feel it’s mine.) I had that record and I played that song over and over and over again. I cried when we left Venezuela. It will always have a piece of my heart.

When I lived there in the late ’60s, Venezuela was a democracy, had recently experienced its first change of government through peaceful means and was thriving. A middle class was developing. The people were generous and friendly. All the deepest feelings of newly minted teenagers infused me there. I can’t separate the way I feel about Venezuela with the way I learned to inhabit my changing body and psyche.

The degradation of that breath-takingly beautiful country, the fleeing of millions of people who simply wanted a decent life, has been heartbreaking for many years. I want a better future for this country that helped make me who I am.

I am shocked by the US intervention and abduction of Venezuela’s leader. This isn’t an endorsement of Maduro at all. But if national boundaries can be breached at any time by strongmen with willing generals, I feel we are on the edge of an abyss. Will the U.S., Russia and China now simply carve up the rest of the world with an eye on resource value and extraction?

Regardless of how anyone might feel about the current American president, what does it tell the other countries who are part of the Organization of American States? What does it tell the world? Does the U.S. not respect its commitments to recognize territorial boundaries? Who are we if we break our word?

I don’t see these as political questions. I see them as moral ones.