Venezuela is in free fall, fast becoming an international pariah. Resistance to a socialistic dictatorship is in the hands of the T-shirt soldiers, teenagers and young adults, many of them from what once was the country’s middle class, Maria Alba Toledo writes.
“Bubble” is a 23-year-old journalism student who set aside his studies for a “greater good.” Raised in a leftist household, he grew tired of watching poverty take over everything, including his own home.
Bubble and some 20 other resistance members call the place where they are entrenched “Mangokistan.” Los Mangos—a residential area in the port city of Guayana, in Bolívar State, in the eastern part of the country—has become a place of perpetual war.
“I left my home because my parents support the government, when sometimes we didn’t have enough to buy groceries,” Bubble tells me. “Now I live in the different places of those who back us. The truth is that we are doing this because we are tired of seeing people starving and dying of the lack of medicine. Living under these conditions is feeling helpless, like we have no future. We do not follow opposition leaders, we are not politicians. We are willing to do this even if it costs us our lives. Until Venezuela is free.”
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