Carolina Mistral: ‘Everyone in Venezuela knows violence is bad’

“But what is happening in your country?” This is one of the questions they most often ask when they discover that Carolina Mistral is Venezuelan. “From the outside, it appears to be a divided, polarized country. They only talk about sectors. Television is very fond of concise data and uses the simplest data in the stories it produces. There is talk of confrontations, social confrontations, two halves… This is a very crude simplification of the situation, because in this narrative there are more complex data and countless factors that exert force in one direction or the other, which are excluded.

It goes without saying that Carolina possesses and defends a critical mindset towards social movements. “In Latin America, we are very political,” he insists. “I cannot be indifferent to the way the situation in my country is handled and reported to the world. If you are Venezuelan and turn on the TV, what you see may or may not suit you, depending on where you are from. For me, coming from humble origins and growing up in a neighborhood in Caracas, nothing suited me,” he adds. His skepticism is similar to what many people experience when they tell them they are from Venezuela.

“I have dark skin, I have braids in my hair, I am of African descent… The first thing that anyone thinks when they see me is that I am Dominican or Cuban. And that makes sense, because I am Caribbean. What happens is that in the collective imagination, Venezuelan women are something else. Before the Bolivarian Revolution, my country was the home of soap operas, of ‘Missouri’ and plastic surgery. Now everything is about experts analyzing macroeconomic data and political decisions,” he concluded sarcastically.

“The problem is that no one tells you the difference between ideological positions and practical proposals. Ideology is one thing and what you want in your daily life is another. What’s more important is what you don’t want in your daily life. People don’t want violence. We don’t have experience of this in our country, but everyone knows it’s not good. Colombia is a classic example… Who wants something like this? No one. This goes beyond ideology. It’s about fear, coexistence. Even more so if the scene is limited to one community.

Before coming to the Basque Country in 2001, Carolina lived in Petare, one of the most populous neighborhoods in Caracas. He grew up in a humble working-class family, in an environment of simple houses built against the hills, with streets and alleys of different shapes, crowded and overlapping. “Yes, it was a very poor environment, but there were a lot of social and educational activities. There were adult courses and enough space for social activities. When Chavez came to power, the supporters’ clubs were boiling. It meant a little hope. After forty years, at least there was an option,” she recalls, when she was twenty and felt she could take on the world.

“I hold grudges.”

In this context, he made Basque friends there. “There is a lot of international volunteering. Every year different people come here and they are all from here. That’s why, when one day they invited me to get to know them and have an experience, I was excited and decided to travel. I didn’t leave my country with the idea of ​​never coming back and not feeling uneasy about it. I left more because of the restlessness of youth. Therefore, I didn’t mean to stay either. Even now I don’t think about settling down forever. I just live day by day, I appreciate the good things and try to improve the things I don’t like. “I hold grudges,” she emphasizes.

He explains that while cultural integration is good, the working environment is the most complex for foreigners. «When you arrive, at first, any job is good, because you think it is temporary. You tell yourself that opportunities will come. But that doesn’t happen. There aren’t many opportunities for immigrants. You have to be very good, very lucky, or both, to be able to devote yourself to your profession. », says the woman who takes care of an elderly person in Victoria. At the same time, Carolina is also very critical of the foreigners themselves, because she understands that their social participation should be stronger. «There is almost no civic participation on the part of immigrants. It’s strange because many times you hear phrases like “How beautiful the Bascardi is”, “How well everything is going”, but when there are demonstrations against cuts, they don’t go. «Most people don’t stand up to defend what they value and what the people here have achieved with great sacrifice.»