“Nieves, there’s been an earthquake in Venezuela.” This was how Gabriela, a Venezuelan friend of mine, interrupted our phone conversation when the news came in. She was in Berlin, and as a new mother she had not been sleeping much. Her tiredness quickly evaporated.
Within minutes, the Venezuelan diaspora groups in Colombia that I work with began to fill with messages of anguish and doubt. Thousands of kilometres away, in Madrid, Aleja woke up and read the first headlines on her phone. She thought it was just another tremor, which is not uncommon in Venezuela. But she soon grasped the scale of the tragedy.
