luiskcaballero

[luiskcaballero]

Progressive politician: there is now such a thing as a Venezuelan constituency. You may want to listen to it.

Dear Congresswoman,

My name is Luis Caballero and I am a Venezuelan-born Seattle resident. Much like your parents, I moved to America looking to find better opportunities in your country and aspiring to build a better home for my American-born children. Knowing your background I have reacted with dismay to the letter you, and other congressmen, sent to Secretary Pompeo regarding the situation in Venezuela.

I hope I don’t have to remind you of how dire the current situation is. Scarcity of food and medicine is so widespread that my family lives off of boxes we send them every few months from the US. Looming are diseases, such as malaria , which had been eradicated years ago are now at the levels of war-ravaged nations. Thousands of hospital patients (my late father was a dialysis patient at some point) die waiting for supplies or as victims of power shortages like the one going on as we speak. And, as a result, over 3 million people ( which is over 10% of the population, equivalent to 30 million Americans) have had not choice but to flee and create the largest migrant humanitarian crisis in the history of the Americas.

I understand how you address the gravity of the situation in your letter and go as far as to condemn the Maduro regime. But to point out a crisis, criticize the current strategy and offer no assertive solution does nothing but accentuate the problem. And, in pushing for a toothless proposal of dialogue and a reversal of sanctions, the letter becomes effectively ignorant. And I don’t say ignorant in an effort to insult anyone. It is ignorant because it ignores reality. It ignores ...

That Venezuelan people have virtually no institution that would allow it to influence the course of events or “ work through the process of figuring out who their leader is”. Courts, media outlets, electoral authorities and military branches are all subjected to orders of the regime.

That the last credible democratically elected branch of government, the National Assembly, was torpedoed by the courts, crippled by the imprisonment of its leaders and bypassed by the creation of a parallel parliament.

That the courage of interim president Juan Guaido has been the only glimmer of hope, in an otherwise doomed country which just 3 months ago had no feasible path to a democratic transition. Instead of praise his efforts to reverse the tragedy, you have chosen to call his recognition "premature" and play into the rhetoric of the Maduro regime.

That the current diplomatic initiative is not Trump-led but Guaido-led, and that it includes a coalition of over 50 democracies calling for regime change. These are democracies from across the political spectrum, and which range from most of Latin American countries to most of the EU and Canada. It's a group of countries which, after years of engagement, understood that the humanitarian crisis is real and urgent, and that Maduro is not interested in any negotiation that doesn't ensure he remains in power at all cost.

That every "dialogue" process put forth over the last 4 years has done nothing but to buy time for the regime to allow it  to exercise more oppression and solidify its grip on power.

That the so called "other countries" promoting dialogue are the same small group of leftist Latin American leaders that are traditional Hugo Chavez sympathizers whose only agenda is to protect Maduro.

As a Venezuelan immigrant I am concerned about what i see as misinformed and dangerous positions. But I am most concerned about where they are coming from. I would have expected congressmen like you, Ocasio Cortez or Omar to be the voice of empathy for the suffering of people around the world. To understand the power and the role America has in helping those in need wherever they might be. And to push for a vision of American that says loudly that unbounded suffering at the hands of oppressive dictatorships will not be tolerated. Instead, in what it seems like an obsession with opposing Trump at all costs, your positions help the oppressive Maduro regime and create a political setback to a truly multi-lateral effort to drive meaningful change.

But as a father of an American citizen, I am just as concerned. It's becoming increasingly clear that American foreign policy is trapped between Trump’s reckless isolationism and a democratic party view of the world that seems more and more passive and that only believes in dangerous open-ended diplomacy with no clear goals or doctrine.

I know a lot of your supporters are with you on this. But I would hope this letter helps you understand the point of view of a small (but growing) part of your constituency that is actually affected by this tragedy. For us this is real, and not a line item in a political plan or an intellectual exercise in foreign policy theories. My ask is that you reflect, become educated and make the best decision you can. And if what you need is a first-hand account, we are here to help.

With respect,

Luis Caballero

[luiskcaballero]

Of course your vote matters. Here is why it matters to me!

I debated a lot about whether I should write anything about this election or not. That’s mainly because I thought that the amount of folks I’d actually be able to convince is small and highly concentrated (and they know who they are) to really make a difference. Or maybe because I probably failed last time. But in democracy every vote counts and that is especially true in two places that are both relevant to this election and hold large real state in my heart.

In 2016 Pennsylvania and Florida went for Trump. Without them he would have lost. God has a sense of irony in my story as those are certainly the two places where I became convinced I wanted to live in this country. The result broke my heart at the time and maybe tomorrow the same thing will happen although there is a smaller chance. Precisely because my friends in those states are people I know and love I try to go out of my way to show empathy for why they vote the way they vote. And in doing so I realize there is one fairly relevant difference between 2016 and now: back then we were dealing in abstracts while today we are talking about realities and credible projections about what happens in a Trump-led world.

And that is what convinced me to write this. Today I don’t appeal to republican friends out of a sense of fear of an abstract idea of what might happen based on my experience with authoritarianism. I certainly could. I could talk to you about how I think Trump is hurting America’s standing in the world (including my own country) and empowering China elsewhere, endangering the earth’s ecosystem or threatening the institutions that make American great. But I know there might be debate on all of those things and we might never agree.

Instead I appeal to them in the hopes they empathize with a friend they know and love (that would be me :) ) in his family’s specific situation. At least for me it’s not about abstracts anymore, it’s about the family I wanted to build in this country and my chances of doing so. It would be hard for anyone to make the argument that I have a lower chance to build a happy family in the United States if Trump has less power at this time tomorrow than in all alternative scenario. And I hope you also empathize enough to understand that I am afraid for the future of my first-born son (due in march)  who I was proud to expect to become an American citizen and who might not get that chance to. I think Trump lovers might agree that he does what he says he will do right?. So my only ask is that you no-longer think about your vote as a reaction to the world you see in the news, as a fearful act based triggered by campaign strategies and or as a frustrated reaction to the dire state that your country is in. But that you also consider how it will directly impact the ones you love… again by that I mean me :).

One more thing.... We are still in a democracy and I am happy we still get a chance to vote. I cherish the opportunity to do that soon enough (Trump-willing). And we should defend the institutions that protect that democracy if for no other reason that tomorrow Florida and Pennsylvania get another chance at correcting course.

Your friend,

Luis

[luiskcaballero]

My final thoughts on this god-forsaken presidential race – and why I’m scared

I’ll get one thing out of the way. The main goal of this write up is to convince my friends who plan to vote for Trump to schedule T-time or a spa this Tuesday (on me!). It will come as no surprise that I am very anti-Trump, and because I live in a safely blue state and can’t vote, this is really one of the few meaningful things I can do to influence the outcome of a pretty historic election.

I care about this because I live here and plan to live here for a number of years, and because I genuinely love this country. I grew up in Venezuela and was deeply influenced by American culture, obsessed with MTV, fan of major league baseball, watched Friends, ate in McDonalds and loved every time my parents brought me to Disneyworld. Then, when I was seventeen, I had the chance to spend a year living with an  amazing American family in rural Pennsylvania as an exchange student. That year was a turning point in my life for many reasons, and led me on a journey that would place me back living in America many years later. Through that year and as I grew up, I realized that my admiration for America was about admiring the passion for hard work and self-sufficiency, the appreciation for the rule of law, the deep-rooted sense of community and the faith in the country’s future and exceptionalism. It is precisely because of what I admire in American that I am terrified about a Trump presidency.

It’s really easy to write post that just says: I don’t get why someone who would vote for Trump. But that would be narrow-minded and contribute to the partisan divide that is really behind what is happening. That is why I spent a ton of time to really try to understand the phenomenon, rather than to dismiss it and reject it. I can now safely say that I get it. I get that the reality of rural America is dramatically different than that of the liberal urban coalition that has come to dominate the political landscape in recent years. I get that the average rural white worker is suffering just as much as the urban minorities, but gets significantly less attention and empathy from the rest of the country. I get that if you go to church, care about what you believe in your heart a marriage should be, or are concerned about what your children see in TV, the progress of what people in Seattle or Brooklyn call “progressivism” feels like a threat.  I get that it is hard to see trade and immigration as something positive and as the reason behind why you get cheap stuff at Walmart, when it is more real for you to see it as the root cause of jobs in your town going away and you not having the life your parents did. Above all, I get that it feels like two different countries, and that you need to pick the side that really reflects who you are and where your interests are, whether that means protecting the rights of the unborn, guaranteeing you can own the gun you want or safeguarding your family from the negative consequences of a more globalized World. Standing for that doesn’t make you a bigot, a racist or an intolerant, it makes you a citizen. I don’t agree with many of those positions, but I get it, I understand it, and I respect it.

One of the things I read that drove it home for me was from someone I met in PA a long time ago, someone I really respect, who wrote something along the lines of “these two candidates have proven to have no integrity, so go and vote for the one who defends the issues you care about.” That made sense at the moment and helped me understand that most reasonable conservatives are not really voting for Trump, they are voting for their issues and against Hillary Clinton. That said, the fundamental flaw of that position is the idea that integrity is a binary variable: either you have it or you don’t. And I don’t think that is true, there are levels of moral integrity. We have all had times in our lives where we’ve done things that are not consistent with our values, and to me there is a relevant question about who has the more integrity and how much evidence there is on that.

There is where I think it is really hard to defend a Trump vote. It is not the same to be insincere, than to be a pathological liar or a “bullshit artist”. It is not the same thing to be untrustworthy, than to be morally ambivalent and dangerously unpredictable. It is one thing to believe in abortion, and a whole other to be openly disrespectful and offensive to woman. It is one thing to allow influence peddling, and a different thing to be willing to defraud people and to disregard your responsibility to pay taxes. It is one thing to be careless about your emails, and a different thing to be a racist and to be willing to purposely introduce prejudice into your policies. One thing is to be a symbol of the political elite that you hate, and a much worse thing to show disregard for the institutions and the democratic principles that make America great.

Here is why I think that is important. I was 17 years old in 1999. In that same year Hugo Chavez came to power in Venezuela and I traveled to PA to spend a year in America. Chavez was the classic outsider, the non-politician in a world of un-trusted politicians. He disregarded political correctness, said things you never thought you would hear in a political campaign, scared everyone and won an election. He won precisely because he represented the disenfranchised, he understood that a large portion of the country was frustrated by facing years of a political system that they felt did not represent them. Many people, looked away at what his apparent values and intentions were because he was saying all of those things that felt needed to be said for years, and because he seemed to represent the issues he cared about. But in reality the issues did not define what Chavez meant to Venezuela and the world. His values did. He had no regard for democracy, an obsession with change for the sake of displaying power and an unwavering determination to squash any opposing voice. Through my entire adult life, I saw him gradually destroy my country, dismantling the democratic system because he felt he was above the institutions, bankrupting the economy because he had no respect for private property, suppressing individual freedoms and human rights because he never saw them as imperatives, and turning what was once a harmonious society into a country in permanent war between two sides. He called out the right problems but his solutions were driven by the wrong values.

When it comes to politicians, values matter more than words because those values will drive what they do after election day. If you do not believe in your heart that Donald Trump is driven by the right values, do not vote for him.

There are real conversations to have in this country. How do we reduce inequality, while continuing to grow the economy? How do we become safer, while protecting individual freedoms? How do we reduce the influence of money in the media and in our politics? But the conversations will only happen, and the issues will only be solved if there are institutions and principled leaders that will drive them. Without the right system, there will only be one view and that view will prevail. It seems foreign to you that the system that you have right now (a system that is praised across the world) will collapse. But believe me, with the wrong leader it can and it will.