It Could Happen Here · Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

Talking to Venezuelans about Venezuela

March 31, 2026·54 min·4 clips

We've gotten so desperate that we've run directly into the hands of vultures because they're the only hands we've been given.

Venezuela becomes the lesson. The conversation asks what Venezuelan political organizing and day-to-day survival can teach a left that sometimes judges solidarity from a distance. One goal can still matter. One speaker describes left organizations in Venezuela working with centrist and right-leaning groups for a shared purpose without pretending the deeper fights went away. The host brings that back to the left in this country, arguing it could learn some coalition discipline without giving up its politics. Solidarity keeps coming back. The host sounds struck by how Venezuelans have gotten through hardship together instead of everyone simply grabbing what they can and leaving others behind. The conversation is careful about distance. The host says much of their experience comes through diaspora communities and migrants, not recent time in Caracas. That matters, and the episode says so. From that vantage point, they still see people used to getting basic necessities for and from one another. The word is mutual aid. The point is not that everyone involved is carrying anarchist theory around, but that the practice often does the work anyway. The critique is blunt in a dry way: outsiders should be impressed by this survival infrastructure instead of dismissing it. The guest reaches back to memories of the height of famine around 2013 and 2014, while noting they were not in Venezuela during another severe period in 2017. What comes through is less a clean slogan than people describing trust under pressure.

As heard by us

A grounded conversation about Venezuela, solidarity, and survival politics when institutions fail.

It Could Happen Here frames Venezuela less as an abstract ideological fight than as a crisis people have had to survive together. The conversation is strongest when it pushes against outside left shorthand: Venezuelans with deep political disagreements, the speakers argue, have…

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Why you'd press play

Neighbors swapping avocados for plantains during a famine turns out to be a lesson in solidarity.

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