Venezuelans like me are too busy celebrating to worry about why Trump deposed Maduro

Just like the deposed Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, I know what it’s like to leave Caracas against your will.

I was in my twenties, in my first professional job, when I decided to escape the ever-worsening poverty – abandoning my friends, family and the life I had been building in my home country – to start again halfway around the world, in London.

When Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, was elected with a landslide in 1999, I was working in the IT department of the state oil company PDVSA. It was there that I glimpsed for myself how Chavez’s leadership would be driven by corruption and how Venezuela would be pushed towards chaos and economic collapse.

At the time Chavez was sworn in, Venezuela was one of the world’s largest exporters of crude oil, producing around 3.5 million barrels a day. After a quarter of a century of siphoning off by corrupt officials, the country now produces less than a million barrels a day – despite holding five times more oil than the United States. More than three-quarters of that output is sent straight abroad as repayment for the bailouts that only just kept the economy afloat.

I never voted for Chavez. Yet, at the beginning, I believed he might bring positive change to the country. He presented himself as a “new broom” – a populist who would sweep away corrupt administrations. Instead, he became an anti-American authoritarian, recklessly printing money, fuelling rampant inflation and using the military to drag Venezuela towards dictatorship.

Almost overnight, the middle class disappeared. You were either part of the ruling elite – under Chavez and, later, Maduro, the rich became vastly richer – or one of the millions whose wages were rendered worthless by hyperinflation.

In Chavez’s first year alone, the price of food and medicine soared from thousands of bolivars to millions. Before long, Venezuelans were struggling simply to feed themselves. The Chavez solution was to establish food banks, hand out rice and call it benevolence.

Money lost value so fast that cash became almost useless. To survive, people had to barter for basic goods. Starvation became normalised. It was only when I travelled to Madrid and Paris that I, a young professional, fully grasped just how poor my country was becoming.

It pains me that, after decades of misrule under Chavez and his chosen successor, Maduro, my family and friends remain there, enduring unimaginable deprivation.

I also left because Venezuela is no place to be gay. It was deeply intolerant. In a city of 3 million people, there were just three gay bars – all unmarked on the outside, with the atmosphere of a private house party within. Discretion was essential. Ice Palace, the capital’s only gay club night, was in a basement near a car park. When The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert premiered in Caracas, it was pushed to midnight and shown in a cinema about as central as Slough is to Leicester Square.

Even with Maduro’s incarceration, I’m not sure I’ll ever return. It will take decades to turn back the clock, to kickstart the economy, and to change societal attitudes. But I’m glad that he is gone, because Venezuelans now at least have a chance to live in a decent world.

For all the Western hand-wringing and street protests about the legal basis of Donald Trump’s actions, whether this marks the end of the rules-based order – or even what happens next – the people of Venezuela are celebrating. They’re not worrying about why the US president did what he did – to stop the narco gangs exporting drugs to America, or to take Venezuela’s vast oil supplies before Russia or China can – they’re just glad that he did.