A Place of Her Own

                Some people find a new hobby to break up the monotony of their work. Andrea Guevara decided to find a new country.  At the age of 31, after years of working as a corporate lawyer in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, she needed a change of pace: something that didn’t involve her company, her government, or the crime rate of Caracas.

                When Andrea got on a plane for Colorado last spring, the President of Venezuela was still Hugo Chavéz. Having risen to power democratically in 1998, he was doing everything he could to alter Venezuelan laws and allow himself to stay in power forever, according to Simon Rimero of the New York Times. In his obituary of Chavéz, Rimero wrote about the former President’s dreams of becoming a caudillo. Chavéz even penned a new constitution after his inauguration in 1999 that stated the presidency would be decided by election for six-year terms, and presidents could be re-elected for successive terms – with no end date in mind.¹  The effects of this desire did not go unfelt by the Venezuelan people. “I’m not glad about all the things that he suffered, because he suffered from cancer. But I feel a relief at some point when I find out that this terrible man was dying,” Andrea said. Elections held following Chavéz’s death in March, 2013 appointed a new President within two weeks. Already out of the country at this point, Andrea did not have a chance to participate in the vote. “I was angry about it, because that was not the right procedure to follow… it was my first election that I couldn’t vote since I turned 18, and I vote every single time,” Andrea said.

                The political turmoil was not the only reason that Andrea wanted to leave Venezuela behind. Her job as a lawyer for Pepsi-Cola was becoming dull, and she felt the need to make a change. “I felt tired, I was sick about everything. I was sick about traffic, I was sick about my work, I was sick about everything. The whole environment. And I felt like I needed to do something more for me and for my career, because I love what I do. So I decided to come here and improve my English because I know that it will be a big issue, an obstacle, to get admission into any program,” she said. Though in the process of earning the equivalent of a master’s degree in her home country, Andrea packed up for Colorado in the hopes that, once here, she could find a master’s program that would help her perfect her legal English and better her chances of finding a job with an American company. “I’m just looking for quality of life, and I don’t have that in my country, unfortunately,” she said. While perfectly qualified to be a lawyer in Venezuela, Andrea is hoping to learn legal English so that she can continue to do what she loves while also enjoying that quality of life offered by the States. “I’m afraid I’ll send someone an opinion or answer some email and my English is not good enough and they will say ‘Oh, this person is helping me with this issue but she doesn’t understand English, how can I trust [her]. I think that English is a tool that is really helpful and today in the corporate world you have to learn another language,” she said.

                By moving to Colorado, not only did Andrea better her chances of getting into an English-speaking master’s program, but she also found a different pace of life that suited her much better than the high-strung paranoia of Caracas. “Colorado is so friendly. It’s peaceful, and for me, that’s the way it makes me feel. Safe and peaceful. I don’t get frustrated about things that used to make me [angry], and I really appreciate it,” she said. Many people who know the name of Venezuela’s capital may not know its nickname: “The world’s murder capital.”² In 2012, OSAC reported 100 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in the Miranda state, an area that includes much of metropolitan Caracas. “I like to go to the movies, and [not] pay attention to if I’m smoking a cigarette and I have my window down. I couldn’t do that in my home country,” Andrea said. Colorado’s slower pace and safer environment are the flip side of Venezuela’s coin. “[I can] walk in the street, and take out my dog, and do silly things that aren’t silly: they’re important things,” she said.

                The transition to living in the States wasn’t too tough for Andrea to handle. When her parents got divorced, her father moved to New York and her mother moved to Mexico with her new husband. She got her fair share of traveling visiting the two of them, as well as her brother and sister who both moved to Spain. No stranger to new places, the choice to move to Colorado was one based on personal need. “The program that I wanted to apply [to] is here, is at DU. So I came here for that reason. Second, because my [family] is all around the world and I just want to find a place for me, in the middle,” she said.

¹ Information on the 1999 Constitution found at www.venezuela-us.org/politics (Website for the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela).

² Reported by Caitlin Dewey for The Washington Post, article titled State Dept. report for Caracas personnel: Crime level ‘critical’.