Alfredo Meza Wilmito's father's car was stolen in the early morning of April 9, 2014. Meza was traveling and found out five hours later because his phone was turned off.
Dad was a doctor, he had retired from university and worked four afternoons a week seeing his patients in a rented office in Ciudad Bolívar. In order to maintain his standard of living he had sold the beach house and the office that he had bought when he was young in another clinic in that city. He had made the reservation in advance to avoid the sentence of traveling to the capital for eight hours on roads in poor condition, full of holes and riddled with faded signage. When I was a child, up to three flights landed a day and I kept track of this loss of status with some pain because my early years are linked to the memory of a fun that dad offered me when he noticed that I liked airplanes. Few took our city into account in their tourist itineraries. The imprint of a historic center built in colonial times on a rocky hill, where the course of the Orinoco became narrower no longer attracted attention.