about valentina oropeza

I was not able to leave behind my life in Venezuela when I moved to the US in January 2022, three months after the death of my father.

Moving to another country turned out to be a good way to outrun the mourning. Life demanded movement and decision, the exact opposite of my will.

Where was my home at that moment? Was it a place, or rather the people I loved? Could I build a new home in the United States? What did the word “home” really mean?

Everything was happening in another language, at a pace too fast to grasp, and with no room to feel sorry for him, or for the family who stayed behind.

I had spent years covering the humanitarian emergency inside Venezuela, most of them leading the investigative unit I founded at Prodavinci: patients who never finished their treatments because there were no medicines, children dying of malnutrition, the malaria outbreak in the country’s mining south. In the US, I found something close to home in a new kind of story: the arrival of Venezuelan migrants, part of the largest exodus ever recorded in the Americas.

I understood where their journeys began, and why. What was new to me was the danger they met along the way: the Darién Gap, Central America, the vastness of Mexico, and finally the border. They travelled those routes alongside people from dozens of countries, so I began listening to them too, until I was standing where they died, in the Sonoran Desert, at the western end of that border.

When immigration law began to change, the testimonies flipped: people were being deported, or leaving to start again somewhere else. Then two earthquakes shook all of us, inside the country and abroad.

They proved something I had been documenting for years. The damage was never only the disaster. It was rooted in the very structures that were supposed to protect the victims.

This decade of coverage — six in Venezuela and four in the US — has taught me that the wounds, the healing, the loss and the learning belong to all of us. That is the story I tell: in my reporting for the BBC, on stage, and in everything I write.