Caracas, Venezuela
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It is less than two months since US special forces captured Venezuela’s longtime authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro during a nighttime raid in Caracas, yet it is hard to overstate how different the South American country now feels.
There’s a new buzz, an optimism that, to be frank, I have never seen before.
I moved to Caracas in 2016.
In the decade that followed, Venezuela saw it all: a quarter of the population fled a catastrophic economic collapse; crime rates exploded before gradually yielding in the aftermath of COVID-19; anti-Maduro demonstrators took to the streets year after year only to be overpowered by tear gas and…