Long before the recent U.S. military assault on Caracas, I pulled out my frayed, yellowing birth certificate. REPUBLICA DE VENEZUELA is centered in all caps at the top. The document is stamped in purple with the seal of Estado Miranda, the state adjacent to the capital. 

This horizontal half-sheet of paper declares in shimmering blue ink that I am the hijo legítimo of Robert Stephen Pastorino and Frances Veronica Estepa de Pastorino. The recorder’s cursive font fills in the blanks with my name in handwritten letters that loop and pirouette outside the lines. This artifact is one of my only tangible links to a place that carries mythical significance in my mind.

As U.S.-Venezuela tensions ratcheted up in late 2025, I called you, Mom, to ask your recollections of Caracas, and of that November morning when Dad, during his first assignment as a young U.S. Foreign Service officer, drove you through the city’s notorious rush-hour traffic to the hospital to give birth to me.

Were you nervous? Was it raining? How was Dad? You were 3,000 miles from the only home you ever knew, San Francisco. It was your first time out of the country, your first year living abroad. Carrying your second child, you were unable to read the street signs, had no driver’s license and were thoroughly unfamiliar with the winding avenidas piled like tangled strands of pasta in this capital city at the northern tip of the Andes.

“I was scared out of my mind,” you answered.

As we talked over the subsequent weeks, I grew increasingly nervous about Washington’s deployment of “the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America.” My anxiety evolved from subconscious twinges to heart-palpitating anger. My beloved Caracas, La Puerta de Venezuela, this imagined paradise of my birthplace was under siege by the U.S. government.

Why, when I look at a map of the Americas and my pupils dart down from Miami, why do I claim Venezuela as mine when you have all the memories?

You recall Dad barking at other drivers in his quest to get you to the private La Clínica Caurimare in time for my delivery. You made it, and 8 pounds and an hour later, I arrived. You shed tears of happiness and exhaustion. Dad was ecstatic. When my 3-year-old sister, Shannon, visited that afternoon to meet her baby brother, you tell me, she was entirely unenthused. She preferred to visit the nurses.

You remind me that one of your favorite Caracas memories is dining at Mi Vaca Y Yo, an acclaimed cabaret. The proprietor seared delicious steaks, the band played merengue and the choicest cocktails flowed. Diplomats and their spouses dined alongside wealthier Venezuelans, sons of the oil industry, maybe a ballplayer or two. Everyone came to see Lulu, a 500-kilogram steer with horns as wide as the tables who would saunter through the dining room and pose for photographs if you had a Kodak Instamatic and a flash cube. Dad loved the spectacle.

Your scariest moment was the earthquake. Rich with oil in the 1960s, Venezuela had quickly modernized its capital. You lived in the Petunia II apartment tower not far from the embassy. But the 6.6-magnitude earthquake on July 29, 1967, sent you, Dad and my sister careening down 17 flights of stairs. You emerged at street level to see adjacent buildings flattened to rubble.

Screams, sirens and death filled the air. The damage to Petunia II was so significant that you never entered it again. The generosity of expats and Venezuelans coalesced around displaced families such as ours. Terrifying terremotos would become unfortunate recurring nightmares for our family.

Five months after my birth, Dad’s decades of diplomatic transfers commenced and you bundled us off to Hermosillo, Mexico. Three years later, we toddled to Washington, D.C., then Lisbon, where Susan was born to complete our family. We all relocated to Bogotá in the late 1970s. After a few more years, your steadying support propelled me into adulthood when I graduated high school in Mexico City.

Fast forward to the first Saturday in January and images out of Caracas show toxic gray smoke rising from multiple zones of the city as dawn breaks. The media announces that the U.S. arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a “brilliant” operation. Remembering other Latin American cities where we lived, I can almost smell the diesel exhaust rising above a cacophony of car horns. I can only speculate about the oppressive tension in the air as Venezuela’s decapitated government imposes a state of emergency. 

I am dismayed. Disgusted. When the U.S. intervenes, it never ends well. In Latin America alone, Washington’s support of the Chilean military in a 1973 coup led to 16 years of dictatorship. Illegally funneled weapons to anti-government “rebels” in Nicaragua ignited a more than decade-long civil war resulting in 30,000 deaths. In El Salvador, we tried the opposite — supporting an oppressive regime to suppress the anti-government people’s movement — and an estimated 75,000 civilians were killed, according to the United Nations Truth Commission. 

Now, U.S. armed forces directed by President Donald Trump have kidnapped a president. Dozens more Venezuelans have died. I imagine some of those victims bear the same birth certificates as mine. Yellowed paper. Purple stamp. Looping cursive handwriting.

Mom, I realize you do not feel the same attachment to Venezuela that I do. You loved accompanying Dad and raising our family overseas. But when he retired in 1995, you were content to never travel abroad again as you had plenty of catching up to do with our extended family in California. I, on the other hand, longed to go back to Caracas. I had an invitation 15 years ago when Hugo Chávez was still in power. In deference to Dad’s absolute opposition to the Bolivarian Revolution, I declined.

Years after Dad’s passing, we are finally able to talk about all the ways his State Department career and faith in U.S. foreign policy dominated our family worldview. It was heavy on geopolitics but lacking sentimentality. That’s where your parenting came in. You taught me to love broadly and without judgment. You grounded me in humility and appreciation for people, places and things. There isn’t a bitter bone in you, and I attempt to emulate that every day. You encouraged me to think for myself, to explore the world on my own terms and to utilize the privileges I was born with, even if it means disagreeing with and protesting my government’s actions.

As I reflect on our precious conversations in recent months, I realize that for you, Caracas was merely a mad dash through traffic in the unforgettable journey of raising your family. Those years are reduced to a souvenir ashtray of a cow named Lulu in your California home. You say the most important gift Venezuela gave you was me. For that, you are grateful.

For me, Caracas is a place I have clung to in my mind forever. The place where I came into this world. A proxy for all my beautiful memories of Latin America. 

But those notions are wishful and naive in relation to Venezuela. Only as an adult have I come to realize how destructive U.S. intervention was and continues to be. Washington’s mission has always been to prop up and ruthlessly defend its own military and economic interests. U.S. foreign policy suffocates Latin American society and self-determination. Sanctions starve ordinary people.

My Caracas is gone. All that remains is a creased government document en español, your priceless retelling of how I came to be and a haunting despair that America’s armadas will not soon retreat.

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Steve Pastorino has lived in Las Vegas since 2017. He is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from UNLV.