27. Hearts on Venezuela

Lars Peter Nissen: 00:12

Daniel Cooper Bermudez, welcome to Trumanitarian.

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 00:15

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Lars Peter Nissen: 00:16

I'm really pleased we managed to set up this interview. You're the director of Hearts on Venezuela, a Venezuelan civil society organisation advocating for more attention on the humanitarian situation in Venezuela, and you're also a member of Civiles Derechos Humanos, a human rights organisation in Venezuela. Why don't you begin by telling us a bit about the work of Hearts on Venezuela, and Civiles Derechos Humanos.

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 00:43

Of course. So Hearts on Venezuela was born in 2O19... may 30th of 2O19. And there was a lot of misinformation about what was happening on the ground at the time. And I am bilingual. I am one of a select number of people who manage both English and Spanish very well in Venezuela amongst civil society, so I took advantage of that position I had to translate and interpret text coming out from civil society so that people could have a perspective of what was happening on the ground directly from civil society. And from there our goal, our objective has become broader, and seeking to improve civil societies work in international advocacy, especially in English language spaces. And with Civiles Derechos Humanos, my work consists in promoting civil society through a variety of mechanisms, mainly capacity building, network building, and improving advocacy capacities as well.

Lars Peter Nissen: 02:01

So you founded Hearts on Venezuela in 2O19, but actually, the crisis in Venezuela begins a couple of years before. So could you take us back to the beginning, describe how the crisis unfolded? And then what led to the need to found Hearts on Venezuela?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 02:21

Absolutely. So I was in... 2O16, for me is a key year in Venezuela for many reasons. The mass migration phenomenon had already begun. And that was the year that, for example, Ban Ki-moon, at the time the UN Secretary General, describe what was happening in Venezuela as a humanitarian crisis. And local organisations had for several years already been denouncing that we were going through a humanitarian humanitarian crisis. And in specifically in 2O16, we already started calling it a complex humanitarian emergency. And in 2O16, the Venezuelan people tried to push for a presidential referendum, which was shot down by the judicial power, which is under the control of the executive power under the Maduro regime. And that year a leading human rights organisation, PROVEA, declared that it was the beginning of the dictatorship after all of the human rights violations during 2O14 that continued in 2O15 and in 2O16, when the democratic ways, means, of resolving the political crisis were blocked by the government. That was a key year. And then in 2O17, mass protests began once again and the constitutional... the attorney general at the time, which was aligned with the Chavista government, for all of her career, said that the there was a breakdown in the constitutional order. And that also caused a lot of protests. And those were key years for Venezuela. And I also think it's important to underline that this happened before sanctions. The first economic sanctions against Venezuela happened in 2O17, mid 2O17 they were announced and they didn't start getting applied until later that same year. So in terms of the complexity of what happened, we call it a complex humanitarian emergency because it wasn't caused by a war and it wasn't caused by a natural disaster, it was a man made multifaceted crisis that devolved from the breakdown and decline of power structures that border society. Rule of law, democratic governance, grand corruption crimes against humanity, militarization are were all elements that were present before sanctions ever happened. So in... back then in 20... since 2O16, I was actually working with another human rights organisation, local human rights organisation, in Maracaibo, Venezuela, which is the country's second largest city. And at that time, we were more focused on defending human rights, but as the crisis became worse, we decided that we also had to... we had an important role in documenting the humanitarian crisis in our city and in our state. And... well, I'd like to talk more more about the role of human rights organisations also in denouncing the humanitarian emergency and how the networked dynamic of civil society was part of what helped elicit a humanitarian response.

Lars Peter Nissen: 06:07

So you are a human rights activist prior to the crisis. You see this accelerating breakdown of society, and you begin to realise we must also get involved in humanitarian affairs, or in humanitarian action. What was your first contact with the international humanitarian system and what what was that experience like?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 06:31

Well, the first contact with the international humanitarian system must have been in, perhaps 2O18, which is already two years into the complex humanitarian emergency. And a member of OCHA gave a workshop on the humanitarian architecture to a roomful of civil society organisations during an event that we called the Human Rights Fair that we had been organising since 2016. And so within human rights spaces, the space was always very inclusive of organisations that did humanitarian work as well, development work, democracy work. The Venezuelan civil society has had a very inclusive culture, which has been very beneficial in very many ways.

Lars Peter Nissen: 07:33

So it begins with training on the humanitarian architecture, sort of understanding the system, these are sort of actors who may engage with Venezuela. And then what happens afterwards?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 07:43

Yeah, we really didn't know anything about the humanitarian system, starting with the humanitarian principles, humanitarian architecture. And at the time, we feared criminalization due to denouncing or even learning more about the humanitarian system. So I remember starting to learn about clusters, for example, and thinking it was, you know, something I couldn't really talk to people about because the government denied the crisis and protests were criminalised. So in the context for us, as people who were learning about the humanitarian system was of very high constraints. And I remember in 2O16, for example, we organised a small protest, calling for humanitarian assistance to enter the country. And we were very fearful of of what could happen. Luckily, we were okay. But, little by little, there was a... between 2O16 and 2O18-2O19, there were... there was still a very significant gap between civil society and the United Nations system. And it wasn't really until the system began its operations in Venezuela since 2O19, especially, that civil society has had a more direct contact with actors. And I think it's also important to highlight that Venezuela is a very centralised country. So a lot of influence and movement happens in the capital city of Caracas, while without Caracas actually being the worse off territory in the country and in other states and cities throughout the country, there is very much less access to people, authority figures within the UN agencies or... and the people who are on the ground representing the UN agencies in the different regions of the country have less decision making power to organise the response for local communities.

Lars Peter Nissen: 10:08

So by the time you're introduced to the thinking that we sort of have an international humanitarian system, you have actually got a couple of years of experience of carrying out humanitarian action in Venezuela. Was there something that surprised you? Was it like, or was it like, Yeah, this totally makes sense to me that, of course, these are the principles. Or it's like, Why the heck do we need clusters? What was the reaction actually from you?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 10:31

Well, so the... we started learning about the humanitarian system, when we didn't have access to it in Venezuela, from Colombia. Because the... we knew about Colombia's response. It was very public. There are very good resources about it online, there's an entire wiki about the Colombian humanitarian architecture, how clusters work, how they're organised. And that was a very important resource for our country. And since the migration phenomenon elicited a humanitarian response before local... before we were able to do anything within Venezuela, we learned from those systems responding to the migration and refugee phenomenon. So that process of starting to work with people internationally, especially in Colombia, was very important for civil society. And we were just really worried and concerned that the situation only got worse and worse. And the UN system was not responding on the ground, and the government continued to deny the crisis. So for many years, that was civil society's main... one of one of civil society's main objective is just to get the humanitarian actors on the ground to have the operations begin on the ground within Venezuela.

Lars Peter Nissen: 12:05

And so this is where Hearts on Venezuela comes into the picture, I guess.

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 12:09

Yeah, in 2O19. So 2O19 was also a key year for the humanitarian response. Because in 2O19, there is very evident political turmoil. And while there's... by this time, we already manage what the humanitarian principles are a lot better than we did in 2O16. And, you know, some of these things in the... on February 23, there's this incident in the border with Colombia regarding humanitarian aid and how it was used in a political manner, which has been very unfortunate and carried out very important... a very important negative perception about how aid is politicised in the country that does not correspond to the reality of the humanitarian response. The humanitarian response, and people on the ground committed to it, are absolutely committed to the humanitarian principles. And at that moment, it seemed like there was a lot of stigma around humanitarian aid and assistance being used in a politicised manner. And that was also something that created a negative point in the humanitarian narrative. But I think the main issue has mostly always been humanitarian access constraints imposed by the government itself. There was denial of the situation until 2O18, 2O19. And since then, the access has been very limited still.

Lars Peter Nissen: 13:58

Yeah, it's a paradox, isn't it? We are able to stand at the border with trucks and say, Oh, let these trucks come through, and somehow link very closely humanitarian aid to regime change, something which, of course, is highly unfortunate, as you said, and for me, it's a deep disrespect for the work being carried out by people inside Venezuela and making their lives more more difficult. It's one thing we were able to, from the outside, impose sanctions, but it just strikes me that we're talking about three years where basically what the international system could do was do a training course. That's not very much.

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 14:38

Yeah. No, not at all. Not at all. And the focus was on responding to the migration and refugee crisis and for years before that. And it was actually... for years, it was incredibly frustrating for civil society, and not only civil society but just generally other Venezuelan population is very sceptical of the United Nations and humanitarian agencies, because we would denounce what was happening and the system seemed not to believe us, or to not be active around constructing a solution to what was happening. So... and the the only thing that ended up eliciting a response was the millions of people leaving to other countries all over South America. So it was when foreign governments throughout Latin America got involved, and it was starting to impact their economies, their cities, that they... that the the international system started to respond, because they didn't believe us internally, but they started believing foreign governments. And by that time, you know, when you have 4 million, 3 million people outside of the country, it's already late. You know, there's a lot of human suffering happening that was ignored. And, and that's, that's still very much part of what's happening. The situation, I think, it's extremely important to note that even with the humanitarian response, since 2O19, it's only gotten worse. The situation has only gotten worse. So for the first humanitarian response plan, for July to December 2O19, was actually published in August. And that plan established that there were 7 million people in need. And today, ACAPS estimates that it's around 14.8 million people and poverty and extreme poverty have only risen. So the impact of the humanitarian response has not yet been respective to the scale and severity of what is happening. And actually, the 2O21 Humanitarian Response Plan mentioned is constructed to respond to... continues to say that it's 7 million people in need, when the World Food Programme itself, established that only in food insecurity, only regarding food insecurity, 9.3 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance in food aid. So there's an incongruence in the statistics being used to build those plans, which are already underfunded. So I think the civil society definitely calls for what more technical and financial cooperation from the UN agencies and and international organisations. And actually, I think one of the things that was very valuable were... was the work of international organisations that already had a presence in Venezuela, and some other international organisations that were willing to get involved early on. So, for example, the Jesuit Service for Refugees, already was providing services to Colombian refugees who had left to Venezuela, because of the armed conflict in Colombia, and they were able to not only report and document what was happening and had direct contact already with the unit United Nations system, but we're also able to provide direct assistance to communities that received Colombian refugees. So they weren't... So they started not only attending Colombian refugees, but they were also providing assistance to the entire community, because everybody in that same community needed aid.

Lars Peter Nissen: 18:48

So basically, we're in the situation where you have escalating needs inside Venezuela, you have a government which is, let's say, very assertive and doesn't give a lot of space for humanitarian action, and you have a UN system that is heavily constrained by this and able to do only very little. And that's probably the way it is. So what can you do and what can Hearts on Venezuela do to... What are the buttons you push to try to change this?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 19:29

From Hearts on Venezuela, for example. What we have done with the... with interpretation and translation, especially, is make reports that were only available in Spanish accessible in English. And we're also now currently in a phase of working with... building networks around similar issues going on in different countries, especially throughout the Global South. So right now we're in processes of getting in touch with organisations, local civil society organisations, in places like Syria, and Haiti to learn from their direct experiences, not only with how they work, but how they interact... how they have interacted with the United Nations systems, what has worked for them, what has not worked for them, and how to perhaps even join forces to put pressure on UN agencies to do a better job because what we have seen in Venezuela is that these aren't issues exclusive to Venezuela. There is the famous Petrie report and Rosenthal reports on the situations on Myanmar and Sri Lanka, which created the Rights Up Front framework for all UN agencies. And we still see how quiet diplomacy is. Practice by United Nations agencies is part of the culture in Venezuela on the ground. So we see, for example, how human rights organisations who want to be... to start doing humanitarian work are excluded from the space. That happened to organisations which I've worked with which were not allowed into clusters, even though they were doing work on food insecurity, for example, and sometimes being the only organisations documenting what... what was happening with food insecurity in a certain area. And likewise, with humanitarian organisations, which were UN agencies actively discouraged from denouncing human rights violations of themselves, of partners, or of communities that they were attending. So that's very much contrary to what the UN Charter represents to start with, and specifically, the rights upfront framework, which was set up to avoid these kinds of problems. So you have a limited protection perspectives from people working on the ground still.

Lars Peter Nissen: 22:07

And so you could argue that if the UN spoke up more, if there was more pushback from... well, not just the UN, but from international humanitarian organisations present on the ground, that they would be probably shut down quite quickly and shoved out of the country. So would that be better?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 22:24

That would definitely not be better, we want the agencies and the international organisations to be present. But we know that they can do more, and we've pressured them to do more and when we've pressured them to do more, there has been a positive response from agencies and from international organisations. So for example, earlier this year, there... five humanitarian workers were arrested for implementing a cash transfer programme. And their local implementing partners with UN AIDS with UNHCR, among other UN agencies historically, and the... nobody in the UN agencies have said anything publicly. So if humanitarian workers... if local humanitarian workers feel that they're not even protected by the UN bodies that they directly cooperate with there aren't... you need to construct the basic conditions in order to do the work. And if you don't construct those basic conditions to do the work, then there won't be a humanitarian response anyways. And that's something that's affecting all kinds of organisations, humanitarian organisations, as well as any sort of civil society organisation is that we are also victims of the complex humanitarian emergency, we don't have electricity, we don't have water in our homes. And that is a limiting factor. And especially if... with the economic crisis also affects us. So we also see that, as the situation becomes worse and worse, humanitarian organisations also suffer from internal migration of their staff, which affects the capacity to work. So I think the... it's not only incumbent on international organisations and UN agencies, but the broader international community, including the Security Council, Undersecretary General, must do more to pressure the Venezuelan state into opening the humanitarian space and protecting civic space. Because if not the institutional and community mechanisms to have a more holistic or comprehensive or structural resolution to the humanitarian crisis, which is a complex humanitarian crisis, it's politically induced, then, you know, it'll only get worse.

Lars Peter Nissen: 24:59

So if I get you right, the basic strategy behind Hearts on Venezuela is, provide information, data, translate the Spanish sources into English so that we have more powerful evidence about the situation that we can use to push the international community. Network, as you say, with humanitarians from Syria, from Haiti, from other places, learn lessons on how to manoeuvre, and, in a sense, all of this is to protect the humanitarian space inside Venezuela.

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 25:33

Absolutely, absolutely. Our main goal is that the humanitarian emergency ends, along with human rights violations, which are the two... some... two of the main issues affecting our population with a lot of root causes that must be addressed by them. And I'd also like to talk more about what Civiles Derechos Humanos does, and they have an amazing project called HumVenezuela or HumVenezuela, and you can access humvenezuela.com, in which we have organising with civil society actors in all branches of society and all kinds of populations, working on analysing the education sector, the health sector, the food sector, and so on, and evaluating the response as civil society and evaluating the complexity... the factors of complexity. So we have... because there's such little information provided by the state, and UN agencies are not usually transparent with the the information that they're collecting. So often the humanitarian needs overview, which are fundamental in constructing, the plans are not published, or agreements between, for example, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights that currently has a presence in Venezuela, the agreement with the Venezuelan state has not been published either. So civil society still has an important role in just showing what the data is, and in HumVenezuela, we have our own civil society constructed data on the impact on society based on on all sources available, both UN agencies and civil society, along with the effectiveness of the response and the factors that involved complexity. So rule of law, protection, human rights violations, the factors that are real causes of the emergency.

Lars Peter Nissen: 27:50

So as you speak, you have a very strong focus on the whole data side of things, the assessment, documenting the impact, monitoring the response. And to what extent... And what's occurring to me is, to what extent are civil society organisations themselves involved directly in the response? What is the role there apart from this accountability role, ensuring the evidence is there? How much is it to handing out cash and blankets themself?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 28:23

Yeah, there's an important sector of civil society that's... of national civil society that does that. And that was also an important learning curve that organisations had to undergo. So there's organisations like Azul Positivo or Accion Solidaria, which for years had been addressing the HIV epidemic in Venezuela. And these organisations were uniquely prepared to begin working with vulnerable communities as HIV... people with HIV are often members of vulnerable communities or people with HIV who are members of vulnerable communities already required some sort of aid or assistance. So they already had good organisational practices and were able to adapt and work with UNICEF, work with UNHCR, work with UN AIDS, to organise the response for other sectors of society and, you know, bring... broaden their scope of work. And Accion Solidaria, for example, when from being mostly an HIV... an organisation that attended people with HIV, and now was a member of the humanitarian country team for several years, especially the first initial years and helped coordinate UN agencies and international organisations together with different civil society organisations that could become humanitarian... that could adopt humanitarian work and have become humanitarian actors. And that's something that has become usual within the civil society, within the civic space. And I think a really beautiful example of this is the network that we created in... since 2O17, in the state of Zulia, where the organisation where... which I used to work with this was based CODES, and we created a Human Rights Network there in which the only requirement was that the organisations... to participate that the organizations had a human rights framework to work. So it didn't matter if it was focused on mental health or on HIV and AIDS or on environmental work or on women's rights. So through that network, we were able to strengthen all of the member organisations so now women's rights organisations became a part of the humanitarian response with United Nations Population Fund or UNICEF, to go to vulnerable communities and provide gender-based perspectives on on violence or to provide trainings on how to migrate or how not to migrate, and for women, especially, to be aware of the risks of human trafficking, for example. And another organisation which grew immensely through the network is an organisation called "ehabilitarte", which originally was just a group of young people that worked from the psychiatric hospital in the city. And little by little, the organisation grew so much that they now work with UN agencies to provide... and international organisations to provide free mental health services on the phone during the pandemic, for thousands of people. So there's been a progressive institutional capacity building that was facilitated by networks of civil society that were diverse, and usually be governed by organisation by human rights organisations that understood the importance of having of building the capacities of other organisations. And for that to happen also with a human rights framework.

Lars Peter Nissen: 32:38

Let's talk a little bit about the humanitarian country team. So it begins with a training course, as you say, somebody from OCHA comes in and does a training course on the margins of a human rights conference or meeting. And then how does that evolve into a humanitarian country team and who sits on it?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 32:58

Yeah, so the humanitarian country team has UN agencies involved. There are usually three national organisations that sit on them... the sit on the humanitarian country team. And then there's some international organisations that participate along with the Venezuelan state and, as I said, the the UN bodies. But before that, the... there wasn't a humanitarian country team, there was something called EGA, which was a sort of unofficial coordination for the response before the the Venezuelan state allowed for a humanitarian country team. So already, even without the permission of the Venezuelan state, there were already being... moves being made to begin the response. That was contrary sometimes to the Venezuelan state's wishes or they weren't totally on board with the clusters being formed. So still, that that's still something that affects us. So the World Food Programme is the leader in the logistics cluster worldwide. And they were just given access to Venezuela this year, in 2O21, despite malnutrition, amongst children especially, being actively and repeatedly reported on since 2O16 and 2O15.

Lars Peter Nissen: 34:36

So we start with a training course. And then organically, we get elements from civil society to begin forming some kind of informal coordination something, and slowly a space is carved out whereby the government accepts more and more humanitarian presence, you're able to establish a country team, you're are able to establish clusters. And slowly, slowly, more and more actors are able to establish themselves. And we have more or less, today, if I hear it correctly, traditional humanitarian architecture with clusters, humanitarian country team with the presence of the government, and so on and so forth.

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 34:36

Yeah, five years since the beginning of the complex humanitarian emergency.

Lars Peter Nissen: 34:39

When you speak to your colleagues from Syria and Haiti, what are the things where you go, Yeah, that's what we thought, tat's how we experienced it. And what are the differences with Venezuela?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 35:35

Well, I think something that we understand that we have in common is that the UN won't resolve our problems for us. And the UN also operates in a way that we have to demand things from the system. So if we don't demand things from the system, we won't get a better response. And that is something that we have learned... you know, in Haiti, evidently, there were significant issues with the humanitarian response. And in Syria, the civil society organisations have had to constantly demand for a stronger response on behalf of the United Nations. And that's the same case in other countries as well. And that's not something that we only exclusively learned from the humanitarian experience but already, we're learning that with the Human Rights experience is that we have to demand action by the different actors involved in order to have a response. And I think that's part of what continues to occur is that Venezuelan civil society, and especially in English language spaces, thus still doesn't have enough access to key actors and key decision making authorities in order to continue to elicit a stronger response by the system. And that's something that we're working on with Hearts on Venezuela and many other organisations are working on in different spaces. And international organisations have also started becoming a lot more involved in that effort as well.

Lars Peter Nissen: 37:24

And do you see a tension between the operational role that Venezuelan civil society organisations play in this advocacy, pushing, demanding role, you say... So if you... if suddenly 80% of your budget comes from a UN organisation, maybe you're a bit more careful to say, Hey, guys, this needs to get better. Do you see that tension?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 37:47

I do not see that tension. Because there is enough diversity within civil society that we have organisations that can dedicate themselves more to reporting, to monitoring, to evaluating the response itself, and holding UN actors accountable, and other folks who are more dedicated to the operations, and the beautiful thing about how we have learned to work in Venezuela in civil society is that those different types of organisations are part of the same network. So we know each other, we are constantly in communications with each other, if something happens that one organisation can't publicly say, or doesn't want to publicly say, it communicates it to other organisations which are able to take those steps. So that is something... that is definitely a strength of civil society and I think a lesson to be learned from Venezuela is that the more connected civil society is, and the more connected humanitarian organisations with different aims and objectives and methods of working are, the stronger the entire space will become.

Lars Peter Nissen: 39:00

I couldn't agree more. And I think we have to be so careful when we chase the optimising operations to coordination that we don't kill the diversity that actually enables us to function in very difficult settings. I think there's a trade off there that we're not always fully aware of.

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 39:20

Yeah, and as I was mentioning before with the Rights Up Front framework is that when UN agencies come into the... on the ground it has to be... has to learn how to take advantage of what exists because in different countries... and I think Venezuela may even be privileged in the sense of you know, having been a middle almost a middle income country and having a broad professional base of people to work with. And that strengthened the the ability of building organisation and building local capacities, and they were already local capacities existing. But in the case of Venezuela, even though we had those capacities, those are also quickly diminishing with mass migration and just the affectation of professionals as well, in the lack of water and electricity, you know, it affected us. In Maracay, for example, we had months on end with 12 to 16 hours of electricity cuts daily. So it's almost impossible to organise a response when when your basic needs aren't being met.

Lars Peter Nissen: 40:42

So here we are five years in. Would you say we have a functioning humanitarian architecture in Venezuela?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 40:46

Yeah, we do have a functioning humanitarian architecture in Venezuela.

Lars Peter Nissen: 40:51

We may think, oh, you know, five years is too long to get there. And we're... but it's there. So what's the project now moving forward? What do you want to focus on?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 41:00

So the project now moving forward is that the humanitarian response, be adequate in terms of the scale and severity of what is going on. So it's great to have the humanitarian architecture, but we're seeing that the situation is only getting worse. And humanitarian response is, evidently, supposed to make the situation better. And if it's not making the situation better than the response isn't being effective yet. So an important step was just getting the humanitarian architecture within the country to get it operating. But there needs to be more commitment from member states, from UN member states, from and donor states, to basically take the risk with Venezuela and increase both financial and technical cooperation and more commitment from international organisations as well. Because there are still capacities within civil society to rebuild institutions, key institutions, to address the structural issues at hand. But the more we wait, and the more prolonged the crisis becomes, the harder it will be and the more significant the long term and chronic consequences on the population will be. And we're already seeing that, and it's well known that child malnutrition has an effect on on generations within the country. So that's what we're trying to avoid.

Lars Peter Nissen: 42:45

So what you have described so far, for me, is a is a fantastic example of civil society holding the system responsible, pushing, carving out the space, making sure the UN delivers, advocating with the government, advocating with the international society. But then before we started this interview, you told me something else that I don't know how to fit into this exactly. You said, I also work on TikTok. And so just explain to me, how the heck does Tiktok friggin fit into this?

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 43:20

Yeah, so... we also... civil society is not, and sometimes maybe not even mostly, addresses work with the international system. And we've had have had to work with the international system, because the Venezuelan state won't respond to the people's needs. But that means that civil society still has to speak to itself and engage more members of the Venezuelan population. So for example, with Hearts on Venezuela, we started creating a series of short animated videos in the TikTok style, in which we talked about toxic polarisation and how it affects our ability as Venezuelans to reach agreements. Because there are extreme political positions on some sides that constantly shoot them down or create obstacles for potential agreements to be made. So there's an amazing group right now called Foro Civico, or Civic Forum, which has been organising sectoral agreements. So instead of trying to solve all of the issues at once in a political negotiation to start working on issue by issue because we can't make all of the country's progress depend on a single negotiations process. That has been a faulty way to think about it. So right now with the COVID 19 vaccine, when the COVAX mechanism, there is a roundtable that... with multiple sectors of the political society as well as civil society represented there, working towards getting vaccines into Venezuela, as well as other areas of negotiations. So that's something that we addressed in this animated... in this short animated video on toxic polarisation. And we're currently preparing two different series on these videos on that address, you know, the pain that comes with the humanitarian emergency. Because we talk about humanitarian emergency and all these more technical concepts, but at the base of humanitarian work is the dignity of people and the protection of people. And when we talk about the dignity of people, we're talking about heartbreak, we're talking about not being able to access basic needs and the suffering that comes with that. So we're creating a short series on how love has been affected during during the migration phenomenon in particular. And there is a series of videos and a bunch of Instagram accounts, for example, that are exclusively posting videos of family reunions after years of people not seeing each other. And sometimes, those kinds of videos allow for the Venezuelan population to heal or to change the way we think or respond or become more involved or become a little bit braver because we think we feel that we're not alone when when other people are expressing the feeling of what has happened to us. And the second series that we're working on is one emphasising the daily solidarity that is practised by Venezuelans, which is part of why the country hasn't ended, finished, you know, its breakdown. Because people during the pandemic, for example, during the pandemic, there have been innumerable GoFundMe is organised by families to finance the recuperation or the medical attention of people who have had COVID 19. And they are constantly funded by the people's communities, and sometimes strangers who would decide to fund other people's medical attention without sometimes even knowing the person. Or another example is during the pandemic, there has been very grave gasoline shortages. And in the city of barquisimeto, the people who ride motorcycles organise themselves to transport renal patients to their dialysis in the clinics, because they couldn't get there because there was... there wasn't gasoline, and there wasn't public transportation working. And these little examples of solidarity for Venezuelans can mean the difference between life and death. And in a way, it's how the Venezuelan population is constructing its own humanitarian response when the Venezuelan state has failed, and when the UN agencies haven't been able to reach the population yet. And I wouldn't want to glorify these forms of response, either, it's, you know, survival mechanisms to and it should have never gotten this far. But it is because of these daily examples of solidarity that people survive.

Lars Peter Nissen: 49:12

Daniel, thank you so much for coming on Trumanitarian. It's truly painful what's happening to your country. But I want to thank you for your work. And what's so impressive about it is... you... the range of issues you focus on, from the structural issues, to getting the right humanitarian architecture in place, but then also to focus on those daily acts of solidarity from people who are everyday humanitarians. And I think dealing with a crisis as difficult and complex as Venezuela, you can't afford to divorce yourself from any of those strategies. And so I think it's just fantastic and impressive to see the work you're doing with Hearts on Venezuela, and all the best for your future work.

Daniel Cooper Bermudez: 50:06

Thank you so much. And thank you so much for having me on this wonderful podcast.