Socialism

My Family Fled Socialism. Then I Voted for Bernie Sanders.

An immigrant's journey to the radical left and back

Germania Rodríguez Poleo | 6.30.2026 8:00 AM

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(Germania Rodríguez Poleo)

In 2005, when I was 11, my mother and I fled Venezuela because the government was going to arrest her for her reporting. She was among the first investigative journalists to document how President Hugo Chávez and the socialist party were taking control of the judiciary and integrating Cuban operatives into the military and security apparatus. She exposed how Chávez and his cronies were enriching themselves with oil revenues, creating what would become the largest corruption ring in modern world history. In an effort to silence her, the regime fabricated charges that she had orchestrated the murder of a corrupt prosecutor and put out a warrant for her arrest.

My mother's escape from Venezuela played out like a Hollywood thriller. She hid in safe houses, was transported in the trunk of a car covered with trash bags, and eventually made it out of the country stowed away on a small boat. A family friend shepherded me to Miami to join her a few days later.

My family had already experienced the brutality of "Chavismo." The police had raided our home, our car had been fired at, and our family bodyguard, Germán Delgado, had been kidnapped and tortured to death by state security thugs. My grandfather was charged with bogus crimes for his journalism. He was arrested by Italian authorities at Interpol's direction, and eventually joined us in exile. The socialist regime forced the newspaper and magazine he owned to close down by preventing them from importing paper to run their printing presses. One by one, my relatives were forced to flee, including my grandmother, who spent her final years desperate to see her home in Caracas one last time before she died.

A radical leftist government uprooted my family and wrecked my homeland. Yet after I arrived at New York University (NYU) as a freshman in 2013, I became a leftist.

How NYU's Groupthink Turned Me Into a Leftist

It was all about fitting in.

When we first moved to Miami, I longed for Venezuela. We sang the "Star-Spangled Banner" every morning in school, and I refused to put my hand over my heart. ("That's not my anthem," I told my mom.) But I quickly learned English and made friends with gringas. By the time I was a teenager, I wanted nothing more than to be an all-American girl, which entailed sealing off my Venezuelan identity.

At first, I was a moderate liberal Democrat, campaigning for Barack Obama's reelection in high school. Then I arrived in New York and encountered NYU's hyperprogressive campus culture. Like my classmates, I became obsessed with social justice. I majored in journalism and politics, and my course load included "The Politics of Inequality," "LGBT Politics," and "Latina Feminist Studies." My professors included militant leftists, an anti-establishment Catalan independence supporter, and a pro-Palestine activist who assigned a book edited by the Marxist historian Vijay Prashad—a defender of Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, and their socialist dictatorships.

The year I arrived on campus, Chávez died of cancer and was succeeded by Maduro, who continued dismantling Venezuela's democratic institutions and doubled down on Chávez's socialist policies. I was still a freshman in 2014 when the country erupted in daily protests, with millions occupying the streets across the country. They were driven by a fury and desperation that my classmates at NYU could hardly imagine.

I knew that Chávez and Maduro were socialists, but I wasn't focused on their economic policies. The problem, I figured, was that Chavez and Maduro were authoritarians who trampled on civil liberties.

In the classic immigrant narrative, the protagonist, who wants nothing more than to be a real American, eventually reconnects with her past through nostalgia or family obligation. I experienced plenty of both, but my transformation was ultimately the result of a profound intellectual dissonance: I couldn't reconcile what had happened to my family with what I was being taught in my Latin American studies classes.

I was told that U.S. and European colonialism and imperialism were solely to blame for poverty in the region. I was being indoctrinated into the philosophy of tercermundismo, or "Third-Worldism," as the Venezuelan classical liberal Carlos Rangel dubbed it—a modification to the socialist creed made by Vladimir Lenin. After the proletariat failed to revolt, as Marx had predicted, Lenin recast communism in........

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