Because Venezuela for the wealthy vs the everyman are two different places. I still see people booking vacations to Caracas despite travel warnings and everything else going on because its so cheap, you can genuinely stay in a quality resort for $50 a night. There's a lot of people who have no morals when it comes to free stuff and influencers are top of that list. Probably some government kickbacks involved as well
I've been trying for ages to pinpoint what it is that irritates me so much about the whole Suspicious Antwerp marketing team and their influencer crew because on the surface most of them, including Luisa, seem nice enough if a bit vain and self-involved. This latest Venezuela trip has just made it click for me.
Anyone else remember through the late 80s/90s and even into early 00s there was a trend where entitled rich white European and North American and Australasian kids thought it made them look cool and edgy and carefree and like some kind of ultimate adventurers to travel to parts of the world where there was civil unrest, or despotic regimes or economic depravation and then write embellished books about it when they returned, usually with racist and/or xenophobic undertones and often painting themselves as some kind of modern day explorer, living an 'exotic' life that everyone should want to emulate and discovering new lands and encountering "funny locals'? Every month there'd be another story on the news where one of them had been kidnapped by the remnants of the Khmer Rouge or taken hostage by FARC, or shot dead in a South African township, or arrested somewhere in Eastern Europe, or gone missing in PNG or Kashmir etc, and their ignorance and arrogance inevitably ended up taking up valuable resources that those countries could not afford to spare and putting local people and also often embassy staff in danger trying to find them or secure their release or recover their bodies.
The Suspicious Antwerp crew kind of have the same air about them as those kids did back then - a whole "look at us, we're so cool and edgy and desirable and don't you wish so much you could be us with all our adventure and extreme sports and luxurious vacations" and though they've been annoying and lacking in self-awareness, it's at least not been quite this ignorant (although last year there was an incident where Icelandic rescue teams had to put themselves at risk recovering bodies from a frozen lake in the dead of winter after a plane carrying a couple of SA influencers and a marketing person crashed while on the way to film an extreme sports-style marketing video) but the entitlement and ignorance involved in this Venezuala trip, and the complete lack of self-awareness of those posting about their 'adventures' there is now crossing that line.
Sorry, rant over. You might have guessed that this stuff really bugs me
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