And there it was: my grandfather's house, empty and decaying. I had lived there while doing summer jobs. It was here that my grandfather had entertained Gabriel García Márquez and former US Secretary of State James Baker. Sitting outside the rusting gates, I tried to recapture my past for my new husband, and in doing so to explain what has happened to my homeland, Venezuela, in the 10 years under President Hugo Chávez. Today, more people die violently every week in Caracas than in Baghdad.

"You see," I said, "this is what has happened all over, this decay. Once, it was not like this." "Yes," he replied, "I see." But I wondered if he did, as he craned his neck forward to peer through the windscreen to read the words Perros Furibundos ("rabidly fierce dogs"). He watched me as I pleaded at the gate, pressing the buzzer beneath a smashed lamp, the electronic eye of the surveillance camera too exhausted to register me. No guard opened the security window; no one spoke over the intercom. The only response was the tired bark of a lone dog, more jaded than fierce, and I wondered when was the last time he ate, or even saw a human being.

We had arrived in Caracas to attend an old friend's wedding, a traditional affair held at the Country Club. "You'll love it," I had enthused. "The old Caracas, that not even Chávez can touch." What I found, though, was very different from what I expected.

Decay was unimaginable when I was a child basking in the tropical sun in my own personal Eden of our Country Club home. The Caribbean's humidity, only 30 minutes away, was soaked up by the Avila Mountains. My blue-eyed Prague-born father would drive his Mercedes coupé home through the poor Puente de Chapellín neighbourhood. He and the locals would wave at each other, for there was no class hatred then. The rich owned the businesses that provided the jobs, and my family gave back to the country that took them in when they fled communist Czechoslovakia.

Although the poor vastly outnumbered the rich, the entire country felt rich from the oil boom of the 1970s, which made Venezuela the world's largest non-Arab oil producer. Mocking the poor Americans, who had always treated us as their mascots, was a national sport. Every week, people tuned in to RCTV to watch their favourite skit: two Venezuelans fly American Airlines to Miami to shop for the day with the refrain: "Está barato; dame dos." ("It's cheap; gimme two."). Last year, Chávez closed the station, saying it was pro-opposition.