“Venezuela is fixed.” Pundits began saying this on Venezuelan state media a couple of years ago, and it became a mantra for a numbed nation. But even Nicolás Maduro, the president, concedes that the phrase is not quite right. The country is not yet fixed, he said in a press conference in 2022, but it’s very much improving.

“Venezuela is fixed.” Perhaps to Maduro’s annoyance, the mantra has become a sarcastic quip, invoked when the Caracas airport goes dark during a power outage, for example. Still, at least for some, in the parts of big cities that aren’t too far from golf courses, the words ring true.

When I headed home to Venezuela for the holidays this past December, my first visit in a long while, my friends who had recently been there told me that I would find the country changed for the better. Lots of new restaurants, they said, and no need to worry about inflation. American dollars are now accepted everywhere, even though paying with foreign currency is technically illegal. The streets feel safer; you can even take out your phone. In 2013, back when I lived in Caracas, two motorists blocked my car and said they would kill me if I didn’t give them my phone.

Venezuela’s government seemed to believe that the worst was behind it—enough so that it could turn to an audacious project: A few weeks before my arrival, Maduro had announced Venezuela’s intention to invade neighboring Guyana and even held a dubious referendum to give legitimacy to this idea. But to my puzzlement, by mid-December, when I landed in Caracas, the invasion that didn’t happen was already old news. The state media’s interest had shifted to a decidedly domestic preoccupation: the president’s effort to redeem a popular musician who had died under ignominious circumstances eight years earlier.

In 2015, the Venezuelan rapper Canserbero was reported to have killed his friend Carlos Molnar in a fit of psychotic rage and then died by jumping out a window. Such was the conclusion of an official inquiry at the time of his death, but his fans had never believed it. In October 2023, Rolling Stone listed Canserbero as the world’s best Spanish-language rapper, drawing new attention to him throughout Venezuela. And so the country’s top prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, announced that the time had come to uncover who really killed Canserbero, and rushed to do so before Christmas.

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December is the best month in Caracas because the valley that lodges the city is lush and green, but the monthslong rains have largely stopped. The city center was so vibrant with holiday decorations when I arrived, its palm trees strung with Christmas lights, that I was tempted to believe not that Venezuela was fixed, but that it had become livable. The reopened Canserbero inquiry struck me as the type of scandal that could happen in a normal country—a true-crime saga involving a rapper, rather than the phantasmagoria I remember of politicians tortured in jail and students killed in protests. Venezuela’s facade of normalcy at first seemed harmless enough to me; superficial improvements are still improvements, even if old problems linger. But the more I learned about the Canserbero case, the less harmless any of this seemed.

In my lifetime, Venezuela went from being the richest country in Latin America to the poorest. Its decline in GDP was the largest of any country in the world outside a war zone in the past 50 years. In fact, not only had no war, or for that matter natural disaster, caused our predicament, but the crash followed on the biggest bonanza in Venezuela’s history, when oil prices peaked in the 2000s.

Inspired by Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Castro himself, President Hugo Chávez implemented an agenda that he called “21st-century socialism,” which got very good press worldwide for its focus on building public housing and issuing subsidies. (Parallel initiatives, such as closing opposition media and rigging elections, received less attention at the time.) Chávez died in 2013, before a drop in oil prices revealed the depths of the damage his corruption and policies had inflicted. Of those first years under his successor, Maduro, I remember a fast descent into squalor and fear. I remember my friends telling me to tie my hair up in a bun, or else desperate people would cut it off and sell it to wigmakers. I didn’t believe this could happen until it did, to an acquaintance.

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Tirone González, also known as Canserbero, knew many hardships. Born in 1988, he was raised in a slum in the city of Maracay, an hour and a half’s drive from Caracas, and lost his mother when he was 9. Three years later, his half brother died in a mass shooting. González gave himself the name of Can, Greek for “dog,” and Cerberus, the mythological guardian of the gates of hell. Canserbero rapped about death and politics and disillusionment. His music was not made for radio—not with Venezuela’s stiff censorship and laws prohibiting vulgar language—but it spread through word of mouth and attracted cultlike devotion. A longtime fan marveled to me that he had once gone to a nighttime concert where the audience had sung along to songs that Canserbero had released only that morning. They had learned the lyrics in fewer than 12 hours.

In 2015, when Canserbero and Carlos Molnar died, the top prosecutor under Maduro did not treat the rapper like a fallen hero. The Venezuela described in Canserbero’s lyrics differed too much from the utopia Chávez had promised. It was a place

Canserbero’s fans saw themselves living in the Venezuela the rapper described—one where the justice system had succumbed to the control of the executive branch, and where Leopoldo López, an opposition favorite for president, had been arrested and imprisoned on bogus charges, along with the judges and police officers who had dared to criticize the government. Few believed the murder-suicide story that the prosecutor’s office released, because they did not think justice was something the judiciary could deliver. The idea that Canserbero’s death was ordered by powerful officials struck many observers as plausible: “I don’t know a single artist who has spoken against the system and reached old age,” El Chombo, a Panamanian reggaeton singer and music critic, said on his popular YouTube channel. “They all die in some accident or under strange circumstances.”

Zair Mundaray, the prosecutor who supervised the investigation in 2015, told me that he understood why Venezuelans distrusted the judicial system of which he was a part. Mundaray has been in public life since before Chávez took power and has witnessed the corruption of many of his colleagues. But, he insisted, not everyone surrendered.

“Go and see records of the political trials,” he said. “It’s always the same five or six prosecutors carrying them through, because many of us weren’t willing to do it.”

The Canserbero investigation, he told me, was on the up-and-up, and the pathologist responsible for the autopsy was Solángela Mendoza, a university professor with four decades of experience and one of Venezuela’s foremost experts.

Saab, today’s top prosecutor, has portrayed the 2015 sequence of events very differently. When I arrived in Caracas in December, details of the new investigation were emerging bit by bit, revealed breathlessly in podcasts and social-media posts by the investigators themselves. Saab’s office had Canserbero’s body exhumed, and had Mendoza, the pathologist, arrested and charged with bribery, along with five detectives and other officials involved in the initial Canserbero inquiry. (A medical guild in Venezuela condemned Mendoza’s imprisonment.)

A day after Christmas, Saab released a bombshell five-minute video on X (formerly Twitter). In it, Natalia Améstica, who is Molnar’s widow, and her brother Guillermo calmly confessed to the murders. With their hands literally tied, the siblings identified themselves, complete with their ID numbers, and narrated how they’d staged Canserbero’s suicide, stabbed Molnar to death, conspired with the police to clean up the crime scene, and bribed their way to freedom. Greed and thirst for revenge got the best of them, they admitted, explaining that Natalia had been Canserbero’s manager, and he had refused to pay her.

Thus, the murder was solved. Saab posted a YouTube link to the Tupac Shakur song “I Miss You,” inviting a self-flattering comparison to the investigation into the death of the 1990s American sensation. President Maduro, too, seemed pleased. His annual New Year’s Day interview with Ignacio Ramonet, formerly of Le Monde, kicked off with a recap of Maduro’s main 2023 achievements. The first one he mentioned—even before any talk of the promised invasion of Guyana—was Canserbero’s death investigation, the highlight of the year.

“Justice has been made,” Maduro told Ramonet, sitting in a baroque room from which the country’s worst years seemed particularly distant. “The name of a young Venezuelan creator has been vindicated.”

Of course, the justice system that had supposedly failed Canserbero in the first place was one that had operated under Maduro, but he did not acknowledge that. Instead, he blamed journalists and social media for smearing the musician.

Mundaray, the original prosecutor in the case, fled Venezuela in 2017. He had publicly condemned the executive branch for rewriting the constitution and told a public-radio interviewer that the state had carried out extrajudicial killings of protesters (the transmission immediately cut out). Now he has political asylum in Colombia and has supplied the International Court of Justice with evidence against the Maduro dictatorship that has led to an investigation into crimes against humanity.

He was reluctant to talk to me about Canserbero. The new investigation, in his view, is theater—contrived by the government to distract from the dozens of journalists, politicians, activists, and dissident soldiers who have been thrown in jail in the past couple of months.

“And these efforts have succeeded,” he said. “You, for example, are paying more attention to Canserbero than to those people.”

A couple of years ago, without any sensible state intervention, some elements of Venezuelan life improved. Violence decreased, leaving sociologists at the Venezuelan Observatory of Crime to speculate that people had gotten so poor that maybe there was nothing left to rob. Santiago Sosa, a researcher at Andrés Bello Catholic University, told me that the country’s economy has grown, though only a little, and not sustainably. Enough time has passed since Venezuelans started leaving the country en masse that migrants are now in a position to send remittances, boosting the purchasing power of those who have stayed. Sanctions forced a few oligarchs to spend money inside the country, so real estate boomed. When I visited, Caracas had a new Ferrari store.

The image of the Venezuelan government, too, has started to change. Maduro had to abandon one of his favorite lines—“Those who don’t like this can pick up and leave”—when Venezuelans took his advice and started trekking across the Darién Gap by the thousands every month. Tony Frangie Mawad, an editor of the online magazine Caracas Chronicles, told me that Maduro has been trying to endear himself to young voters, many of whom never knew Venezuela before Chávez, ahead of this year’s election. To that end, the ruling party has jettisoned revolutionary red in favor of multicolored icons and hearts. The president now has a TikTok account, a podcast, and a superhero figurine called SuperMoustache. His wife is no longer the “first combatant Cilia Flores” but just Cilita. In last year’s annual holiday address, a video showed spectacular aerial views of Venezuela. The message, Mawad said, is “Look at these beaches. Look how full of people they are. If this really was an authoritarian regime, do you think people would be enjoying the beach so much?”

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In Venezuela, the majority of the population consumes only state media. Most people have little to no access to the internet. Most people also see little to no benefit from the flickering economic growth that Maduro’s rhetoric exaggerates, but they can see the image he presents.

For all of these reasons, perhaps, Canserbero is a good saint to canonize at this moment. He’s the rapper who died in the darkest of times, and who was then wronged by a corrupt system that slandered him. The government that recently sought the truth about his death cannot be the same one that tarnished his reputation—and caused hyperinflation and shortages that people would rather forget. If a postmortem redemption arc is possible for Canserbero, perhaps the worst really is over.

Constructing this tale about the pursuit of justice has required the machinations of a perverse system. Ibéyise Pacheco, an investigative journalist, obtained a voice message from the Améstica siblings describing the torture that they say they went through before filming the five-minute video confession that the prosecutor’s office posted on X. Joel García, the family’s lawyer, told me that he hasn’t yet met his clients, because they were forced to sign a document renouncing their right to legal representation. García tried to access the files of the initial investigation, but they’re classified.

The siblings didn’t get a proper trial, just a preliminary hearing where they pleaded guilty and were each sentenced to 25 years in prison. A lawyer who has represented political prisoners told me that, between the lack of due process and the dubious on-camera confessions, the Amésticas are being handled in a manner usually reserved for protesters or opposition activists. Mundaray, the former prosecutor now in exile, said that in his 30-year tenure, he never saw a case in which not just the accused were put in jail, but also investigators and officials who had reached a conclusion that contradicted the government’s story. (The Venezuelan Public Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.)

If the Amésticas went to trial, the public might have a chance to scrutinize the details of the Canserbero case. But there will be no such public airing, despite the feverish coverage of the investigation and video confessions. The hoopla around the Canserbero case effectively serves to conceal a wider truth about the state of the country instead: Venezuela is not fixed. Deadly protests have stopped not because repression has disappeared, but because it’s been successful.

Miranda González Améstica, Natalia’s daughter, was 11 on the night of the singer’s death. She told me that her mother and uncle had only a vague connection to Canserbero. She said that Natalia was not even his manager, as she professed to be in the video, and only Molnar, Natalia’s husband, was close to him.

Miranda told me that rumors had followed her family for years, and that she tried to avoid even hearing Canserbero’s music. When Saab reopened the investigation, she was studying communications in Caracas. Natalia was put under house arrest, and three weeks later learned that she was going to jail from a post on X in which the prosecutors announced orders for her imprisonment. She packed a small suitcase and stayed up until the early morning, waiting for the authorities.

Miranda asked many times to see her mother in prison, and her requests were mostly refused. But on Christmas Eve, she and her 2-year-old half brother were finally allowed 10 minutes with Natalia, with nine police officers present. Miranda was afraid to cry: Some women she’d met in the waiting area had warned her that the officers would end the visit if she did. And Natalia couldn’t say much. She just told Miranda many times: “Please, take care of yourself. Please, be safe.”

To Miranda, the message was clear. She left Venezuela within the week.