Watching Venezuela’s Last Glacier Disappear
In 1976, Alejandra Melfo and her family joined the tens of thousands of Uruguayans fleeing their country’s military dictatorship. Melfo, who was 11 when her family arrived in Venezuela, remembers delighting in the lighthearted Venezuelan national anthem, and realizing that her blond hair and pale skin were unremarkable in a country where generations of Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian immigrants had also found refuge and opportunity.
When Melfo was a teenager, she and her family moved to the prosperous university city of Mérida, in the mountains of western Venezuela, and she became one of the many foreign-born students at the University of the Andes. The Venezuelan government had invested a sizable portion of the country’s oil wealth in education and research, and the university—the first in Latin America to be connected to the internet—was known throughout the continent and beyond for its scientific accomplishments. For Melfo, it became a professional home: A theoretical physicist, she joined the faculty even before she completed her doctorate, and served as a professor at the university for 25 years.
Though Melfo officially retired in 2016, she is one of the few faculty members still on the job. As Venezuela has descended into political and economic crisis, the university has endured rising street crime and armed raids of campus buildings. Professors and students have left in droves, and classrooms are dark and empty; because of the country’s crushing inflation, the remaining professors
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