September 11: the day I discovered that New York was my home too
Twenty-five years have passed and I can still remember that morning.
It was Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I was in Caracas, on the 7th floor of the Torre Mene Grande, where Econoinvest then rented a small space. As almost always, before the market opened, we had CNBC on.
Shortly before nine in the morning an image of New York appeared. From a distance you could see smoke coming from one of the Twin Towers. The first reports were confused. People spoke of a small plane, maybe a light aircraft, and it all seemed like an accident.
At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03, we watched United Airlines Flight 175 crash into the South Tower.
In that instant any possibility of thinking it was an accident disappeared.
The United States was under attack.
And for me, from Caracas, they were attacking something far closer than I had until then understood.
The city I did not want to go to
My relationship with New York had begun seven years earlier, almost by chance.
In 1994 Venezuela was beginning to go through a severe financial crisis. An Argentine friend, Ariel, worked at Oppenheimer and they were expanding the team for Latin America. He called me to talk about the possibility of joining.
I was 25 years old and, quite simply, I did not want to leave Venezuela.
I even remember the place where I ended up making the decision. It was at El Urrutia, a restaurant in Sabana Grande, in Caracas. I met there with Herman and Pedro and, between the two of them, they finished convincing me to take that opportunity and go to New York.
I could not imagine then how deeply that decision would change my life.
I arrived in Manhattan and rented my first apartment at 19 West 69th Street. I paid $1,525 a month and was only a few meters from Central Park.
I started working at Oppenheimer. Later our group moved to Morgan Stanley, where my friend Fabián was as well.
But the most important thing New York gave me had nothing to do with Wall Street.
There I found Selva again. We fell in love, we got married, our daughter Victoria was born. I bought my first apartment. I built a family.
New York was the place of many of my firsts as an adult: as a husband, as a father, as a professional, as a homeowner.
When I arrived I was 25.
When I returned to Venezuela in 1999 I was someone else.
Cortlandt Street
During those years, the World Trade Center was not for us only a symbol of New York.
It was part of everyday life.
My friend Tony and I often rode the subway together. We got off at Cortlandt Street and from there walked to our respective offices.
Two years after my return to Caracas, Tony had decided to do the same: leave New York and go back to Venezuela.
On the night of September 10, 2001, the group of Venezuelan friends who still remained in New York gathered to say goodbye to him.
The place chosen was Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Dinner ended after midnight.
Tony still keeps the receipt from that night. Because he paid past midnight, it was dated with a date that a few hours later would be etched forever:
September 11, 2001.
Seventeen minutes
Back to that morning in Caracas, I remember the confusion after the first impact.
We were all in front of the television.
With us was Mr. Moore, an American about 70 years old, retired from Merrill Lynch, who advised us at Econoinvest.
Then came the second plane.
I think anyone who was watching television that morning remembers the feeling. For those of us who had lived in New York and had friends working there, everything changed in scale.
We did practically nothing else.
No one was thinking about markets, prices, or trades.
Everyone was in front of the television and, at the same time, grabbing phones.
I called Selva. We began desperately to reach our friends. She called friends who worked at Merrill Lynch in the World Financial Center, right next to the World Trade Center. We called Fabián, Tony, and so many others.
Tony, fortunately, was still at home. He had not left for the office.
But during those first hours no one knew who was all right and who was not.
I remember that feeling of calling our friends in New York with the fear of not being able to reach them.
And I also remember Mr. Moore.
That man of about 70, with a whole professional life behind him, was crying. Deeply distressed, he was doing exactly the same as we were: calling again and again trying to reach his family.
We were Venezuelans who had lived in New York and an American who happened to be in Caracas.
We were all far away.
And all of us, in some way, were there.
When the towers fell
There are images one can describe. Others are practically impossible.
For me, watching the Twin Towers collapse belongs to the second category.
The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. The North Tower, at 10:28. That day 2,977 people were murdered in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania.
When I saw the towers fall I felt a sadness and a disbelief that even today I struggle to explain.
But I also discovered something about myself.
I had never imagined I could feel that way about a place.
It was as if, without realizing it, New York belonged to me — or rather, I belonged to New York.
I had gone back to Venezuela because I had always thought Caracas was my home. And it was.
What I did not understand until that September 11 was that over the previous five years New York had also become my home.
Its streets, Central Park, the subway, Cortlandt Street, Wall Street, my friends, my career, my marriage, the birth of my daughter.
All of that had left in me a sense of belonging that never went away.
The day that changed the world
September 11 also transformed far more than New York.
It changed the priorities of the United States and, with them, a large part of the international order.
The fight against terrorism moved almost immediately to the center of U.S. foreign policy. Then came the war in Afghanistan and, later, the war in Iraq, along with a much more intense American military and political presence in the Middle East.
From Latin America we also lived the consequences.
The region had already lost some of the strategic relevance it had held for Washington during the Cold War. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union had begun to shift priorities.
September 11 deepened that change.
For years, an enormous share of America's political, diplomatic, military, and security attention was concentrated on the Middle East and on the global fight against terrorism.
It is not that Washington abandoned Latin America, nor that everything that came afterward in the region is explained by that decision.
But those of us who lived through those years did see how the center of gravity of U.S. foreign policy shifted toward another part of the world.
Twenty-five years later, it is worth thinking as well about what that relative loss of attention meant for Latin America.
Wall Street after September 11
In my profession there was another transformation I could observe firsthand.
The international financial system changed.
In October 2001 the USA PATRIOT Act was passed. Among other things, the law markedly strengthened the American architecture against money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
Everything tightened: knowing the customer, due diligence, bank correspondent relationships, the tracking of certain transactions, and the hand of the authorities over high-risk institutions or jurisdictions.
For those of us who have worked our whole lives inside the financial system, the change was enormous.
Compliance ceased to be a secondary function and became one of the centers of power inside institutions.
Many of those changes were necessary. A modern financial system cannot allow its institutions to finance terrorism, money laundering, or crime.
Over time over-compliance also appeared: institutions that, faced with regulatory and reputational cost, prefer not to maintain certain relationships even when they are perfectly legitimate.
Latin Americans know that reality well. Venezuelans, in particular, live it today when we try to open or keep international bank accounts.
The effect stretched far beyond U.S. borders. The importance of the dollar and of the United States financial system meant that banks and financial centers around the world had to adapt to ever stricter standards.
Not everything came from September 11. In the years that followed would come new tax rules, sanctions, the FATCA law, international transparency standards, and the weakening of traditional bank secrecy, even in historic centers such as Switzerland.
But today's financial system cannot be understood without that turning point.
The heroes
There is something else that must not be forgotten.
The evil of that terrorist act was accompanied by extraordinary demonstrations of courage.
Firefighters, police officers, employees, and ordinary citizens, faced with the unimaginable, chose to help others even at the risk of their own lives.
Among the victims of September 11 were 343 members of the Fire Department of New York, 37 Port Authority Police officers, and 23 officers of the New York Police Department.
At Morgan Stanley there is a story that is often told: that of Rick Rescorla, the firm's head of security at the World Trade Center.
Rescorla had insisted for years on preparation and evacuation drills. On September 11, that preparation helped thousands of employees leave the complex. He kept helping with the evacuation and died that day.
One clarification: I had worked at Morgan Stanley, but my group was in Midtown and came from the original Morgan Stanley. I did not personally know those who worked at the World Trade Center. The firm had merged with Dean Witter in 1997, and the group I associate with those towers came mainly from that other organization.
You do not need to have known them to admire them.
Their stories are part of what we must remember.
Twenty-five years later
Writing this in 2026, there is a turn that did not exist that day.
When I watched the Twin Towers fall I was Venezuelan. I had lived in the United States, I had built a family there, and I loved New York deeply, but I had returned to my country.
Life, however, would take another turn.
After what we lived through in Venezuela from 2010 onward, the United States opened its doors to us again. This time it was Miami that gave us the chance to rebuild our lives and start over.
And about a year ago I became a U.S. citizen.
Today I can say with pride that I am Venezuelan by birth. I love Venezuela deeply and it will always be my homeland.
But I can also say, with that same pride, that I love the country that adopted me and of which I now have the privilege of being a citizen.
I am a Caraqueño.
I am a New Yorker for everything that city made of me.
And now I am also a Miamian, because Miami gave us a new chance when we needed it most.
Over the years one discovers that loving a place does not oblige you to stop loving another.
Never Forget
That is why, for me, Never Forget means much more than remembering where I was on September 11, 2001.
It means remembering the 2,977 people who that morning left for their offices, boarded a plane, went to work at the Pentagon, or were simply living an ordinary day and never came home.
It means admiring those who ran toward the danger when everyone else was trying to escape it.
It means not forgetting the evil of a terrorist act capable of murdering thousands of innocents indiscriminately.
But it also means defending what terrorism seeks to destroy.
Freedom.
The rule of law.
And the values of a society in which people from anywhere in the world can arrive, work, build a family, and one day feel that they belong to it too.
Twenty-five years ago, sitting in front of a television on the 7th floor of the Torre Mene Grande in Caracas, watching the Twin Towers disappear, I understood something I had not known until then.
New York was my home too.
Today, as a Venezuelan by birth and a citizen of the United States of America, that memory holds still more meaning for me.
To the victims, our remembrance.
To the heroes, our admiration.
And against terrorism and those who would destroy our freedoms, our determination to defend them.
Never Forget.
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