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As he rushed up the stairs from the Palo Verde metro station and jumped into the camioneta (small bus) for the five-minute ride to his home in Caracas, Jesús Piñero’s head buzzed with projects and ideas. It was 25 March 2016, and Venezuela was in meltdown, but the 22-year-old was upbeat. Exam results, parties and family awaited after a day with friends shaking a tin on the street for money to buy lightbulbs for the university history department where – in a first for his working-class family – he was a promising student.

His white Blu phone – only $80 (£60) but his most expensive and valued possession – did not stop pinging. His mother, Elisa, was worried. “When are you getting home?” She had been messaging all afternoon. A cake was ready for his brother and sister, who had birthdays that week. The family was gathering. It was getting dark. Street crime was horrendous.

Piñero had grown up fearful of the sound of gunfire in Petare, a sprawling neighbourhood of half a million people that contains Venezuela’s largest slum. The Piñero family lived in the Distrito 9 section of the José Felix Ribas barrio, one of the poorest, steepest sections. “You hear gunshots every night,” he says. “You see death very close up, you see armed people.”

Friends had been hit by random bullets. It was one reason Piñero often stayed indoors. He was a nerd, not one of those rough-and-tumble kids, braving street gangs or battling with homemade kites off the rooftops. By 13, he had already been robbed at knife-point – his phone snatched. “I stayed at home, reading Harry Potter. I loved to read.” Piñero is speaking to me over video call from Caracas. He was often sickly as a child, and Elisa was protective of the youngest of her four children. But neighbours were impressed. “Elisa’s son is going to be great,” they would say. “He’s a brainiac.” He hadn’t yet gone through the challenging process of letting them know he was also gay, which only Elisa and select friends knew.

The bus was a safe place, a community refuge. Everybody was from the barrio. “Nobody stole on buses, because it was like stealing from your own people,” he says. A thief risked getting lynched. It had happened in a nearby barrio, when a crowd had surrounded a mugger, beating him up and torching his motorbike.

A family he knew sat on the bench at the back of the bus, and Piñero took a seat on the next row, staring down at his phone as messages poured in from friends.

Then he saw the pistol. It was small and shiny, but pointing right at his face. Piñero was so transfixed that he didn’t even see the man’s face. “Give me the phone, motherfucker!”

Piñero extended his arm with the phone. Then he snatched it back. “I thought: ‘When am I ever going to buy another phone?’” he says. “It’s my most prized possession – my connection to my friends, my photos, everything was there. I don’t have money to buy another one. You can’t take this away from me.”

The pistol butt crashed into his head, and he found his face rammed against the window by the attacker.

On the street, a noisy, bustling, chaotic place of street-hawkers, musicians and motorbikes, people were staring. He’d never liked that. Normally, he was shy. But he felt sure people would come to help.

Instead, the bus emptied. People shrieked. Even the driver and ticket collector ran, taking the cashbox.

Now he was fighting for his life. He grabbed the man’s pistol arm, thinking that if he just kept it pointing at the ceiling, he might survive. “I was really scared it would go off. To this day, I feel as if I was on the verge of death,” he says, tearing up. “I was like: ‘I want this to be over already. I just want to be home.’”

The two men staggered along the aisle of the bus – Piñero’s wallet, spectacles, phone and water bottle went flying. Somehow they wrestled each other towards the door at the front, like two out-of-control drunks, bashing into the hard seats.

He remembers tumbling out on to the street and crashing against the pillar holding the roof of the bus stop. Suddenly, he felt weak and let go. His attacker hopped on to the back of a waiting motorbike and sped off.

Piñero went straight back into the bus and scrabbled around for his possessions. Everything was still there. He had done it. The nerdy, bespectacled gay kid had won the battle against the malandro, the bad guy. The bus driver was not impressed. “Dude, you can’t be taking your phone out in the street,” he said.

People gathered around Piñero and jabbered at him. He said he felt bruised, but fine. “Then I felt this strong pressure in my chest. I thought it was nerves and tiredness from fighting.”

“Are you hurt?” they asked. He insisted he was OK, but people were pointing and saying: “No, no, no. That’s not true.” He began to cough blood. It dripped on to his white Central University T-shirt. He looked down to see a small black burn hole on the left side of his chest. “Shit,” he said to himself. “I’ve been shot.”

The bullet had punctured a lung, missed his heart by two centimetres and lodged in muscle in his back. He was struggling to breathe. Each gasp hurt – a sharp, searing pain. His thoughts went to bizarre places: how would he find out his exam grades now?

He asked the family who had sat behind him to call Elisa. At home, as the news sank in, the screams were so loud that neighbours came running in. Elisa fainted. She woke up under a bed, unsure how she got there. Was Piñero dying?

Still, this was his barrio, which he calls an urban Macondo (after Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional Colombian village in One Hundred Years of Solitude). In Petare, the novelist’s magical realism is, well, real. One of Piñero’s sister’s motorbike taxi friends was right there, waiting to run clients into the steep barrio streets. He pulled up. “If you feel weak, grab me around the waist,” he said. Usually in Caracas, only women did that. Men placed their hands on their thighs. Anything else was considered too gay.

The irony barely had time to register: Piñero was out to Elisa, but not the rest of his family. As they wove through traffic, he realised he was about to have one of Caracas’s worst experiences – arriving at a hospital with a gunshot wound. Usually, this was a sign of criminality and guaranteed a slow, possibly lethal, reception. People who lived by the gun were often left to die by it. “That happened to my older sister’s boyfriend, Johnny. He bled to death outside the hospital because they wouldn’t treat him since he’d been shot and they thought he was a thug,” he says.

He couldn’t understand why the mototaxi drove right past the main Ana Francisca Pérez de León hospital building, until they headed up a short hill to a new wing opened by former president Hugo Chávez ahead of the 2012 elections (which the radical strongman went on to win for the fourth time in a row).

Sometimes, surviving is about luck. Right there, ready to mop and sweep floors as part of her cleaner’s job at the hospital, was his mother’s barrio friend, Maite. Elisa always lent her their water hose. “He’s a good kid!” Maite told the emergency unit. “A student!”

Piñero found himself being wheeled under strip lights into the emergency room. His breathing got worse. Each gasp was more of a struggle, and inflicted more pain. A young trainee doctor tried to calm him. “My love, calm down, you’re going to breathe, baby, you’re going to breathe,” she said. “You’re also stopping me from getting to the beach,” she quipped, before going off to find a senior doctor.

As he lay there, Piñero began to question why he had fought. He wished he hadn’t, and that he could be at home with his family, eating cake. Who cared, now, about a phone?

The young doctor returned and went to work, receiving instructions from a senior. A tube was inserted under his left armpit to drain the blood. There was no anaesthesia, just the awful, grating sensation of plastic pushing through flesh, setting his teeth on edge. “I was very scared because the bullet hadn’t come out,” he says. “It could be anywhere in my body.” They wheeled him towards the X-ray unit, but everything went black. He awoke back in the emergency room with an oxygen mask clamped to his face.

This was 2016. Oil prices had tanked and, since Venezuela lived off the stuff, the worst failings of the regime now led by Chávez’s heir, Nicolás Maduro, were showing. That meant rampant inflation, empty shops, dark university corridors and bare hospital pharmacies. “We would go weeks without running water. We didn’t even have money for soap to bathe with,” Piñero recalls. The family ground their own corn, because maize flour had disappeared. “It was a very dark year. All hope for change disappeared,” he says.

Now his family had to source everything the doctors needed. The Piñero family were poor, but also resourceful. They knew how to get stuff. “The doctor says: ‘I need it,’ and gives you a list, and you have to go out and buy it wherever you can,” Piñero says. He recites the list: “Syringes, IV fluids, IV bags, the treatment, the painkillers.” A cousin brought sheets. His father, a cement-truck driver, took out a loan to buy him some new glasses, since the others were smashed beyond repair.

The good news was that, if there were no complications, the punctured lung could be left to repair itself. He was taken to the hospital’s special gunshot ward. Elisa or his sisters sat with him at all times. They did not like the other two gunshot victims, who looked like bad guys. They had heard that assassins’ victims, if they survived, were finished off in their hospital beds. What if a gunman arrived to kill the other patients? Or if these guys had pistols?

The bullet stayed inside. The doctor said it might work its way out, or nearly out, and be easier to remove later. “But I was kind of afraid, because I was like: “No, what if the bullet rusts, or I get an infection or something?” It was eventually removed a month later.

Five days after being shot, Piñero was discharged to recover at home. “I remember my brother came to pick me and my mother up. I was very afraid to walk in the street, and I was overwhelmed by all the people.”

On the way back, they slowed down for a funeral cortege – a hearse followed by motorbikes. His brother dropped them at the entrance to the alley. There were still 120 steps to climb.

As they started up, a woman called Candelita, whose uncle was head of the community council, stopped to show Elisa a photo on her phone. “You see this guy here? He’s the one who shot your son. He is also the one being carried by the funeral procession.”

Barrio justice had been delivered in the harshest way. The attacker had broken the taboo on violence on buses. A gangster turned regime thug called Wuileisys Acevedo, known as Wilexis, ruled here. “A kind of Pablo Escobar,” Piñero explains. “He was supposed to guarantee peace in the neighbourhood.” Wilexis had ordered the execution, or so people said.

This is Caracas. Not everyone survives. Wilexis himself was gunned down by government agents after he turned against Maduro after popular protests in 2019. When US helicopters buzzed overhead and explosions disturbed the city on 3 January this year, soldiers snatched Maduro and his wife, taking them to the US. At least 80 people died. That marked the end of Chávismo and his Bolívarian revolution – which had initially burned with optimism, then self-immolated.

Nearly 8 million Venezuelans – a quarter of the population – have left since 2010. Piñero is one of the few whose lives are better. He teaches at a US school, is finishing his PhD, gives private classes and is living outside Petare in his own apartment. “I achieved my dream,” he says pointing at the walls around him. “What you see here is mine.”

Little by little he shed his fear of walking in the street. He kept his phone hidden. “I walked with my hands in my pocket and always looking all around,” he said. If people rubbed against him, he flinched. He still can’t stand the sight of a gun. A paintball session ended with him in a corner, having a panic attack. “I was saying: ‘I don’t want to be here, get me out of here,’ and people were like: ‘What’s wrong with you? It’s a toy gun!’ But I didn’t want it.”

The scar is still there. On our Zoom call, he leans into the camera and lifts his T-shirt to show me the puckered mark.

He says he has been looking at photos of himself as a 22-year-old. “I was a dreamer. This makes me very sad. I didn’t choose to be born into something like this, to have to be strong and endure things. We Venezuelans have been through so much.”

A lot has changed since 2016. “Now that I’ve been given a second chance at life. I have to make the most of it,” he says. “My mom is the most important person in my life. I try to spend a lot of time with her.” Elisa dreamed of one day seeing Venice, so Piñero saved up and took her to Italy. She still blesses him every day. “My day doesn’t work if she doesn’t give me her blessing.”

The Piñero who was shot was not religious, but now he talks to God at night. “It fills me with peace. My communication with God is private, it’s intimate.”

He has also had a boyfriend for the past three years, who his family know. “They respect it now,” he says. His academic career is working out well, providing opportunities his siblings and parents never had. He recently won a scholarship to travel around the US.

I ask if, apart from reinforcing his will to make the most of life, he feels that he also lost something with the shooting. He struggles to answer. “No one has ever asked that,” he says. Eventually, he says: “The gunshot is how I became an adult.

“Symbolically it also represents something else. It is like my historical mark of the Chávista revolution. This process has left marks, some visible, others invisible, on each one of us. This is my true mark.”