The world’s hypocrisy caused humanitarian calamity and signed the death warrant of a longstanding democratic tradition.
The decisive defeat of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who has illegally held the presidency since a fraudulent election in 2013, brought the suffering that a country of 28 million people has experienced over two decades of autocracy into the spotlight.
It’s not debatable that the Socialist government has been inhuman — the kind of evil we tend to see as belonging in history books, not in the 21st century. An independent watchdog has documented 45,000 cases of torture, as well as other despicable human rights violations across the last decade. Reports by Human Rights Watch implicated this regime in the murders of 20,000; and Amnesty International has registered 2,400 forced disappearances and dozens of deaths in these summer months, including many children and those with disabilities.

Because of this, it was not a surprise that Chavism, the ideological movement behind the dictatorship, was happy to cheat more than once in order to stave off their loss (or that they didn’t do a very convincing job of it, with phony results so ridiculous that experts have calculated the probabilities of them being valid at one in one hundred million).
A laudable moment followed July’s vote, as heads of state from each end of the political spectrum backed the legitimate president-elect, Edmundo González Urrutia. This included bellicose support from rightwing Argentine leader Javier Milei and Chile’s progressive Gabriel Boric. Only a litany of authoritarians from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia (alongside their de facto Caribbean colonies) promoted this apparatchik narrative, as did Honduras’ administration and our very own President López Obrador.
However, despite initial fanfare, Washington’s attention has tapered off and its strategy to oust Maduro is proving toothless. And yet, beyond this policy failure, there is another obvious question: With Maduro so weakened, who is the real problem? It might be more convenient for us to treat it as their internal affair, as we often have, but an honest reading of events shows another side to that coin.
Let’s review the past two decades, and how our leaders treated the men who took a stable state and turned it into a nation where independent judges are literally raped. For years, Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez, was included by the Latin American left as one of them: his party was a member of the São Paulo Forum, their political conference. It wasn’t just on the farthest-left side of the aisle — Enrique Peña Nieto and Jair Bolsonaro are two examples of presidents who should have known better than to accord the autocracy the support that they did. Thus, legitimacy became the gift of our elected leaders to the butchers of millions of lives, and a crucial factor in the regime surviving crises in previous years.
To reiterate, left-of-center administrations have opposed this ongoing dirty war against Venezuelans, most notably Chile and Guatemala. But the sad truth is that they are a minority amongst their peers.
After the vote, Presidents Lula da Silva and Petro spent days trying to forge a statement without the words “dictator” or “fraud.” Mexico plainly boycotted two international summits discussing the crisis. Argentine power-broker (and convicted felon) Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, meanwhile, reacted to questions after the elections by saying that, while Maduro was no saint, the opposition was just as bad. As she herself has argued (regarding the military junta that ruled her country in the late 1970s and early 1980s), promoting a “both-sides” narrative is apologia at best and enabling brutality, by way of omission, at worst. Even Pedro Sánchez, Span’s premier, who cultivates an image of moderation and refinement, led every MEP not from the right against an EU resolution in support of the opposition in Caracas and was accused of aiding in the exile of the pro-democracy president-elect and coercing him into signing a concession letter.
Such a hypocritical and blasé abandonment of the progressive principle of universal human rights is being echoed outside the halls of power. A myriad of examples exist. Take Elena Poniatowska, a writer who has risen to fame and profit using stories from the fatal repression of the student movement in 1968. She must have lost those same morals when she received a medal from the dictatorship, when she proudly stood for a photo op with Vice President Jorge Rodríguez, a leader of the police crackdown that had fired on 80,000 students and left hundreds of casualties. She still campaigned for Chávez years later. Or take a look at “las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo,” a now-disgraced group of activists and victims once lauded for their efforts to search for the desaparecidos of the military government, in headlines for an endorsement of Maduro in that election. “If Videla was on the wrong side of history because he kidnapped innocents, why would you applaud this?” is the one reasonable reaction. Then there’s La Jornada, a nationalist newspaper in Mexico which accuses democratic renewal of being a nefarious plot — their way of eroding public opposition and enabling continued slaughter by promoting complacency. And it’s not just a single paper. Canal 5 Noticias from Buenos Aires and the respectable French daily Libération do the same. Viridiana Ríos, an academic with a façade of neutrality, meanwhile, uses “the great leader” to refer to a demagogue behind a putsch.

Nicolás Maduro, just like Hugo Chávez before him, is a murderous tyrant. The one solution to the crisis is his unconditional removal. But we also need to take a more critical view of how we, the free world, either allowed events to reach such reprehensible degeneracy or even actively enabled democratic and economic decline. We need to understand that our leaders don’t only affect our lives inside those imaginary lines we call borders, but, for better or worse, those of billions of strangers as well. For a time now, that impact has been thoroughly negative. Anyone who believes that any human being, regardless of nationality, deserves the same fundamental rights has a duty to reverse this wrong and to actively force change in Caracas. And that’s the truth, whether you’re an ordinary citizen or a head of state.
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