To Those Who Explained Venezuela to Us Without Listening
By Enrique Lozada Garcia (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – The fall of dictator Nicolas Maduro and his main accomplice, Cilia Flores, in a surgical military operation carried out by the Administration of Donald Trump marked the beginning of 2026. For the first time, the world looked directly at what is truly happening in Venezuela. However, faced with this new reality, part of the ideological spectrum has chosen to impoverish the debate, reducing it almost exclusively to two axes: international law and oil.
It is undeniable that oil permeates the lives of Venezuelans: the country has made its history—and paid its tragedy—on top of the largest proven crude reserves on the planet. For decades, moreover, Venezuela’s potential has been deliberately minimized and reduced to a functional stereotype: a country of beauty queens and oil.
Likewise, international law is invoked not as a real tool of protection, but as a convenient rhetorical resource. In an increasingly multipolar global order, its application no longer responds to universal principles, but to concrete interests, camouflaged behind worn-out clichés about sovereignty and the self-determination of peoples.
Reducing the conversation about Venezuela to oil and international law is not only an analytical mistake: it is an ignorant, complicit, and dehumanizing stance. Assuming that Venezuela is merely “oil” and appealing to certain principles of international law reveals how many of those who speak of human rights, social justice, and Latin American progressivism end up functioning as useful idiots—if not as direct accomplices—of the dictatorship Venezuelans have suffered for more than 26 years.
If only those who today seek to explain our pain to us Venezuelans had cared about our oil and our sovereignty when Cuba, Iran, Russia, and China took almost absolute control of the country’s oil production apparatus. If only they had demanded respect for national sovereignty when the regime continued sending oil to Havana while Venezuelans spent entire days without electricity and stood in endless lines to fill their gas tanks. If only they cared as well about the ecocide now being perpetrated in the Mining Arc of Bolívar state, where the indiscriminate use of mercury has devastated a large part of the Venezuelan Amazon—inflicting irreparable damage on one of the lungs of the world.
If only Claudia Sheinbaum, Gustavo Petro, and Lula da Silva had reacted as quickly as they did when they signed their joint document rejecting the US operation of January 3, 2026—but on July 28, 2024—to demand that the result of the presidential election be respected, in which the opposition proved—ballot by ballot—its overwhelming victory over Nicolas Maduro.
If only Kirchner and Correa and their parties had appealed to the international community to demand that María Corina Machado be allowed to run as a candidate and not be arbitrarily and irregularly barred.
If only the Chilean Communist Party, Uruguay’s Broad Front, and Paraguay’s Guasú Front had raised their voices when the Argentine Embassy in Caracas was violently besieged by the regime, simply for giving refuge to the political team of Maria Corina Machado.
But they didn’t. And in politics, when one chooses to stay silent in the face of injustice, one is not neutral: one takes a side.
Those who invoke Latin American brotherhood and seek to explain to us Venezuelans that “it all comes down to oil” took the side of those who arrested more than 2,000 people during the post-electoral protests. They are the ones who today do not raise their voices for their compatriots imprisoned in Venezuela.
They are accomplices to daily human rights violations; accomplices to sexual violence, including against minors; accomplices to the torture of political leaders and journalists. They are those who constantly speak of the victims of Operation Condor but refuse to acknowledge that in Venezuela enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings are today the order of the day.
Those who decorated Nicolas Maduro with state honors while his regime ordered point-blank executions against young protesters—as happened with Bassil Da Costa—have no moral authority to speak to us of Latin American brotherhood. Those who for years benefited from Chavez’s and Maduro’s petro-checkbook while downplaying or denying the systematic persecution of the independent press cannot give us lessons about “how to get out of a dictatorship” either.
Because while in much of the region a democratization process was only just beginning, Venezuela already had decades of democratic life and played an active role in multilateral efforts to consolidate a free Latin America.
International law has failed completely in Venezuela. When the report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, was made public—and documented exhaustively, thanks to thousands of testimonies from victims and witnesses and rigorous investigation, how the regime committed torture, arbitrary imprisonment, extrajudicial executions, sexual violence, political persecution, and systematic censorship—the response of a significant part of the international community was silence, diplomatic lukewarmness, or worse still, the relativization of the facts.
Faced with the failure of those who for years were unable—or unwilling—to exert real pressure to force a democratic transition in Venezuela; faced with those who today seem more concerned about Nicolas Maduro testifying in his trial in New York and exposing the vast corruption network of Chavismo—including the illegal financing of political campaigns in different countries of the continent; and faced with those who continue to deny an unquestionable reality: that Venezuela today is a devastated country in which nearly a quarter of its population was forced into exile, silence is no longer an option.
And yes: oil and international law exist and play a role in this great chessboard that opened with the arrest of Nicolas Maduro. But the fundamental task belongs to Venezuelans: to begin rebuilding our destiny. Today we have legitimate leadership to move toward a democratic transition; firm allies who understand the criminal nature of the regime we face; and a people who, with faith and hope, long to gradually rebuild the country that was once reduced to the caricature of “beauty queens and oil.”
Venezuelans are determined to go all the way. To conquer freedom. To ensure our families want to come back. To ensure there are no political prisoners and that freedom can be breathed in every street of the country. We are firm and clear in our goal.
To those who try to reduce this conversation to oil and international law, keep talking among yourselves. Because Venezuelans—and the world—are ready to move forward, guided by our courage and by God, toward Venezuela, land of grace.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.