Héctor Sánchez, sociologist. — The injustice suffocating Venezuela today is not an isolated event. It forms part of a long historical pattern of “exceptionalism” in which ordinary citizens have become trapped in the struggles of those who hold power.
Behind the mask of a supposed “higher interest,” rival factions have distorted the common good, claiming the authority to act and decide on our behalf while, in practice, deepening dispossession for their own benefit. Their response to the tragedy of the June 24 earthquake has laid this reality bare.
As Latin America’s critical intellectual tradition has long argued, we face a form of “colonial alchemy” in which our wealth generates our poverty to sustain the prosperity of others: empires and their local overseers, both within the government and the opposition.
Today, Venezuelan society finds itself squeezed between two equally cynical forces. On one side stands a government willing to rely on repression and electoral fraud to remain in power under the pretext of “protecting us,” while embracing foreign tutelage whenever it serves its interests. On the other stands an opposition leadership prepared to make any concession necessary to seize power and replace the old vassals in their relationship with global centers of influence. This “commission-agent bourgeoisie,” as Eduardo Galeano would have called it, appears to have sold its soul to the devil at a price that would have embarrassed Faust himself.
Foreign intervention reveals, above all, the moral poverty of a political leadership that subordinates national sovereignty to calculations of its own political advantage. It represents a form of beggary in which sovereignty has slipped into a distant second place.
We are witnessing “schizophrenic practices” in which each side would rather burn the house down with everyone still inside than acknowledge the historical reality of the Venezuelan people. While political leaders compete to prove who can serve foreign interests more faithfully, ordinary Venezuelans bear the consequences of this unequal exchange, exporting misery to finance others’ prosperity.
It is time to put an end to these suffocating forms of tutelage. Venezuelans are neither a people incapable of governing themselves nor a nation in need of guardians. We do not need to be “saved” from Miraflores, Miami, or the White House. Following the Latin American national-popular tradition of thought, we must reject the dangerous illusion that an independent and sovereign path is impossible. We must free ourselves from foreign powers and from their domestic accomplices.
Real power does not reside in presidential palaces, embassies, or influencers interested only in monetizing tragedy. True power reveals itself in an outstretched hand, in the streets, neighborhoods, residential communities, towns, factories, and universities. As the recent national tragedy demonstrated, only an organized people can recognize themselves and shape their own destiny above any empire or political faction.
Breaking this perverse logic is not simply an act of faith; it is an act of political will. And political will is, ultimately, the one thing no one has ever managed to take from us. The Venezuelan people must move beyond the elites’ power games because the solution lies elsewhere.
