Caracas Chronicles

Teodoro Petkoff, one of the founders of Venezuela’s Movimiento Al Socialismo in the 1970s, once said to my family: “I didn’t divorce Stalin to marry Chavez.” Not all socialists followed his example. Today, part of the global debate about Venezuela illustrates one of the greatest ironies of the post-Cold War landscape: the international left has not evolved in their readings of Latin American politics since Henry Kissinger led the U.S. foreign policy and the South American dictatorships executed Plan Condor. 

A vast majority of advocates for human rights and decolonial struggles are convinced that the White House has a direct hand in the Venezuelan “situation,” trapped in an U.S.-centered tunnel vision as blinding and harmful as the American exceptionalism revered by conservatives.

The easy trick of 1960s jargon

Just like his mentor Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez was intelligent at designing the international image of the Bolivarian regime. The famous 2006 UN speech where he calls George W. Bush “the devil,” dramatically referencing smells of sulfur on the United Nations’ podium, marked the international conscience. Still reposted today, that speech cemented the regime in the international left’s mind as “a lighthouse in the neoliberal night,” in the words of a Paris-based Venezuelan analyst. The international left (American in particular) has ignored a hard truth: even authoritarians can have good points. Especially when these good points are such an effective smokescreen. 

Let us dissipate the smoke then. The success of the Chavista manipulation is displayed in all its glory by the media outlet The People’s Forum, which garnered a worrying 90k views on X (formerly Twitter) after uploading a video on the 31st of July declaring that Maria Corina Machado is a “far-right fascist leader.” This hinges on two main pieces of evidence: she met once George W. Bush in Washington DC, and she pleaded in 2018 for Benjamin Netanyahu to carry out a military intervention in Venezuela. The video then moves on to say that the people in Venezuela are engaged in a “socialist people-first process, that stands for a free Palestine.” It finishes by stating that the Maduro government has sent “so much” aid to Palestine, without providing evidence other than the government’s word.

María Corina Machado is being demonized by the international left for doing what their revolutionary leaders have always done: compromise with international actors to achieve a domestic goal. 

The same people who are outraged at her meeting with Bush do not express outrage over Chavez calling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President who has openly denied the systematic extermination of the European Jews by the Nazi regime, his brother and comrade. The same international left that has, rightfully so, made the fight against negationism a pivotal aspect of their defense of Palestinian people. But all flies in fights when it comes to echoing someone who knows how to talk against American imperialism, as Chavez did by reframing the old tropes of the 1960s. 

What of the prolonged association of the Chavez and Maduro regimes with China? Xi Jinping also met with George W. Bush in 2008, before arriving to power, but he does not get the same level of scrutiny for having risen to prominence after meeting with the conservative president, and he has been denounced as responsible for the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs, according to several human rights organizations. 

What of the unconditional support the Chavez and Maduro regimes have received from Vladimir Putin, who has been systematically called out for his instrumentalization of the suffering of what the left calls “the global majority” to disqualify the criticisms of his regime? Why are the associations with them morally acceptable? Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro have successfully embarrassed the international left by trapping them in their own trap: US-centric analysis.

The decolonial bias

Falling into the same register as the decolonial left, why should the Venezuelan people who have suffered exodus, the return of eradicated diseases for lack of medicine (a threat to global health), energy cuts, controlled exits and entries, lack of consular services, as well as total erasure from the discourse on human rights violations, adapt to the American view of resistance? 

Why should the Venezuelan proletariat adapt to the international left’s (often privileged) view of global politics?

One of the central claims of the decolonial left in their support to Chavez is his insistence on indigenous rights. But legal and formal recognition of indigenous lands has not avoided the massive deforestation and the impact on native communities that the gold rush, led by the Maduro government, has caused on the Venezuelan Amazon, which would be a scandal to the international left if Bolsonaro’s Brazil was responsible for it. NGOs focused on social justice and the environment have extensively reported human rights abuses such as human slavery, human trafficking, and mass killings in the hands of soldiers and guerrillas or gangs allied with the Maduro regime. 

Venezuelan academics who remain in the country, such as Maria Eugenia Grillet, have said that “illegal gold mining seems to be promoted by a certain part of the state, by corruption, by unregulated illicit activities—and by the political, economic and social crisis of the country.” The case of the Mining Arc decreed by Maduro assembles everything the decolonial current craves to denounce: exploitation, pollution, expropriation of common goods for private and illegal profits, as well as corruption in government that exploits the poor and makes the rich richer, all while representing an “existential threat” to indigenous groups.

We are praised when we get tear-gassed in Paris for fighting for our social rights, but Venezuelan protesters are called agents of US-imperialism when they do it for our human rights. How can the international left claim to be behind a regime that embraced, since their 1999 constitutional project, military rule as default? How can the international left claim to be behind a regime whose only stance on the Palestinian issue has been to instrumentalize for appearance’s sake? Populations who today are falling prey to the once-eradicated diseases, in an eerily similar fashion to the Venezuelan’s population descent into a public health disaster. Common struggles of oppressed populations are a leitmotif of decolonial struggles, how can the international left continue to support a regime that has pushed its population to, as Paula Vasquez Lezama used to say “a war-like domestic situation without the war” ?

The international left claims to support a regime that deprived its people of basic resources such as a quality education, good quality public healthcare, and that stands behind criminalized abortion? There is no coherence in supporting a ruler that stands for the creation of special prisons for protestors, calling them “reeducation farms”. Does the international left have such poor standards for its leadership that it will accept foreign policy over domestic affairs? Note to authoritarians: one good enough speech at the UN buys you twenty years of good faith.

These questions are eating Venezuelans alive and are pushing them to reactionary politics, breeding movements that the same American left does not understand, such as why there are there MAGAzuelans in Florida. Because the Venezuelan population is left as prey to other authoritarianisms, who see their screams in the void as a political opportunity.