Long ago Venezuela ceased functioning as a recognizable republic governed through reciprocal law. What remained was the visible shell of a State occupied by criminal patronage networks, military corruption, narcotrafficking structures, paramilitary violence, ideological operatives, and political figures whose survival depended less on constitutional accountability than on protected access to force, money, and fear.
Government institutions continued functioning publicly while losing legitimacy internally. Courts remained. Elections remained. Ministries remained. Official speeches remained. Yet the relation between institutional language and lived reality fractured. Citizens learned to navigate contradictions that would once have appeared intolerable: corruption without consequence, violence without accountability, elections without trust, legality without reciprocity, patriotism fused with extraction.
The country did not collapse into chaos through sudden rupture. It normalized degradation step by step while preserving the appearance of institutional continuity. That was the true danger. Not disappearance of structures, but their survival after recognizability had already deteriorated within them.
Ten years ago Americans could still treat Venezuela as distant pathology, a failure belonging to another political culture. That illusion no longer holds.
The executive culture surrounding Donald Trump exposed mechanisms Americans once assumed constitutional tradition alone would prevent: attacks against institutional legitimacy, pressure upon electoral credibility, demands for personal loyalty over civic obligation, normalization of disinformation, contempt toward procedural restraint, degradation of judicial independence, and transformation of political identity into permanent grievance mobilized through resentment, fear, and spectacle.
The danger does not reside in resemblance alone. It resides in normalization. Citizens adapt. Language adapts. Institutions adapt. Contradictions that once produced alarm become explainable. Then tolerable. Then routine. What once appeared disqualifying becomes incorporated gradually into ordinary political life.
This does not make the United States Venezuela. Historical conditions, constitutional structures, federal distribution of power, and civic traditions remain different. But recognizable mechanisms do not require identical outcomes to remain dangerous.
What matters is whether language retains the capacity to name deterioration before deterioration completes its normalization.
Diagnostic anger begins there.
Not because anger possesses truth. Not because anger sanctifies perception. But because certain inequities become too substantial to absorb inwardly without falsification. Under such conditions, indifference demands greater distortion than anger.
This anger differs from ideological rage because it does not seek enemies as emotional nourishment. It seeks recognizability. It attempts to restore proportion between language and consequence after public discourse has begun dissolving that relation through euphemism, procedural theater, tribal loyalty, intimidation, propaganda, and institutional cowardice. It confronts conditions whose normalization depends precisely upon weakening direct recognition.
That is why diagnostic anger remains fundamentally different from violence even when severe in expression. Violence seeks domination, humiliation, submission, or destruction. Diagnostic anger seeks exposure. It attempts to invalidate conditions that permit inequity to harden gradually into accepted reality while institutions continue speaking the language of democratic legitimacy.
Some words divide because they dehumanize. Other words reveal divisions already operating beneath institutional language designed to conceal them. A political culture may continue invoking democracy while reorganizing itself around concentrated executive power, selective legality, disinformation, personal loyalty, and fear administered through permanent agitation. Under such conditions, excessive moderation in language becomes another form of concealment.
This does not authorize hysteria, fabrication, or totalization. The prose must preserve distinctions within the anger itself. The nouns must remain earned. The mechanisms must remain observable. The pressure must remain tied to recognizable conditions rather than rhetorical intoxication. Otherwise anger loses diagnostic force and becomes spectacle.
Yet once rigor is maintained, anger acquires another function. It protects language from surrendering completely to euphemism. Every deteriorating civic order develops vocabularies designed to neutralize recognition: stability, security, patriotism, emergency, normalization, procedural continuity. Diagnostic anger interrupts that sedation. It restores disproportion to speech where disproportion already exists in reality.
The risk of expressing such recognition openly is not merely reputational. The greater risk may lie in refusing expression once recognition has already occurred. Euphemism then ceases being caution and becomes inward cooperation with distortion itself.
That was always the deeper danger.
Venezuela demonstrated how collapse normalizes itself while continuing to speak the language of legitimacy. The lesson was never confined to Venezuela alone.
“Geometric Allegory” digital painting 2023 by Ricardo Morin (American visual artist born in Venezuela–1954)
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Author’s Note
This installment continues Chapter XII, “The Fourth Sign,” following the initial discussion of Autocracy (§§ 1–9). It cattends to Venezuela and examines §§ 10–25 in which the earlier framework is applied to a specific national case. The chapter concludes in a separate installment devoted to The Asymmetry of Sanctions (§§ 26–34).
Ricardo F. Morín, December 26, 2025, Oakland Park, Florida.
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Chapter XII: Part 2
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Venezuela
*
10
To comprehend the practical implications of autocracy and its concentration of power, I defer to Rafael Arráiz Lucca’s book, Venezuela:1830 a nuestros días:Breve historia política [2016]. Here, Arráiz Lucca provides a comprehensive history of Venezuela from independence to today. [1] He examines political, economic, and social changes that have shaped the nation. He traces early struggles and the rise of caudillos, and has treated Hugo Chávez’s rise to power, his ideology, and the effects of his policies on society. He has also examined the continuing influence of Chávez under Nicolás Maduro. In his view, both Chávez and Maduro have exemplified regimes that have centralized power and suppressed dissent.
11
The country’s political trajectory has been determined by its enduring history of military rule. Since independence in 1811, twenty-fivemilitary officers have held the presidency, presided over 172 years of governance, and entrenched the military’s influence in the nation’s political fabric. [2] The transition to representative democracy in 1961 marked a significant shift, which introduced in thirty-eight-years of civilian-led stability under the Punto Fijo Pact (see Chapter XI). This civilian era, however, was not free from upheaval. The 1989 Caracazo riots, coupled with the failed coup attempt by Hugo Chávez in 1992, revealed the fragility of civilian democracy and the persistent appeal of military leadership in moments of crisis. [3][4]
12
The Caracazo riots and the subsequent repression had exposed deep societal fractures that undermined confidence in civilian governance. For many, the chaos and disillusionment restored the perception of the military as a force of order and stability, a perception grounded in the nation’s long history of caudillo leadership. Chávez’s rise can be understood as a direct consequence of this historical legacy: a charismatic military figure presenting himself as the answer to the failures of civilian politics. The violent repression following the riots, coupled with the systemic inability to address the economic and social inequities they symbolized, prepared the conditions for a return to autocratic tendencies, concealed within populist rhetoric. This marked the beginning of a new authoritarian era, shaped not only by the fractures of the present but also by legacies of the past.
13
The presidency of Hugo Chávez continued the tradition of authoritarianism that had characterized the regime of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez.[5] As in the era of Pérez Jiménez, Chávez depended upon oil to finance his policies. [6]
14
For Hugo Chávez, “participatory democracy” directed toward empowering marginalized groups. He created community councils and social missions, which became instruments of his political control—the so-called Bolivarian ideology. Participation thereinwas conditioned upon loyalty to Chávez, which ultimately led to the marginalization of people opposed to his policies. His blend of populism and authoritarianism framed dissent as being unpatriotic and thus hindered national progress. This approach enabled him to diminish the power of law; the legislative and judicial branches of government became dependent on the executive.
15
With the endorsement of Nicolás Maduro by Hugo Chávez in 2012, the country advanced further toward authoritarianism. [7] Opposition parties such as Vente Venezuela, Primero de Justicia, Un Nuevo Tiempo, and Voluntad Popular accused Chávez and Maduro of manipulating the Consejo Nacional Electoral. [8][9][10][11][12]
16
After the death of Chávez, Maduro faced similar accusations in the 2013 and 2018 elections. The Organization of American States, the Lima Group, the International Contact Group, and the Group of Seven concurred.[13][14][15] Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also questioned his legitimacy. [16][17] One exception is the United Nations’ Security Council debate (press release SC/13719), which urged Venezuelans to resolve their crisis internally. [18][19]
17
Following Venezuela’s 2016 suspension from Mercosur, Latin American responses varied and then changed as political administrations changed. [20][21] Initially, Argentina favored the measures by the Organization of American States to apply diplomatic pressure on Venezuela and sought to address the political and humanitarian crises there. [22] It also recognized Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president, though in 2019, it changed and became an advocate for mediation. At first, Brazil recognized Guaidó and was for sanctions against the Venezuelan government, and then in 2023 requested for mediation. [23] Between 2018–22, Colombia accused the Maduro regime of drug trafficking and of giving support to the guerrilla groups, the National Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces; Colombia severed diplomatic relations. [24] Later, in 2022, a new administration restored diplomatic relations and promoted non-intervention. Chile has consistently urged sanctions against Maduro’s government, and even referred Venezuela to the International Criminal Court (ICC). [25][26] Peru expelled Venezuela’s ambassador: The immediate trigger for the expulsion was Venezuela’s Tribunal Supremo de Justicia’s move to dissolve the opposition-controlled Asamblea Nacional, which Peru saw as a step toward authoritarian control. [27] As all other members of the Lima Group did, Peru regularized the status of Venezuelan migrants. In the beginning, Mexico condemned the human rights abuses in Venezuela and called for the release of all political prisoners, but, in 2018, it adopted a non-interventional approach and in 2022 offered mediation as the only recourse. [28][29][30]
18
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, opposition leader María Corina Machado was disqualified after having won her coalition’s primary. [31] The Tribunal Supremo de Justicia based its decision on her alleged support of U.S. sanctions, supposed corruption, and accusations holding her responsible for losses related to the American subsidiary Citgo of the Venezuelan State-owned oil and natural gas company: Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). Machado’s denial of access to the allegations against her was a blatant violation of due process. Her disqualification left Edmundo González Urrutiaas the unified opposition candidate. [32]
19
Both campaigns engaged in tactics of intimidation. González’s coalition deployed 200,000 observers across 16,000 voting centers and Maduro’s administration intensified media censorship and repression. After Maduro declared victory, protests resulted in extrajudicial killings, arrests, and crackdowns on independent media. [33]
20
González’s coalition collaborated with international observers, including the Organization of American States, the European Union Electoral Observation Mission, the Carter Center, and the United States Mission to the United Nations, to monitor irregularities. [34][35][36][37] The government, however, withheld disaggregated voting data critical for audits—supposedly because the data had been hacked—and imposed travel restrictions on foreign observers. [38] The Carter Center criticized the elections for failing to meet international standards of transparency, fairness, and impartiality. [39]
21
Maduro accused both Machado and González of having incited unrest and announced investigations into the crimes of “usurpation of functions” and “military insurrection,” each carrying thirty-year prison sentences. On August 8, 2024, González left for Spain after the government had granted him safe passage.
22
To understand Venezuela’s political and institutional landscape, one must examine how global indices assess the state of its democracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index, and the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index all provide distinct metrics illuminating Venezuela’s democratic decline under Nicolás Maduro.
23
The Democracy Index ranks countries with higher scores as more democratic. Freedom House and Transparency International diverge from this by using lower scores to indicate worse outcomes, with lower numbers signifying less freedom and higher corruption.
24
In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, Venezuela ranked as the least democratic country in South America in 2008; in 2022, it ranked 147th out of a total of 167 countries. [40] Likewise, in 2023, Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index finds that Venezuela scored low both as a democracy and high corruption, while in its CorruptionPerceptions Index Venezuela scored 13 out of 100 and was positioned as one of the most corrupt nations globally. [41]
25
Additionally, a report by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for the period from 2012 to 2023 has highlighted the severe corruption to be found in Venezuela. [42] In its 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index, out of 180 countries, Venezuela received a score of 13 out of 100, ranking 177th. These indicators present a clear picture of Venezuelan authoritarianism and of the deterioration of its political landscape in recent years.
~
Endnotes
§ 10
[1]Rafael Arráiz Lucca, Venezuela: 1830 a nuestros días: Breve historia política. (Caracas: Editorial Alfa, 2016), 15-151, 212-37.
[3]The Punto Fijo Pact was a political agreement signed by the three predominant political parties—Acción Democrática (AD), Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI), and Unión Republicana Democrática (URD)—at the residence of Rafael Caldera (COPEI): Punto Fijo. The pact aimed to stabilize the country after the fall of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez [1952-1958] by ensuring democratic alternation of power, institutional continuity, and preventing single-party rule. While it contributed to political stability and a peaceful transition to democracy, critics argue that it also entrenched elite dominance, marginalized smaller parties, and fostered systemic corruption. As a foundational element in Venezuela’s post-dictatorship political landscape, the agreement shaped the nation’s governance for decades. Its legacy, however, is marked by political divisions, as the pact’s structure increasingly excluded some groups and led to dissatisfaction among factions. This period reflects both the challenges and achievements of Venezuela’s efforts to establish a stable and inclusive democracy.
[5]Fredy Rincón Noriega,El Nuevo Ideal Nacional y los planes Económicos- Militares de Pérez Jiménez 1952-1957(Caracas: Ediciones Centauro, 1981)–Kindle Edition
Judith Ewell,The Indictment of a Dictator: The Extradition and Trial of Marcos Perez (College Station: A&M University Press, 1981).
[6] Both leaders have employed centralized power and state control over resources, though their approaches differed. Pérez Jiménez emphasized technocratic and infrastructural development. His policies, as outlined in the Nuevo Ideal Nacional, focused on large-scale construction projects and urban modernization. These initiatives promoted economic growth, but their benefit was directed towards the middle and upper classes. Chávez, on the other hand, pursued a blend of populism and socialism aimed at redistributing oil wealth through extensive social programs for the poor. These policies increased the State’s dependence on oil revenues and left the country vulnerable to market fluctuations.
§ 15
[7]Margarita López Maya, “The Venezuelan Caracazo of 1989 : Popular
Javier Corrales, “Chapter 12: Venezuela’s Autocratization, 1999-2021: Variations in Temporalities, Party Systems, and Institutional Controls.”PDF extracted from Archon Fung, et al, When Democracy Breaks: Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse,from Ancient Athens to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). https://tobinproject.org/sites/default/files/assets/Chapter%2012%20-%20Venezuela%20-%20Corrales.pdf
[12] The Consejo Nacional Electoral, responsible for overseeing elections in Venezuela, has faced long-standing accusations of partisanship and favoritism. Opposition groups (Vente Venezuela, Primero de Justicia, Un Nuevo Tiempo, Voluntad Popular) have alleged that Chávez and Maduro appointed to it only members who favored the ruling party. For an analysis of the Consejo Nacional Electoral’s role in reinforcing authoritarianism, see Javier Corrales: Autocracy Rising:How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2023), 3, 28. Also see Jennifer L. McCoy and David J. Myers, The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 276-80, 293-96.
§ 16
[13] The Lima Group, formed in August 2017, includes: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Guyana, and St. Lucia.
[14] The International Contact Group (the European Union, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Uruguay) advocates for credible elections and have voiced concerns about the Consejo Nacional Electoral’s impartiality.
[15]Group of Seven (G7)–Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States–has condemned electoral irregularities in Venezuela and called for independent oversight. Allegations of voter registration manipulation by the Consejo Nacional Electoral, has heightened suspicions of vote tampering.
[18]“Venezuelans Must Resolve Crisis Themselves, Security Council Delegates Agree while Differing over Legitimacy of Contending Parties. Briefing on Weekend Incidents Biased, Says Foreign Minister as Speakers for United States, Russian Federation Exchange Barbs,” United Nations: Meetings Coverage and Press Releases, 8472nd Meeting, SC/13719, February 26, 2019. https://press.un.org/en/2019/sc13719.doc.htm
[19] In February 2019, a United Nations Security Council Report debated whether to supervise elections or mediate between Maduro’s government and the opposition. Ultimately, the Council upheld a non-interventionist approach while offering to mediate.
[21]Mercosur (acronym for the Mercado Común del Sur or the Southern Common Market) is a regional trade bloc founded in 1991 by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay (it later included Chile). Mercosur’s mission is to promote economic integration and free trade.
[30].- Mexico has mediated between Nicolás Maduro’s government and the opposition after the July 28, 2024 presidential election results, with support from Brazil and Colombia.
[38].- Disaggregated election results enhance transparency by enabling cross-checking against aggregated totals. This method reveals potential errors, facilitates audits, and highlights regional irregularities, strengthening the legitimacy of electoral outcomes.
Observations On Perception 