Ricardo F. Morín — Oct. 10, 2025
Although the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize (2025) to María Corina Machado brings joy and honor to those who still believe in the possibility of a democratic Venezuela, it also reveals a far more complex reality; one that demands reflection.
The international press has yet to grasp the dream surrounding the supposed liberation of Venezuela from a narco-state. Venezuelans continue to wait indefinitely for liberation. Beneath this hope lies a deeper bondage: the nation’s territory continues to be bound to multinational interests (Chinese, Russian, American, and others) driven not by ideology but by competition between investors and criminal networks. For all of them, a prolonged conflict in Venezuela is convenient; it serves as a bridge to a regional metamorphosis and justifies the expropriation of the natural resources of the country; it aims at consolidating hemispheric dominance by the multinational interests. The situation in Venezuela is therefore not only political but also structural; it is an experiment in which sovereignty is traded for access and resistance itself becomes a form of captivity.
The crisis in Venezuela reveals a moral conflict in modern politics: how suffering can both be exploited and perpetuated when comprehension yields to fantasy. The dream of liberation has become one of the nation’s most persistent fantasies. Behind the language of emancipation lies a silent convergence of global interests; each one sustains the very conflict it claims to oppose. In Venezuela, disorder legitimizes intervention and chaos provides the pretext for extraction. In this sense, Venezuela is not merely a nation in distress but also a stage upon which the grammar of domination continues to be enacted through the vocabulary of deliverance
The challenge is no longer to imagine freedom as an external rescue but to comprehend how dependence disguises itself as salvation. Only comprehension (the act of seeing beyond grievance and beyond consolation) can pierce the veil of liberation and restore meaning to the very idea of freedom.
Editor: Billy Bussell Thompson
Observations On Perception 