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“Unmasking Disappointment: Series VII”

April 22, 2026

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“Geometric Allegory” digital painting 2023 by Ricardo Morin (American visual artist born in Venezuela–1954)

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Author’s Note

This installment examines how ideological labels, liberal, socialist, democratic, are deployed as instruments of alignment rather than as enforceable commitments.  Venezuela is approached not as an exception, but as a case in which administrative practice, international positioning, and partisan abstraction converge to obscure responsibility.  What follows traces how power is exercised through method rather than doctrine, how ideological language displaces accountability, and how clarity, rather than consensus, emerges as the first condition for recovery.

Ricardo F. Morín, January 12, 2026, Oakland Park, FL.

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Chapter XIII

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The Fifth Sign

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The Pawned Republic

1

The Venezuelan economic crisis developed within a political environment in which control over foreign currency, public spending, and state revenues became increasingly concentrated in state-controlled allocation systems and off-budget fiscal mechanisms.  After exchange controls were established in 2003, access to foreign currency was centrally allocated through state mechanisms such as CADIVI, and by 2013 even government authorities were publicly acknowledging fraud in the assignment of preferential currency, including allocations to shell companies.  At the fiscal level, parallel funds such as FONDEN handled large sums outside meaningful parliamentary scrutiny, while public information on state spending and parafiscal funds became increasingly unavailable.  Under these conditions, the diversion of public resources did not appear as isolated misconduct but as a recurring feature of governance in which formal procedures governing budget approval and reporting remained nominally in place while independent verification and public disclosure diminished.  What emerged was not the failure of a declared doctrine, but the consolidation of an administrative method in which access to public resources depended less on transparent procedure than on the concentration of discretionary control.

Debates that frame socialism and capitalism as opposing economic systems mistake ideological language for operational reality.  These terms describe beliefs about ownership and social purpose, not the concrete methods through which economies are administered.  Economic stability arises instead from institutional practice:  whether taxation is predictable, contracts are enforced without eDebates that oppose socialism to capitalism misidentify the operative field.  These terms describe beliefs about ownership and social purpose; they do not describe how economies are administered.  Economic stability does not follow from declared purpose but from enforceable limits on taxation, spending, and contract execution.  It depends on whether taxation follows rule, whether contracts are enforced without exception, whether budgets are bounded by procedure, and whether authority is exercised within limits enforced through budget law, contract enforcement, and institutional oversight.  Where these conditions are absent, ideological designation does not fail; it becomes irrelevant.xception, budgets are constrained by rule rather than urgency, and authority is exercised through procedure rather than discretion.  A polity may describe itself as capitalist while permitting economic decisions to be redirected by political convenience, just as another may invoke socialist aims while maintaining disciplined fiscal administration and enforceable limits on power.  The divergence in outcomes reflects not ideological virtue or failure, but the presence or absence of methodological constraint—a distinction that, once obscured, allows ideology to substitute for responsibility rather than to inform it.

As state procurement in sectors such as oil, infrastructure, and food imports became subject to political discretion, auditing functions weakened and oversight bodies lost operational independence.  State-controlled revenues and contracts were increasingly used to redirect resources through discretionary allocation.  Public authority ceased to function as a mediating structure and became an object of appropriation.  The result was not episodic corruption but a stable arrangement in which diversion operated as an expected outcome of governance. 

The mechanism did not explain action; it displaced its examination.  Ideological language did not clarify operations; it rendered them inaccessible.  Official discourse invoking class struggle and anti-imperialism shifted public attention away from currency allocation, public spending, and procurement practices toward symbolic political conflict.  These appeals replaced the examination of procedures with narratives of opposition that carried no capacity for control. 

This substitution extended beyond the national sphere.  Governments identifying with liberal or democratic traditions supported sanctions presented as instruments of pressure.  In practice, these measures intensified economic hardship without altering the internal configuration of power. [1] At the same time, states maintaining political and economic alignment with the Venezuelan government, including China, Russia, and Cuba, tolerated the weakening of electoral oversight, judicial independence, and legislative authority and framed inaction as fidelity to principle. [2] Across these positions, ideological designation did not guide action.  It concealed a convergence:  measures that weakened society without altering authority, and positions that preserved authority without regard to how it was exercised. 

2

What is presented as a divide between opposing systems resolves, in operation, into a convergence of practices.  External pressure that weakens a population without altering authority, and external tolerance that preserves authority without regard to institutional dismantling, produce the same condition:  the isolation of society from judicial, electoral, and legislative means of contesting authority. 

Within that condition, the population is not situated between competing models of governance.  It is rendered instrumental to positions that do not operate upon the mechanisms that sustain or constrain power.  The language of alignment, whether in the form of solidarity, neutrality, or caution, does not alter this configuration when it remains detached from the procedures through which authority is exercised. [3] 

Where accountability is not enforced, other forms of organization take hold.  Criminal and informal economic networks operating without judicial or regulatory enforcement expand into the space left unregulated.  Their growth does not require ideological justification; it follows from the absence of enforceable limits. [4] What is described as crisis does not begin with collapse.  It begins when constraint is withdrawn from the exercise of power and remains withdrawn without consequence.

 

Endnotes on Chapter XIII

[1] Francisco Rodríguez and Jeffrey Sachs, “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment:  The Case of Venezuela,” The Lancet 393, no.  10178 (2019):  2584–2591; Center for Economic and Policy Research, “Sanctions in Venezuela:  Economic and Humanitarian Impacts,” 2019.

[2] R.  Evan Ellis, “The Maduro Regime’s Foreign Backers:  China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), November 6, 2020; United Nations Human Rights Council, “Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,” 2022.

[3] Javier Corrales, “Democratic Backsliding Through Electoral Irregularities:  The Case of Venezuela,” Perspectives on Politics 18, no.  2 (2020):  311–327.

[4] Insight Crime, “Venezuela’s Criminal Landscape:  A Country of Collusion,” 2021; Transparency International, “Venezuela:  Corruption Perceptions Index,” 2022.

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Chapter XIV

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The First Issue

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Resisting Partisan Control:   Civil Society’s Stance in Venezuela

1

Democratic life is not secured by a single principle but by the interaction of distinct forms:  pluralism, partisanship, nonpartisanship, and antipartisanship.  These forms do not resolve into unity.  They define how authority is organized, contested, and limited within institutions such as parties, courts, and legislatures. 

Pluralism establishes the condition under which difference can appear without being suppressed.  Its function is to ensure that multiple positions can enter public space without requiring prior alignment.  Where institutions fail to protect participation through electoral access and legal safeguards, participation contracts and representation narrows. 

Partisanship organizes competition through structured alignment.  Its function depends on a limit:  that allegiance to a party does not supersede adherence to the rules governing the contest itself.  When that limit dissolves, competition persists in form while its constraints disappear. 

Nonpartisanship suspends alignment in order to preserve procedure.  Its role is not neutrality in the abstract, but the maintenance of conditions under which decisions remain accountable to rule rather than to affiliation. 

Antipartisanship emerges when these arrangements fail.  It rejects parties as vehicles of representation, but in doing so it removes the structures through which accountability is exercised.  Where this rejection becomes programmatic, it does not remove power.  It removes the structures that limit it, leaving power to concentrate without opposition. 

2

In Venezuela, antipartisanship became a governing strategy through the delegitimization of established parties and the centralization of authority in the executive.  Public disillusionment with established parties enabled the rise of a singular political alternative that did not operate outside institutions but reorganized them.  Institutional limits were recast as impediments, and their removal was presented as restoration.  What was removed, however, was not obstruction but constraint. [1] 

Under Chávez, this method extended through the redirection of state resources.  Oil revenues were deployed to secure political alignment across sectors.  Access to state-distributed resources increasingly depended on political alignment, particularly through government programs and public employment, establishing dependence in place of institutional trust.  Under Maduro, this structure persisted under contraction:  as resources diminished, the requirement of alignment intensified while preserving the same operational logic. 

3

Clientelist practices were not introduced but expanded and centralized.  What had been dispersed became systemic.  Programs such as the Misiones Bolivarianas, funded through oil revenues and administered through state-aligned structures, illustrate this transformation.  Their stated function was social provision; their operation linked access to political identification.  In programs such as Barrio Adentro, healthcare delivery was administered through structures coordinated with the governing apparatus. [2] Benefits did not follow need alone, but alignment. 

Policies of expropriation and currency control further restricted independent economic activity.  By reallocating assets through administrative decision, these measures reduced the space within which alternative forms of organization could emerge.  Economic contraction followed as a consequence of constrained operation. 

4

The weakening of institutional structures displaced rather than eliminated organized activity.  Civil society organizations assumed roles in legal defense, human rights documentation, and service provision where State institutions failed to operate consistently. 

Organizations such as Provea, Foro Penal, and Transparencia Venezuela document violations, provide legal defense, and maintain records of administrative conduct.  Electoral observation organizations document voting conditions and irregularities despite legal and operational restrictions.  Community-based structures such as Mesas Técnicas de Agua coordinate access to basic services such as water supply in the absence of reliable State provision.  These activities maintain a verifiable link between documented actions and their consequences, between public claims and records, and between authority and its legal limits.  Where institutions no longer secure these relations, they are sustained through practice. 

5

These formations do not constitute an alternative system of governance.  They operate within limits imposed upon them, and their continuity remains contingent.  Legislative measures increasing oversight of non-governmental organizations have further reduced their operational space. 

What persists is not a program but a set of practices that maintain a verifiable link between action and consequence, authority and limit, and decision and verification.  Where these relations are sustained, even in restricted form, the possibility of reconstruction remains. 

Democratic recovery does not begin with alignment or design.  It begins with the reestablishment of constraint upon power and the restoration of procedures through which actions can be examined and limited.  Where these conditions are absent, declarations of principle do not fail; they do not operate.

Endnotes on Chapter XIV

[1] Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, Dragon in the Tropics:  Hugo Chávez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela (Washington:  Brookings Institution Press, 2011), 19–24, 30–34.

[2] “Barrio Adentro:  Complementariedad entre Cuba y Venezuela,” YouTube video, https://youtu.be/y8GXPozsSWQ.

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“Unmasking Disappointment: Series V”

March 25, 2026

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“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 focuses on Venezuela, examining §§ 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

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10

To grasp 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 covers political, economic, and social changes that have shaped the nation.    He explores early struggles and the rise of military strongmen, 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 profoundly shaped by its enduring history of military rule.   Since independence in 1811, twenty-five military 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 ushered 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 lingering appeal of military leadership in moments of crisis. [3][4]

12

The Caracazo riots and the subsequent repression had laid bare deep societal fractures that undermined confidence in civilian governance.   For many, the chaos and disillusionment rekindled the perception of the military as a force of order and stability, a perception rooted in the nation’s long history of caudillo leadership.   Chávez’s rise can be understood as a direct outgrowth 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, paved the way for a return to autocratic tendencies, cloaked in populist rhetoric.   This marked the beginning of a new authoritarian era, shaped not only by the fractures of the present but also by the shadows of the past.

13

The presidency of Hugo Chávez continued the tradition of authoritarianism that had been seen earlier during the regime of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez. [5]    As in the era of Pérez Jiménez, Chávez relied on oil to finance his policies. [6]

14

For Hugo Chávez, “participatory democracy” aimed at empowering marginalized groups.   He created community councils and social missions, which became instruments of his political control—the so-called Bolivarian ideology.    Participation therein hinged on one’s 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 undervalue 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 slid further into 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 asked 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 broke diplomatic relations. [24]    Later, in 2022, a new administration reopened diplomatic ties 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 shifted to 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 Urrutia as 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 Corruption Perceptions 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.

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Endnotes

§ 10

  • [1]    Rafael Arráiz Lucca, Venezuela:    1830 a nuestros días:    Breve historia política. (Caracas:    Editorial Alfa, 2016), 15-151, 212-37.

§ 11

  • [2]   José Gregorio Petit Primera, ”Presidentes de Venezuela (1811-2012).   Un análisis estadístico-descriptivo,” Revista Venezolana:   Análisis de Coyuntura (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, XXII-1, 2016), 47-56.
  • [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.
  • [4]   Rafael Arráiz Lucca, “February 4, 1992: The Day Venezuelans Learned the Name ‘Hugo Chávez,” (Caracas Chronicles, February 04, 2019). https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2019/02/04/february-4-1992-the-day-venezuelans-learned-the-name-hugo-chavez/

§ 13

  • [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

§ 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.
  • [16]    Venezuela’s Humanitarian Crisis:    Severe Medical and Food Shortages, Inadequate and Repressive Government Response, Human Rights Watch, October 24, 2016. https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/10/24/venezuelas-humanitarian-crisis/severe-medical-and-food-shortages-inadequate-and
  • [17]   “Venezuela: New research shows how calculated repression by Maduro government could constitute the crime against humanity of persecution,” Amnesty International, February 10, 2022. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/venezuela-calculated-repression-maduro-government/
  • [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.

§ 17

§ 18

§ 19

§ 20

§ 24

§ 25

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“Unmasking Disappointment: Series III, Part II”

February 18, 2026

Resentment, Force, and the Architecture of Power

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“Geometric Allegory” digital painting 2023 by Ricardo Morin (American visual artist born in Venezuela–1954)

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Author’s Note:

The preceding chapters established a standard by which political life may be assessed.    They did not propose an ideal government as a program, nor did they advance virtue as a moral aspiration detached from circumstance.    They articulated, instead, a set of constraints—justice, restraint, and judgment—without which governance loses proportion and language loses meaning.

The chapters that follow examine how those constraints were displaced.   They do not proceed from intention or ideology, but from accumulation.   Political resentment, once mobilized as a source of legitimacy, became a governing instrument rather than a condition to be addressed.   Military authority, long embedded in Venezuela’s institutional history, ceased to function as a stabilizing force and assumed a constitutive role in political identity.   Party structures, rather than mediating between society and the State, hardened into asymmetries that neutralized opposition and converted pluralism into fragmentation.

These developments did not arise in isolation, nor were they the product of a single figure or moment.   They emerged through a convergence of affect, coercion, and institutional design.    The disappointment examined here is not emotional in nature.    It is structural:   a consequence of ideals retained as symbols after their operative limits had been removed.

“Part II” traces these mechanisms in sequence.   What appears is not a rupture from the ethical geometry outlined earlier, but its progressive distortion.   Virtue persists in language while constraint disappears in practice.   Governance continues to speak in universal terms even as power concentrates and accountability dissolves.    The result is not merely authoritarianism, but a political order in which disappointment becomes systemic—produced, sustained, and normalized.

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Ricardo F. Morín, December 12, 2025, Oakland Park, Florida.

Chapter IX

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The First Sign

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On Political and Social Resentment

1

From the ashes of Venezuela’s fractured democracy arose a bitter sentiment:   a resentment that reshaped the political and social fabric of the nation.   Political and social resentment, born of inequality, historical grievances, and unfulfilled promises, became the primary currency of Hugo Chávez’s rhetoric and policies.   This undercurrent of discontent allowed Chávez to rally the dispossessed under the banner of his Bolivarian Revolution, which reframed a nation’s despair as the foundation of his movement.

2

Chávez’s speeches evoked the memories of colonial exploitation and 20th-century corruption; they cast the elite as Venezuela’s oppressors.   The enduring inequality between rural and urban areas, the oil-rich elite, and impoverished communities was central to this narrative.  Through fiery oratory, Chávez positioned himself as the voice of the marginalized, promising economic justice and empowerment. [1]

3

Yet, behind the veneer of inclusion and equity lay policies that ultimately betrayed these ideals.  The social programs known as Misiones, though impactful in the short term, were not sustainable.  Funded by volatile oil revenues, these initiatives addressed symptoms rather than structural causes and ultimately deepened Venezuela’s dependency on oil wealth and the state’s centralized control. [2]

4

Despite their initial popularity, these policies created new inequalities.   Access to state benefits became contingent on political loyalty and fostered division and mistrust among the very populations Chávez had vowed to uplift.   Corruption and inefficiency plagued these programs, leaving many promises unfulfilled and further polarized Venezuelan society.

5

The Cult of Personality

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Chávez’s charisma played a critical role in channeling resentment into political capital.   His larger-than-life persona blurred the boundary between leader and nation; he transformed dissent into perceived betrayal of patriotism.   This cult of personality, portraying critics as enemies of progress, allowed him to centralize power with little resistance.

6

As Chapter VI, Chronicles of Hugo Chávez, demonstrated, Chávez presented himself as the champion of the people, while his approach undermined pluralism and fostered a climate of fear and conformity.   This dynamic cemented his control but weakened democratic institutions.   His frequent invocation of historical grievances acted as a smokescreen for growing authoritarianism.

7

Exploiting Division

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The Bolivarian Revolution thrived on cultural division, deliberately stoking class, racial, and regional tensions to consolidate power.   Amplifying resentment and ensuring loyalty among his base, Chávez’s rhetoric of “us versus them” weaponized existing fractures in Venezuelan society.  By cultivating distrust, his regime inhibited collective action across class or political lines and fractured the potential for broad-based scrutiny by a legitimate opposition.

8

This strategy also extended to the private sector.  Expropriations, price controls, and the vilification of business leaders dismantled private enterprise and reinforced dependence on the State.   These actions exacerbated economic decline, displaced blame onto perceived enemies of the revolution, and perpetuated cycles of resentment. [3]

9

Its Allure

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Chávez’s manipulation of resentment was not simply a response to inequality but an exploitation of it.   By harnessing historical and contemporary grievances, he galvanized a movement that promised to heal Venezuela’s wounds while simultaneously deepening its divisions.    The promise of unity and progress became a pretext for authoritarianism; it left behind a legacy of mistrust, unmet expectations, and fractured institutions.[4]

10

When resentment is allowed to govern a nation, it may consume the very structures meant to protect it.   Although Chávez offered hope to the disillusioned, his revolution ultimately amplified the very injustices it claimed to address.

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Endnotes—Chapter IX

  • [1]   Luis Vicente León, Chávez: La Revolución No Será Televisada (Caracas:    Editorial Planeta, 2008) 112-127.
  • [2]   Luis Vicente León, Misiones Sociales: Un Gobierno de Dependencia? (Caracas:   Editorial Alfa, 2011) 45-59.
  • [3]   Michael F. A. Sargeant, The Venezuelan Military Under Chávez:    Political Influence and Militarization (New York:   Columbia University Press, 2013) 150-165.
  • [4]   Gustavo Coronel, Venezuela: The Collapse of a Democracy (Miami:   Editorial Santillana, 2015) 203-220.

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Chapter X

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The Second Sign

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Emblem of the Bolivarian Army.

The Solid Pillar of Power:   The Military Force

1

The dynamics outlined in earlier chapters reveal how the military functioned not merely as an institution but as an axis of political identity.   Military rule has shaped Venezuela’s identity since its independence in 1811—see Appendix:   19th and 20th-century Constitutions.   This endurance stems not only from political necessity but from a deeply ingrained belief in military dominance—a force that has long stifled Venezuela’s progress.   For nearly two centuries, from the early republic to the present, the military has been the backbone of Venezuela’s governance, shaped by a succession of caudillos—each with distinct ambitions yet bound by reliance on military authority.   Long cast as the steady hand in political turbulence, the military remains a rigid scaffold encasing Venezuela’s political landscape.    Chávez’s rise and his reconfiguration of military influence must be understood within this context.    As his predecessors had done, Chávez sought to harness military power within a new vision of State control and to intertwine military and political authority in ways that reinforced Venezuela’s autocratic rule.

2

In the wake of independence, Venezuela grappled with instability as military leaders—at times disciplined and at times opportunistic—imposed order in a fractured State.   The first decades were marked by struggles between competing factions, from the rivalry between Simón Bolívar and José Antonio Páez to later military-led conflicts, including the struggles of the Blue Federalists in the 1860s and Cipriano Castro’s rise at the turn of the 20th century.   Yet, the military’s rigid hierarchy and capacity for decisive action secured its position as the nation’s dominant force.    Soldiers dictated national policies and shaped Venezuela’s fate from barracks and battlefields, not from parliamentary halls.    Civilian governance, fragmented and short-lived, repeatedly failed to unify the country amid ongoing strife.

3

This legacy endures in General en Jefe Vladimir Padrino López and General en Jefe Diosdado Cabello, who embody the military’s entrenched presence in Venezuela’s political structure.    Padrino López, as Minister of Defense, represents the continuity of military influence within the State.    His strategic alliance with Nicolás Maduro, grounded in unwavering loyalty and ideological alignment with Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution, cements his role as a linchpin of the regime’s survival.    Diosdado Cabello, who straddles both military and civilian power, leverages his military background to reinforce the government’s authority.   Together, they embody the enduring fusion of discipline, ambition, and coercive power.

4

Vladimir Padrino López is widely regarded as a highly disciplined and pragmatic individual.    He combines the traits of a loyal military officer with the political acumen necessary to navigate Venezuela’s volatile political landscape.   He presents himself as a defender of institutional order and frequently emphasizes the military’s role as a stabilizing force in Venezuela.   However, beneath this outward professionalism lies a figure integral to the Maduro regime’s political survival.    Padrino López’s loyalty to Maduro has been central to the regime’s endurance.   His calculated diplomacy, unlike the confrontational style of other officials, positions him as a pragmatic actor, particularly in dealing with international actors.    He balances his public military role with behind-the-scenes influence and leverages his position to navigate internal power struggles.    His emphasis on anti-imperialism and nationalism solidifies his standing within the military and political elite.

5

Padrino’s alleged role in the regime’s repression has made him controversial.    He has been accused of involvement in systemic military corruption and illicit activities, including drug trafficking and illegal mining.   These allegations raise concerns about his complicity in the regime’s criminal activities.    His actions reflect calculated pragmatism:    he presents himself as a pillar of stability, yet his actual influence remains ambiguous.    Some analysts suggest that he could emerge as a power broker in times of crisis.

6

As we analyze the present power structures and their ties to Chávez’s legacy, we must examine the broader historical forces at play.   Though often regarded as the architect of Venezuela’s autocratic system, Chávez both emerged from and reinforced the country’s longstanding traditions of militarism and populism.   His rise was not an isolated event but the culmination of nearly two centuries of political and social currents.   To focus solely on him is to overlook the historical forces that enabled and shaped his rule.    Understanding Venezuela’s path to autocracy requires recognizing its political evolution—see Appendix:   Constitutional Evolution in the 19th to 20th Centuries.

~

*

Chapter XI

*

The Third Sign

~

The Asymmetry of Political Parties

1

Since the late 20th century, Venezuela’s political landscape has undergone significant transformation, driven by persistent socio-economic instability that disproportionately affected the middle and lower classes.   The democratic system established in 1958 was initially defined by a two-party duopoly—Acción Democrática (AD) and Partido Social Cristiano (COPEI)—instituted under the Pacto de Punto Fijo to stabilize democratic governance through alternating power-sharing (see item 26—Constitution of 1961—Appendix, A-1). [1][2][3]   Over time, however, this duopoly increasingly monopolized the political arena and marginalized other voices, especially those of socialist and leftist groups.   This exclusion not only suppressed pluralistic participation but also deepened discontent among Venezuela’s disadvantaged populations—a factor that ultimately contributed to the system’s collapse. [4]

2

Economic mismanagement, inequality, and political corruption during the 1980s and 1990s further discredited the two-party system.   A widening debt crisis, coupled with falling oil prices, exacerbated social inequalities.[5][6]   The Caracazo riots of 1989 marked a decisive rupture by exposing the growing gulf between the ruling elite and the general population and signaling the end of the old political order. [7]   These riots, which erupted in response to austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund, revealed deep political and social fractures in Venezuelan society. [8]  

3

In the aftermath of these systemic failures and societal fractures, Hugo Chávez’s Movimiento V República (MVR) emerged in 1999 as a dominant force, offering populist rhetoric and pledges of wealth redistribution fueled by oil revenues.   The Movimiento V República eventually transformed into the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) in 2007.   This transition not only solidified the political left’s dominance but also reduced internal factionalism that could more effectively enforce its policies. [9][10][11]

4

Chávez’s death in 2013 left a power vacuum, and Nicolás Maduro’s rise to power was contested within the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela.   Factionalism, particularly between military and civilian wings, complicated governance.    Maduro’s consolidation of power relied on autocratic legalism—a practice involving the manipulation of the constitution, judicial subversion, and the exploitation of elections to sustain a democratic façade.   Extralegal tactics, however, (such as repression, media censorship, and the co-optation of all branches of government) became essential means by which the regime maintained control. [12] [13][14]

5

Though new opposition parties emerged, the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela continued to dominate the political landscape.   Fragmentation became a defining obstacle for opposition parties, with internal disagreements over strategy and competing visions for engagement with the regime.   The Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela‘s strategy for weakening opposition parties persisted through judicial and electoral manipulation and the promotion of splinter groups, which led to a continued weakening of democratic resistance.

6

The opposition parties struggled to present a united front:   a vulnerability that both Chávez and Maduro’s governments actively exploited.   This partly explains the opposition’s failure in presenting itself as an effective alternative.   Pivotal moments in Venezuela’s political crises were the 2004 recall referendum (when Chávez narrowly survived his recall) and the Ruling 156 by the Tribunal Supremo de Justicia in 2017 (which stripped the opposition-controlled Asamblea Nacional of its powers)—events that further deepened political tensions. [15] [16][17]

7

As the political landscape became increasingly fragmented, opposition leaders attempted to develop alternative strategies, and new opposition parties emerged.   Altogether, at one point, there were 49 parties (see Appendix: Item B).   Despite this expansion, the ruling party has maintained its dominance, while the opposition is still in disarray.   Political splintering has become a defining barrier for the opposition in mounting a challenge against the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela and has led to repeated failures in electoral and non-electoral arenas:   internal divisions over strategy mean that some factions advocate dialogue while others push for more confrontational approaches.   The Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela has played a role through its policy of “divide and rule.”   By co-opting certain opposition leaders, creating splinter groups, and using judicial and electoral mechanisms to weaken opposition parties, the regime has effectively neutralized potential threats to its dominance.

~

Endnotes—Chapter XI

  • [1]    Martz, John D., Acción Democrática. Evolution of a Modern Political Party in Venezuela, (Princeton:    Princeton University Press, 1966).   Provides a detailed history of the Democratic Action (AD) party in a PhD thesis on Venezuela.  https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-46.4.468 .
  • [2]    Ellner, Steve, “Venezuelan Revisionist Political History, 1908-1958: New Motives and Criteria for Analyzing the Past” (Latin American ResearchReview:   The Latin American Studies Association, 30, no. 2, 1995), 91-121.    This article offers critical context for the history of the Social Christian COPEI Party. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2503835 .
  • [3]    Handlin, Samuel Paltiel, “The Politics of Polarization:   Legitimacy Crises, Left Political Mobilization, and Party System Divergence in South America” (PhD diss., Political Science: University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2011), 8, 39-48, 54, 59, 73, 79, 81-86, 91-93, 95, 116, 168, 172.
  • [4]    Myers, David J. “The Struggle to Legitimate Political Regimes in Venezuela: From Pérez Jiménez to Maduro” (Latin American Research Review: Cambridge University Press, October 23, 2017).  DOI:    https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.240 .
  • [5]    Kornblith, Miriam and Levine, Daniel H. “Venezuela:    The Life And Times Of The Party System,” Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame , Working Paper no. 197, June 1993).  https://pdba.georgetown.edu/Parties/Venezuela/Leyes/PartySystem.pdf.
  • [6]    Corrales, Javier, Fixing Democracy: The Venezuela Crisis and Global Lessons (Cambridge:   Cambridge University Press, 2021), 99-133.
  • [7]   López Maya, Margarita “The Venezuelan Caracazo of 1989:    Popular Protest and Institutional Weakness,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 2003), 35, 117–137.   DOI:    10.1017/S0022216X02006673
  • [8]   Naím, Moises, Paper Tigers and Minotaurs:    The Politics of Venezuela’s Economic Reforms, (Washington: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1993).   https://observationsonthenatureofperception.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/4d0d0-papertigersandminotaurs.pdf.
  • [9]    “Dossier No. 61:   The Strategic Revolutionary Thought and Legacy of Hugo Chávez Ten Years After His Death,” (Monthly Review Online, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, March 1, 2023).    https://mronline.org/2023/03/01/dossier-no-61-the-strategic-revolutionary-thought-and-legacy-of-hugo-chavez-ten-years-after-his-death/ .
  • [10]    Marta Harnecker, Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution:   Hugo Chávez Talks to Marta Harnecker (New York:   Monthly Review Press, 2005), 45-7.
  • [11]    Barry Cannon, Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution:   Populism and Democracy in a Globalised Age (Manchester:   Manchester University Press, 2009), 101-3.
  • [12]    Gregory Wilpert, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power:   The History and Policies of the Chávez Government (London:   Verso Books, 2007), 102-04.
  • [13]    Javier Corrales, and MIchael Penfold, Dragon in the Tropics:   Hugo Chávez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela (Washington:   Brookings Institution Press, 2011), 19-24, 30-34.
  • [14]    Tiago Rogero, “Evidence shows Venezuela’s election was stolen—but will Maduro budge?” (The Guardian, August 6, 2024).   https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/06/venezuela-election-maduro-analysis.
  • [15]   Gustavo Delfino and Guillermo Salas, “Analysis of the 2004 Venezuela Referendum:    The Official Results Versus the Petition Signatures,” (Project Euclid, November 2011).   DOI:    10.1214/08-STS263
  • [16]   Rafael Romo, “Venezuela’s high court dissolves National Assembly” (CNN, March 30, 2017.   https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/30/americas/venezuela-dissolves-national-assembly/index.html.
  • [17]   Margarita López Maya, “Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez:   Savior or Danger?” (Latin American Perspectives, vol. 29, no. 6, 2002), 88-103—provides critical context to the 2004 Recall Referendum.    https://www.jstor.org/stable/2692130

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“Unmasking Disappointment: Series II”

January 21, 2026

*

“Geometric Allegory” digital painting ©2023 by Ricardo Morin (American visual artist born in Venezuela–1954)

Author’s Note

Reflections from previous chapters eventually lead to a more historical inquiry, in which the following archive, Chronicles of Hugo Chávez, becomes another lens through which I approach the Venezuelan experience.

*

Ricardo F. Morín, December 12, 2025, Oakland Park, Florida.

Chapter VI

*

Chronicles of Hugo Chávez

~

1

Hugo Chávez, who spearheaded the Bolivarian Revolution, was born on July 28, 1954, in Sabaneta, Venezuela.   He died on March 5, 2013, at 4:25 p.m. VET (8:55 p.m. UTC) in Caracas, at the age of 58.   As the leader of the revolution, Chávez left a discernible imprint on Venezuela’s political history.   To reconstruct this history is to revisit a landscape whose consequences continue to shape Venezuelan life.

At the core of Chavismo lies a deliberate fusion of nationalism, centralized power, and military involvement in politics.   This fusion shaped his vision for a new Venezuela, one that would be fiercely independent and proudly socialist.

~

Hugo Chávez at age 11, sixth grade, 1965 (Photo: Reuters).

2

Hugo Chávez’s childhood was spent in a small town in Los Llanos, in the northwestern state of Barinas.   This region has a history of indigenous chiefdoms (i.e., “leaderships,” “dominions,” or “rules”) dating back to pre-Columbian times. [1]   Chávez was the second of six brothers, and his parents struggled to provide for the large family.   As a result, he and his older brother Adán were sent to live with their paternal grandmother, Rosa Inés, in the city of Barinas.   After her death, Chávez honored his grandmother’s memory with a poem; it concludes with a stanza that reveals the depth of their bond:

Entonces, /  abrirías tus brazos/  y me abrazarías/  cual tiempo de infante/   y me arrullarías/  con tu tierno canto/  y me llevarías/  por otros lugares/  a lanzar un grito/  que nunca se apague. [2]

[Author’s translation:   Then, /  you would open your arms /  and draw me in /  as if returned to childhood /  and you would steady me /  with your tender voice /  and you would carry me /  to other places /  to release a cry /  that would not be extinguished].

3

In his second year of high school, Chávez encountered two influential teachers, José Esteban Ruiz Guevara and Douglas Ignacio Bravo Mora, both of whom provided guidance outside the regular curriculum. [3][4]   They introduced Chávez to Marxism-Leninism as a theoretical framework, sparking his fascination with the Cuban Revolution and its principles—a turning point more visible in retrospect than it could have been in the moment.

4

At 17, Chávez enrolled in the Academia Militar de Venezuela at Fuerte Tiuna in Caracas, where he hoped to balance military training with his passion for baseball.  He dreamed of becoming a left-handed pitcher, but his abilities did not match his ambition.   Despite his initial lack of interest in military life, Chávez persisted in his training, graduating from the academy in 1975 near the bottom of his class.

5

Chávez’s military career began as a second lieutenant; he was tasked with capturing leftist guerrillas.   As he pursued them, he found himself identifying with their cause and believed they fought for a better life.   But by 1977, Chávez was prepared to abandon his military career and join the guerrillas.   Seeking guidance, he turned to his brother Adán, who persuaded him to remain in the military by insisting, “We need you there.” [5]   Chávez now felt a sense of purpose and understood his mission as a calling.   In 1982, he and his closest military associates formed the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement-200:   they aimed to spread their interpretation of Marxism within the armed forces and ultimately hoped to stage a coup d’état. [6]

6

On February 4, 1992, Lieutenant Chávez and his military allies launched a revolt against the government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez.   Their rebellion, however, was swiftly quashed.   Surrounded and outnumbered, Chávez surrendered at the Cuartel de la Montaña, the military history museum in Caracas, near the presidential palace, on the condition that he be allowed to address his companions via television.   He urged them to lay down their arms and to avoid further bloodshed.   He proclaimed, « Compañeros, lamentablemente por ahora los objetivos que nos planteamos no fueron logrados . . . » [Author’s translation:   “Comrades, unfortunately, our objectives have not been achieved… yet,”].[7]   The broadcast marked the beginning of his political ascent.   His words resonated across the nation and sowed the seeds of his political future.

~

Chávez announces his arrest on national television and urges insurgent troops to surrender.

7

In 1994, newly elected President Rafael Caldera Rodríguez pardoned him. [8]   With this second chance, Chávez founded the Movimiento V República (MVR) in 1997 and rallied like-minded socialists to his cause. [9]   Through a campaign centered on populist appeals, he secured an electoral victory at age 44.

8

In his first year as President, Chávez enjoyed an 80% approval rating.   His policies sought to eradicate corruption in the government, to expand social programs for the poor, and to redistribute national wealth.   Jorge Olavarría de Tezanos Pinto, initially a supporter, emerged by the end of the elections as a prominent voice of the opposition.   Olavarría accused Chávez of undermining Venezuela’s democracy through his appointment of military officers to governmental positions. [10]   At the same time, Chávez was drafting a new constitution, which allowed him to place military officers in all branches of government.   The new constitution, ratified on December 15, 1999, paved the way for the “mega elections” of 2000, in which Chávez secured a term of six years.   Although his party failed to gain full control of the Asamblea Nacional (National Assembly), it passed laws by decree through the mechanism of the Leyes Habilitantes (Enabling Laws). [11][12]   Meanwhile, Chávez initiated reforms to reorganize the State‘s institutional structure, but the constitution’s requirements were not met.   The appointment of judges to the new Corte Suprema de Justicia [CSJ] was carried out without rigor and raised concerns about its legitimacy and competence.   Cecilia Sosa Gómez, the outgoing Corte Suprema de Justicia president, declared the rule of law “buried” and the court “self-dissolved.” [13][14]

9

Although some Venezuelans saw Chávez as a refreshing alternative to the country’s unstable democratic system, which had been dominated by three parties since 1958, many others expressed concern as the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) consolidated power and became the sole governing party. [15]   Legislative and executive powers were increasingly centralized, and the narrowing of judicial guarantees limited citizens’ participation in the democratic process.   Chávez’s close ties with Fidel Castro and his desire to model Venezuela after Cuba’s system—dubbed VeneCuba—raised alarm. [16]   He silenced independent radio broadcasters, and he antagonized the United States and other Western nations.  Instead, he strengthened ties with Iraq, Iran, and Libya.   Meanwhile, domestically, his approval rating had plummeted to 30%, and anti-Chávez demonstrations became a regular occurrence.

10

On April 11, 2002, a massive demonstration of more than a million people converged on the presidential palace to demand President Chávez’s resignation.   The protest turned violent when agents of the National Guard and masked paramilitaries opened fire on the demonstrators. [17]   The tragic event—the Puente Llaguno massacre—sparked a military uprising that led to Chávez’s arrest and to the installation of a transitional government under Pedro Francisco Carmona Estanga. [18]   Carmona’s leadership, however, was short-lived; he swiftly suspended the Constitution, dissolved the Asamblea Nacional and the Corte Suprema, and dismissed various officials.   Within forty-eight hours, the army withdrew its support for Carmona.   The vice president, Diosdado Cabello Rondón, was reinstated as president and promptly restored Chávez to power. [19]

11

The failed coup d’état enabled Chávez to purge his inner circle and to intensify his conflict with the opposition.   In December 2002, Venezuela’s opposition retaliated with a nationwide strike aimed at forcing Chávez’s resignation.   The strike targeted the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), which generated roughly 80% of the country’s export revenues. [20]   Chávez responded by dismissing its 38,000 employees and replacing them with loyalists.   By February 2003, the strike had dissipated, and Chávez had once again secured control over the country’s oil revenues.

12

From 2003 to 2004, the opposition launched a referendum to oust Chávez as president, but soaring oil revenues, which financed social programs, bolstered Chávez’s support among lower-income sectors. [21]   By the end of 2004, his popularity had rebounded, and the referendum was soundly defeated.   In December 2005, the opposition boycotted the elections to the National Assembly and protested against the Consejo Nacional Electoral (National Electoral Council) (CNE). [22]   As anticipated in view of the opposition boycott, Chávez’s coalition capitalized on the absence of an effective opposition and strengthened its grip on the Assembly. [23]    By that point, legislative control rested almost entirely with Chávez’s coalition.    What followed was not a departure from this trajectory, but its extension through formal policy.

13

In December 2006, Chávez secured a third presidential term, a victory that expanded the scope of executive initiative.   He nationalized key industries—gold, electricity, telecommunications, gas, steel, mining, agriculture, and banking—along with numerous smaller entities. [24][25][26][27][28][29]   Chávez also introduced a package of constitutional amendments designed to expand the powers of the executive and to extend its control over the Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV).   In a controversial move, he unilaterally altered property rights and allowed the state to seize private real estate without judicial oversight.   Furthermore, he proposed becoming president for life.   In December 2007, however, the National Assembly narrowly rejected the package of sweeping reforms.

14

In February 2009, Chávez reintroduced his controversial proposals and succeeded in advancing them.   Following strategic counsel from Cuba, he escalated the crackdown on dissent. [30]   He ordered the arrest of elected opponents and shut down all private television stations.

15

In June 2011, Chávez announced that he would undergo surgery in Cuba to remove a tumor, a development that sparked confusion and concern throughout the country. [31]   As his health came under increasing scrutiny, more voters began to question his fitness for office.   Yet, in 2012, despite his fragile health, Chávez campaigned against Henrique Capriles and secured a surprise presidential victory. [32]

~

Chávez during the electoral campaign in February 2012.

16

In December 2012, Chávez underwent his fourth surgery in Cuba.   Before departing Venezuela, he announced his plan for transition and designated Vice President Nicolás Maduro as his successor, alongside a powerful troika that included Diosdado Cabello [military chief] and Rafael Darío Ramírez Carreño [administrator of PDVSA]. [33][34][35]   Following the surgery, Chávez was transferred on December 11 to the Hospital Militar Universitario Dr. Carlos Arvelo (attached to the Universidad Militar Bolivariana de Venezuela, or UMBV) in Caracas, where he remained incommunicado, further fueling speculation and rumors.   Some government officials dismissed reports of assassination, while others, including former Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz, claimed he had already died on December 28. [36]   Maduro’s cabinet vehemently refuted these allegations and insisted that no crime had been committed.   Amidst the uncertainty, Maduro asked the National Assembly to postpone the inauguration indefinitely.    This further intensified political tensions.

17

The National Assembly acquiesced to Maduro and voted to postpone the inauguration.   Chávez succumbed to his illness on March 5.   His body was embalmed in three separate stages without benefit of autopsy, which further fueled suspicions and conspiracy theories.   Thirty days later, Maduro entered office amid sustained political uncertainty. [37]   The implications of this transition extend beyond chronology; they shape the conditions examined in the chapters that follow in this series, which comprises 19 chapters, miscellaneous rubrics, and an appendix.

~

Endnotes:

§ 2

[1]   Charles S. Spencer and Elsa M. Redmond, Prehispanic Causeways and Regional Politics in the Llanos of Barinas, Venezuela (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Abstract: “…relacionados con la dinámica política de la organización cacical durante la fase Gaván Tardía.” Published in Latin American Antiquity, vol. 9, no. 2 (June 1998): 95-110. https://doi.org/10.2307/971989

[2]   Rosa Miriam Elizalde y Luis Báez, Chávez Nuestro, (La Habana: Casa Editora Abril, 2007), 367-369.    https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzEKs4usYkReRVdWSG5LQkFYQ3c/edit?pli=1&resourcekey=0-yHaK7-YkA47nelVs-7JuBQ 

§ 3

[3] “The Hugo Chávez Show,” PBS Front Line, November 19, 2008.    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hugochavez/etc/ex2.html

[4]   L’Atelier des Archive, “Interview du révolutionnaire:   Douglas Bravo au Venezuela [circa 1960]” (Transcript:   “… conceptos injuriosos en contra de la revolución cubana …” [timestamp 1;11-14]), YouTube, October 14, 2016.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cx2D5VM8VM

§ 5

[5]   “Hugo Chavez Interview,”YouTube, transcript excerpt and time stamp unavailable:   Original quote in Spanish (translated by the author):  “. . . , if not, maybe I’ll leave the Army, no, you can’t leave, Adam told me so, no, we need you there, but who needs me?”   Retrieved October 12, 2023.

[6]   Dario Azzellini and Gregory Wilpert, “Venezuela, MBR–200 and the Military Uprisings of 1992,”in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (Wiley 2009).    https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp1525

§ 6

[7]   “Declarations in a Nationwide Government-Mandated Broadcast,” BancoAgrícolaVe, YouTube, February 4, 1992.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QqaR1ZjldE

§ 7

[8]   Maxwell A. Cameron and Flavie Major, “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez: Savior or Threat to Democracy?,” Latin American Research Review, vol. 36, no. 3, (2001):  255-266.    https://www.proquest.com/docview/218146430?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals

[9]   Gustavo Coronel, “Corruption, Mismanagement, and Abuse of Power in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela,” Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity:    Development Policy Analysis, no. 2 (CATO Institute, November 27, 2006).   https://www.issuelab.org/resources/2539/2539.pdf.

§ 8

[10]   “Jorge Olavarría Ante El Congreso Bicameral [July 5,1999],” YouTube.    https://youtu.be/_OkqNn8VF-Y?si=Cvuh4Vk391_0Pnut .   Accessed January 9, 2025.

[11]   Mario J. García-Serra, “The ‘Enabling Law’:    The Demise of the Separation of Powers in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela,” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review, vol.32, no. 2, (Spring – Summer, 2001):   265-293.     https://www.jstor.org/stable/40176554

[12]   “Venezuela:   Chávez Allies Pack Supreme Court,” Human Rights Watch, December 13, 2004.    https://www.hrw.org/news/2004/12/13/venezuela-chavez-allies-pack-supreme-court

[13]   “Top Venezuelan judge resigns,” BBC News, August 25, 1999.   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/429304.stm

[14]   “Suprema Injusticia:    ‘These are corrupt judges,” Organización Transparencia Venezuela.    https://supremainjusticia.org/cecilia-sosa-gomez-these-are-corrupt-judges/

§ 9

[15]   “United Socialist Party of Venezuela,” PSUV.   http://www.psuv.org.ve/

[16]   “Venezuela and Cuba, ‘VeneCuba,’ a single nation,” The Economist, February 11, 2010.   https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2010/02/11/venecuba-a-single-nation

§ 10

[17] “Photographs reveal the truth about Puente Llaguno massacre,” April 11, 2002, YouTube.    https://youtu.be/NvP7cL-7KL4?si=cUpMAv0myAWH5UWP

[18] “Pedro Carmona Estanga cuenta su verdad 21 años después,” El Nacional de Venezuela.     https://www.elnacional.com/opinion/pedro-carmona-estanga-cuenta-su-verdad-21-anos-despues/

[19] “Diosdado Cabello Rondón:Narcotics Rewards Program: Wanted,” U.S. Department of State.     https://www.state.gov/bureau-of-international-narcotics-and-law-enforcement-affairs/releases/2025/01/diosdado-cabello-rondon

§ 11

[20]   Marc Lifsher, “Venezuela Strike Paralyzes State Oil Monopoly PdVSA,” Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2002.    https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1039101526679054593

§ 12

[21] “Socialism with Cheap Oil,” The Economist, December 30, 2008.    https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2008/12/30/socialism-with-cheap-oil

[22] “Venezuela: Increased Threats to Free Elections; New Electoral Body Puts Reforms at Risk,” Human Rights Watch, June 22, 2023 7:00AM.    https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/22/venezuela-increased-threats-free-elections

[23] Juan Forero, “Chávez Grip Tightens as Rivals Boycott Vote,” The New York Times, December 5, 2005.    https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/world/americas/chavezs-grip-tightens-as-rivals-boycott-vote.html?referringSource=articleShare

§ 13

[24] Louise Egan, “Chavez to nationalize Venezuelan gold industry,” Reuters, August 17, 2011, 2:40 PM.   https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-gold/chavez-to-nationalize-venezuelan-gold-industry-idUSTRE77G53L20110817/

[25] Juan Forero, “Chavez Eyes Nationalized Electrical, Telcom Firms,” Reuters, January 9, 2007, 6:00 AM ET.    https://www.npr.org/2007/01/09/6759012/chavez-eyes-nationalized-electrical-telcom-firms

[26] James Suggett, “Venezuela Nationalizes Gas Plant and Steel Companies, Pledges Worker Control,” Venezuelanalysis, May 23, 2009.    https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/4464/

[27] David Brunnstrom, “Factbox: Venezuela’s nationalizations under Chavez,” Reuters, October 7, 2012, 10:51 PM.    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-election-nationalizations/factbox-venezuelas-nationalizations-under-chavez-idUSBRE89701X20121008/

[28] Frank Jack Daniel–Analysis–, “Food, farms the new target for Venezuela’s Chavez,” Reuters, March 5, 2009, 6:06 PM EST.   https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-chavez-analysis-sb/food-farms-the-new-target-for-venezuelas-chavez-idUSTRE5246OO20090305/

[29] Daniel Cancel, “Chavez Says He Has No Problem Nationalizing Banks,” Bloomberg, November 29, 2009, 15:02 GMT-5.    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2009-11-29/chavez-says-he-has-no-problem-nationalizing-banks

§ 14

[30] Angus Berwick, “Special Report: How Cuba taught Venezuela to quash military dissent,” Reuters, August 22, 2019, 8:22 AM ET.    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-cuba-military-specialreport/special-report-how-cuba-taught-venezuela-to-quash-military-dissent-idUSKCN1VC1BX/

§ 15

[31] Robert Zeliger, Passport: “Hugo Chavez’s medical mystery,” Foreign Policy, June 24, 2011, 10:20 PM.   https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/24/hugo-chavezs-medical-mystery/

[32] Juan Forero, “Hugo Chavez Beats Henrique Capriles,” The Washington Post, October 7, 2012.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/venezuelans-flood-polls-for-historic-election-to-decide-if-hugo-chavez-remains-in-power/2012/10/07/d77c461c-10c8-11e2-9a39-1f5a7f6fe945_story.html

§ 16

[33] Bryan Winter and Ana Flor, “Exclusive:   Brazil wants Venezuela election if Chavez dies – sources,” Reuters, January 14, 2013, 9:12 PM EST, updated 12 years ago.    https://www.reuters.com/article/cnews-us-venezuela-chavez-brazil-idCABRE90D12320130114/

[34] “Venezuela National Assembly chief: Diosdado Cabello,” BBC News, March 5, 2013.   https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-20750536

[35] “Rafael Darío Ramírez Carreño of Venezuela Chair of Fourth Committee,” United Nations, BIO/5031*-GA/SPD/630; 25 September 2017.   https://press.un.org/en/2017/bio5031.doc.htm

[36] Ludmila Vinogradoff, “La exfiscal Ortega confirma que Chávez murió dos meses antes de la fecha anunciada,” ABCInternacional, actualizado Julio 16, 2018, 12:44    https://www.abc.es/internacional/abci-confirman-chavez-murio-meses-antes-fecha-anunciada-201807132021_noticia.html?ref=https://www.google.com/

§ 17

[37] “Cuerpo de Chávez fue tratado tres veces para ser conservado: … intervenido con inyecciones de formol para que pudiera ser velado,” El Nacional De Venezuela – Gda, Enero 27, 2024, 05:50, actualizado Marzo 22, 2013, 20:51.   https://www.eltiempo.com/amp/archivo/documento/CMS-12708339

~

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Posted in Authoritarianism, Populism, Political Power, Executive Power, Charismatic Leadership, Political Myth, Democratic Breakdown, Venezuelan Politics | Leave a Comment »

“Viability”

January 11, 2026

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Ricardo F. Morín
Viability
Watercolor frottage and white corrector on drafting vellum
20″x30″
2005

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The question is often posed as to why certain corrupt regimes become objects of political action while others, no less compromised, do not.  At first glance, this appears to demand a comparative moral explanation.  In fact, it does not.  The difficulty lies not in the absence of information, but in the assumption that such actions are guided by a coherent and generalizable system of principles.

What can be observed is not the application of a principle across cases, but decisions taken one case at a time.   Political action does not follow a rule that can be applied in advance to different regimes.   For that reason, comparisons between Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia, or Argentina obscure more than they clarify.  They assume a standard of decision-making that is not, in practice, a guiding action.

The actions examined here are those taken by Donald Trump in his capacity as a political actor.  His name is introduced not to explain behavior through personality or intention, but to locate responsibility.  The analysis proceeds from observable decisions and the circumstances in which those decisions were taken, rather than from suppositions about character, motive, or disposition.

The more relevant question is therefore not why some regimes are confronted and others ignored, but under what circumstances a country presents few obstacles to action, and which immediate interests align to make that action feasible.  This reframing shifts the analysis away from moral judgment and toward observable circumstances.

Understood in these terms, the issue admits a response—not as a rule, but as an account of how decisions are made in specific cases.   There is no way to infer, from the level of corruption alone, whether action will occur.  There is, however, a way to explain why, in particular circumstances, action proceeds.

In the Venezuelan case, several conditions converge.

First, immediate external resistance is limited.  Venezuela lacks allies willing to impose material, military, or economic consequences in response to pressure or limited intervention.

Second, state institutions do not act in a coordinated manner.  Administrative agencies, security forces, and political authorities do not reliably operate under a single command, reducing the ability to mount a unified response and making external action easier to pursue.

Third, Venezuela can be publicly described as an exceptional case—marked by collapse, criminal conduct, and administrative failure—which allows actions to be presented to domestic audiences without invoking a general principle that would need to apply elsewhere.

Fourth, economic interests operate through short-term negotiation rather than long-term alignment. Venezuelan oil, under sanctions and administrative disorder, can be folded into ad hoc bargaining without requiring stable commitments or enduring partnerships.

Finally, pressure on Venezuela does not trigger immediate disruption to major markets or strategic balances. Unlike cases involving Saudi Arabia or Russia, action does not risk cascading economic or military responses.

None of these factors amounts to a moral explanation or a guiding doctrine. Taken together, they describe when an administration acts through foreign policy: not because corruption is greater, but because resistance is limited, interests converge quickly, and a domestic account of the action can be sustained—conditions absent in many cases of equally severe corruption.

This does not explain the world.  It explains a decision.

 

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“Unmasking Disappointment: Series I”

January 7, 2026

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“Geometric Allegory,” digital painting 2023 by Ricardo Morin (American visual artist born in Venezuela–1954)

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To my parents

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Acknowledgements

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I wish to acknowledge Billy Bussell Thompson for his meticulous editorial guidance.  His feedback sharpened the structure, precision, and internal discipline of this work.

Preface

“Unmasking Disappointment” follows a line of inquiry present throughout my work:   the examination of identity, memory, and the relations that emerge when life unfolds across cultural boundaries.   Although I have lived outside Venezuela for more than five decades and became a naturalized citizen of the United States twenty-four years ago, my relationship to the country of my birth remains a persistent point of reference.   The distance between these conditions—belonging and removal—forms the backdrop against which this narrative takes shape.

This work belongs to a broader autobiographical project that gathers experiences, observations, and questions accumulated over time.   While personal in origin, it does not proceed as confession or memoir.   Its method is sequential rather than expressive:   individual exposure is situated within historical forces and political structures that have shaped Venezuelan life across generations.   The intention is not to reconcile these tensions, but to render them visible through recurrence, record, and consequence.

“Series I” introduces the first thematic clusters of this inquiry.   The episodes assembled here do not advance a single thesis, nor do they aim at resolution.   They trace points of friction where private experience intersects with public power, and where political narratives exert pressure on ordinary life.   Across these encounters, patterns emerge—not as abstractions, but as conditions that alter how authority is exercised, how responsibility is displaced, and how agency is constrained.

The chapters that follow examine the pressures produced by systemic inequality and trace contemporary Venezuelan conditions back to their historical formation.   Autocratic rule and popular consent appear not as opposing forces, but as elements that increasingly entangle and weaken one another.   Within this entanglement, truth does not disappear; it becomes less evenly accessible and more readily displaced by narrative.

When public discourse is shaped by propaganda and misinformation, authoritarian structures gain resilience.   Recovering truth under such conditions does not resolve political conflict, but it clarifies the limits within which political life operates.   Agency emerges not as an ideal, but as a condition sustained—or undermined—through practice and consequence.

This work does not propose deterministic explanations or simple remedies.   It proceeds by accumulation, drawing attention to patterns that persist despite changing circumstances.   What it asks of the reader is not agreement, but attention:   to evidence, to sequence, and to the conditions under which political freedom may be meaningfully exercised.

Writing from Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I remain aware of the distance between the environments in which this work is composed and the conditions it examines.   That distance does not confer authority; it imposes responsibility.

Ricardo Federico Morín
Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, January 21, 2025

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Table of Contents

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  • Chapter I – A Written Language.
  • Chapter II – Our Recklessness.
  • Chapter III – Point of View.
  • Chapter IV – A Dialogue.
  • Chapter V – Abstract.
  • Chapter VI – Chronicles of Hugo Chávez (§§ I-XVII).
  • Chapter VII – The Allegorical Mode.
  • Chapter VIII – The Ideal Government and the Power of Virtue.
  • Chapter IX – The First Sign:   On Political and Social Resentment.
  • Chapter X – The Second Sign:   The Solid Pillar of Power:   The Military Forces.
  • Chapter XI – The Third Sign:  The Asymmetry of Political Parties.
  • Chapter XII – The Fourth Sign:  Autocracy (§§ 1-9):  Venezuela (§§ 10-23), The Asymmetry of Sanctions (§§ 24-32).
  • Chapter XIII – The Fifth Sign:  The Pawned Republic.
  • Chapter XIV – The First Issue:   Partisanship, Non-partisanship, and Antipartisanship.
  • Chapter XV – The Second Issue:   On Partial Truths and Repressive Anarchy.
  • Chapter XVI – The Third Issue:   The Clarion of Democracy.
  • Chapter XVII – The Fourth Issue:   On Human Rights.
  • Chapter XVIII – The Fifth Issue:  On the Nature of Violence.
  • Chapter XIX – The Ultimate Issue:   About the Deliverance of Injustice.
  • Acknowledgments.
  • Epilogue.
  • PostScript.
  • Appendix:   Author’s Note, Prefatory Note.     A). Venezuelan Constitutions [1811-1999], Branches, and Departments of Government.   B) Evolution of Political Parties: 1840-2024.    C) Laws Enacted by the Asamblea Nacional.  D) Clarificatory Note on Domestic Coercion, Foreign Presence, and Intervention.
  • Bibliography.

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Chapter I

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A Written Language

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Stability is often sought where it cannot be secured.   Experience has shown this repeatedly.   Even careful intentions tend to draw one into uncertain terrain, where understanding lags behind consequence.   At the desk, as late-afternoon light reaches the page, writing assumes a practical function:   it becomes a means of ordering what would otherwise remain unsettled.   The act does not resolve vulnerability, but it records it.   Whether time alters such conditions remains uncertain; what can be done is to give them form.

What follows moves from the conditions of writing to the conditions it must confront.

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Chapter II

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Our Recklessness

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“Our painful struggle to deal with the politics of climate change is surely also a product of the strange standoff between science and political thinking.” — Hannah Arendt:   The Human Condition:   Being and Time [1958], Kindle Book, 159.

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1

The COVID pandemic and the 2023 Canadian wildfires, among other recent events, have made visible conditions that were already in place.     These events did not introduce new vulnerabilities as much as they revealed the extent to which existing systems depend on economic incentives and political habits that privilege extraction over preservation.   During the period when smoke from the fires reached the northeastern United States, daylight in parts of Pennsylvania was visibly altered and registered the reach of events unfolding at a considerable distance.   Such occurrences do not stand apart from prevailing economic arrangements; they coincide with a model that treats natural conditions as commodities and absorbs their degradation as an external cost.

2

The fires in California in 2025, like those that spread across Canada in 2023, do not present themselves as isolated occurrences.   They form part of a sequence shaped by environmental neglect, political inertia, and sustained industrial expansion.   Conditions such as desertification, resource scarcity, and population displacement no longer appear solely as projected outcomes; they are increasingly registered as present circumstances.   Scientific assessments indicate that these patterns are likely to intensify in the absence of structural change. [1][2][3]   What is brought into view, over time, is not a singular failure but a system that continues to operate according to priorities that favor immediate yield over long-term continuity.

3

The question of balance does not arise solely as a technical problem.   It emerges within a moral and political field shaped by prevailing economic assumptions.   The treatment of nature—and more recently of artificial intelligence—as a commodity reflects a trajectory in which matters of shared survival are increasingly translated into market terms.    Under such conditions, considerations that once belonged to collective responsibility are recast as variables within systems of calculation.

4

Such patterns place increasing strain on conditions necessary for collective survival.   Responses to these conditions vary and range from indifference to urgency, though urgency does not invariably produce clarity.   What becomes apparent, across repeated instances, is a tendency for crisis to recur without sustained adjustment.   This recurrence parallels the political histories examined in the chapters that follow, where warning and consequence frequently fail to align.

Endnotes—Chapter II

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Chapter III

Point of View

1

Conversations with my editor, Billy Bussell Thompson, have accompanied the development of this work over time.    His attention to research method and to the structure of argument has contributed to the clarification of its scope and direction.    These exchanges, often conducted at a distance and without ceremony, formed part of the process through which the present narrative took shape.    After an extended period of uncertainty regarding how to approach the subject of Hugo Chávez, the contours of Unmasking Disappointment gradually emerged.

2

Hugo Chávez entered national political life as a leader whose authority was exercised in opposition to political liberalism. [1]  While his public discourse emphasized alignment with the poor, the material benefits of power accumulated within a narrow circle. [2]  Over the course of his tenure, democratic institutions in Venezuela experienced progressive weakening, and governance assumed increasingly authoritarian forms.   These developments become more legible when situated within the historical record and examined through documented practice rather than rhetorical claim.

3

The events that followed Chávez’s rule are marked by disorder and unresolved consequence.   Their persistence draws attention to questions of historical accountability and collective responsibility that remain unsettled.   Examining the record of autocratic leadership—its ambitions as well as its failures—provides a means of approaching the problem of justice in Venezuela without presuming resolution.   Through this examination, enduring tensions come into view as conditions to be understood rather than conclusions to be reached.

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Endnotes—Chapter III

  • [1]   The term caudillo originates in Spanish and has historically been used to describe a leader who exercises concentrated political and military authority.    In the Venezuelan context, the term carries particular resonance and refers to figures associated with the post-independence period of the nineteenth century.    Such leaders tended to consolidate power through a combination of personal authority, allegiance from armed factions, and the promise—whether substantive or rhetorical—of maintaining order under conditions of instability.    While some were regarded as defenders of local or national causes, others became associated with practices that facilitated authoritarian governance and weakened institutional structures.    The concept of the caudillo continues to function within Venezuelan political culture as a descriptive category applied to leadership forms that combine popular support with concentrated power.

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Chapter IV

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A Dialogue

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A series of conversations between BBT and the author accompanied the examination of Venezuelan politics and history developed in this section.   These exchanges formed a transitional space in which reflection gave way to historical inquiry, allowing questions of interpretation, responsibility, and record to be addressed through dialogue rather than exposition.

1

—RFM:   “My writing has been concerned with the evolution of Venezuela’s political landscape, with particular attention to the emergence of authoritarian forms of rule.   The focus has been less on abstract doctrine than on how specific policies translated into everyday conditions for ordinary Venezuelans.”

2

—BBT:   “Examining how authoritarian leadership shapes political conditions is necessary, though the term itself is often contested and applied unevenly.   In Chávez’s case, the use of propaganda was not exceptional in form, but it was consistently employed as an instrument of governance.   How did official narratives during his tenure circulate, and what effects did they have on public perception over time?”

3

—RFM:  “Propaganda is not unique to Chávez; it functions as a recurring instrument across political systems.   In Venezuela, official media regularly attributed economic hardship to external interference rather than to domestic policy decisions.    At the same time, material conditions deteriorated, with shortages emerging from economic mismanagement and later compounded by external restrictions.   Opposition groups also circulated counter-narratives, which in turn elicited responses from the State.    These exchanges unfolded within a historical context shaped by civil conflict and Cold War alignments, and produced a fragmented informational environment.   Within that environment, responsibility for economic decline was frequently displaced, while public perception was managed through repetition rather than resolution.   The social and economic reforms invoked in justification did not, over time, yield the reductions in poverty and inequality that had been promised.”

4

—BBT:  “To render Venezuela’s political conditions with some accuracy, attention must be given to how ordinary citizens encountered these dynamics in daily life.     How were such conditions navigated in practice, particularly where political discourse intersected with immediate economic necessity?”

5

—RFM:  “The economic collapse that followed the decline of the oil-based model intensified poverty and placed sustained pressure on public services.   Examined in sequence, this period shows how colonial legacies and authoritarian practices converged in the formation of Chavismo.   Episodes such as the 1989 riots known as El Caracazo registered widespread disaffection with established parties and democratic institutions.   Under such conditions, the demands of securing basic necessities frequently outweighed engagement with abstract political principles.”

6

—BBT:   “Clarity in narrative depends in part on recognizing the assumptions that guide interpretation.   When these assumptions are made explicit and examined, the account becomes less directive and more accessible, allowing readers to follow the record without being steered toward a predetermined position.”

7

—RFM:  “No narrative proceeds without interpretation, including this one.   Writing provides a means of approaching Venezuela’s history—its colonial formation, episodes of authoritarian rule, and periods of political disruption—without foreclosing alternative readings.    A coherent account need not be exhaustive; it remains open insofar as it attends to implication and consequence rather than resolution.”

8

—BBT:  “The exchange itself underscores the importance of careful narration when approaching Venezuela’s political and social record.    Attending to multiple viewpoints does not resolve complexity, but it allows a more coherent account to emerge without reducing that history to a single explanatory frame.”

The exchange marked a transition from reflective inquiry to historical record.

~

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Chapter V

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Abstract

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1

This section examines the sequence through which the political project articulated under Hugo Chávez assumed autocratic form.    Rather than attributing this outcome to a single cause, the inquiry proceeds by tracing how leadership decisions unfolded within a convergence of historical conditions, institutional arrangements, economic pressures, and geopolitical alignments.   The account does not begin from conclusion, but from record.

2
Attention remains on how authority was exercised and how its effects registered within Venezuelan society.    Historical circumstance, institutional design, and external influence are examined not to simplify the record, but to make visible the interdependencies through which power consolidated over time.    What emerges is not an explanatory thesis, but a configuration whose coherence can be assessed only through sustained attention to sequence and consequence.

~

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“Clarity Is Not Optional”

January 3, 2026

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Ricardo F Morin
Points of Equidistance
CGI
2026

Ricardo F. Morin

January 3, 2026

Oakland Park, Fl.

Power, Sovereignty, and the Cost of Duplicity

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Venezuela’s transition and Ukraine’s survival now constitute a single test:  whether power can be constrained without illusion,  and whether the United States can act coherently even when its president cannot perceive coherence himself.

This text does not argue for a policy or predict an outcome.  It marks the threshold at which coherence ceases to be discretionary and becomes a condition of survival.

The United States cannot act in one theater in a way that invalidates the principles it claims to defend in another.  If sovereignty,  territorial integrity,  institutional continuity,  and legal accountability are treated as binding in Ukraine,  they cannot become flexible,  provisional,  or strategically inconvenient in Venezuela.  And the reverse must also hold:  if those principles are treated as binding in Venezuela,  they cannot be relaxed,  reinterpreted,  or selectively applied in Ukraine.  Once that line is crossed in either direction,  coherence collapses—not only rhetorically,  but structurally.  Power ceases to stabilize outcomes and instead begins to manage decay.

This is not a moral claim;  it is a functional one.  Modern power does not fail because it lacks force,  but because it loses internal consistency.  When the same instruments—sanctions,  indictments,  military pressure,  diplomatic recognition—are applied according to circumstance rather than principle,  they no longer constrain adversaries.  They instruct them.  Russia and China do not need to prevail militarily if they can demonstrate that legality itself is selective,  contingent,  and subject to reinterpretation by whoever holds advantage in the moment.

For this reason,  no transition can rest on personalization.  Trust between leaders is not a substitute for verification,  nor can rapport replace institutions.  This vulnerability is well known in personality-driven diplomacy and has been particularly visible under Donald Trump in his repeated misreading of Vladimir Putin.  Yet the deeper danger is not psychological;  it is procedural.  Policy that depends on who speaks to whom cannot survive stress.  Only policy that remains legible when personalities are removed can endure.

Nor can outcomes be declared before institutions exist to carry them.  Territorial control without civilian authority is not stability.  Elections conducted without enforceable security guarantees are not legitimacy.  Resource access without escrow,  audit,  and legal review is not recovery,  but extraction under a different name.  When the United States accepts results without structures,  it postpones collapse rather than preventing it.

Equally corrosive is legal improvisation.  Law applied after action—indictments justified retroactively,  sanctions reshaped to accommodate faits accomplis—does not constrain power;  it performs it.  Once legality becomes explanatory rather than directive,  it loses its disciplining force.  Adversaries learn that rules are narrative instruments,  not boundaries.

Finally,  there can be no tolerance for proxy preservation.  A transition that leaves intact militias,  shadow financiers,  or coercive intermediaries is not a transition at all.  It is a redistribution of risk that guarantees future rupture.  External backers may be delayed,  constrained,  or audited,  but they cannot be placated through ambiguity without undermining the entire process.

The test is stark and unforgiving.   If an action taken in either Venezuela or Ukraine could not be defended, word for word, if taken in the other—or if a compromise tolerated in one would be condemned if replicated in the other—then the axiom has already been broken.

What must therefore remain true,  in both places at once,  is this:  power must submit to the same standard it invokes—without exception,  without personalization,  and without retreat into expediency disguised as realism.

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Authority Where Legitimacy Has Not Yet Converged

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This section does not assess democratic legitimacy or political merit.  It observes how authority is presently constituted and enforced when coherence is under stress.

A question posed during a press conference—regarding the opposition coalition led by María Corina Machado and the electoral victory of Edmundo González Urrutia—elicited a dismissive response from President Donald Trump.  Asked why a transitional leadership would not center on that coalition,  he replied that there was “no respect for her,”  implying an absence of authority within the country.

Taken at face value,  the remark appears personal.  Read diagnostically,  it exposes a more consequential distinction:  legitimacy does not presently translate into authority inside Venezuela.  The same distinction—between legitimacy and enforceable authority—has shaped Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion, where legitimacy was established internally but had to be defended materially against external aggression.

Electoral victory, international recognition, and moral credibility confer legitimacy.   They do not, by themselves, confer enforceable power.  Authority, as it exists on the ground, flows from the capacity to compel compliance—whether through control of coercive institutions, resource chokepoints, or the operational machinery of the state.  In Ukraine, that authority is exercised defensively to preserve an already legitimate sovereign order against external aggression.  In Venezuela, it persists independently of electoral outcome, sustained by institutions and mechanisms detached from legitimacy.

In this sense,  the question raised by Trump’s remark is not whether Machado’s coalition is legitimate,  but what presently lends authority within the country—and who is capable of enforcing decisions,  preventing fragmentation,  or compelling compliance.   The answer is neither rhetorical nor normative.  It is about how authority is currently constituted and exercised under present conditions.

Recent commentary surrounding U.S. engagement with Venezuelan actors has made this distinction operational rather than abstract.  The marginalization of María Corina Machado has not turned on questions of democratic legitimacy, electoral mandate, or international recognition.   It has turned on her unwillingness to participate in transactional arrangements with the existing technocratic and financial strata that currently exercise control within the State.  In contrast, figures such as the Vice President Delcy Rodríguez are treated as viable interlocutors precisely because they command enforceable authority through continuity with those mechanisms—coercive, financial, and administrative—that persist independent of legitimacy.  Criminality, in this logic, is not disqualifying.  It is evidence of control.  What is being selected for is not moral credibility, but negotiability under pressure.

This distinction matters because transitions that confuse legitimacy with authority tend to collapse into disorder or entrenchment.   Authority negotiated without legitimacy produces repression.   Legitimacy asserted without authority produces paralysis.  Durable transition requires that the two converge—but they do not begin from the same place, nor do they converge through the same means.

In Ukraine, legitimacy and authority are aligned but strained by external aggression; in Venezuela, authority persists in the absence of legitimacy.  Treating these conditions as morally or procedurally equivalent obscures the obligations they impose.  When support is conditioned more heavily where legitimacy is intact than where it is absent, coherence gives way to ethical imbalance.

Trump’s comment does not clarify U.S. strategy.  It does, however, expose the fault line along which policy now risks fracturing:  whether authority is assessed and transformed in relation to legitimacy, or accommodated independently of it in the name of order.   The choice is not neutral.  It determines whether power reinforces or undermines the principles it invokes.

The distinction between legitimacy and authority does not negate the requirement of coherence.  It sharpens it.  When coherence is abandoned selectively, collapse is no longer an accident of transition but a consequence of duplicity.

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“María Corina Machado: The Inheritance of a Republic”

October 14, 2025

By Ricardo Morín

Oct. 14, 2025

There are lives that seem to recapitulate the destiny of a nation, as if history, in search of renewal, gathers its scattered promises into one mortal form.  María Corina Machado stands within that rare order of beings in whom blood, memory, and conviction converge—not as privilege, but as burden.  She was not merely born into Venezuela’s republican lineage; she was summoned by it.  The call that first thundered through the assembly halls of Caracas in 1811—when its independence was declared and its first republican constitution conceived—still vibrates beneath her name.

Her ancestry reaches into the first pulse of the Republic.  From the Rodríguez del Toros, who set their signatures beneath the Act of Independence, to the Zuloaga engineers who electrified a nation, hers is a genealogy woven into the civic arteries of Venezuela.  It is a lineage that chose service over title, innovation over indulgence, and fidelity to the law over the ease of silence.  In that tradition, the notion of freedom is not an abstraction—it is inheritance, obligation, and vocation.  It is the thread that binds a people to their conscience.

When the institutions that once defined Venezuela began to crumble, when legality became theater and words lost their weight, Machado stepped into the void with the gravity of someone aware that retreat was impossible.  Her defiance was not theatrical—it was ancestral.  Every gesture, every refusal to submit, bore the quiet authority of history fulfilled.  She spoke as one who understood that to preserve dignity in times of humiliation is the purest form of resistance.  There is, in her manner of being, that rare synthesis of intellect and steadfastness that defines the moral personality of a nation at its best—lucid, unbending, and human.

Yet today, her adversary is not one but many.  Before her stands not only a narco-state that has hollowed out Venezuela’s sovereignty, but a fractured opposition—an archipelago of parties and personalities bound less by principle than by convenience.  Factionalized, transient, and transactional, these groups have transformed plurality into pretext and compromise into commerce.  Many have learned to live off the dictatorship they denounce.  They negotiate freedoms for themselves even as the country sinks deeper into captivity.  Against that duplicity, Machado’s presence has become a moral indictment: her clarity exposes their corruption; her endurance, their opportunism.

Around this internal disarray, the world circles in watchful appetite.  Venezuela’s vast natural wealth—its oil, gas, gold, and rare minerals—has become the prize of criminal networks and multinational investors alike.  Russia, China, Iran, and the United States, each cloaked in rhetoric of salvation, compete not to free the country but to secure a share of its exhaustion.  Behind the diplomatic masks of assistance lies the same calculation: that chaos can be profitable, that a nation weakened by hunger and fear can be managed more easily than one restored to its sovereignty.  This, for twenty-five years, has been Venezuela’s condition—a field of material, moral, and human extraction; its people scattered, its institutions despoiled, its memory pawned to the highest bidder.

In such a landscape, María Corina Machado stands as both witness and counterpoint.  Her struggle has never been for power but for coherence—for the recovery of a civic language capable of naming what has been lost.  To speak of law, truth, and justice amid pervasive corruption is to resurrect meaning itself.  Her voice has become the thread that gathers the nation’s scattered conscience, reminding Venezuelans that dignity cannot be negotiated, and that no foreign savior will restore what only citizens can redeem.

To see her walk through the streets, welcomed not by luxury but by faith, is to glimpse a country remembering itself.  She has become, willingly or not, the mirror through which Venezuelans rediscover their own moral architecture: decency, courage, compassion, and an unextinguished appetite for truth.  In her endurance, the long-interrupted dialogue between people and Republic resumes.

The Nobel Peace Prize, bestowed upon her, is therefore not a coronation but a recognition—an acknowledgment that her struggle transcends the moment and becomes emblematic of the human spirit’s refusal to yield to despair.  In awarding her, the world affirms that Venezuela’s republican dream—born in fire, preserved in conscience—still breathes through one of its daughters.  It is the dream of a nation that believes peace must be built not upon submission, but upon moral clarity; not upon silence, but upon the unwavering voice of the citizen.

What María Corina Machado represents is more than opposition to tyranny.  She is the embodiment of continuity—of the idea that a Republic, like a soul, survives so long as there remains one person willing to bear its weight with dignity.  Her ascent is not accidental—it is the return of an ancient promise.  In her composure, Venezuela recognizes itself once more: wounded yet unbroken, luminous in defiance, faithful to the destiny inscribed in its first act of freedom.

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“The Veil of Liberation: Venezuela and the Machinery of Power”

October 10, 2025

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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

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“The Politics of Erasure: Authoritarianism and Spectacle”

August 22, 2025

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Cover design for the essay “The Politics of Erasure: Authoritarianism and Spectacle.” The composite image juxtaposes surveillance, militarization, propaganda, and mass spectacle to underscore how authoritarian regimes render lives expendable while legitimizing control through display.

By Ricardo Morín, In Transit to and from NJ, August 22, 2025

Authoritarianism in the present era does not present itself with uniform symbols. It emerges within democracies and one-party states alike, in countries with declining economies and in those boasting rapid growth. What unites these varied contexts is not the formal shape of government but the way power acts upon individuals: autonomy is curtailed, dignity denied, and dissent reclassified as threat. Control is maintained not only through coercion but also through the appropriation of universal values—peace, tolerance, harmony, security—emptied of their content and redeployed as instruments of supression. The result is a politics in which human beings are treated as expendable and spectacle serves as both distraction and justification.

In the United States, the Bill of Rights secures liberties, yet their practical force is weakened by structural inequality and concentrated control over communication. After the attacks of September 11, the USA PATRIOT Act authorized sweeping surveillance in the name of defending freedom, normalizing the monitoring of private communications (ACLU 2021). Protest movements such as the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020 filled the streets, but their urgency was absorbed into the circuits of media coverage, partisan argument, and corporate monetization (New York Times 2020). What begins as protest often concludes as spectacle: filmed, replayed, and reframed until the original message is displaced by distractions. Meanwhile, the opioid epidemic, mass homelessness, and medical bankruptcy reveal how millions of lives are tolerated as expendable (CDC 2022). Their suffering is acknowledged in statistics but rarely addressed in policy, treated as collateral to an order that prizes visibility over remedy.

Venezuela offers a more direct case. The Ley contra el Odio (“Law against Hatred”), passed in 2017 by a constituent assembly lacking democratic legitimacy, was presented as a measure to protect tolerance and peace. In practice, it has been used to prosecute journalists, students, and citizens for expressions that in a democratic society would fall squarely within the realm of debate (Amnesty International 2019). More recently, the creation of the Consejo Nacional de Ciberseguridad has extended this logic to place fear and self-censorship among neighbors and colleagues (Transparencia Venezuela 2023). At the same time, deprivation functions as a tool of discipline: access to food and medicine is selectively distributed to turn scarcity into a means of control (Human Rights Watch 2021). The state’s televised rallies and plebiscites portray unity and loyalty, but the reality is a society fractured by exile, with over seven million citizens abroad and those who remain bound by necessity rather than consent (UNHCR 2023).

Russia combines repression with patriotic theater. The 2002 Law on Combating Extremist Activity and the 2012 “foreign agents” statute have systematically dismantled independent journalism and civil society (Human Rights Watch 2017), while the 2022 law against “discrediting the armed forces” criminalized even the description of war as war (BBC 2022). Citizens have been detained for carrying blank signs, which demonstrates how any act, however symbolic, can be punished if interpreted as dissent (Amnesty International 2022). The war in Ukraine has revealed the human cost of this system: conscripts drawn disproportionately from poorer regions and minority populations are sent to the frontlines, their lives consumed for national projection. At home, state television ridicules dissent as treason or foreign manipulation, while parades, commemorations, and managed elections transform coercion into duty. The official promise of security and unity is sustained not by coexistence but by the systematic silencing of plural voices, enforced equally through law, propaganda, and ritual display.

China illustrates the most technologically integrated model. The 2017 Cybersecurity Law and the 2021 Data Security Law require companies and individuals to submit to state control over digital information and extend surveillance across every layer of society (Creemers 2017; Kuo 2021). Social media platforms compel group administrators to monitor content and disperses the responsibility of conformity to citizens themselves (Freedom House 2022). At the same time, spectacle saturates the landscape: the Singles’ Day shopping festival in November generates billions in sales, broadcast as proof of prosperity and cohesion, while state media showcases technological triumphs as national achievements (Economist 2021). Entire communities, particularly in Xinjiang, are declared targets of re-education and surveillance. Mosques are closed, languages restricted, and traditions suppressed—all in the name of harmony (Amnesty International 2021). Stability is invoked, but the reality is the systematic denial of dignity: identity reduced to an administrative category, cultural life dismantled at will, and existence itself rendered conditional upon conformity to the designs of state power.

Taken together, these cases reveal a common logic. The United States commodifies dissent and normalizes abandonment as a permanent condition of public life. Venezuela uses deprivation to enforce discipline and the resulting compliance is publicly presented as loyalty to the state. Russia demands sacrifice and transforms coercion into patriotic duty. China fuses surveillance and prosperity and engineers conformity. Entire communities are suppressed in the name of harmony. The registers differ—commercial, ritualistic, militarized, digital—but the pattern is shared: dissent is stripped of legitimacy, lives are treated as expendable, and universal values are inverted to justify coercion.

References

  • ACLU: “Surveillance under the USA PATRIOT Act”. New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 2021. (This article documents how post-9/11 legislation expanded state surveillance in the United States and framed “security” as a justification for reducing privacy rights.)
  • Amnesty International: “Venezuela: Hunger for Justice. London: Amnesty International”, 2019. (Amnesty International reports on how Venezuela’s Ley contra el Odio has been used to prosecute citizens and silence dissent under the rhetoric of tolerance.)
  • Amnesty International: “Like We Were Enemies in a War: China’s Mass Internment, Torture and Persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang”. London: Amnesty International. 2021. (Amnesty International provides evidence of mass detention, surveillance, and cultural repression in Xinjiang carried out in the name of “harmony” and stability.)
  • Amnesty International: “Russia: Arrests for Anti-War Protests”. London: Amnesty International, 2022. (Amnesty International details the systematic arrest of Russian citizens, including those holding blank signs, under laws claiming to protect peace and order.)
  • BBC: “Russia Passes Law to Jail People Who Spread ‘Fake’ Information about Ukraine War.” March 4, 2022. (News coverage of Russia’s 2022 law criminalizing criticism of the war shows how “discrediting the armed forces” became a punishable offense.)
  • CDC.: “Opioid Overdose Deaths in the United States. Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention”. 2022. (The CDC provides statistical evidence of widespread loss of life in the U.S. and underscores how entire populations are treated as expendable in public health.)
  • Creemers, Rogier: “Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China”: Translation with Annotations. Leiden University, 2017. (An authoritative translation and analysis of China’s 2017 Cybersecurity Law illustrate how digital oversight is institutionalized.)
  • UNHCR: “Refugee and Migrant Crisis in Venezuela: Regional Overview”. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2023. (This report offers figures on the Venezuelan exodus and highlights the mass displacement caused by deprivation and repression.)

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