By Luis Manuel Aguana
The photograph of María Corina Machado (MCM) in Panama with all the political actors of the Unity Platform who were displaced by her on October 22, 2023, does not represent the Venezuela that the photograph itself attempts to project. And in my opinion, this is something that political leaders sometimes forget: that they are not there for themselves, but for what they represented at the culmination of an election in the eyes of the people who elected them.
Following this logic, MCM did not win the 2023 primaries; rather, the parties that are now being photographed with her, with her consent, lost resoundingly to the people of Venezuela. The people voted against them. And it is important to remember that this is exactly what happened with Chávez in the 1998 elections: Chávez did not win the 1998 elections because of who he was; the political status quo, born in 1958 and which now refuses to renew itself, lost.
And I don't mention this to dismiss MCM's leadership, but to emphasize that she turned out to be the only political figure left standing after the disaster of Juan Guaidó's interim presidency, and that when measured in primaries the result could not be other than 93% in her favor, which should rather – and still should – be read as a 93% rejection of a political class that failed.
If MCM has accepted, for political reasons, to officially coexist with those who betrayed the deepest aspirations for freedom of Venezuelans, no matter how many Panama Manifestos they write, the weight of such a burden will inevitably drag them down with it, with the predictable political setbacks to which the lamentable Venezuelan opposition leadership has accustomed us.
Because it seems there is something that politicians deliberately forget: they are not the ones who have suffered the most from the destruction of decades of tyranny. The weight of political repression over the last 27 years has fallen primarily on Venezuelan civil society. “Historically, less than 15% of the political prisoners registered in Venezuela over the past 27 years formally belonged to political parties or were leaders of the organized opposition. The vast majority of the more than 19,000 politically motivated arrests documented during this period correspond to ordinary citizens without party affiliation, such as protesters, community leaders, students, military personnel, humanitarian workers, and professionals from various sectors” (see in Spanish, Gemini Brief Survey on Political Prisoners in Venezuela, in https://share.google/aimode/By1amieZ2V7nywmaO).
Therefore, it is the population, gathered in organized civil society, that must somehow take charge of its destiny, not only because of the demonstrated lack of true political leadership, but also because it has been the one that has paid the price for the mistakes of the political leadership. More than a decade ago, I defined a term that fits well with the situation we are experiencing, where it seems that Venezuelans only have ourselves to rely on to get out of the quagmire in which we find ourselves: Civil Opposition.
“The Civil Opposition is civil society in its leading role in bringing about change, and its involvement in public affairs is manifested in its active participation and oversight of key public actors. It will always be in opposition and will constantly remind these actors that there is an anonymous citizenry affected by the decisions and public policies implemented. These are ordinary people who are not party members, but who are conscious citizens who live in and love their country; NGOs that have their own civic spaces; and opinion-makers without ties or skeletons in the closet, who are contributing their grain of sand every day to ensure things are done right. Had this decisive participation existed earlier, perhaps things wouldn't have gone so far, and Chávez wouldn't exist on the Venezuelan political scene.” (see in Spanish Oposición Civil, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/2012/08/oposicion-civil.html).
But Venezuelan civil society faces a fundamental problem: it exists socially, morally, and even constitutionally, but it has yet to consolidate itself as an autonomous political entity. And until that happens, it will continue to be used, fragmented, or absorbed by the very factors that led to the country's institutional collapse.
For years, various international actors—particularly from the United States—have insisted, as Marco Rubio has now done as US Secretary of State, on the need for Venezuelan civil society to organize and assume a more active role in democratic reconstruction.
However, every time civil society has attempted to structure itself, political parties have ended up using it as a source of electoral support, reserving for themselves the monopoly of representation and power. This is perhaps the first major danger: turning civil society into a subordinate instrument of partisan interests.
The Venezuelan experience demonstrates that the traditional political leadership has tolerated civil society as long as it serves as a machine for mobilization, legitimization, or international pressure. But when civil society attempts to develop its own proposals, autonomous mechanisms of representation, or sovereign initiatives, the process of disqualification, fragmentation, or infiltration begins.
The central problem is that in Venezuela, the very concept of representation has been hijacked. Political parties assumed that representing citizens was equivalent to politically replacing them. But the 1999 Constitution introduced a fundamental change: the people can exercise sovereignty directly, without the mandatory intermediation of public authorities or political parties.
This principle, enshrined especially in Articles 5 and 70 of the Constitution, opened the possibility of direct participation by organized society through consultations, citizen assemblies, constituent initiatives, and binding participatory mechanisms. However, this possibility was never fully developed because it threatened both the regime and the traditional party system.
Therefore, the organization of Venezuelan civil society requires first understanding something essential: it cannot be structured solely around electoral events. When civil society organizes only to vote, it inevitably ends up depending on those who control candidacies, resources, and political negotiations.
Civil society must be built as a permanent instance of citizen oversight, public deliberation, and sovereign exercise, not as a temporary appendage of electoral campaigns. It must be understood that the struggle of civil society is not merely electoral, but institutional and structural. The Venezuelan problem is not limited to changing rulers; it involves rebuilding the rules of coexistence and the mechanisms for the distribution of power.
For this reason, sectors of civil society, grouped in the National Constituent Alliance (ANCO), have raised the need for a truly original constituent solution, where the sovereign—the people—redefine the social pact of Venezuelans, proposing a national project, The Great Change, for the structural change of power relations between the State and its citizens, and which goes far beyond the simplicity of a transitional program implemented by any government from a political party (see ANCO's project, The Great Change, Proposal for the Refounding of Venezuela, in https://ancoficial.blogspot.com/p/documentos-fundamentales.html).
The idea here is that society as a whole needs to redefine power relations among its actors because the current Social Pact ran its course more than 30 years ago, long before the disaster that devastated Venezuela in 1998. Hence, the pernicious volatility of leadership is no surprise, constantly bringing us back to square one and preventing us from climbing out of the hole we were put in.
It must also be understood that Venezuelan civil society is not homogeneous. It is a diverse, complex, and contradictory ocean. Within it coexist professional associations, academic institutions, churches, NGOs, students, businesspeople, unions, communities, and regional movements. Attempting to standardize it or assume its “representation” would be to repeat the same mistakes of the traditional party system. And all this without considering that within this entire universe, there are those who use the guise of civil society to deceive the population, concealing their ambitions for power. No one is against anyone's legitimate aspirations; what is intolerable is failing to express them directly through the natural channels of political parties, hiding behind the cloak of impartial independence that civil society supposedly provides.
The strength of civil society lies precisely in its diversity and decentralization. But this diversity demands strategic coordination. And therein lies another historical challenge: how to articulate collective leadership without falling once again into strongman rule, partisan hegemony, or vertical structures.
The Venezuelan experience demonstrates that leadership vacuums end up being filled by the same actors responsible for the previous failure. And this, it seems, is what we will see after the spectacle in Panama. That is why civil society needs to build ethical leadership, mechanisms for consensus, and minimum common objectives: institutional recovery, popular sovereignty, decentralization, the rule of law, and republican reconstruction.
Venezuelan civil society must understand that it faces not only an authoritarian regime, but also a political culture deeply distorted by decades of co-optation, clientelism, centralism, and partisan dependence. The democratic reconstruction of Venezuela will not happen simply by changing rulers. It requires building citizenship. And that task cannot be delegated.
If civil society continues to completely surrender its representation to political actors without effective citizen oversight, the country will once again repeat the historical cycle of frustration, dependency, and institutional collapse.
The great lesson of these years is clear: an organized civil society cannot limit itself to merely accompanying political processes; it must become a permanent guarantor of citizen sovereignty and a true counterweight to power. Only in this way can Venezuela rebuild a Republic where citizens cease to be mere spectators and once again become sovereign.
Caracas, May 31, 2026
Blog: TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
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