By Luis Manuel Aguana
At the end of the year, people tend to take stock, however briefly, of what has been achieved in the year that is ending, compared to what is expected for the next. I have the good or bad habit of looking at what I wrote on the same day in previous years, just to see if we have made at least some progress in our quest to return to who we once were, even though with each passing year there are fewer of us who can remember that.
It has been 27 years since the Venezuelan people, in December 1998, decided by a majority, in fair, free, and transparent elections, to put a coup leader in the presidency because we had already given up on the possibility that any of the existing parties in the current political status quo would stop treating us like sheep to be slaughtered for their survival. Well, the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. Any Venezuelan who was a child at that time has no idea what was lost at that moment.
For example, anyone who was 10 or 15 years old in 1998 (not to mention those born that year or later) could not understand at the time the problem posed by the exhaustion of the political model built in 1958. Twenty-seven years later, we are faced with adults aged 37 or 42, respectively, who have no idea of the freedoms we enjoyed during those 40 years of democracy, or what they meant to the generation of Venezuelans who did experience them. They only have a vague, ethereal idea of what their parents or older relatives may have told them. The only thing they have really experienced politically, economically, and socially is the trashy legacy of the 1992 coup leader and the gang that followed him, which is still in power on December 31, 2025. Do you realize how serious the problem is?
The great challenge that remains for us older people is to convince these new generations that a much better and perfectible Venezuela is possible, not only because we had it before and did not know how to appreciate it as a society, but also because the price of not doing so will be repeating the mistakes of those who led us into that political abyss in 1998, and who, unfortunately, have not yet disappeared from the political scene, attempting to approach the country's new leadership with well-known intentions of getting their hands on a new and possible government leadership. And that is completely unacceptable, even if the undisputed leader is María Corina Machado (MCM).
That is why, on this last day of 2025, I want to examine my approach over the last two years, the end of 2023 and 2024, so as not to go back much further, because I believe that those two milestones discussed on this same day at the end of each of those years may be the key to what should happen in 2026.
On December 31, 2023, I dedicated myself to a concept that has been little discussed: certainty (see Certainty for 2024, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/certainty-for-2024.html). And especially certainty as the responsibility of those who, by chance, have been called upon to lead an entire people at crucial moments in the country's history. I invite you to read it so that you can familiarize yourselves with the basic concept. To bring you up to speed, I will just mention one paragraph that summarizes what I want to emphasize now:
Leaders, who guide the group and make decisions about political action, must, unlike the people at the bottom of the pyramid, operate in accordance with the environment and respond to its constant changes in order to make decisions that influence the natural behavior of the people who follow them. Leaders, NOT THE PEOPLE, are the ones who must work and live with constant uncertainty, attentive to what may happen in order to take the appropriate actions, transforming uncertainty into certainty for their people. Is that easy? Of course not! That is why they have to earn their position as leaders.
By this I meant that it is the job of leaders to face the uncertainty of the path they themselves must open, so that those who come after them can secure it with certainty once it has been opened. They are the ones who go ahead, carrying machetes and cutting through the undergrowth in a jungle, and whatever danger appears ahead, they are the first to face it. That is, they open paths and decide the direction. Those behind them pave the way once that direction has been decided and the dangers have been overcome.
On December 31, 2023, I asked what we should expect for the year 2024. My wish that day was that the leadership that emerged on October 22 of that year would begin by reducing our uncertainty, taking charge of it and protecting Venezuelans from the distortions of a fatal opposition direction, which had been completely defeated. And I said that I hoped not to make the same mistake as in previous years, suggesting today to this new opposition a wise handling of certainty. But did that happen in 2024? Let's continue to remember.
On December 30, 2024, I spent the day reviewing the theory of successive approximations, applying it to the political reality in Venezuela. Some scientists who know more about this subject than I do may be shocked that I used this methodology in politics. But that is the beauty of having studied the exact sciences first and politics later. There are coincidences that cannot be wasted for the sake of common understanding (see Successive Approximations 2024-2025, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/successive-approximations-2024-2025.html).
There, I pondered the following proposition: removing Nicolás Maduro Moros' regime from Venezuela is a sufficiently complex problem that it warrants being tackled through a method of successive approximations. And the following year, 2025, we were in a position to begin that process.
The first iteration occurred when MCM swept away the traditional opposition on October 22, 2023, when all Venezuelans gave her a clear mandate to lead us out of the regime WITHOUT THE DEAD WEIGHT OF A defeated opposition, represented by the key factors of Juan Guaidó's interim government and the old MUD/PU.
The second iteration, which should have been implemented this year, 2025, as I mentioned in my last note of 2024, had to do with the expulsion from the political system of that opposition, which was completely defeated in 2023, but we saw it everywhere in Oslo on December 10, 2025, embracing MCM, with pretensions of participating in the government of Edmundo González Urrutia (EGU), despite the complete rejection of the entire Venezuelan people in October 2023 and July 2024.
Politically speaking, 2025 passed in just 10 days. Why? Because 10 days were enough to define the rest of the year politically. EGU was not sworn in as he was constitutionally obliged to do, and for the rest of the months until today, December 31, Venezuelans continue to wait for the US government to resolve the regime's departure with all the actions they have taken. Halfway through the year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognized the struggle of the Venezuelan people in the figure of MCM, awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize. And that was it. That was the political summary of 2025.
Venezuela stopped iterating and moving politically this year. The methodology froze. The new opposition, now led by MCM and EGU, did not shake off the leaders who had been politically defeated by Venezuelans since 2023, and that will have consequences in 2026. Venezuelans rejected with their votes the representatives of the interim government, which ended up delaying the evolution that had begun with the popular victory in the MCM primaries and EGU's crushing electoral victory over Maduro, an impossible goal to achieve if she did not endorse his votes. Where are we now? What will happen in 2026, understanding what has happened in 2023, 2024, and 2025?
Personally, I have no doubt that things will not remain the same for the regime or the opposition in 2026. The opposition itself, led by MCM, will undergo a readjustment because it is no longer perceived as chemically pure, having fatally mixed with political factors rejected by Venezuelans. We will not know to what extent this mixture is decisive until we see who they put in charge to begin resolving the issues and dealing with an increasingly threatened regime.
And we are already beginning to see this with the appointment of the new spokespersons for MCM and EGU, in the choice of the natural spokesperson for MCM and the spokesperson for Guaidó's former and failed interim government, famous for that “the regime is weak” in all the international media, how about that? This begins to give us a measure of who is having an influence on the decisions that will be made, this being the first sign of what the future holds.
On the other hand, the situation that prevents the US from definitively resolving the threats it has made to Nicolás Maduro Moros' regime still seems unresolved. In a recent article published after Christmas in the New York Times, the former US ambassador to Venezuela, based in Bogotá, Colombia, James Story, suggests the following to Donald Trump's administration:
“The Trump administration should create an interagency task force, drawing on the authorities of the intelligence community and the Treasury and Justice Departments, to work with the democratic opposition and identify trusted elements in Venezuela’s armed forces to take charge of security during a political transition if and when Mr. Maduro leaves power” (see New York Times, This May Be Our Last Chance to Get It Right in Venezuela, December 26, 2025, Jimmy Story, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/opinion/venezuela-america-maduro-security-strategy.html).
So what? Haven't they done it yet? I believe that if anyone intends to overthrow the regime in the current circumstances, this should have been one of the first tasks to be completed by the US-opposition team, if such a team actually exists. But if they haven't done so by now, it's unlikely we'll see it in the short term with the Trump administration under increasing siege in the US during 2026, and even more so when this has been Story's warning for months (see Making politics in Venezuela, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/making-politics-in-venezuela.html).
If, for some divine reason, Venezuelans emerge from this regime in 2026 and begin a new chapter in our history, it will unfortunately not be because of what our opposition political leaders did in 2025, but rather because of the suffering and resilience of the Venezuelan people, which has been more than demonstrated to the world over the past 27 years. Some of you may call me petty for holding such a view. And perhaps you are right.
I am just a simple spectator sitting in the stands at a game where I see our team lose, lose, and lose, with players who play and “make mistakes” in favor of the other team. And when a new star comes along who hits home runs, the other players—the good and the bad—manage (this time out of meanness) to make her fail; and the worst thing is that she “sacrifices” herself for them because “the whole team must win”. Worse mistake, impossible.
Unfortunately, that's not how politics works in Venezuela. In this game, if we lose, not only does the team lose, but the entire stadium full of people loses, due to the betrayal of the Venezuelan vote in two successive elections—October 22, 2023, and June 28, 2024—by entrusting their freedom to a new emerging leadership represented by MCM, with the consequent moral disappointment of the country and victory for the regime. We Venezuelans are still waiting to find out what it will be: freedom or betrayal. Hopefully, these players, and especially our star, will begin to understand this once and for all in 2026, giving the right meaning to our irrevocable decision to place the freedom of our nation in their hands and not in the hands of others.
Once again, my dear friends, followers, and readers of ICTs & Human Rights, my sincere thanks for accompanying these notes throughout 2025. I wish you and your families all the best for 2026, and I hope that, with God's help, this will truly be the year of freedom... Let's work harder and better to make it so. Amen! Happy New Year 2026!
Caracas, December 31, 2025
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
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