By Luis Manuel Aguana
I must confess that I have never had such mixed feelings about what is happening in Venezuela. It is a strange mixture of joy, surprise, indignation, frustration, hope, expectations, anger, and finally acceptance, for something that all of us in this country are responsible for in one way or another. The country became unviable for everyone, locals and foreigners alike, to the point that foreigners, seeing that it would be impossible to restore order and eliminate the threat we posed to them, and that the situation would affect them, decided to act above our self-determination, above what we Venezuelans sovereignly decided on June 28, 2024.
As a sick society, we were responsible for the arrival of a coup leader to power in 1998. We were responsible as a country for the approval of a new Constitution in 1999 that trampled on and centralized power in a single person, without any control from the other public powers of the State. We were responsible. I feel implicated as a Venezuelan, like the scolded boy who did not know how to do his job and had it taken away from him by force to teach him how to do it. Some will be very happy about what has happened, but what it really means at heart is the complete failure of a society that created demons threatening the rest of the world.
And one must first ask why this is so. It is so because the people who have misgoverned for 27 years did not come from outer space or another country; they are the worst of the same people who ruled the country for 40 years until 1998 and were directly responsible for the emergence of a phenomenon like Chávez. As the true leaders of 1958 gradually disappeared, they took control of the country with their most genuine creation: Hugo Chávez Frías.
We Venezuelans have finally reached the extreme of Aesop's fable, “The Frogs Asking for a King,” which I described many years ago: We are still feeling what we wanted as a country in 1998: someone to bring order. It seems as if all Venezuelans went together to ask the god Jupiter from the fable to do so. And our plea was granted when someone came along who is eating the frogs in utter disorder. But this country deserves more than Jupiter's lapidary design for the eternal reign of that king (see in Spanish Fabulas de Esopo in http://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/2012/03/fabulas-de-esopo.html).
I feel morally and politically obliged to be consistent, more than 12 years after writing the above, by not joining the “chorus of frogs” (pardon the expression, which is not mine but from the fable and which I use only for explanatory purposes) who still ask “Jupiter” for order, and he sent us a predator, who, like any predator, will end up eating them all, one by one. Are we now in that situation? Take a look inside yourselves and answer that question for yourselves.
The whirlwind of events following January 3 suggests that Venezuelans on both sides have completely lost control of what will happen in the country, because the US has taken it over indefinitely. When the Americans asked the political opposition if it had any plan for what ended up happening in the early hours of January 3, unfortunately for us, there was no response. And they did not want to waste any more time.
But if we Venezuelans had no plan, trusting in a collapse of the armed forces, as opposition advisors assured us, the US definitely did have one and is implementing it. Whether that is good or bad, even if it shines like the mirrors of the Spanish conquistadors, we do not yet know. I am not here to assess whether the situation is good or bad for Venezuelans. Only time will tell. For the purposes of this article, I am deliberately ignoring whether the events that have taken place will be positive or negative for the country.
Technically, Venezuela is now the subject of a formal occupation without “occupiers” on the ground... yet. Some will not want to admit it in this way, but we are now like the countries that lost the war after World War II. Venezuela is now the prized booty of the US in a war being waged on several fronts around the world for the domination of continental blocs. We are just a vital piece in a global game of Monopoly, where the players may not give a damn about what happens to us Venezuelans now.
In August last year, I pointed out that the mobilization of US warships to the Caribbean, rather than being motivated by the fight against drug trafficking or the extraction of its leaders, was mainly due to marking territory, in a sort of division of the world, which I called Yalta 2.0, and which was operating for the benefit of the major powers (see Yalta 2.0, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/yalta-20.html).
But I was partially wrong; it was both. Removing Nicolás Maduro Moros from Venezuela not only resulted in them easily gaining control of the country, but also ensured US influence in this part of the world, in an absolutely key area that was dangerously slipping towards China and Russia: oil.
By taking control of Venezuelan oil, the US is changing the global energy equation in its favor. No more discounted oil shipments to China, fueling the factories of its main commercial rival; no more free shipments to Cuba, suffocating the Cuban tyranny; no more purchases of Russian scrap metal with Venezuelan oil. Everything will go to the US accounts, which will use it in part to pay off the debts incurred by Chávez and Maduro with US companies. It reminded me of the infamous episode of Cipriano Castro in December 1902, when the Americans saved us from the Germans, British, and Italians who blockaded the Venezuelan coast to compulsively collect their debts, only to do exactly the same thing themselves, but successfully, 123 years later. How history repeats itself...
Managing Venezuela's oil industry is the first step, not only to control the country, but also to control the strategic position of energy in the US and the Western world. While it is true that Venezuelans stand to gain from the future revival of our main industry, it is no less true that it is no longer ours...
For many years, my colleagues at ANCO throughout the country and I, through this corner of the internet, asked the opposition political sector to take the initiative to call on the Venezuelan people to decide their own destiny directly through the constitutional call for a National Constituent Assembly, even when they were the majority in the National Assembly 10 years ago. However, they decided to ignore that request, and ultimately that destiny was decided by Donald Trump in a single night, deciding for all of us. Do we deserve that? Many will say yes. That they got rid of this plague for us. That they even prefer the US to govern the country forever as another state of the American union (“We're going to run the country”, Trump dixit).
Some will say that “this is only temporary,” that the US governed Japan after the destruction caused to that country by World War II (just as is happening here, but without the war) and that in just six years they had their own platform for takeoff into development. But Venezuelans are not Swiss or Japanese. In fact, there is nothing further from those cultures than us. There are people in Japan who now believe the opposite:
“Now, should we accept the idea that the roadmap to Americanization that Japan took after the war, which followed the Westernization promoted by the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century, was a blessing for Japan that left only a positive legacy? The answer of the author of these lines is ”no." I am compelled to say that, with this phase of occupation, the Japanese people and Japanese society made a historic mistake of enormous proportions. What do I mean by this? The loss of autonomy and initiative caused by the way in which Japan was able to evade its responsibilities for the war" (see in Spanish Nippon.com, Masuda Hiroshi, The Other Legacy of the Occupation, at https://tinyurl.com/mwchysmc). It will be interesting to continue discussing the government of one country over another and its consequences in greater depth at a later date.
Together (the regime and the opposition), we destroyed the country that was left to us, and apparently what is beginning to happen is what we deserve at the end of one path in order to start a new one. I do not want those who destroyed the country to stay, nor their partners who are still in Venezuela with active political responsibilities, surviving within the opposition, and who will continue to exist like cockroaches after an atomic explosion.
Make no mistake. Of course, I welcome the positive consequences that have begun to be felt, such as the release of some political prisoners throughout the country and the closure of the Helicoide. But we still hope that ALL political prisoners will be released, including the Metropolitan Police officers from 2002. That is a non-negotiable condition, as María Corina Machado (MCM) pointed out. We will have to wait and see how far the consequences of January 3 will go, and whether this détente is nothing more than the well-known attempt to buy time to see how far Donald Trump is capable of going, or whether his power in the US will diminish, in order to remain in power.
At ANCO, what we have always wanted, demanded, and proclaimed loudly through our numerous statements is that Venezuelans decide their own destiny, as we did in 1811 and reaffirmed in 1821 with Bolívar leading a war in Carabobo. Freedom back then cost a lot, only to have reached this unfortunate point in 2026. I am not anti-American, and I deeply believe in the democratic model of your Founding Fathers. But I do not believe in gratuitous concessions of freedom from anyone, especially when you remain indebted to those who obtained it for you. What happened on January 3, although it is cause for general celebration, will have a very high cost that we Venezuelans will pay with interest for many years to come. For now, it will be with oil, but what about later? That is what happens when someone else achieves freedom for you. And something important happens with freedom: it only works well and in your favor when you achieve it yourself through your own efforts. Unfortunately, that did not happen here, despite the sacrifice of death, imprisonment, and torture of many Venezuelans. Simply put, as a society as a whole, we were unable to...
And yes, it's true, Maduro is in prison and the structure that remains will eventually be subjugated by the US. And people may be happy about that. After the Castro-Chávez-Maduro tragedy, someone else will bring order, not the Venezuelan people with their legitimate representatives. Are we doomed to submission in order to live well and in peace? I can't swallow that, and I don't accept it. I'd rather eat bread I've baked myself, striving to make it better every day. And it won't be the best, like in any country that hasn't suffered what we have, but it will be mine, ours. And no, this is not a display of retro nationalism, but the legitimate lament of a Venezuelan, part of a people who were stripped of their options to decide their own destiny, because someone else decided it for them. We Venezuelans did not regain our freedom; only the administrator changed.
I hope that at some point in the future—if I still have life left for that—I will not find myself on the same sidewalk as the Puerto Rican independence movement, with the only difference being that that beautiful island does not have anywhere near the wealth that we have in Venezuela, so coveted by all the powers, and that it seems that its future has already been defined in another Yalta 2.0, which will make that new libertarian effort extraordinarily more difficult. Let's now see what the outcome of all this will be and what role we will play in this new scenario. That is why we had better start moving early... May God bless the future of Venezuela...
Caracas, January 11, 2026
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
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