Dear international left: Stop telling Venezuelans what to think

It's not a right- versus left-wing issue

Originally published on Global Voices

Author's note: This piece is written in the first person, but it’s not a singular experience. It results from many conversations with fellow scholars, activists, and dear friends living outside of Venezuela.

Talking about Venezuela is impossible, yet it is equally impossible not to talk about Venezuela. For those who, like me, are part of the immense diaspora that makes today over 8 million Venezuelans abroad, a new crisis means a new cycle of confusion, of looking at our complex conflict from afar and of impossible conversations online and offline about geopolitics.

I have lived outside of Venezuela for 15 years, and during this time, the crisis in my home country has been a lingering, haunting presence. Once again, as Venezuela splashes across the news, the international community remains largely ignorant about the depth and complexity of the situation. 

Meanwhile, Venezuelans watch the crisis unfold from a distance, grappling with the guilt-ridden impotence that comes from seeing family and loved ones suffer while being unable to do anything substantial to alleviate it. Most of us try to help financially, or any other ways, our loved ones back home. We’re abroad, but never away.

Add to this countless conversations with friends, colleagues and strangers who try to explain to us why Venezuela is going through all of this. These international narratives, shaped by voices that are far from our hard-to-believe realities, force us into a perpetual state of having to educate and explain, quite often to no avail, when we have to match the storytelling contest we inherited from the Cold War. 

‘Venezuelasplaining’ and global left misunderstandings

Throughout the years, I have met numerous individuals from the international left who consider themselves allies and human rights defenders. However, their understanding of Venezuela's situation is often superficial and misguided. “Venezuelasplaining” happens when people, from their faraway vantage points, attempt to explain the intricacies of our crisis to us, often ignoring or oversimplifying the harsh realities we face.

Prominent figures and intellectuals, many of whom I read and admire, have over the years praised the Bolivarian Revolution — the name Hugo Chávez gave to his political project — as a stand against US imperialism and capitalist expansion. While their intentions to defend a Latin American movement are understandable, their silence years later on the egregious human rights violations in Venezuela is painful. Celebrating the revolution without acknowledging the suffering it has caused reveals a selective blindness that undermines the very principles they claim to uphold.

I’ve lost count of videos, articles and people passionately arguing that the current situation in Venezuela is the result of US-imposed sanctions. The issue is quite complex, of course, and not everyone agrees on the utility of such sanctions. What I can say is that Venezuela’s economy was quite struggling before then, and that many more elements are worth highlighting, which I’ll briefly get into below.

The ongoing struggle  

Venezuela, unlike a number of its neighbors, continues to criminalize abortion; LGBTQ+ rights are at a standstill. The legalization of same-sex marriages is not even on the horizon. These are but two elements that seem to escape those defending what goes on in Venezuela under the banner of progressive politics. And that’s far from being the whole story.

In February 2018, the International Criminal Court opened a preliminary examination into possible crimes against humanity committed by Venezuelan authorities since at least April 2017. In each unfolding chapter of our political crisis, the list of people who are detained, tortured and assassinated by authorities soars. Houses in a number of cities throughout the country have been turned into torture centers, thereby expanding the well-known practices taking place in intelligence headquarters, popularly known as El Helicoide.

- “I was tortured”
– “But was it the right-wing or the left wing?”

As I write these lines, people are being doxxed, arbitrarily detained, and forcefully disappeared. People who are usually active on social media have started to share news privately with contacts abroad for fear of retaliation. Those who continue to publicly share information have pointed out that human rights defenders inside and outside the country are finding their passports annulled — a new episode of a very long series of identity control that makes the lives and circulation of Venezuelans a dark tunnel.

One of the most harrowing aspects of the current situation is “Operation Knock Knock,” a state-led initiative involving house-to-house searches and arrests of political dissidents that encourages denunciation. From the pulpit, government spokespersons threaten critics with imprisonment, shortages, social media regulations, and dehumanize whoever is against them. It may be difficult to understand, but the discourse itself is part of this system of abuses.

The majority of the victims in the demonstrations are young people who took to the streets out of desperation, protesting a regime that seems to offer no future. Election observers are increasingly going into hiding as so many of them have been arrested or have warrants issued against them. The list of victims continues to grow, and their stories are often lost in the global discourse, erased as academics, intellectuals and political leaders perpetuate the “right versus left” narrative that puts the government as part of the noble opposition to US imperialism and any adversary as “far-right collaborationists.” Personally, I feel unable to see any ideology that goes beyond staying in power.

The real story is far from this reductive narrative. Every video, comment and argument defending the Venezuelan government and dismissing its human rights abuses over the years disregards a great deal of suffering and perpetuates propaganda. The lack of nuance is nothing short of exasperating, as the chaotic nature of the conflict and the ideas around them keep pushing us back and forth, and imposing sides on us that we have not chosen, confusing values and ideologies with alliances, making difficult any productive debate given the vast appropriation of discourse that relentlessly empties words and concepts of their meaning.

“Neocolonialism is you wanting to explain my own history to me. Neocolonialism is you expecting me to be the subject of your utopias.”

Venezuelan academics, authors, journalists, activists, researchers and other experts that for over 15 years, with every crisis, every news headline and every conversation with curious acquaintances, are put in the impossible situation of explaining it all in terms others can understand. All of it to discover at the end that, in the words of a dear friend of mine: “We’ve spent decades talking to the wind every time.”    

I cannot underscore how painful this is.

All these maneuvers hide behind a discourse of social justice that many audiences on social media buy in with a single click, ignoring what they could easily learn if they accepted what those who have lived through these abuses and this repression say. They misuse ideas of objectivity saying it’s important to see “both sides,” overlooking how this story is that of a state that seems to be the main adversary of its own people.

And worse, these narratives also push Venezuelans into polarizations that do not align with reality. As difficult as it is to see the global left speaking about what it does not know, it is equally painful to see Venezuelans traumatized by the experience with Chavismo aligning themselves with conservative and anti-rights groups, deeply unwilling to listen to any narrative that remotely resembles that of Chavismo, making them vulnerable to equally superficial readings of the conflict.  

Looking back to look forward

A month ago, I returned to Venezuela for the first time in many years. I went back to its incredible mountains and the images of my youth, but the visit was bittersweet. My father, gravely sick, saw more than one of his children in person simultaneously for the first time in a really long time. Despite going through the most challenging period of his 80 years of life, amidst injections, IV lines, erratic diagnoses, and a manual hospital bed at home, where the rhythm of our care was set by electricity cuts and water shortages, he told me those days were also the happiest for him, because we were together.  

That’s a big part of what made so many Venezuelans vote. They went to the polls in spite of great limitations, saying not only that they wanted change, but also that they wanted their loved ones back home. In its early years, Chavismo was indeed a portrait inviting all of those who didn’t see themselves in spaces of power to become a government priority. Those days seem long gone, the country is exhausted, with people constantly referring to the Venezuela “of before,” one that I’m not sure we all agree on what it was like.

I’m in awe of the incredible resilience of those who voted and then took to the streets to protest in spite of significant fear, yes, but also of the level of organization among civil society, journalists, human rights defenders inside and outside the country. The many digital third spaces that have been created to give one another hope, solidarity and tools to work with are a phenomenon that I observe with passion, and that has given me new air to breathe and to remain active and available for those who need me.  

The fight to tell our own stories is a battle against erasure. A resistance against being taken out of our own story. It is also a resistance against simplifications imposed by external narratives, by new masks hiding old powers, encouraging the dismissal of those who have already suffered more than enough. For those a bit too eager to be allies, one request: listen before you speak. Prepare to feel uncomfortable, learn to unfollow heroes and accept that realities are complex and those living through them will give you a better sense of them than tired old political tropes.

Written by Laura Vidal