By: Ricardo Abud
The question hurts because it's fair, it arises from the ruins, and it has no easy answer. It's not a phrase uttered from academic comfort or ideological detachment: it's the cry of an exhausted people who have watched their future being ripped away before their very eyes. Asking it forces us to look into a mirror that no one wants to hold for too long.
What crime did the average Venezuelan—the worker from Guayana, the teacher from Maracaibo, the peasant from the plains, the student who dreamed of becoming a doctor—commit to deserve what has been done to them? What original sin do we bear that those who swore to defend the people have devoured them with such impunity, with such coldness, with such smiles?The most honest answer is also the worst: none. We have committed no crime. We did not deserve this fate. A people who have learned to say goodbye too often—saying goodbye to their children who emigrate, to their parents who die without medicine, to wages turned to ash, to cities that have fallen silent, to hope that has become a broken habit—face today a profoundly obscene, perverse betrayal.
Venezuela was not destroyed solely by a failed economic model, nor only by sanctions, nor exclusively by external conspiracies. Venezuela was devastated by the moral degradation of its leadership, an ethical tragedy rather than an ideological one. The country was plundered by elites who discovered that power was more profitable than the homeland, turning the nation into the private patrimony of its leaders, who have never loved our beloved country.
Venezuela wasn't destroyed by a single hand. It was destroyed by two opposing forces that, on the surface, hated each other, but deep down shared the same hunger. For years, Venezuelan political discourse was divided between slogans, anthems, and flags. There was talk of revolution, democracy, sovereignty, resistance, the people, freedom. But while the country debated symbols, a significant portion of the leadership transformed Venezuela into a vast black market for power, a territory of private business deals disguised as historical struggles, where many leaders stopped thinking as public servants and began acting as administrators of spoils.
On the one hand, the Bolivarian project, born from the genuine energy of millions who believed that something fundamental had to change in a country where oil enriched a few while slums grew on the hillsides like open wounds, was hijacked from within. Not by imperialism, although that convenient specter served as a smokescreen for two decades. It was hijacked by those who administered it: a revolutionary bureaucracy that learned, with astonishing speed, that the revolution was more profitable as rhetoric than as practice, and more useful as a shield than as a project.
The mansions in La Lagunita, the apartments in Madrid, the accounts in Andorra, the inflated contracts, the diverted preferential dollars, PDVSA transformed into the slush fund of a patrimonialist state: all of this is not the result of an external conspiracy. It is the result of internal decisions, made by individuals with names and surnames, who chose plunder over management, privilege over service, impunity over accountability.
While millions stood in endless lines for food or medicine, a new, obscene caste emerged: officials who had amassed wealth in record time, bureaucrats who had become magnates, military officers running businesses, and political operatives traveling in private jets while speaking of blockades and popular resistance. They constructed a revolutionary liturgy where sacrifice was demanded solely of the people, transforming the movement into a machine of privilege sustained by collective suffering. They lived like a tropical aristocracy, shielded by bodyguards, privileges, and opaque accounts.
The anti-imperialist discourse, which has legitimate historical roots in Latin America and found fertile ground in Venezuela, was emptied of moral content and transformed into a rhetorical weapon. Every denunciation of corruption was met with an accusation of treason. Every warning sign was stifled with the mantra of the external enemy. Thus, while the Orinoco Mining Arc devastated the Venezuelan Amazon—the very nature that the official discourse promised to defend—while concessions were granted to transnational corporations without bidding or transparency, and while Venezuelan gold traveled to foreign countries in planes laden with sovereignty sold by the kilo, the heirs of Bolivarianism continued to deliver speeches about national dignity before rolling cameras.
The contradiction didn't bother them. They had learned to live within it as one lives within a ruined house: ignoring the creaks and groans.
It would be dishonest, and ultimately complicit, to stop there, because the other side of this coin—the one that was sold for years as a moral alternative, as democratic hope, and as a national rescue project—is also not clean. The Venezuelan opposition, with its honorable and genuine exceptions, which exist and deserve recognition, built its own aristocracy of failure. Sectors that claimed to fight for democracy began to profit from the Venezuelan tragedy as a political industry. Some transformed national pain into diplomatic careers, international funding, media prominence, or personal gain. The country became a ladder for them; they destroyed Venezuelan companies abroad: Monómeros and CITGO.
They often negotiated behind the backs of the people they claimed to represent. The call to street protests frequently served to improve the terms of negotiations that no one would know about until it was too late. The denunciation of authoritarianism was selective, aimed at international audiences and external funders, rather than at the conscience of the average Venezuelan who didn't have time to read press releases because they were standing in line to get insulin.
Economic sanctions, a pressure tactic used by foreign governments and designed in Washington with the blessing or complicit silence of opposition leaders, did not affect the government. This is known to everyone who has studied the phenomenon with intellectual honesty. The sanctions hit ordinary citizens. They closed hospitals that were already failing and dried up imports that were already insufficient. And while this was happening, significant sectors of the opposition leadership remained silent about these effects or, worse, celebrated them as signs of effective pressure. Effective for whom? Not for the malnourished child in the Maturín hospital.
And there one of the deepest wounds of contemporary Venezuelans appeared: the feeling of utter abandonment. The average citizen watched as government and opposition leaders could hurl insults at each other by day and coexist by night within the same ecosystem of privilege. Some of them even prepared for exile. They, too, bought properties abroad and sent their children to European universities while urging young Venezuelans to resist, not to emigrate, that the struggle was worthwhile. They delivered the discourse of sacrifice from the comfort of their own homes; they demanded resistance from others.
While people buried loved ones due to a lack of medical supplies or crossed borders on foot, many leaders were discreetly preparing their "golden exile": apartments in Madrid, accounts in Miami, investments in Panama, children studying abroad, and fortunes protected far from the chaos they helped create. That, too, is a form of betrayal, less obvious than government plunder, but equally real in its effects on the dignity of those who believed in them. For them, the homeland was a temporary business; for the people, a permanent sentence.
What happened in Venezuela has a precise name in political history: the transformation of a nation into the private patrimony of its elites. This is not an exclusively Venezuelan phenomenon; Latin American history is full of variations, but in Venezuela it acquired almost biblical dimensions due to the scale of the available resources and the speed of their devastation. Various analyses of Venezuela have pointed out how structural corruption, institutional co-optation, and democratic erosion became central elements of the national crisis, transcending ideological labels. Some analysts have described the Venezuelan case as a form of “chaotic authoritarianism,” where corruption, institutional decay, and power networks ultimately supplant the normal functioning of the state.
The traces of that plunder are everywhere. Gigantic projects, announced with fanfare and applause, were reduced to abandoned concrete skeletons, left to rot under the sun and weeds. Hospitals were inaugurated but never functioned, bridges connect nothing, multi-million dollar power plants are unable to illuminate entire cities, and water systems have collapsed in a country traversed by some of the continent's most powerful rivers. Venezuela has become a bitter paradox: a rich territory where people live as if they inhabit a nation besieged by perpetual scarcity.
The water and electricity crisis has ceased to be an emergency and has become a humiliating routine for citizens. The electricity goes out as if the country were aging from within, slowly rotting from its institutional core. Water arrives when it wants to, if it arrives at all. Entire families store buckets and containers as if they lived in makeshift camps, not modern cities. Venezuelans have learned to cook in the dark, to sleep through endless blackouts, to lose food, medicine, and peace of mind because of a state incapable of maintaining even the most basic services.
Behind every blackout, behind every dry pipe, behind every unfinished project, lie vanished fortunes. Billions evaporated amid corruption, inflated prices, shell companies, and political collusion. The deterioration wasn't accidental: it was orchestrated. An oil-rich nation was reduced to collapse, with universities emptied of resources, teachers condemned to starvation, and institutions in ruins.
The most absurd contradiction emerges when comparing historical anti-imperialist discourse with contemporary reality. For decades, national sovereignty was spoken of as a sacred principle, and foreign interference was denounced with almost religious fervor. But then came the convenient, negotiated silences. While impassioned speeches about independence were delivered, the country was gradually surrendered, piece by piece, to external interests, opaque alliances, and humiliating economic dependencies. And part of the opposition, which had previously denounced the institutional destruction, also ended up subordinating its agenda to international calculations, hoping for foreign intervention or geopolitical validation rather than national reconstruction.
The result was devastating: a nation without moral leadership. A country where too many leaders stopped asking themselves what Venezuela needed and began only asking themselves what they could get from it.
Throughout this analysis, there is a protagonist who often appears as an abstract figure but is, in reality, the only concrete character in this story: the ordinary Venezuelan. The one who made life decisions based on promises that would not be kept; the one who voted believing that his vote mattered and that whoever won would have some level of commitment to his well-being; the one who stayed when everyone told him to leave, because he loved his country with that kind of irrational and profound love that defies easy explanation.
Those who ultimately left—seven, eight, ten million people—in the largest exodus in recent Latin American history did so not because they wanted to, but because they were driven by hunger, violence, disease, and a lack of future prospects. Venezuela became a country where survival consumes all the energy that should be devoted to living, creating, and imagining the future. This exhaustion was not accidental: it was the accumulated result of decisions that prioritized plunder over management, propaganda over infrastructure, and inauguration ceremonies over completed projects.
The depth of that betrayal lies precisely in the fact that it was neither a management blunder nor an unexpected consequence; it was a systematic process. When political leadership subordinates the fate of an entire nation to its own interests, social dismantling becomes a tool for control and enrichment.
Looking at the impact on the core of society, three dimensions of this rupture become evident:
Displacement as a strategy: The mass migration of millions of people not only relieved the pressure on a state incapable of providing basic services, but also transformed the affective and economic structure of households. Physical distance broke down natural support networks, leaving children and the elderly at the extremes of life in an unprecedented state of vulnerability.
The substitution of life for survival: When daily life is entirely consumed by figuring out how to obtain water, electricity, medicine, or food, the capacity to plan for the future is nullified. A society exhausted by the immediate struggle for subsistence has less room for organization, protest, and the demand for rights.
The breakdown of historical trust: By using rhetoric of redemption, sovereignty, or democracy to camouflage their plunder, they destroyed the invisible pact that binds citizens to their leaders and institutions. They instilled a collective cynicism where dignity began to be seen as naiveté and cunning as the only way to survive.
Destroying bridges, leaving hospitals in ruins, or bankrupting industries is severe material damage, but reversible with resources and time. However, fracturing the emotional fabric of a country, scattering its generations across continents, and forcing a society to learn to love one another from afar is an anthropological wound that takes decades to heal. As the article aptly describes, they were fully aware of the human cost of their decisions, and yet they chose plunder over their homeland.
While the people were emotionally shattered, much of the leadership remained trapped in their power struggles, indifferent to the anthropological damage they were causing. Destroying an economy can take years; destroying the emotional fabric of a nation can take generations.
Venezuelan corruption wasn't just about stealing money. It was something far worse: the theft of historical trust. They stole Venezuelans' faith in institutions, in politics, in public discourse, in merit, in justice, and even in the future. They destroyed the invisible pact that sustains nations: the idea that collective sacrifice has meaning. When a society loses that faith, it enters extremely dangerous territory: national cynicism. That dark place where people stop believing in everything, where corruption becomes normalized, where dignity seems naive, and where mere survival replaces true living.
The irony becomes almost unbearable when comparing the country's different eras. The Fourth Republic, that regime which Chavismo turned into a synonym for everything Venezuela needed to overcome, possessed, with all its flaws, a consistency that its successors could never match, even at their best. The parties of that time didn't proclaim a revolution of the poor: they were openly elites governing for elites, and in that honesty, at least, there was no hypocrisy in promising paradise while building hell. The Fourth Republic persecuted, imprisoned, and repressed, as powers that feel threatened do, but it didn't fill its prisons with the same number of inmates or with the same systematic cruelty that characterized those who came to power swearing liberation.
A project that defined itself as socialist, anti-imperialist, and heir to the oppressed of the earth, amassed a vast number of political prisoners, resorting to hostage tactics where a few are released according to the needs of the current negotiation, as if freeing those who should never have been captured were a gesture of magnanimity and not an admission of guilt. The Fifth Republic did not surpass the Fourth: it plagiarized its worst aspects and discarded what little functionality it had, adding to it the unbearable weight of the betrayed promise. Because to govern badly without having promised anything is mediocrity. To govern worse after having promised everything is something that political language lacks a sufficiently precise word to name, although morality does: it is infamy.
When the contemporary history of Venezuela is written honestly, it becomes clear that the greatest tragedy was not only economic or political. It was spiritual. It was the transformation of politics into a marketplace of personal ambitions where too many leaders stopped loving the country and simply began to exploit it.
People do not forget. It may take time, they may be manipulated, divided, exhausted, and scattered across ten different countries, surviving in precarious conditions they did not deserve, but history always takes its toll. No propaganda machine can ever erase hunger, exile, humiliation, or betrayal.
Venezuelan history must be written in all its starkness, without the mythologies each side constructed to shield themselves from judgment and without the heroic narratives that conceal complicity. It must record the names of those who enriched themselves, the amounts stolen, and the geography of the gilded exile. It must be established that Venezuela did not fall solely due to dark forces from abroad, although these existed and acted, but was betrayed from within, deliberately, by people who knew exactly what they were doing and chose to do it anyway.
Venezuela's problem is not ideological at its deepest root. It is moral. It is the story of a ruling and opposition elite, red and tricolor, that lost, or perhaps never had, the sense of what it means to be responsible for a people; that confused power with ownership, treated the State as a family inheritance, and used politics not as a vocation of service but as a method of enrichment through rhetoric.
However, even amidst such devastation, something remains that the elites could never fully plunder: the moral memory of the people. Venezuelans survive. In Caracas and Lima, in Bogotá and Madrid, in Santiago and Miami, millions of Venezuelans work, build, educate their children, maintain their extraordinary sense of humor and their disarming affection, and hold somewhere in their hearts an image of their country that no one has yet been able to steal. That is the only capital that the political class has failed to plunder, because it resides in the memory and love of those who carry it.
Venezuela deserves an honest assessment of its history. Not the judgment of the victors who rewrite the past to suit their own purposes, nor the judgment of the resentful who seek only revenge without justice, but a calm, well-documented judgment, merciless in its treatment of lies, that allows us to understand what really happened, who made which decisions, and what the human cost was.
That judgment will come. When people tire of merely surviving, they begin to demand accountability. And Venezuela's accountability is long, detailed in the suffering of millions, and every line bears a name.
To those who betrayed: history has no compassion, nor will it ever have any, for your complicit silence or your empty rhetoric.
Then the question will continue to hover over the ruins, uncomfortable and fierce: What did the Venezuelan people really do to their leaders to deserve so much contempt?
Maybe nothing.
Perhaps the Venezuelan's real sin was trusting too much.
And history, sooner or later, always ends up judging those who turn the homeland into merchandise and the people into victims of their business dealings.
To the nations that refuse to die, including Venezuela: still.
"Nations do not die when they are defeated. They die when they resign themselves to deserving defeat."
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EXCLUSIONARY THAN BEING POOR
P.S. I leave with a profound sadness, seeing how, after decades of impassioned speeches about sovereignty, independence, and dignity, they have finally handed the country over to the interests of the United States. It is the final capitulation of a political class that used the flag as a commodity; one side that secretly kneels to save its privileges and another that always awaited foreign tutelage. In the end, those who swore to defend the homeland turned it into a bargaining chip, leaving the people trapped in the bitter paradox of seeing their destiny decided, once again, far from their own hands. Please excuse the length; it was necessary.
Here is Claudio Fermín's tweet, and I want to emphasize: The true greatness of a citizen lies in their ability to put the integrity of the nation before any personal or partisan interest. In the shared message, Claudio Fermín raises a banner of denunciation against what he describes as the systematic plundering of Venezuelan assets and sovereignty.
It is an act of patriotism to denounce, without reservation, external aggression and the surrender of natural resources that belong to the people. While others remain silent out of convenience or political calculation, this stance reaffirms the defense of national dignity as a non-negotiable principle. Speaking frankly about the fate of our oil, our uranium, and the sovereignty of our homeland is not merely an exercise in criticism; it is a call to the conscience of a nation that demands to be respected and defended in its entirety, far removed from the obsequiousness and subservient attitudes that have sought to undermine Venezuela's strength.
History will remember those who, in times of trial, had the courage to raise their voices for the sovereignty of the homeland, regardless of the political cost involved.
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