Portable Country, Corrupt State: The Venezuelan Dilemma

-Analysis-

CARACAS — A U.S. attack on Venezuelan territory seems imminent. Until recently, words such as “sovereignty,” “popular will,” and “democracy” carried weight in Venezuela. A U.S. fleet near our shores would have sparked massive protests and all the anti-imperialist imagery that Latin America has ruminated on for a century. But that Venezuela no longer exists. Neither its state nor its government are what they used to be.

Years ago, writer Adriano González León coined an image: Portable Country. He couldn’t have imagined that the metaphor would cease to be literary and become anthropological. Nowadays, nationality is a condition: more than eight million Venezuelans carry their country packed in their hand luggage. “Venezuela” is as much a diaspora as it is a geography, and more nostalgia than sovereignty.

Venezuela is being hijacked under the name of a flag.  Rather than outrage, the appearance of a Yankee armada, has produced an almost sacrilegious sigh of relief in many: finally, someone bigger than them. Finally, someone with the strength to stop the abuse.

Paradox of hope

This is where the contemporary Venezuelan paradox opens up: hoping — with a modesty we lost long ago — that the United States, that historical giant, will push hard enough to break the lock on the hijacking. No one believes they will invade; everyone hopes they will force the executioners to release the chain.

The dilemma is obscene. But nausea solves nothing. Asking a hungry, exhausted, and unarmed society to fight an armed and oil-rich apparatus is a cruelty reserved for those who have never needed justice.

The basic truth, beneath the anti-interventionist rhetoric, is this: Venezuelan society is facing a criminal organization that uses state structures as a facade. And when faced with criminal organizations, the moral discussion about intervention changes in nature.

The word ‘intervention’ stops being sacrilegious and becomes a possibility, even a hope: emergency surgery.

Scandinavian-style pacifism — that luxury — does not work in the face of a mafia structure that divides the country as spoils among the military, front men, and guardians of the looting.

In that context, the word “intervention” stops being sacrilegious and becomes a possibility, even a hope: emergency surgery. Remove the tumor. Relieve the pain. But the price of relief can be permanent mutilation. That is the question that must be faced head-on.

The U.S. fleet — that ominous presence, that figure that has plagued Latin America with tragedies — is now seen by many Venezuelans as proof that there are still forces capable of forcing a mafia to retreat, rather than a sign of domination.

Force vs reality

The list of horrors resulting from U.S. interventions is too long to repeat. But doing nothing can also go wrong. In fact, it already has gone wrong: eight million exiles, a pulverized country, a state without legitimacy, and an elite that turned power into personal wealth.

What is looming is not an invasion. The United States is not going to rule Caracas. What is looming is something colder, more typical of this era: calibrated, staggered military pressure aimed at destroying the sense of impunity of Maduro’s regime. Bringing them to their knees to negotiate.

Neither Pearl Harbor nor Panama. Rather, the shadow of an aircraft carrier looming over the twilight of a regime.

Internal solution?

But here’s the uncomfortable question: what if external pressure is insufficient, not because of a lack of will, but because the day after is an abyss that no one knows how to cross?

Venezuelan society has been pushed so far to the limit that it has largely placed its hope in something it would have rejected without hesitation.

When a mafia takes over a country, talking about an “internal solution” is not enough. That has been proven. But external pressure is no guarantee either: it may work, or it may degenerate into a theater of impotence, with isolated blows that Maduro’s regime turns into fuel for its narrative of resistance. Every bombardment will be turned into political capital.

The United States can destroy assets; Maduro’s regime can survive them. Force, without a strategy to break the power structure, is just noise.

The truth is that Venezuelan society has been pushed so far to the limit that it has largely placed its hope in something it would have rejected without hesitation. Not because it is ideal, but because the alternatives have been exhausted.

It is better to face the horror of reality than to take refuge in the aesthetic fantasy of moral purity that only those who are not being beaten can afford.

The Venezuelan dilemma will not disappear anytime soon. Perhaps there is no clean way out — and every option has a price that is impossible to pay without permanent damage.

That is the hardest truth: there may be no right answer, only choices between different forms of horror.