Caracas Chronicles

From that dust, this mud —Spanish proverb

Amid war headlines and the growing feeling that we are entering a global conflict, social media is once again echoing the slogan about “the end of the rules-based international order.” This phrase sums up the idea that a democratic international system existed until recently. It’s the global version of “we were happy but just didn’t know it.”

But that slogan carries a false narrative, one that strategically forgets how Israel can not only possess nuclear weapons outside the scope of non-proliferation treaties, but also systematically commit atrocities without ever facing sanctions. Or how Russia, the U.S., and other powers offered Ukraine security guarantees in exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal—only for Russia to invade, and the U.S. to refuse to defend Ukraine, in blatant violation of the Budapest Memorandum, as Zelensky himself has denounced.

That doesn’t mean international laws and rules were fictitious—they were simply suspended or enforced at the convenience of the strong. Russia, China, and Iran have never obeyed them, and the U.S. and NATO countries wielded them like weapons, never intending to respect them or demand their allies do so. The U.S. committed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan comparable to those of Russia in Ukraine and Israel in Palestine, without ever facing consequences.

In fact, Obama, during a visit to Hiroshima, told the Japanese people that the U.S. could not be held accountable in any way for the 1945 atomic bombing—a rare moment of honesty in an era of hypocrisy. As experts like Alain Joxé have shown, the rules-based international order was systematically sabotaged by those who claimed to defend it—much like how police forces in the “third world” (and sometimes the first) sabotage the rule of law they’re supposed to uphold.

When exactly did we live in a world where gentle democracies upheld international law by punishing tyrants, perpetrators of genocides, and war criminals? Didn’t we all witness the genocides in Rwanda, Sudan, and Gaza unfold live before the indifferent eyes of the very same “democracies” that, from their inception to this day, have perpetrated crimes against humanity or supported those who did? When did even experts and educated people start accepting such Orwellian narratives as truth?

Living off the story

Something very similar is happening in Venezuela. For decades, opposition movements have clung to the narrative (or is it a myth?) that before 1998 we lived in a kind of democratic utopia that would make Norway or Finland look underdeveloped by comparison. There’s no shortage of nostalgic tales about the virtue of puntofijista politicians, tales that often contrast with how those very politicians were perceived by their contemporaries.

But more troubling than this widespread melancholy is the fact that a political class, seemingly out of other trades and reduced to selling narratives, is now pushing an even more hypocritical and false myth than before: that the rules-based international order still exists, and that its virtuous champions are on a crusade against criminal regimes.

It’s a sort of 1980s cocktail—military fantasies of Delta Force with Chuck Norris mixed with the financial fantasies of Wall Street with Michael Douglas. The mariacorinista narrative is not only dishonest—it encourages people to believe that mature autocracies like Israel and El Salvador, or emerging ones like the United States and Argentina, are in fact thriving democracies and defenders of the rule of law. It’s hard not to see this narrative as part of those regimes’ propaganda.

In truth, democracy doesn’t die—whether by beheading or slow strangulation—when autocracies seize power. Autocracies seize power because democracy is already dead or dying…

This logic plays out in a politics centered on selling stories to an audience that doesn’t want to buy them, and in a collective memory distorted by a faulty sense of time—disorienting and confusing a country already battered by repression and global chaos.

Though narratives alone won’t stop the erosion of democracy or the rise of autocracies, they are tools. They translate ideas into stories, making them more memorable and understandable while linking the past, present, and future into a coherent trajectory.

But the “death of democracies,” as described by our opposition, is a terrible starting point. In truth, democracy doesn’t die—whether by beheading or slow strangulation—when autocracies seize power. Autocracies seize power because democracy is already dead or dying, unable to contain them.

Trump and Chávez were both products of long processes of democratic decline. Wasn’t Obama already the “deporter-in-chief” back when the idea of a Trump presidency was still a punchline? Have we forgotten the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, and PRISM, post-2001? Or how the Iran-Contra scandal in the late ’80s effectively sanctioned impunity for a sitting US president? Or the systemic corruption embedded in lobbying and campaign financing? In truth, the tycoon didn’t have to build a Gestapo or a Gulag. He found them ready to go, needing only a pilot.

A different story is possible

In Venezuela, both the middle class of Caracas, Valencia, and other big cities, and the remnants of the cultural and academic elite, dream of returning to the puntofijista past as if it were Ithaca. But how could they tell a different story when our intellectual references are mostly organic intellectuals of Puntofijismo—its widows, executors, and apologists? When our public opinion is as diverse as the iconic couch from Friends?

How democratic was a democracy that upheld the Law of Vagrants and Crooks? Was democracy the same in Caracas as in the southern Lake Maracaibo region? Was it the same for criollos as it was for the Yukpa or Pemón peoples? For the slum and for the gated community? What real power did ordinary Venezuelans have beyond voting? How much democracy was there for the poor? Wasn’t corruption already systematic and institutionalized? Sure, we had an independent legislative branch—but did we ever have a truly independent judiciary?

And those little dictators of past decades—the Metropolitan Police, the National Guard, the corrupt military, the DISIP agents—weren’t they just seeds waiting for the right time to sprout into FAES, CONAS, SEBIN, and DGCIM? Could it be that chavismo simply harvested what was planted by a deeply corrupt, oligarchic regime?

All this left us with a society untrained and unequipped to fight for its freedom, fragile institutions, and leaderships born and bred in a decadent, bureaucratic, vote-chasing political culture. That’s why they have no clue—never have—on how to lead a democratic struggle. In those childish narratives, Venezuela’s wonderful democracy fell suddenly and violently due to someone’s mistake or wickedness… and will return just as suddenly—since the dictatorship is always about to fall, always in crisis (which, incidentally, has been going on for decades).

What if Venezuela’s democratic struggle is a long-term one—even if the dictatorship falls—because regime change is not the same as a “democratic transition”?

(One might argue there’s another narrative: a slow, progressive transition in which voting power gradually prevails. But that’s not truly an opposition narrative—it’s a fantasy adopted by those trained by madurismo, who now have the same pitiful relationship to the regime as a monkey to its organ grinder.)

Against this backdrop, neither you nor I can write a new narrative for the democratic struggle on our own. All we can offer are ideas and signposts. What if the “rules-based international order” is a near-utopian demand, a project to rescue from the realm of the impossible—not something to take for granted? What if there are no pure democratic regimes that are simply “born” or “die,” but rather democratization processes that advance and retreat?

What if democracy isn’t something to defend or restore—but something we must constantly reinvent and win over and over again?

What if chavismo was the final outcome of a long decline that began, say, in 1973? What if Puntofijismo wasn’t a democratic Eden, but the egg in which the authoritarian serpent was incubated? What if Venezuela’s democratic struggle is a long-term one—even if the dictatorship falls—because regime change is not the same as a “democratic transition”?

What if democracy isn’t built with political parties and politicians, but despite and against them—using tools we haven’t invented yet, and led by figures we are yet to discover?

What if our story isn’t an Odyssey where we return to an Ithaca that never existed—but rather a tropical, visceral, cyberpunk Aeneid, where Aphrodite is María Lionza and a multitude of Aeneases carry their children and elders—their memory and their promise—beyond the ruins, across space and time, to found something new, leaving behind a Troy unworthy of nostalgia?

What if this is only the origin story of a magnificent people—people we are not, but who will be born from us—and who will found another Rome, or another Venice, in a future we cannot yet imagine? What if we’re just characters in the prequel?Now that would be a good story. In any case, a far better one than what the storytellers are trying to sell us.