A country where every conventional path to change has been systematically sealed shut
For much of the last three decades, Venezuela has been framed as a laboratory—an ambitious experiment in “twenty-first-century socialism” meant to overcome corruption, inequality, and the exhaustion of the old political order. Yet the reality that has emerged is far starker: a nation held hostage by a revolution that promised constitutional renewal but ultimately learned to govern against its own Constitution.
To understand why nearly every negotiation in Venezuela ends in failure, one must return to the origins of the so-called “process”—the failed coup of 1992, the slow dismantling of representative democracy, and the gradual replacement of popular legitimacy with the legitimacy of force.
From Constituent Hope to Military Hegemony
The revolution began with a captivating promise: to transcend the “elite democracy” of the 1961 Constitution through a participatory system anchored in a newly drafted national charter. The 1999 Constitution—approved by referendum—seemed, at first, a modern correction to a tired political model. It incorporated referendums, expanded rights, and embraced the language of citizen protagonism.
But while the text moved toward greater democratic ambition, the political practice moved sharply in the opposite direction.
The crisis of 2002—the failed April coup and the December oil strike—recast the government’s narrative. A project originally sold as democratic renewal now claimed perpetual victimhood: every criticism, every protest, every institutional challenge became proof of an entrenched conspiracy. The government emerged hardened, convinced that its survival required permanent mobilization and absolute control of the oil industry, the economy, and the security forces.
Out of this emerged the so-called civic-military union, the ideological spine of the new order. By 2005, with the opposition boycotting legislative elections, institutional checks vanished. A simple lesson took hold in the ruling elite: without counterweights, electoral majorities become a license for anything.
When the People Say “No”—and Power Says “We Continue Anyway”
The watershed moment came in 2007. A sweeping constitutional reform meant to formalize twenty-first-century socialism—including indefinite presidential re-election—was rejected by voters. For the first time, the people said “no.”
In a constitutional democracy, that “no” should have constrained the government or forced a political recalibration. In Venezuela, it triggered a tactical retreat followed by a strategic advance through other channels. Re-election was later approved through a different mechanism; enabling laws proliferated; the military extended its reach; and the oil boom was weaponized as patronage.
Venezuela crossed an invisible line: hegemony ceased to be electoral and became coercive. The revolution continued to claim democratic origin while increasingly relying on instruments of force.
The Dialogue Dilemma: A Constitution That Recognizes the Right to Resist
From outside, Venezuela’s crisis is often narrated as a political standoff requiring “political will” and international mediation. But inside the country, the situation is more paradoxical: dialogue is structurally impossible unless the government admits two premises it has never accepted.
- That twenty-first-century socialism has no constitutional standing, having been explicitly rejected by referendum.
- That Venezuelans retain a constitutional right to resist any regime that violates democratic principles or human rights (Article 350).
These are not academic details. They are the heart of the impasse. A government demanding recognition as democratic while simultaneously defending a project the electorate rejected is not negotiating; it is staging political theatre—an exercise designed to buy time, ease sanctions, and recover international legitimacy.
The cognitive dissonance is profound: the Constitution that the revolution once championed now legitimizes forms of resistance the government insists on criminalizing.
Elections Where Voting Is Allowed but Choosing Is Not
For years, the international community placed hope in “semi-competitive elections”—a belief that if the opposition organized enough and voters turned out, the government might be compelled to accept defeat or negotiate a transition.
The 2015 parliamentary elections seemed to validate that theory: the opposition won overwhelmingly. But what followed revealed the system’s true architecture. The elected parliament was stripped of power, its acts annulled, and a parallel Constituent Assembly was installed to neutralize it. This culminated in the parliamentary elections of December 6, 2020—a watershed moment.
By the time Venezuelans reached the polls, the outcome was already engineered.
The Supreme Court had intervened in major opposition parties, removing legitimate authorities and appointing “ad hoc” leaders aligned with the government. The symbols remained, but the political substance was replaced. What the world saw as pluralism was, in practice, a landscape curated to simulate competition.
The fraud was not merely electoral—it was procedural. The judiciary was deployed to produce the illusion of legality while dismantling the core of democratic contestation.
The message to Venezuelans could not have been clearer:
You may vote, but you may not choose.
When Courts Become Architects, Not Arbiters
In functioning democracies, constitutional courts protect the citizen against abuses of power. In Venezuela, the Supreme Court became an architect of the political system itself.
Its rulings—dressed in legal solemnity—have enabled executive overreach, neutralized elected bodies, intervened in parties, and provided an endless stream of justifications for outcomes predetermined by political loyalty rather than constitutional fidelity.
What has emerged is a form of judicial autocracy: government actions are retroactively certified, opposition claims dismissed, and the Constitution interpreted as an instrument of political convenience. Legal language survives; constitutional meaning does not.
A Middle Class That Left, and One That Learned Not to Look Directly
Rarely does international coverage dwell on the Venezuelan middle class, yet its fate may be the key to understanding the country’s trajectory.
Once the symbol of an upwardly mobile nation, the middle class found itself politically divided, institutionally orphaned, and ultimately dismembered. Millions emigrated—engineers to Spain, nurses to Chile, teachers to Colombia, care workers to the United States. Their departure enriched host countries and impoverished Venezuela’s capacity for reconstruction.
Those who remain often oscillate between endurance and disillusionment, deprived of the institutional scaffolding that could convert their education and civic instincts into political agency.
And yet, paradoxically, this fragmented, transnational middle class may be the country’s last reservoir of long-term democratic potential—not as a new elite, but as citizens who have learned through experience how institutions should function and why societies cannot survive without shared rules.
Beyond Left and Right: A Crisis of Rentier Authoritarianism
To foreign observers, Venezuela is often reduced to ideological shorthand—an extreme leftist populism confronted by a liberal opposition. But such framing misses the structural core.
Venezuela’s crisis is not fundamentally ideological. It is institutional.
Across decades and administrations, the state has been defined by its dependence on oil rents—a system in which political power is built by distributing privileges, not building institutions. Chavismo did not abolish this model; it radicalized it, militarizing its management and cloaking it in the language of social justice. The old economic elite was not replaced by empowered workers; it was replaced by a new political-military class that mirrors and deepens the vices of the past.
Thus the central confrontation is not socialism versus capitalism.
It is rentier authoritarianism versus republican reconstruction.
What Is Truly at Stake
Venezuela does not seek pity. It seeks precise understanding.
Understanding that:
- The 2020 electoral episode was merely the visible tip of a long, procedural defraudation of the democratic system.
- Any “dialogue” that avoids confronting the unconstitutional nature of the ruling project is theater.
- And any reconstruction will require—not an opposition miracle—but a revitalized civic culture capable of imposing limits on power.
The way out is neither military intervention nor naïve negotiation.
It is the slow, difficult, unglamorous work of rebuilding republican norms that outlast leaders.
Until that occurs, Venezuela will remain what it is today:
a country whose revolution promised emancipation but ended by holding the nation hostage—locked inside a constitutional architecture it systematically hollowed out.
Juan C. Delgado Medina