The Strange Hope of an Unstable Country

A U.S. attack on Venezuelan territory seems imminent. Until recently, words such as “sovereignty,” “the will of the people” and “democracy” carried a certain gravitas in Venezuela.

A U.S. fleet near our shores would have sparked massive protests and brought forth all the anti-imperialist imagery Latin America has been ruminating on for a century. But that Venezuela no longer exists. Neither its state nor its government are what they once were.

This is where the contemporary Venezuelan paradox lies: hoping — with a modesty we lost a while ago — that the United States, that historical ogre, will push hard enough to break the kidnapper’s lock. No one believes it will invade; everyone hopes it will force the executioners to drop the chains.

The dilemma is obscene, but disgust solves nothing. To expect a hungry, exhausted and unarmed society to defeat an armed and oil-rich machine is a cruelty reserved for those who have never needed justice.

The fundamental truth beneath the anti-interventionist rhetoric is this: Venezuelan society faces a criminal organization that uses its state structures as a front. When dealing with criminal organizations, the moral debate about intervention takes on a different flavor. Scandinavian-style pacifism — that luxury — does not work when there is a mafia structure that divides the country as spoils among the military, front men and guardians of plunder.

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

The U.S. fleet — the ominous presence that has plagued Latin America with tragedies — is now seen by many Venezuelans not as a sign of domination, but as proof that there are still forces capable of forcing a mafia to retreat.

The list of horrors resulting from U.S. interventions is too long to list. But doing nothing can also go wrong. In fact, it already has gone wrong: 8 million exiles, a country in ruins, a state without legitimacy and an elite that has turned power into personal wealth.

What looms ahead is not an invasion. The United States is not going to govern Caracas. What is looming is something colder and more characteristic of this era: a calibrated, staggered military pressure aimed at destroying the sense of impunity of Nicolas Maduro's regime, thus bringing it to its knees to negotiation.

It is neither Pearl Harbor nor is it Panama; instead, it is the shadow of an aircraft carrier looming over the twilight of a regime.

But this uncomfortable question is raised: What if external pressure is insufficient, not because of a lack of will, but because the day after there will be an abyss no one will know how to cross?

When a mafia takes over a country, talk about an “internal solution” is not enough; that has been proved. But external pressure is no guarantee, either. It may be effective, or it may degenerate into a theater of impotence, with isolated blows to Maduro’s regime becoming fuel for its narrative of resistance. Each bombardment will be converted into political capital.

The United States can destroy assets; Maduro's regime can survive their loss. 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, for the most part, placed its hope in something it would have rejected earlier without hesitation. Not because it is ideal, but because alternatives have been exhausted.

It is better to face the horror of the facts than to take refuge in a lovely fantasy of moral clarity that only those who are not being beaten down can afford.

The Venezuelan paradox will not disappear anytime soon. Perhaps there is no easy way out. Every option has a price that is impossible to pay without permanent damage.

And that is the starkest truth: There may be no best solution, but only choices between different forms of horror.