By Juan Carlos Sosa Azpúrua
There is a widespread superstition, a very Venezuelan one, according to which to negotiate is to surrender. That prejudice, forged over twenty-seven years of fraud disguised as dialogue, has a legitimate historical explanation. But to confuse the failed negotiations of the past with negotiation itself as a political instrument is like renouncing surgery because a quack once lied to us. Recent world history teaches the opposite of what Venezuelan skepticism would like to believe: the most durable transitions from tyranny to democracy were not born of the adversary’s humiliation, but of the table.
There is, moreover, a principle too often forgotten: great authoritarian systems rarely collapse because someone breaks down the front door. As a rule, they erode because their own structures stop finding sufficient reasons to sustain themselves. Military strategists have known this since Sun Tzu: the most elegant victory consists of breaking the adversary’s will before destroying him. Modern negotiation theory concurs: lasting change appears when the incentives to remain inside the system become weaker than the incentives to abandon it, because this reduces violence, resistance, and human cost, and increases the chances of subsequent stability. It is vital to understand that what is at stake is not saving a regime, but saving a country.
Roger Fisher and William Ury, in Getting to Yes, dismantled decades ago one of the great errors of traditional negotiation: focusing on positions instead of interests. Where positions declare, «I will not yield,» interests ask, «What does each actor need in order to accept change?»
Thomas Schelling, for his part, showed that many crises that appear unsolvable find a way out when incentives and the expectations of cost shift. Something similar happens in game theory: it is not always the one who threatens most who wins; often it is the one who manages to change the very structure of the game who prevails. And this is what distinguishes a strategic negotiation from a mere conversation.
Spain did not leave Francoism by assault, but by political craftsmanship. Adolfo Suárez, a man from within the regime itself, negotiated with an opposition that included recently legalized communists the terms of a Law for Political Reform that the Francoist old guard itself ended up voting for in the Cortes. From that came the Moncloa Pacts: born not of surrender, but of an armistice between adversaries who decided that the country mattered more than revenge. Spain moved from autarky to parliamentarism without a single further civil war, because no one demanded public beheadings.
Poland offers an even more precise lesson for Venezuela, because there, too, a criminal apparatus governed with no intention of leaving. General Jaruzelski sat down, in 1989, at the Warsaw Round Table with a union, Solidarity, that he had banned and imprisoned only years earlier. The result was not the Party’s humiliation, but semi-free elections that the ruling apparatus itself thought it could control. It was wrong: it lost every seat that was contested. But the essential point is that the Polish communist apparatus had a negotiated exit, not a gallows, and that is what kept Poland from repeating Romania, where Ceaușescu fell before a firing squad and the country took a decade to digest the vacuum that violence left behind.
South Africa offers a lesson as well: Mandela emerged from twenty-seven years in prison, the same number, by an irony of fate, that Venezuela has now spent submerged in Chavista darkness. And instead of organizing revenge, he sat down with de Klerk at CODESA. The result was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that privileged truth over punishment, and a country that, for all its later failings, did not plunge into the racial war so many had predicted.
In Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution showed that a transition could occur almost without violence when internal and international conditions converged.
Even East Germany ended up crumbling more from internal exhaustion than from external military conquest.
The pattern is similar across these cases: the outgoing regime was not defeated by internal military action, nor cornered into collapse. It was «convinced» that it had more to gain by accepting new rules than by resisting them. That is the difference between a transition and a cliff’s edge.
Now, it would be naive, or complicit, to present negotiation as a panacea without distinguishing the process now taking shape in Caracas from the farces that preceded it. Venezuela already knew dialogue as anesthesia. In Santo Domingo, in Barbados, in Norway, the regime sat down again and again with interlocutors who lacked the strength, the legitimacy, and the real will to extract verifiable concessions. Chavismo did not come to those tables to negotiate its exit: it came to buy time, bribe «opposition figures,» cool the streets, dilute sanctions, and return from each round with the same share of power and an added coat of international legitimacy. The «opposition» sitting across the table, fragmented and without guarantees of enforcement, ended up signing communiqués the regime broke before the ink dried. That was not negotiation: it was a contrivance, a fiction shaped like an agreement, and the country paid for that fiction with more years of misery.
The process that began this August in Caracas differs from those farces in a detail that is not minor: for the first time, the United States is not watching the table from the diplomatic sidelines, but oversees it from within, with real capacity to impose costs and to offer verifiable incentives, from oil licenses to the modernization of electrical infrastructure, in exchange for concrete, auditable steps. The difference between a mediator who can only ask for good faith and a guarantor who can condition sanctions, assets, and international recognition is the difference between a notary and a guarantor of debt. That architecture of incentives and penalties is precisely what was missing in Barbados and Santo Domingo.
That does not guarantee success, but it does change the nature of the game: negotiation no longer happens in a vacuum, but under the shadow of a world power willing to enforce what is agreed.
Every successful negotiation between an entrenched power and a society demanding an exit from darkness rests on principles that negotiation theory and the diplomacy of democratic transitions have proven again and again:
Separate the people from the problem. One does not negotiate with «the enemy»: one negotiates electoral guarantees, a credible judiciary, a verifiable timetable. To personalize the conflict, to turn it into a war of egos, is the surest way to make it fail.
Negotiate interests, not positions. The regime does not defend an ideology: it defends impunity, wealth, and personal security. Recognizing this without euphemism, and offering dignified legal exits in exchange for a real exit from power, is more effective than demanding apologies no one will ever utter.
Gradual, verifiable reciprocity. The GRIT strategy, small, unilateral, verifiable steps, matched step by step by the other side, is what allowed the Cold War to de-escalate without either side feeling humiliated. Applied to Venezuela: release of political prisoners in exchange for the partial lifting of sanctions, and so on, rung by rung, up to the CNE and the TSJ.
Verification mechanisms with teeth. An agreement without international observers, without firm dates, and without automatic consequences for noncompliance is not an agreement: it is a letter of intent. The contrivances of the past died for lack of exactly this.
Calculated amnesty, not total impunity. The transitions that worked: South Africa, Spain, Chile, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, understood that demanding full justice up front blocks any negotiated exit, but that absolute impunity poisons the legitimacy of the outcome. The middle ground, truth in exchange for individual guarantees, without giving up the possibility of future justice, is uncomfortable, but it is the only one that has worked in practice.
There is a temptation, understandable after so much suffering, to demand that the regime be overthrown from outside, in one stroke, without further ado. But that temptation is a strategic error. The experience of Libya and Iraq, where the collapse of the power apparatus occurred without a negotiated architecture to replace it, did not leave democracy behind: it opened a vacuum that anarchy and militias filled for years. A regime that fades from within, negotiating its own irrelevance in exchange for guarantees, leaves behind institutions that can be reformed. A regime forced to collapse from outside, without an agreement, leaves behind a crater. Venezuela does not need a crater: it needs institutions that, even if hijacked today, can be recovered without starting from zero.
I write this aware that Venezuela has spent twenty-seven years (the same span Mandela spent in prison, as already noted) submerged in a darkness many of us thought we would not live to see end. But the Venezuela negotiating today is not the one that was negotiating five years ago. The capture of Maduro, on January third, closed a de facto era. The double earthquake demands a physical reconstruction that now intertwines with institutional reconstruction; and Washington’s decision to become involved not as a spectator but as an active guarantor, from the reactivation of oil to the modernization of the electrical system, has created, for the first time in a generation, a convergence of interests pointing in the same direction. And it is worth remembering that tyrannies rarely disappear because someone pushes them into the void. They almost always disappear because they end up convincing themselves that the void is staying where they are.
That may be, today, the true Venezuelan challenge: not to negotiate out of weakness, but because political intelligence understands that great nations are not rebuilt on the ruins of an absolute victory, but on the foundations of a peace solid enough for freedom, at last, to take root.
Peace never consists of forgetting the past, but of keeping the past from continuing to govern the future. Countries are not reborn because all their conflicts vanish. They are reborn when they discover they possess a common cause more powerful than their differences.
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