by Juan Carlos Sosa Azpúrua
There is a new species of nostalgia circulating through Venezuela. It is a curious one, because it does not long for what we had, but for something we pretended, for a very long time, to have: sovereignty. Venezuela today mourns a sovereignty that had been pawned for twenty-seven years. A segment of public opinion laments the tutelage of the United States as though it were the first dispossession rather than the last chapter of one: none of that chorus wept when the country ceded entire portions of its sovereignty to Cuba, Iran, China, and the ELN. Military intelligence and the repressive apparatus had spent two decades under Cuban tutelage before January 2026. The airports, the refineries, the citizen identification system served Iranian interests with Miraflores’s complicity, not its coercion. The debt that mortgaged three generations of oil rent was contracted by Beijing, collected in advance in barrels. And the de facto cession of stretches of territory to a foreign guerrilla, the ELN, has, to this day, no equivalent in the relationship with Washington. The third of January did not inaugurate the loss of sovereignty. It closed a cycle that had already consummated it.
Selective memory is not an accident. It is a political posture that deserves to be called by its name. Sovereignty seemed to exist, in their eyes, so long as Venezuela was handing over spheres of decision, resources, and strategic autonomy to ideologically sympathetic foreign governments. Suddenly it became sacred the moment the United States acquired a decisive capacity to shape the transition. Sovereignty should not have an ideology. A country that does not control its territory, that destroys its currency, that allows the collapse of its public services, that lacks an independent judiciary, that expels millions of its own citizens, and that needs foreign powers to prop up its political structure cannot proclaim itself sovereign merely because the flag still hangs intact over the Miraflores Palace. Sovereignty is not a ceremony. It is a capacity.
But sovereignty does not mean isolation or autarky. West Germany did not lose its historical dignity because it needed the Marshall Plan and American protection after 1945. Nor did Japan stop being Japan because its institutional reconstruction took place under extraordinary American influence. Decades later, both were prosperous democracies capable of deciding their own destiny. That should be our aspiration.
The American presence cannot constitute Venezuela’s permanent destiny. At best, it should constitute the scaffolding that lets us rebuild the house. Because no one keeps the scaffolding once the building is finished. The moment will come to take it down. But it would be foolish to tear it down while we are still rebuilding the walls.
None of this exempts the current tutelage from scrutiny. Every foreign intervention carries costs, and it deserves them. But there is an elementary distinction between administering a reconstruction and administering a plunder. Treating both episodes as equivalent is not nuance: it is propaganda dressed as neutrality.
Since that early morning when American forces extracted Nicolás Maduro, chavismo as a project of personalized power lay in ruins. The clientelist structure and the armed bureaucracy did not vanish overnight, but the axis that sustained them broke. Delcy Rodríguez assumed the interim presidency under Washington’s watchful eye, and the country entered a phase of pragmatic tutelage. It is not a perfect democratic idyll, nor should anyone pretend it to be. But the change in atmosphere is undeniable.
The most honest indicator is not rhetoric, it is capital. Restrictions on investment have been lifted. Washington has selectively eased oil sanctions, allowing the import of equipment, spare parts, and diluents that the oil industry had gone years without being able to obtain. The reform of the Organic Hydrocarbons Law updates a legal framework frozen for two decades. Parliament — the same body that spent years denying the electrical collapse, approved opening power generation to private investment. Seventeen international companies have resumed or explored operations since the start of the year. Research firms project double-digit growth through the end of the decade.
In the energy sector: oil, electricity, gas, concrete movement is under way: Chevron has expanded its stake in joint ventures; BP has just joined the second phase of development at the giant Loran gas field, alongside XRG of Abu Dhabi and UCC of Qatar; Shell is participating in another phase of the same complex, and conversations continue with other major international companies that have signed agreements or memoranda to reactivate fields and gas projects. Oil production has climbed steadily, surpassing one million barrels a day in several months of 2026. GE Vernova has agreed to a program aiming to recover close to a thousand megawatts within the first twenty-four months and more than five thousand within four years. IMPSA is retaking Tocoma. Even in water and basic infrastructure, official rhetoric and contacts with investors point toward rebuilding systems collapsed by years of neglect and corruption.
This is only a fraction of what is needed, but it is the kind of technological and financial investment Venezuela requires to begin rebuilding a system devastated by decades of disinvestment, improvisation, and corruption. It is not yet the boom, but it is the restart of a flow that chavismo had shut off with its mixture of ideology and plunder. None of this is reconstruction yet. A country is not rebuilt in a few months. Least of all when, on June 24th, two earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 struck the north-central region within less than a minute, leaving thousands dead, tens of thousands injured, and damages estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. The state apparatus’s initial response bore the scars of decades of decay.
A power grid ruined by nearly thirty years of disinvestment, a collapsed water system, and an oil industry stripped of its technical cadres do not recover in months, least of all when two earthquakes fall on that liability in a single day. To demand the results of a normal country today is either naivety or the alibi of those who prefer that nothing change so they can keep saying nothing has. To imagine Venezuela transformed into Switzerland in seven months belongs more to the realm of fantastic literature than to political analysis. But something fundamental did change: the direction of the movement.
Our nation is reappearing on the map of international investment. None of this means Venezuela is fixed. It means something considerably more modest, and at the same time enormously important: the country has begun to be repairable. What has measurably changed is the willingness to bet on our destiny. That does not guarantee the outcome, but it marks an atmosphere quite different from a year ago, when the only relevant question was how much further we could fall.
That said, corruption cannot be recycled under a new disguise. If it is, we will have changed the rhetoric while leaving the mechanism intact. Venezuela needs transparent bidding processes, international audits, clear rules, published contracts, effective dispute-resolution mechanisms, and officials chosen by competence rather than kinship, party loyalty, or friendship. It needs to recover a word that for too long sounded almost revolutionary: merit. Calling on the most capable cannot be a decorative gesture. It has to be a policy of state, with the explicit exclusion of those who enriched themselves administering other people’s misery.
But to demand an immaculate transition is to misunderstand how transitions that actually work occur in practice. Don Quixote is not memorable because he succeeds; he is memorable because every time he is knocked down, and he is knocked down again and again, beaten, humiliated, ground to pieces, he climbs back onto Rocinante and continues on his way. That is the lesson this transition demands: not the purity of never falling, but the resilience of rising after every fall and continuing.
The line worth watching is not between purity and impurity, but between transitional pragmatism and continuismo dressed up as pragmatism. Venezuela is not rebuilt; it has merely stopped sinking. Its resilience resembles less any other figure of Greek mythology than Antaeus: the giant who lost strength in the air but recovered it, intact, every time his body touched the earth again. Venezuela has touched bottom more than once, the last time, literally, when the ground split twice in a single day, and from each contact with that bottom it has drawn, so far, the strength for the next attempt. For the first time in twenty-seven years it has a direction subject to scrutiny, and not merely a slogan. That modest horizon is worth more than nostalgia for a sovereignty that, by the time people began to mourn it, had long since been pawned.
This is not a moment for preciousness or absolute purity. Real transitions are rarely surgical. Retaining certain elements of the former regime can allow for an internal implosion with minimal trauma: avoiding a power vacuum, preserving the chain of command of what remains of the armed forces, and letting the system disarm itself rather than explode. It is a cold calculation, but a realistic one.
After a prolonged tyranny there always emerge those who imagine the transition as theater: the curtain falls, every actor of the old regime disappears, and onto the stage step, impeccably dressed, the democrats who will build the Republic from nothing.
History almost never works that way, and it offers precedents. Spain did not move from Franco to a European democracy by immediately expelling from the state everyone who had been part of Francoism. Adolfo Suárez himself came from the regime’s own institutional apparatus. The transformation happened by partially using existing structures to dismantle them from within. Chile did not wake up democratic the day after the 1988 plebiscite either. Pinochet remained commander-in-chief of the Army for years, and later a senator for life. South Africa negotiated the end of apartheid with elements of the old power structure to avoid civil war. The countries of Eastern Europe, after 1989, often accepted the presence of former communist cadres reconverted while they built new institutions.
None of these transitions was immaculate; all of them demanded pragmatism, time, and the decision to privilege viable stability over perfect vengeance. These are examples of negotiated transitions in which forces tied to the old regime took part in building the order that would eventually replace it. And the comparative literature on democratization records similar experiences in Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Retaining cadres of the outgoing regime who know how to operate the state without diverting it into their own pockets does not betray the principle of transparency: it is, so far, the only known method by which a system collapses inward rather than onto the population.
Those concessions may strike us today as distasteful. They were. But they formed part of the political price of a transition that avoided a fresh violent rupture. The lesson is not that impunity must be guaranteed. It is understanding that transition and vengeance are different concepts. Sometimes the smartest way to destroy a regime once and for all is to get it to dismantle itself from within. Implosion tends to produce fewer deaths than explosion. If dismantling military, police, bureaucratic, and economic structures built over a quarter-century requires negotiating with some of their members, then it will have to be done. Not because they are our natural allies. Still less because we should forget accountability. But because politics, once it leaves the terrain of slogans, consists of administering imperfect realities in pursuit of higher goals. Democracy does not always arrive on a white horse. Sometimes it arrives walking through the mud.
Venezuela will be no different. The road will be long, uneven, and at times frustrating. But for the first time in a generation there exists a real possibility that the effort will not dissolve into nothing. As Cervantes wrote through the voice of his hidalgo: «Liberty, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts the heavens gave to men; with it, the treasures the earth holds and the sea conceals cannot compare.» Today that liberty is not merely an abstract ideal: it is the capacity to decide, to attract capital, to rebuild power grids and wells, to look forward without the yoke of Havana, Tehran, or the guerrillas. Like the phoenix of Greek myth, reborn from its own ashes, Venezuela now has the chance to rise not by miraculous decree, but through patient work, transparency, and realism. The horizon is no longer a chimera. It is there, at the end of the road, so long as we do not let the very people who led us to ruin appropriate the rebirth.
Venezuela does not need the perfection of purists today. It needs to rebuild a destroyed state, recover its institutions, and seize a historic opportunity unlikely to present itself again. After twenty-seven years of destruction, two earthquakes, millions of emigrants, a devastated economy, and institutions too often reduced to caricatures of themselves, Venezuela has before it something few generations receive: a second chance. It will not be perfect. There will be mistakes. There will be figures we would rather not see seated at certain tables. There will be uncomfortable agreements. There will be distasteful concessions. There will be decisions hard to defend from a stance of academic purity. But history is not written in laboratories.
The Greeks understood this long before we did. Ulysses did not return to Ithaca along a straight line. He had to cross storms, monsters, temptations, shipwrecks, and strange lands. What mattered was never the purity of the path. It was arriving at Ithaca.
Venezuela, too, is trying to make its way home. And perhaps it is worth recalling Cervantes once more, not to turn Don Quixote into a supplier of motivational quotes, but to recover what constitutes the moral nerve of his entire adventure: the will to keep walking when reality seems bent on proving that the road is impossible.
Because there are eras in which true idealism consists in understanding reality. And true patriotism, rather than lamenting a sovereignty we lost long ago, consists in building the conditions to recover it. Not tomorrow. Not by decree. Not through miracles: stone upon stone, institution upon institution. Until Venezuela can do without tutors because once again we are capable of governing ourselves. Then we will be able to speak of sovereignty. And this time it will be real.
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