Summary
In light of the announcement of a general amnesty aimed at “healing the wounds” of political confrontation since 1999, the analysis and proposal from La Tabla/Data Journalism Platform stresses the importance of including historically excluded social actors. Achieving peace and tranquility cannot be possible solely with traditional political actors.
The amnesty must also protect farmer spokespeople, worker representatives, and urban residents who have fought for access to land, dignified work, and housing, facing criminalization in their struggles. Their actions, though labeled as crimes, were rooted in legitimate collective claims and political proposals from Commander Chávez. Including these groups is crucial for the amnesty law to fulfill its goal of avoiding “revenge, retribution, or hatred” and fostering respectful coexistence in diversity. Exclusion would only perpetuate the hegemonic narrative that reduces the conflict to a dispute between “government and opposition,” erasing the social injustices that fuel it.
Analysis/Proposal La Tabla/Data Journalism Platform FEB 1, 2026
The political and social conflict in Venezuela has deep historical roots in significant structural imbalances. These inequalities, which have solidified over time, act as mechanisms that crystallize advantages for the dominant sectors while imposing severe disadvantages on oppressed groups, indefinitely blocking access to fundamental rights and perpetuating a system based on privilege.
This state of imbalance cannot be altered through isolated actions. The hegemony of the dominant class operates and reproduces with a sense of absolute normality; defending the model and its social metabolism is not perceived as a response to a threat but as the preservation of a normal and legitimate state of affairs. In these periods of imposed “social peace,” any individual or collective act of rebellion is systematically delegitimized: it is interpreted as a common crime, born from selfish ambitions, a manifestation of psychiatric pathology, or, at best, as an expression of sterile psychosocial resentment.
The rise of Hugo Chávez to the presidency in 1999, preceded by the military rebellion of February 4, 1992, was framed by the hegemonic narrative as the “zero episode” of contemporary conflict. This foundational narrative is not innocent: it serves to stigmatize and criminalize every subsequent action aimed at breaking domination through the assertion and exercise of rights. By pinpointing this event as the inception of “political violence,” a narrative is constructed that absolves the previous order and places the blame for conflict on a specific disruptive event.
This mechanism is constitutive of domination: for the hegemonic view, it is unacceptable to acknowledge that the oppressed can be autonomous agents of their own liberation. Thus, rebellion must always be attributed to an “external disruptive agent,” alien to the true essence of the people, who manipulates and distorts legitimate demands. The dominant narrative replaces the historical subject of the oppressed with a demonizable individual—such as Commander Chávez, the Bolivarian government, Chávezism, or the “regime”—that can be easily characterized, isolated, and combated.
The political consequence of this narrative operation is profound. By establishing 1999 as the exclusive starting point of the conflict, there’s a simplification of the social field into only two actors: the “regime” and the “opposition.” In this binary framework, the legitimate protagonists—the multiplicity of subjects, struggles, and historical claims that preceded and transcend this dichotomy—disappear.
It is precisely from this critical understanding that any proposed Amnesty Law, claiming to aim at “healing the wounds,” should be evaluated, starting from that limiting narrative. A genuine national reconciliation cannot be founded on the exclusion of socially silenced actors. If the intention is genuinely reparative, the amnesty process must explicitly and prominently include all those sectors whose conflict arises from structural inequality.
Therefore, it is imperative that this general amnesty consider as beneficiaries:
· Spokespeople and leaders of farmers who fought for agrarian reform and the right to land.
· Union leaders and worker groups who acted in defense of dignified work, collective bargaining, and better labor conditions.
· Residents of urban popular communities, including tenants and squatters, who mobilized for the right to housing and a dignified space in the city.
The actions of these sectors, although they may have at some point been classified as crimes by a legal system serving the status quo, were born out of legitimate claims for public policies and collective rights that were violated. Their exclusion from an amnesty process would not only be a historical injustice but also a reaffirmation of the same erasure and domination mechanisms that seek to be overcome. Including them would finally acknowledge that the Venezuelan conflict is more profound and complex than a mere struggle between a few political elites; it is, at its core, the expression of a social struggle for justice and equity that has been ongoing for decades, if not centuries.
A