When hope transforms into a strategy, history changes course.
On July 28, 2024, over 70% of Venezuelans democratically elected Edmundo González Urrutia as president of the Republic. However, Nicolás Maduro’s regime—backed by the criminal structure of the Cartel of the Suns, classified by numerous agencies as a transnational terrorist organization—entrenched itself in power and denied the transition.
Today, Venezuela stands at a critical juncture where electoral victory does not equate to effective power. The strategic question now is how to convert that moral and political majority into an irreversible majority capable of dispelling fear and breaking the monopoly on force.
Paradoxically, the answer may lie far from Caracas: in New York. The recent election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of the most complex city in the hemisphere offers a profound lesson: the key is not to promise more, but to redefine how a people perceives risk and hope.
A shift in perspective
For two decades, chavismo dominated Venezuelan collective psychology through a simple principle: fear.
Maduro—like Pinochet at the end of his regime, or the Polish Communist Party before Solidarność—understood that as long as the population perceives the future as uncertain, the authoritarian present can sustain itself with minimal legitimacy.
On the other hand, the democratic opposition has tended to speak in terms of gains: reconstruction, prosperity, investment. But in an exhausted and impoverished society, people no longer measure their lives by what they can gain, but by what they fear losing.
Here lies Mamdani’s lesson: one does not win by offering abstract hope, but by promising immediate relief from daily deterioration.
In South Africa, the African National Congress understood this logic at the end of apartheid. When Nelson Mandela appealed to forgiveness, it was not from idealism but from calculation: offering reconciliation reduced the risk of civil war. Change ceased to be a threat and became the only safe exit.
Venezuela must rebuild that same “emotional reference point”: that the continuity of the regime represents danger and the transition represents well-being.
People must once again believe in the Republic.
Fear as the architecture of power
The chavista apparatus governs less by consensus than by controlling perceptions. In the neighborhoods, fear is measured in silence: the fear of losing a subsidy, of being denied a passport, of a child being detained. The regime has turned every basic need into a tool of psychological domination.
This matrix cannot be dismantled solely by sanctions or diplomatic statements; it is dismantled when citizens perceive that their risk decreases outside the system. This occurred in Poland in the 1980s. When Solidarność created networks of economic and spiritual support—bread, shelter, mass—the people understood that the state was no longer indispensable.
In Venezuela, this task falls today on civic, religious, and exile networks, called upon to replace the social function of the collapsed state: providing security, employment, and minimal health care.
Every time a citizen finds protection outside the regime, the psychological cost of disobedience lowers.
Hope as disciplined action
The second lesson from Mamdani is to turn hope into discipline.
Venezuelan democracy has suffered from the instant syndrome: each election is experienced as redemption or ruin. But successful transitions—Chile in 1988, Poland in 1989, South Africa in 1990—were not decided in a day; they were processes of rational persistence, where hope was managed as a state policy.
The campaign against Pinochet provides the closest example. Chilean strategists understood that people would not vote for an ideal, but for an emotion: “The joy is coming.” That phrase was less of a slogan and more an antidote to fear. It promised relief, not utopia.
Venezuela needs an equivalent message: one that offers protection, normality, and everyday life. No more sacrifice, but shared breathing.
Symbolic governance must come before real governance.
When a regime denies alternation, power must first be assumed on a symbolic level.
The Venezuelan opposition already holds electoral, legal, and moral legitimacy; now it must exercise narrative authority. This means behaving—communicating, deciding, acting—as if governing already, showing what a free country would look like.
Mandela did this from Robben Island prison: he spoke as head of state long before he was one.
In communist Poland, Lech Wałęsa signed communications as if Solidarność were already a parallel government. In Chile during the plebiscite, democrats projected images of a future that did not yet exist, but that people could imagine and desire.
In the Venezuelan case, this translates to simulating the Republic from below: citizen courts, humanitarian networks, anti-corruption observatories, local leadership schools. Each parallel institution reduces the gap between lost legality and living legitimacy.
From moral majority to irreversible majority
The triumph of González Urrutia in 2024 was a political event without practical translation. But this majority can be consolidated over time if managed emotionally with the precision of a national security strategy.
Converting fear into calculation: demonstrate that the FTO’s permanence in power implies greater risk (insecurity, isolation, poverty) than its exit.
Managing relief: offer small tangible victories—releases, restoration of rights, humanitarian openings—to keep the sense of progress alive.
Consolidating the common narrative: the Republic as a moral refuge against crime.
Internationalizing empathy: communicate that Venezuela does not seek intervention, but coherence from the free world in the face of a criminal state.
Conclusion: breathe before rebirth
Zohran Mamdani closed his speech in New York with a powerful metaphor: “Breathe, New York.”
Venezuela needs exactly that: to breathe before it can reborn.
For a quarter of a century, the people have held their breath between fear and waiting. Today, after the denied victory of July 28, the challenge is not only political but also psychological: to regain the sense of control.
When a society stops fearing change because stagnation is worse, the regime that oppresses it has already begun to fall.
The Venezuelan transition will not depend solely on sanctions, nor even on international recognition, but on an invisible change: that the majority decides freedom is less risky than obedience.
Then, like South Africa, Poland, or Chile before, the country will find out that history is also won in the mind.
Fear paralyzes if it lacks direction; courage is born when pain acquires meaning.
@antdelacruz_