Preamble: Today’s events, travel, and what listening teaches
Today’s news from Venezuela has landed heavily for many people — emotionally, politically, and personally. For me, it brought back memories of traveling through Panama in 2024, where conversations with locals quietly revealed how long the shadow of U.S. intervention still stretches. Not in slogans or outrage, but in lived experience: disrupted institutions, uneven recovery, and a lingering skepticism toward promises that power exercised “for good” will remain restrained.
Over the years, I’ve also followed a person from Venezuela (Isamar, who is part of the Colombia-Venezuela group that sings Ukrainian songs), who is genuinely relieved that a leader they experienced as a dictator, similar in survival tactics and repression to Lukashenko in Belarus, is no longer in power. Their relief is real and should not be dismissed. When people have lived under repression, a rupture in the system can feel like oxygen.
But relief and caution can coexist.
Travel, listening, and history teach the same lesson again and again: removing a leader and rebuilding a society are not the same act. And the space between the two is where civilians usually pay the highest price.
That is the lens through which I’m reading today’s events — not celebration, not panic, but careful analysis rooted in memory.
The reaction across Latin America to recent U.S. actions in Venezuela is also not confusion or surprise. It is memory.
For much of the region, U.S. intervention is not an abstract debate about power or legality; it is lived history. Chile in 1973, Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Panama in 1989, and decades of covert pressure, sanctions, and proxy politics left a durable lesson: external intervention rarely ends with democracy, and often begins a long period of instability.
Even when interventions removed genuinely abusive leaders, they frequently replaced repression with fragmentation, violence, or economic collapse. Latin American societies learned — painfully — that the question is not whether a dictator falls, but what replaces the state afterward.
That historical memory matters enormously right now.
Venezuela is not Panama. It is a large, socially exhausted country with deep inequality, armed actors, criminal networks, and millions already displaced. Any externally driven “decapitation” of leadership risks reopening the pattern Latin America knows too well: power vacuums, militia politics, humanitarian crises, and migration flows that punish civilians rather than elites.
This is why reactions from across the region include both condemnation of authoritarian rule and deep unease about precedent. Those two positions are not contradictory. They are historically consistent.
And this is where the global conversation intersects directly with Ukraine.
People who stand with Ukraine — including myself — do so on a clear principle:
borders matter, sovereignty matters, and aggression must not be rewarded.
That principle is what distinguishes support for Ukraine from older interventionist models. Ukraine did not ask for regime change in Russia. It asked for the right to exist within internationally recognized borders. The international response has been grounded (at least formally) in self-defense under international law, not in criminalization or forced leadership removal.
This distinction is critical — and fragile.
When powerful states frame the arrest or removal of foreign leaders as a form of justice rather than war, the line between rule of law and rule by power begins to blur. That blurring is precisely what Russia exploits when it labels Ukrainian leaders “criminals,” civil society “extremists,” and invasion “law enforcement.”
For those standing with Ukraine, this creates a real tension.
On the one hand, there is understandable moral satisfaction in seeing abusive regimes challenged. On the other hand, the erosion of norms is never selective. Once powerful actors normalize exceptional measures, others adopt them without restraint — and often without accountability.
Latin America understands this dynamic instinctively. Many countries in the region oppose both authoritarian rulers and external military solutions, because they have lived through the aftermath of “successful” interventions that left societies poorer, more violent, and less sovereign.
The real danger of the Venezuela moment is not that the United States will suddenly invade allies like Canada or Greenland. That fear misunderstands how alliances and power systems work. The real danger is subtler and more global:
- Criminalization replacing diplomacy
- Exceptional actions becoming precedents
- Weaker states becoming arenas for proxy retaliation
- Civilian populations absorbing the costs of “decisive” moves
For Ukraine’s supporters, this should sharpen — not weaken — commitment to consistent principles. Supporting Ukraine means defending sovereignty, civilian protection, and international law even when outcomes are inconvenient. It means resisting the temptation to cheer actions that feel righteous in isolation but destabilizing in aggregate.
Latin America’s warning is not anti-democratic. It is anti-naïveté.
History shows that power exercised without a credible post-conflict plan produces instability, not justice. And instability, once unleashed, does not stay local. It spreads through migration, food systems, energy markets, and political radicalization — affecting precisely the global order Ukraine depends on for its survival.
Standing with Ukraine, therefore, does not mean applauding every assertion of Western power. It means insisting that power be bounded, principled, and accountable, because that is the only environment in which smaller nations can survive.
Latin America knows what happens when those boundaries dissolve. Ukraine cannot afford a world where they do.
A note for Canadian readers
For Canadians, this moment is a reminder of how much our security depends not on proximity to power, but on institutions, alliances, and norms. Canada’s safety has never rested on military dominance; it rests on treaties, multilateralism, and predictability. When those norms weaken anywhere, smaller and middle powers feel the consequences first. That is why panic about hypothetical invasions misses the point. The real Canadian interest is in preserving a world where disputes are governed by law, not by exception — because that system is what has allowed Canada to remain secure without becoming militarized or authoritarian.
For those who stand with Ukraine
Standing with Ukraine means more than opposing Russian aggression; it means defending a rules-based international order even when it is tested by our own allies. Ukraine’s survival depends on the principle that borders cannot be changed by force and that sovereignty is not conditional on power. If global politics slides toward a world where leaders are removed by might and legality is applied selectively, Ukraine becomes less safe, not more. Consistency is not weakness here — it is strategy. The strongest solidarity with Ukraine is a commitment to limits on power, civilian protection, and accountability that apply universally.
And for the people of Venezuela
It is essential to separate regimes from societies. The people of Venezuela have endured economic collapse, political repression, sanctions, migration trauma, and international power struggles — none of which they chose. History shows that externally driven political “solutions” often deepen civilian suffering, regardless of intentions. Any future for Venezuela must be one that restores dignity, agency, and social stability to Venezuelans themselves, not one that treats the country as a stage for global signaling. Justice that bypasses people is not justice; it is another form of control.
Final reflection for today as I am still learning
Fear-driven narratives about imminent invasions distract from the harder, more urgent work of defending norms before they erode. Latin America’s memory, Ukraine’s struggle, Canada’s security, and Venezuela’s pain all point to the same lesson: power without restraint is destabilizing, even when exercised by democracies. The task now is not to cheer or panic, but to insist — publicly and persistently — that strength be matched with responsibility.
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