These days I'm thinking a lot about how collective trauma narrows the horizon of what feels plausible. How it shrinks imagination and hope.
How we shift our mindsets from "what kind of country do we want?" to "what's the least bad option we can accept?".
I guess that's an adaptive response to trauma. It makes sense. Aspiration feels idealistic, impossible, and even dangerous. We begin to settle for relative improvement over transformation.
I understand that when a nation has endured, suffered, fractured, crushed and gotten itself destroyed under such dramatically awful governance for so long… the idea of a good government becomes utopian.
That asking people who have been personally impacted by the regime to think about the broader implications of an intervention or to aspire for more can feel disrespectful. Like asking someone to consider an ideal nutrition plan when they are dying of famine.
But I also think that, while we have to frame ideals in context, make room for celebration and hope (especially when we've had so little for so long), stopping there is where things go awry. Prioritizing survival is understandable and human, but it's not sufficient.
History teaches us that removing tyrants without disrupting the entire framework that sustained them and rebuilding political imagination only leads to another form of tyranny. Relief is not liberation. Survival can't be the end goal.
Even in survival mode, we must preserve moral and political horizon beyond "less bad" to prevent authoritarianism from prevailing. Our morals define the boundaries of what we accept, even during compromise. And those boundaries should always be top of mind and protected, before they're broken and legitimized.
I don't expect a sudden magical change for the better. We need basic stability before we're able to demand better. We might need to endure a compromised government, corruption and partial justice for a while in order to rebuild. I might be idealistic but I'm not stupid.
My distance does not invalidate my perspective. Trauma doesn't grant monopoly over truth, and silence has never protected democracy. These thoughts aren't meant to override those still in survival mode, but to challenge the ceilings imposed on all of us.
Everyone is free to have their own stance on the matter, I rather retain my expectations for the bare minimum of a functioning state (real democracy and sovereignty, prosperity that isn't extractive…) than start to confuse cynicism for wisdom, accept corruption, discard ethics as naive thinking, and democracy as luxury.
Refusing to let trauma dictate the limits of our thoughts is an act of resistance in itself.
This isn't about placing the burden of imagination on a traumatized population, but about refusing to let power define what a population should accept.
Is this new reality for Venezuela slightly less horrible? I don't know, time will tell. I just don't want it to become the ceiling of our aspirations. I don't want chavismo to remain in place. I don't want any external power deciding our future under the guise of salvation. I want a real functioning, prosperous, and safe democracy for my beautiful country and I don't ever want to think that's asking too much.
Yes, transitions require compromise, imperfect alliances, and morally uncomfortable decisions. The danger is not compromise, it's forgetting that it is a compromise. If we forget, we're no longer transitioning, we're settling.
A society that abandons the language of democracy, ethics, and sovereignty in the name of survival may survive, but it will not recover.
Venezuela's risk isn't pragmatism.
It's expectation collapse.
You can rebuild institutions later. You cannot easily rebuild moral expectations once they collapse.