On Jan. 23, 1958, the Venezuelan people ousted a dictator and installed South America’s longest-lasting democracy, a historic feat that ended with the authoritarian governments of Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro. The 68th anniversary of the overthrow of Marcos Pérez Jiménez may see the ouster of Maduro at the hands of the increasingly authoritarian President Trump, who has committed acts of war in the region without a congressional mandate.
Right-wing Pérez Jiménez ruled 1950s Venezuela with an iron fist, repressing political dissent and censoring the press with his secret police, the Seguridad Nacional. The regime fostered broad discontent among students, workers and sectors of the military, culminating in massive citizen demonstrations and a general strike that broke out into a bloody revolution.
My father was the press attaché at the Caracas embassy that night in 1958 when Pérez Jiménez flew into exile on a flight path straight over our house. Without the reviled secret police, Venezuelans experienced freedom of assembly and freedom of the press, which allowed my father’s work in supporting democracy to expand exponentially. The ruling junta that followed the revolution carried Venezuela into free elections, establishing a democratically elected government that would last four decades.
The leftist Chávez and Maduro regimes re-imposed suppression of dissent, eventually plunging Venezuela into a constitutional crisis. The first Trump administration recognized the election of interim president Juan Guaidó in 2019, but Maduro has prevailed in maintaining control of the presidency by decree. Election fraud, human rights abuses, rampant corruption and a severe economic crisis have resulted in the outmigration of millions of Venezuelans, many of them to the United States. Until recently, many were granted Temporary Protected Status, and the second Trump administration’s termination of these protections has put hundreds of thousands at risk of deportation.
In his second term, Trump has thrown gasoline onto the fire of this chaotic scenario with lethal strikes on civilian boats in the waters off Venezuela, taking possession of tankers carrying Venezuelan oil, and designating Maduro as a member of a foreign terrorist organization. Trump has said that he will make land assaults on Venezuela next.
As congressional candidate and Coast Guard veteran James Martin recently wrote in the Sun Sentinel, Trump’s justification for these actions revolves around claims that Venezuelans are complicit in trafficking in fentanyl and thus should be treated as enemy combatants. This despite evidence that it is Mexico, not Venezuela, that produces this lethal drug. At the same time as Trump is literally blasting Venezuela, he has pardoned the former president of Honduras who was convicted of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
Congress has not declared war on Venezuela. The taking of civilian life is a crime. Trump has taken the criminal immunity granted to him by the Supreme Court to run rampant over the Constitution.
This is not behavior worthy of our country. The country my father represented during his Foreign Service career, the place American diplomats around the globe represent today. The world’s longest-lasting democracy now has an emerging dictator at the helm.
J. K. Amerson López is the author of “Embassy Kid: An American Foreign Service Family Memoir.” She lives in Lake Worth Beach.
