The uneven fight of the peoples against dictatorships
By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 30/07/2025
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The dictatorship from Cuba is now 66 years old and its expansion into Venezuela is over 26 years old, into Nicaragua over 23 years old, and into Bolivia over 20 years old. The captive peoples have done all to regain their freedom. Legal complaints, a permanent opposition, dialogues, and negotiating tables, elections, massive demonstrations, and mobilizations, upsurgences, and insurrections, peaceful civil resistance and more, and none of these has worked because it is an uneven fight in which dictatorships have the upper hand, the monopoly on violence, crime, arms, international manipulation, and impunity.
Instead of enumerating the permanent and tireless actions the peoples from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, have carried out and still carry out -with great commitment, patriotism, and courage- it is best to ask ourselves, what has not been done to end dictatorships and regain freedom and democracy?
Proof of resistance and the permanent fight for freedom carried out for decades, can be best measured by the number of political prisoners, tortured, executed by firing squads, assassinated, exiled, extorted, kidnapped, and all victims of State-terrorism perpetrated in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, where crime has been established as a methodology of Castroism now turned into 21st Century Socialism, or Castrochavism.
The strength of dictatorships is based on violence, deception, crime, and manipulation with the objective to indefinitely remain in power. It is not ideology, or politics, is pure and hard transnational organized crime that internally operates State-terrorism, and externally operates international hybrid warfare. Part of their repertoire is; the establishment of narco-States, narcotics’ trafficking, forcible migrations, human trafficking, conspiracies, destabilizations, guerrillas, terrorism, coups d’etat, common crime, assassinations, magnicides, alliance with extracontinental dictatorships, and all sorts of other attacks.
The armed fight, attempted early on against Cuba’s dictatorship, was betrayed and defeated. Afterwards, within the framework of the Cold War, decades of co-existence and containment ensued. When all dictatorships from Latin America were forced to democratization, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union was dissolved, it signaled the triumph of capitalism over communism, Cuba remained with an accomplice quietness and criminal actions of narcotics’ trafficking, guerrillas, and terrorism continued to be perpetrated against democracies.
In Nicaragua the fight of the “contras” and a victory at the electoral polls were needed for the Castroist dictatorship, with the pseudonym of “Sandinista,” to deliver the presidency to Mrs. Violeta de Chamorro in 1990, but retained its control of the armed forces, maintained organized crime as a political party, and protected the “piñata” the nickname given to corruption. The dictator was ousted but not the dictatorial institutionality and in 2007 it came back to subject the peoples until now.
In Venezuela everything has been deception, treason, and crime. Maduro’s agonizing Castrochavist regime obtained advantages from the international environment and the U.S. government in exchange for assisting in the conduct of elections, deceiving in Mexico and Barbados. Maduro’s regime took all the benefits and started by disqualifying the opposing leader Maria Corina Machado, then disqualified her replacement Corina Yoris, and when Edmundo Gonzalez -as yet another replacement candidate under the command of Machado- was chosen, it was shown that Venezuelan peoples resoundingly voted for freedom at the elections held on 28 July of 2024. The regime applied State-terrorism and currently yields a threatening power, traffics with kidnapped people, and pursues its own financial interests.
In Bolivia in 2019, following Evo Morales’ electoral fraud, resignation, and flight the dictator was ousted but not the dictatorship. The transitory president -currently imprisoned- turned out to be a president of the regime’s continuity and in a fraudulent election in 2020 gave the presidency back to Castrochavism. In Bolivia, the high treason of the functional opposition, tragic replica of similar opposition in Venezuela and Nicaragua, maintains the farce at the expense of the peoples poverty with yet one other forthcoming elections on the path to misery.
At a hemispheric and global level, the international legal obligations bestowed upon democracies and its leaders are not met, because they have tolerated, coexisted, negotiated with, protected, sustained, and diplomatically recognized Cuba’s dictatorship and its expansion in this 21st century to control Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. Furthermore, democracies and their leaders sidestep the condition of para-dictatorial governments that Castrochavism has installed in Brazil with Lula, Mexico with Lopez-Obrador and now with Sheinbaum, Chile with Boric, Colombia with Petro, and Honduras with Xiomara Castro. The peoples from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia are in a situation of defenselessness and democracies are threatened and attacked by dictatorships that perpetrate those crimes.
The ending of dictatorships is indispensable and unavoidable and is the responsibility of democratic leaders of the Americas. There must be sanctions against functional oppositions, disqualifying sanctions against dictatorships, their chieftains, and their beneficiaries. The Armed Forces must be recovered as the peoples’ and the nation’s defenders; there must not be impunity. Urgent political decisions are needed for the preservation and protection of democracies and for the defeat of transnational organized crime that controls countries and supplants politics.
*Lawyer & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.
Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas
«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».