By Meg Foley Yoder
At Harvard’s Kennedy School, three Venezuelan opposition figures traced their country’s descent from democracy to dictatorship, and imagined what justice and rebuilding might still look like.
On November 5, the Institute of Politics’ (IOP) John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum featured “Venezuela Under the Lens: Human Rights Crisis and Pathways to Justice,” co-hosted by the Carr–Ryan Center and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. The event began in mourning and moved quickly to urgency. Before anyone spoke about repression, exile, or international courts, Harvard Kennedy School dean Jeremy Weinstein asked for a moment of silence for Setti Warren, the beloved director of the Institute of Politics who passed away suddenly earlier in the week. Weinstein recalled how Warren “cared deeply about the development of young leaders” and could always be pictured “in the back of the room . . . ensuring that everything was running smoothly.” That sense of public service as something fragile but necessary became an unspoken frame for what followed.
Stories of Awakening and Resistance
Moderator Kathryn Sikkink, the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy, set the tone by signaling that this would not be a theoretical conversation. She had “three amazing human rights advocates” onstage—former National Assembly leaders Freddy Guevara and Miguel Alejandro Pizarro Rodríguez and human rights litigator Génesis Dávila—and she wanted to hear their stories of human rights activism amid the Venezuelan crisis of the past decade, their assessments of the current political and human rights landscape, and the problem of what the international community is—and is not—willing to do.
In answer to Sikkink’s question of how each came to their current role in the democratic opposition, all three used biography to show how Venezuelans were pulled, not lured, into politics. Guevara admitted, “I didn’t want to be a politician at all,” describing how the closing of a TV station under Chávez pushed him from student protests to national leadership. Dávila told a lawyer’s version of the same disillusionment: she entered the justice system expecting to “serve justice in my country,” only to find “the judicial system was already co-opted by the executive branch.” Pizarro, who grew up in a household steeped in leftist politics—his mother worked in parliament and his father had fought as a guerrilla—described how he broke from that history to join the student movement and, at twenty-one, become one of the youngest deputies in Venezuela’s parliament. His story, he said, undercuts the idea of an unbridgeable divide: “Freddy and I are a good proof that that is absolutely a lie,” since both men, from opposing political traditions, arrived at the same fight for democracy.
Venezuela’s Descent into Dictatorship
When Sikkink turned from personal histories to the political landscape, she asked Pizarro to “set the stage” for those less familiar with Venezuela. His response provided the evening’s clearest through line. Since 2015, he said, “there’s a big majority of the country that wants a different future,” and the opposition has tried “every tool in the nonviolent, in the transitional tool books.” What has changed is not the people’s demand but the regime’s response. “Slowly, but in a really steady pace,” he explained, Venezuela has moved “from . . . competitive” politics “to a full-fledged dictatorship, and now to a police state . . . pretty similar to Nicaragua or a Caribbean version of North Korea.”
He grounded that assessment in the July 28, 2024, election, which the opposition claims to have won seventy to thirty. The campaign unfolded under near-total control: the opposition’s leading figure, María Corina Machado, who has since been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, was barred from running; rallies were met with arrests; and media coverage was tightly restricted. After the vote, Pizarro said, the regime responded not by negotiating but by intensifying repression. “We managed to prove that we won the election because we recovered the tally sheets,” he said. “We have the paper trail that shows that we won.” Yet even with that proof, the government has refused to cede power.
Human Rights in Free Fall
Pizarro having outlined the political deadlock, Sikkink steered the conversation toward the human cost. Turning to Dávila, she noted that the event’s title invoked both crisis and justice and asked how Venezuela’s human rights situation had evolved. Dávila answered with the precision of a litigator, tracing what she called three distinct phases of decline.
It began in 2009, she said, when Judge María Lourdes Afiuni was imprisoned after enforcing a U.N. ruling that called for the release of a political prisoner. The case, broadcast “in every single media in Venezuela,” served as a warning that judges and prosecutors were expected to “follow instructions from Chávez,” not the law. The second phase came in 2014 and 2017, when protests erupted nationwide and the government responded with lethal force, mass arrests, and torture. At that point, Dávila explained, isolated violations had become “a generalized attack against the civilian population”—a pattern consistent with crimes against humanity.
The third phase, she said, is the one Venezuelans now live under: “terrorism of the state.” “They kill their own population,” she said. “They rape opposition leaders. They torture students like you.” Years of documentation by her organization and others have led to an open investigation at the International Criminal Court and findings by the United Nations fact-finding mission. Yet, she reminded the audience, these international mechanisms move slowly. “We are here,” she said, “because we cannot return to our country.”
Desperation and the Question of Intervention
After Dávila’s stark account, Sikkink invited Guevara to bring the discussion into the present. How, she asked, do Venezuelans themselves view the country’s political future? His response was blunt. “I’m going to get into the spicy stuff,” he said with a half-smile, before describing the growing public support for international intervention. “If you ask today’s Venezuelans if they want the United States government to exert . . . military force to take down Maduro and the regime, they will say yes, for sure.”
When the discussion turned to what might come next, Guevara confronted the question most outsiders prefer to avoid: what if change no longer seems possible without external force? He said plainly that many Venezuelans now favor international military intervention to end the dictatorship—and that he understands why. “If you ask Venezuelans today,” he said, “they will say yes, for sure.”
It was not warmongering, but a statement of despair. After years of protests, elections, and negotiations, Venezuelans have seen every democratic avenue closed and every agreement broken. “We did everything that was in our chance,” he said, “and the world failed us, too.” The population’s growing readiness to accept outside intervention, he argued, reflects the collapse of faith in nonviolent change, not a taste for conflict.
Guevara described a country systematically stripped of leverage: political parties outlawed, the press silenced, the judiciary subservient, and the military divided to prevent any challenge from within. In such conditions, he said, people will inevitably look outward. “When a population is being killed, raped, and tortured,” he told the audience, “you can’t ask them to wait for a better option.”
Exile, Rebuilding, and the Venezuelan Diaspora
During the Q&A, all of the questions came from students and fellows, many of them members of the Venezuelan diaspora studying at Harvard. The first student asked how to challenge what she described as an “international narrative” that downplays the scale of Venezuela’s crisis. Guevara responded that in the United States the issue is often discussed through the filter of U.S. politics, through debates about Trump or past interventions, rather than through the realities of Venezuelans who have lost the ability to change their government peacefully.
Another student asked what role young Venezuelans abroad could play. Pizarro said that those studying and working overseas are part of a generation acquiring the skills Venezuela will need to rebuild its institutions, describing them as “the rebuilding elite.” Dávila insisted that rebuilding must belong to everyone—the exiles gathering skills abroad and the citizens still inside Venezuela who, as she put it, “resist every day simply by staying alive.”
A fellow then raised the U.S. government’s decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans and asked what message the panelists had for those affected. Dávila, who holds TPS herself, said that most Venezuelans on that status do not want to stay abroad permanently—they want to return safely. She also noted that the Maduro government has begun revoking passports and even citizenship from political opponents abroad, further isolating them.
Other student questions touched on migration in Latin America, the shrinking flow of humanitarian aid, and what the opposition’s “plan B” might be if international pressure again fails to bring change. Pizarro emphasized that most Venezuelan migrants in the region did not leave by choice and need protection. Guevara said Venezuelans would continue working from exile “until one day . . . someone will open a window.” Dávila closed by reaffirming her hope for eventual rebuilding: “We will never go back to what Venezuela was . . . what we’re going to do is be the country we have been dreaming about.”
Mike DeStefano | IOP
