The Failure of Bolivarian Socialism Does Not Justify Violating Venezuela’s Sovereignty

Abdulaziz Yagoub

Venezuela is neither a poor land nor an incapable people. It is a vast country stretching across nearly one million square kilometers, overlooking the Caribbean Sea, whose natural endowments alone could amount to a project of self-sufficiency. Beneath its soil lies the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves, alongside gas, minerals, water resources, forests, and fertile agricultural land. Nearly thirty million people live on this land—diverse in ethnicity and culture—carrying a vitality that could have produced a model of development worth emulating, rather than a tragedy invoked in every political debate.

Yet for decades, these immense resources were placed in the grip of an ideology that believed more in slogans than in people, in centralization more than production, and in the state more than society. Marxism, in its Venezuelan incarnation known as Bolivarian socialism, did not view the economy as a complex system requiring diversification and sustainability. Instead, it reduced it to a single resource controlled by the state and redistributed politically. It failed to do justice to the citizen by turning him into a dependent on rent rather than a partner in production, and it undermined his dignity by tying livelihoods to loyalty rather than competence and work.

During the years of oil abundance, the picture appeared deceptively bright. Money flowed, subsidy programs expanded, and revolutionary rhetoric intensified. But socialism, instead of investing that historic moment in building a diversified economy and a genuine productive base, squandered it on short-term, consumption-driven spending. Agriculture was not revived, no competitive national industry was built, and no income sources beyond oil were created. Here lies the essence of the failure: an ideology that raises the banner of social justice yet proves incapable of freeing society from the fragility of a mono-resource economy.

When oil prices fell, the collapse was not accidental—it was revealing. The currency imploded, inflation spiraled out of control, basic goods disappeared, and public services declined to their bare minimum. The Venezuelan citizen found himself alone before a state unable to protect him, in a country ranked among the richest in the world in terms of resources. Millions were forced to emigrate, not out of rejection of their homeland, but in search of a viable life. At this point, the claim that the crisis was merely the result of a blockade or an external conspiracy collapsed, despite the impact of sanctions, as the structural flaws had preceded them and paved the way.

Politically, the experience was no less of a failure. The system retained an electoral façade but hollowed it out of substance. Judicial independence eroded, media space narrowed, and the principle of genuine alternation of power receded. In the name of the people, the people were marginalized; in the name of social justice, the middle class—the backbone of any political and economic stability—was crushed. This was not a temporary deviation, but a logical outcome of a worldview that sees the state as guardian over society, dissent as a danger, and opposition as a threat.

Nevertheless, the failure of Bolivarian socialism—however evident and severe—does not grant any external party the right to impose guardianship or commit aggression. Here emerges a fact often overlooked in political discourse: from within the United States itself, from its academic, legal, and media institutions, voices have risen rejecting any military or coercive economic intervention against Venezuela. These voices argue that such policies not only violate ethical principles, but also exceed the constitutional powers of the U.S. president and directly contradict the charters of international law.

These positions, which neither defend the Venezuelan regime nor its socialist ideology, stem from a deeper principle: that state sovereignty is not a political option. The United Nations Charter, in Article 2, prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. They also stress that collective sanctions, regardless of their justifications, do not topple regimes as much as they punish peoples, stripping democratic rhetoric of any moral substance.

That such a stance emerges from within the world’s most powerful state lends added weight to the critique of the Venezuelan experience, as it clearly separates the failure of the ideological model on the one hand, from the rejection of intervention and domination on the other. Bolivarian socialism failed to deliver justice to citizens or to diversify national income sources; yet external intervention has never proven to be a path to democracy or stability.

Venezuela, in its full picture, is not a battleground between Marxism and capitalism, but an open lesson on the limits of ideology and the limits of power. A lesson that reminds us that peoples alone possess the right to choose their systems, hold their leaders accountable, and correct their mistakes—without guardianship, blockade, or intervention. And that internal failure, however grave, does not justify external aggression, just as resisting hegemony does not absolve the need to build a just, productive, and genuinely democratic state.

Footnote:
Rentier economy: income derived from land or natural resources rather than from labor.