There are silences that do not express prudence or balance. They express a position.
In Uruguay, the Frente Amplio deliberately avoided clearly describing Nicolás Maduro’s regime.
That silence, and the explicit refusal to define it as a dictatorship, was not neutral. It was a political decision: it reveals that, for some, abuses only deserve condemnation when they come from an ideological adversary.
Silence then stops being an omission and becomes a message.
A message that relativizes, that prioritizes victims according to political convenience. That’s where ethics degrades.
Human rights do not allow double standards. They are not suspended due to party affinity nor are they negotiated due to ideological belonging.
Closing your eyes to a dictatorship is not neutrality: it is taking sides. And there are silences that, due to their persistence and opportunity, are complicit silences.
The ambiguity does not respond to diplomatic caution or ignorance. It responds to an alignment logic.
In the name of a misunderstood “ideological solidarity”, it was chosen to look the other way in the face of a regime that imprisons opponents, censors the press, dismantles republican institutions and has caused one of the most serious humanitarian crises on the continent.
The international reports are clear: political prisoners, systematic persecution, forced exile and suppression of electoral guarantees.
In the face of this evidence, an ideological alibi persists that shifts the focus: there is more talk about the United States than about Venezuela; more of external intentions than of concrete violations.
Inconsistencies
None of this implies endorsing foreign interventions.
Precisely out of respect for international law and the self-determination of peoples, the condemnation of a dictatorship cannot be relativized or silenced.
Furthermore, it is incoherent to denounce some interventions and remain silent on others that have been operating for years in Venezuela.
Nor does it imply accepting simplistic readings about American action.
Every intervention raises legitimate questions: strategic interests, energy resources, geopolitical repositioning. But this debate cannot function as a moral alibi.
The self-determination of peoples, a pending issue in Venezuela, begins with respect for their fundamental rights.
Defense of human rights
The axis is in Caracas. And in the Venezuelan people: deprived of choosing freely, of expressing themselves without fear and of living without persecution or exile.
When the defense of human rights becomes selective, it ceases to be defense.
Human rights do not allow double standards.
When ethics is subordinated to ideology, it stops guiding and begins to cover you up.
The objective should be unequivocal: peace, effective respect for human rights and full, real democracy, with guarantees, alternation and institutional control.
At that point, the problem is no longer just Maduro.
They are also those who, knowing what was happening, chose to look the other way.
*Academic
