Hands Off Venezuela

My country, not your prop.

In the kindest way possible: keep your hands to yourself.

The past forty-eight hours have clarified, very quickly, who is a friend and who is not. I know I’m not alone in that. Many Venezuelans learned the same thing this week.

What surprised me most was how completely the script flipped. People who rarely reached out did. The safety net I assumed would be there collapsed without warning.

So let me be clear about something.

Liking/Posting an Instagram story is not the same as supporting the Venezuelan people. And if you truly supported us, you would not have taken to the streets this Saturday and Sunday demanding the release of Nicolás Maduro.

This desperation to oppose Trump in every possible form, even when it requires defending a dictator, is not principled. It’s reactive. And it is hurting people.

I know it can be hard to hear, but the Trump administration can do something that aligns with justice.

I know that the actions taken were legally dubious, executed without proper authorization, and deeply dangerous in their precedent. I will never celebrate American unilateralism.

But do not mistake legal critique for moral confusion.

You did not hear your mother cry, convinced that “los gringos” had finally come to start another forever war.
You did not wake up to a phone call instead of an alarm.
You did not hear explosions through a cell phone speaker and try to decide whether the silence meant safety or death.

Watching a TikTok is not the same as waking up to bombs going off in your hometown, putting your loved ones in danger.

That terror, and the relief that comes with the capture of a man who has bled a country dry, can - and, indeed, do - coexist. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or has never lived it.

I am astonished by how quickly some people adopt new causes, new flags, new chants, without any personal connection, historical understanding, or willingness to listen. The scarcity of solidarity is apparently a thing of the past; it can be mass-produced overnight.

This is not solidarity. It is consumption.

Anyways,

Thank you to those who did show up in support of the Venezuelan people and our desire to see Chavismo end. We want these people out of power. They have stripped our country not only of its wealth, but of its trust, its institutions, and its sense of future.

And to the rest of you, put the reels down. Read. Listen. Speak to the people you claim to defend with such confidence.

Because the regime you are romanticizing would not thank you.
It would imprison you.
Disappear you.
Keep you in one of its prisons for the foreseeable future.

So yes. Hands off Venezuela.

It is not your humanitarian aesthetic.
It is not your cause to perform.
It is not yours to rewrite.

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Mano, tengo fe

Emiliana Korin