I know there are countless conspiracy theories circulating on social media all the time; some are the delusions of people completely detached from reality, others are inventions to grab attention, others are exaggerations driven by political or ideological motives, and some, even if we didn’t believe them at first, turned out to hold a grain of truth.
I am going to focus on these last two types of conspiracy theories because, as a Venezuelan, I am acutely aware of how deeply my society has been affected by them. When the emigration of Venezuelans to the rest of the continent began, the grand explanation given by Chávez, and later by Maduro, was not that their socio-economic policies were a disaster, that there was rampant internal corruption, or that they had promoted people without any real qualifications to positions of power simply because they were government loyalists.
The explanation was that the economy had failed due to U.S. sanctions. If there was a rise in crime, hyperinflation, healthcare crises, deteriorating infrastructure, and the mass deaths of Venezuelans traveling through the Darién jungle, it was all the fault of a "Gringo" conspiracy. They weren't governing the country; they didn't have access to the country's resources; they weren't appointing ministers, governors, mayors, and even judges to positions that led to the massive institutional collapse of the nation. Yet, they were blamed for every single ill because they were the "evil empire" intervening across half the world and causing chaos.
And it wasn't entirely false that U.S. military and economic interventions have historically been a disaster in almost every country where they have been applied. However, the economic sanctions they imposed came at a time when Venezuela had already endured a decade of resource mismanagement, and they did not truly have the impact the government claimed they did. They did worsen a situation that was already bad, but they were not the creators of the disaster in which millions of Venezuelans live. That was caused by the Chavista government.
And there was no desire to escape it, because the conditions of vulnerability created by poverty allowed the Chavista leadership to remain in power. It wasn't just corruption and a total absence of moral principles; there was also a vision that one can only thrive in misery. This is not an assumption of mine: I literally watched hundreds of speeches reclaiming the poor (both from Chávez and Maduro) as victims who needed to be protected by the State, instead of giving them the tools to lift themselves out of poverty. If Venezuelans left poverty behind, the government would no longer be necessary; and that is how they stay in power: not through an authentic vision of improving society, but by creating a state of dependency.
At the end of the day, the true conspiracy did not come from the outside, but from within. It was never about protecting the vulnerable, but about manufacturing them en masse to secure a monopoly on power. When the well-being of the ruling elite depends directly on the misery of the citizen, poverty ceases to be a social problem to be solved and becomes a State policy to be maintained.
The true sovereignty of a people is not measured by how much they endure in scarcity, but by how free they are to generate their own wealth without asking permission from those who promised to save them. Because a prosperous and independent citizen questions, demands, and votes freely; but an impoverished and dependent citizen can only think about how to find the money to pay for tomorrow's meal. And it is there where the true and most cruel conspiracy lies.
Note: The images and the Spanish-to-English translation of this post were done by Gemini AI.
