Carlos Padrón

Venezuelan psychoanalyst

As Venezuelans, we share embodied knowledge formed by living through violence, terror, collapse, authoritarianism, migration, fear, absurdity, trauma, and survival. But we also share a layered archive of extraordinary stories: the struggles and resilience of our people; our complex and fascinating history; our literature, art, and music; our relentless and often subversive humor; our mischievousness and warmth; our creativity and echalebolismo; our capacity to improvise; our singular forms of happiness.

I want, or perhaps need, to believe that there are secret vessels that connect all Venezuelans, carrying shared meanings beneath words, surviving displacement and distance, being inside or outside the country, despite radical political differences: pro-trump or anti-trump, chavista or anti-chavista, left or right. Compartimos una cultura que nos abraza como una red invisible de sabores, saberes y símbolos, y compartimos este idioma en el que escribo y que quizás (o casi con seguridad) no sepas leer.

It becomes, at times, unbearable watching our collective knowledge, culture, history, and material reality flattened, converted into a symbol, a slogan, a talking point. “Venezuela” invoked as warning or weapon, detached from the bodies that live it. Venezuelan people reduced to a signifier, a name to be used and abused in service of personal and political, and academic agendas along the political spectrum that have little interest in our actual lives. As if we were not real, we did not age, grieve, desire, love, fail, or improvise. As if collapse were an abstraction rather than something that long ago entered our bodies and our psychic intimacy.

I want to insist on this: we are not metaphors. We are not symbols to eventually be spit out when the next crisis arrives, as you move on to new objects to consume, new fantasies to be satisfied by, new discourses to perform, and a new moralism to wield.

We are not evidence or proof of your worldviews or ideologies. We are not characters of your grand narratives. We are not cautionary tales. We are not symbols of your utopias, your Garden of Eden or your Garden of Earthly Delights, your cannibals or your bons sauvages. Don’t make us a stereotype, the formidable revolutionaries, or, on the other hand, the poor devils in need of liberation.

People from the international left and the international right: don’t try to capture us within your perverse logic: a logic that expects us to exist in order to recognize you as our most formidable ally, a crucial source of political and intellectual authority, a provider of material resources, and ultimately as someone who can reassure themselves that they are no longer taking advantage of us. What changes, depending on your political stance, is not this logic but the figures through which it operates.

From the right, we appear as cannibals or threats, as the infantile other in need of rescue and liberation. From the left, we are recast as bons sauvages, as supposedly incorrupt and authentic beings (uncorrupted in ways you imagine yourselves no longer to be), and therefore as those who will be able to carry out the revolution you have not, so long as it takes place far from the comfort of your first-world ways of life and your political and economic privileges. The more you devalue or idealize us (again, according to your political stance), the more this same logic is expected to result in your obscene self-satisfaction and righteousness.

We are not your kink.

We are real. We are flesh and blood. We are subjects of history, with agency, autonomy, and thinking minds who understand the source of our suffering. We are not confused puppets mechanically led by Ideology: or not more than you!

I categorically reject both the Venezuelan dictatorship and the American attempt to rule Venezuela (to rule the world, for that matter). But when people add from the comfort of their privileged American (or Global North) lives, “and we stand with the Venezuelan people,” something in me recoils. It irritates my core. Because I want to ask: who are “the Venezuelan people” for you? I am afraid that for many, we are nothing more than a name, an abstraction you invoke without knowing us, without caring to know us. A symbolic empathy that costs nothing, demands nothing, risks nothing.

I say this: let it also be you—in flesh and blood, not rhetorically, and not from the convenient distance of your comfortable, probably gentrified apartments—who risks something by confronting reality. But this time, your reality: your government. After all, who invaded Venezuela? You are also inevitably implicated. Let those without sin cast the first stone.

It is disturbing to feel that my psychic life, once private, once mine, has become public, is now also yours. It’s like something in me is being used up, extracted, enjoyed, devoured, and finally made spectacle, projected onto the world screen. I feel intruded upon, exposed, invaded. This makes me feel a strange and unexpected embarrassment, perhaps the one you feel when strangers see you naked.

Touch our wounds so you know that we are real. Come near us, get to know us. And yet, at the same time, a refusal: don’t come believing you are our saviors! The path to Hell is also paved with good intentions.

People from the international right and the international left: we have a long list of self-proclaimed saviors in our history, and they only brought destruction, submission, poverty, and silence. I do not want to replace one master with another, the machos of the so-called “Bolivarian revolution” with the machos of the Global North. Together with many other Venezuelans, I demand recognition without domination, solidarity without material or narrative assimilation, care without the violence of being “rescued.”

 January 7th, 2026

https://www.cccacommunity.com/venezuela-private-wounds-loud-audiences

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