Venezuelan Activists at Harvard Describe a Country in Crisis — and a Generation That “Will Never Surrender”

At a time when Venezuela is back in the headlines—whether through the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to opposition leader María Corina Machado, the revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans in the United States, or reports of deadly boat attacks off Venezuela’s coasts linked to anti–drug trafficking operations—three prominent Venezuelan advocates came to Harvard to urge the world to look beyond the headlines and confront the full depth of the country’s human rights catastrophe.

Speaking at the prestigious John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School, under the banner “Human Rights Crisis and Pathways to Justice,” the panelists described a country where a quarter of the population now lives abroad, the economy has lost more productive capacity than Germany did during World War II, and political dissent is met with torture, rape, enforced disappearance, and exile.

“Just imagine what this means for daily life,” the moderator, Kathryn Sikkink, the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy, urged the audience. “We’re not talking about an abstract crisis. We’re talking about the dismantling of an entire society.”

The event was hosted by the Carr–Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy and co-sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), underscoring the growing collaboration across Harvard on issues at the intersection of democracy, human rights, and Latin America. 

From student protests to exile

The panel featured three Venezuelan figures whose careers have been defined—and often derailed—by the country’s democratic unravelling:

• Freddy Guevara, co-founder of the opposition party Voluntad Popular, former congressman and vice president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, and a leader of nonviolent mass protests against Nicolás Maduro’s government.
• Génesis Dávila, a Venezuelan lawyer and founder of Defiende Venezuela, an NGO that provides free legal aid and litigates human rights cases before international bodies.
• Miguel Alejandro Pizarro Rodríguez, a former member of parliament elected at 21 from one of Caracas’s largest low-income barrios, later an opposition representative in international forums, including the United Nations.

All three stressed that they never intended to become “professional dissidents.”

“I didn’t want to be a politician at all,” Guevara said. He described starting out as a student leader when Hugo Chávez shut down a major television station. As a communications student, he joined protests and quickly found himself drawn deeper into public life. “Being a politician in Venezuela used to be something shameful—no one wanted their kids to go into politics,” he said. “Our generation decided to change that and assume the risks, because that’s the price you pay for great things.”

For Dávila, the turning point came inside the justice system itself. She had gone to law school dreaming of becoming a prosecutor, judge, or even a Supreme Court justice. Instead, she discovered that courts and prosecutors’ offices were “co-opted by the executive branch.”

“What they expected from prosecutors and judges was not to follow the law, but to follow instructions,” she recalled. “I didn’t go to law school for that.”

Disillusioned, she briefly regretted becoming a lawyer—until a formative internship at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights introduced her to legal professionals who did follow due process rather than political orders. Inspired, she returned to Venezuela and founded Defiende Venezuela to help victims bring their cases before international bodies.

“When we started, people told us we were crazy,” Dávila said. “They said an international decision could take ten years, or maybe never come. Our answer was simple: if it will take that long, then we need to start now.”

Since then, she and her colleagues have represented more than 2,000 victims, helped push for the UN fact-finding mission on Venezuela, and contributed evidence to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has opened an investigation into alleged crimes against humanity in the country.

Pizarro’s path was shaped by politics from birth: his father had been a guerrilla fighter, his mother worked in parliament. Even so, his family opposed his early activism.

“My dad didn’t want me anywhere near politics,” he said. “But growing up in that house, it was impossible to avoid it.”

He became a student leader, then at 21 one of the youngest deputies ever elected to the National Assembly, representing Petare, one of Latin America’s largest barrios. In 2018, the Maduro government charged him with multiple offenses, including treason and “hate crimes.” He spent three months in hiding before escaping the country with the help of foreign diplomats and now serves as a diplomatic representative of the Venezuelan opposition.

“From violations to crimes against humanity to state terror”

Asked to map the human rights situation over time, Dávila described three phases: an initial wave of severe violations, their escalation into crimes against humanity, and, more recently, what regional bodies have called state terrorism.

She pointed to the 2009 case of Judge María Lourdes Afiuni, who was arrested after applying international law and releasing a political prisoner in line with a UN opinion. “The government essentially said, ‘You freed a political prisoner; now you are the political prisoner,’” Dávila recounted. The case was broadcast widely in Venezuela, she said, as a warning to all judges and prosecutors that disobedience would not be tolerated.

Subsequent protest waves—particularly in 2014 and 2017—saw hundreds of demonstrators arbitrarily detained, tortured, and in many cases killed. In 2017, she argued, the pattern of abuses met the threshold for crimes against humanity: “a generalized and systematic attack against the civilian population, part of a state policy.”

At the time, students in one of Sikkink’s Kennedy School courses urged that the ICC open an investigation. The Organization of American States took up the call, and while some observers initially questioned why the OAS was talking about crimes against humanity at all, the ICC soon followed with a preliminary examination. The Court has since confirmed that there is a reasonable basis to believe crimes against humanity have been committed in Venezuela.

“Last year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights went further,” Dávila noted. “They concluded that Venezuela has moved from crimes against humanity to terrorism of state. The regime uses terror to stay in power.”

A stolen election and a “Caribbean version of North Korea”

Pizarro, asked to lay out the broader political context, emphasized that for at least a decade, Venezuelan voters have tried every nonviolent tool available.

“We have voted, we have organized, we have demonstrated. There is no strategy from the literature on nonviolent transitions that we haven’t tried,” he said. In 2015, the opposition won a sweeping victory in the National Assembly elections. Since then, he argued, the government has steadily mutated “from competitive authoritarianism to a full-fledged dictatorship, and now to a police state pretty similar to Nicaragua—or a Caribbean version of North Korea.”

He focused in particular on the July 28 presidential election, in which opposition forces rallied behind a substitute candidate after María Corina Machado was barred from running.

“We went into an election with no international observers, one political prisoner per day during the campaign, no radio or TV ads, and candidates who couldn’t even stay in hotels because owners were afraid,” he said. “Even so, we won that election 70–30.”

Opposition groups, he added, collected tally sheets from polling stations as proof. “It’s not that we are claiming victory out of the blue—we have a paper trail,” Pizarro stressed. He said the government responded by trying to seize those tally sheets and intensifying repression: more than 1,000 people detained, over 300 disappeared, and at least 25 killed in the aftermath, according to his figures.

Internationally, he noted, the Maduro government now relies on a network of authoritarian allies—Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua—and finances itself through “illegal economies,” from mining to drug trafficking. Venezuela, he quipped, has become something like the intergalactic cantina in “Star Wars”: “Whatever you need—illegal mining, drug trafficking, mercenaries—you can find it in Venezuela.”

“We cannot do this alone”

All three panelists returned repeatedly to a central message: Venezuelans have exhausted domestic avenues for change and now urgently need sustained, smart international support.

Guevara addressed one of the most contentious questions head on: growing Venezuelan support for the use of force against the regime, including calls for U.S. military intervention, which have intensified as political negotiations stall.

“If you ask Venezuelans today whether they want the U.S. government to use military force to remove Maduro, they will say yes,” he said bluntly. “Not because they are warmongers or extremists, but because they have tried everything else.”

He acknowledged the trauma that U.S. audiences associate with military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and the legitimate concerns about unintended consequences. But he urged listeners not to project those histories uncritically onto Venezuela.

“Venezuela is not the Middle East,” Guevara argued. He described it instead as a relatively homogeneous society—without religious or ethnic civil-war fault lines—that has historically been aligned with the United States and integrated into global markets. “The question we must ask is: if not this, then what? What is the credible alternative that you are offering to a population that has already lost so much?”

A “never again” generation

During a lively Q&A, Venezuelan students, and members of the broader diaspora in the audience, pressed the panelists about what comes after the dictatorship: How can a future Venezuela avoid repeating past mistakes? What role will young people educated abroad play in rebuilding institutions? What happens if external pressure fails?

“We must be the ‘never again’ generation,” Pizarro responded. That, he said, means preserving historical memory, recognizing that the pre-Chávez political order cannot simply be restored, and insisting on institutions and checks and balances that prevent the concentration of power.

“We are not nostalgic for the past,” he emphasized. “We don’t want to go back to what Venezuela was before Chávez, and we obviously don’t want to stay in what it is today. Our task is to build the country we’ve been dreaming of—one we’ve actually never seen.”

Dávila underlined that rebuilding will not be the responsibility of a small elite, but of “an entire nation”—those who stayed, those who left, those who return, and those who support from abroad.

“The fact that you are here at Harvard is an enormous privilege, and also a mandate,” she told the Venezuelan students in the room. “You are exceptional people—that’s why you’ve survived what you have and arrived where you are. But change in Venezuela will not be just your job. It will be the work of all of us.”

Guevara closed on a note of defiant optimism, even as he acknowledged that Venezuelans have lost much of their formal agency.

“We have crossed a very dangerous line where most Venezuelans now believe that violence would be justified to remove the regime,” he said. “If Maduro doesn’t leave and no one helps us, people will arm themselves; others in the regime might eventually open a path; or the cycle will repeat until another external actor decides to step in. These are possibilities—but none are under our full control.”

What is in their control, he argued, is the decision to keep fighting.

Quoting Winston Churchill, Guevara pledged that Venezuelans would continue struggling “on the beaches, in the fields, and in the streets” until an opening appears.

“Even if all our friends and families can no longer fight from inside the country, we will fight from abroad,” he said. “One day, someone will open a window, and we will re-enter our society. We will never surrender.”