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On 3 January this year, a US special forces unit abducted the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, from a fortified bunker in Caracas. The operation had not been authorised by the US Congress, let alone by the United Nations Security Council. Trump did not invoke human rights or democracy; his justifications ranged from the war on drugs to the restoration of US influence in the Western Hemisphere. The intervention’s first noticeable effects were the easing of US sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry and regulatory changes that benefited US companies.
Some of the outcomes fortunately coincided with human rights demands that civil society had been urging for years. In the weeks following the US intervention, the interim government installed by the United States, under pressure from people on the streets, released over 500 political prisoners, according to figures from the civil society organisation Foro Penal. But this coincidence did not change the fact that what happened in Venezuela was, above all, an exhibition of naked power in the service of a foreign interest.
Venezuelan civil society had spent years documenting every act of repression and every political prisoner, and ahead of the July 2024 elections, the domestic opposition had organised a meticulous parallel count that demonstrated beyond doubt that it had won the vote. The agenda that Venezuela had set for itself was that of a democratic transition through the ballot box. The US military operation, far from aligned with that agenda, installed in power a figure that came from within the authoritarian regime.
For those of us who believe in international solidarity with those fighting for democracy and human rights, Venezuela poses an uncomfortable challenge. If the exercise of power in its rawest form — without any justification in terms of rights and without incurring any cost — can produce in a single weekend a result that years of human rights diplomacy failed to achieve, what then is the point of democratic solidarity?
Unconditional scope
As it does every year, between 22 and 24 August the Centre for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL) held its annual conference on the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Totalitarianism, which the city of Buenos Aires has commemorated on 23 August since 2015.
As part of this event, CADAL premiered its documentary Humanos, about international democratic solidarity during the years of Argentina’s last military dictatorship. The solidarity that we received in our darkest days forms the foundation of the work the organisation carries out today, supporting those who currently live under authoritarian regimes.
In an act of democratic solidarity, CADAL presented its 2026 Graciela Fernández Meijide Award to several human rights defenders who have been arbitrarily detained simply for their human rights work: Anacleto Micha Ndong, a political prisoner in Equatorial Guinea; Kim Jung-Wook, Kim Kook-kie and Choi Chun-gil, three South Korean pastors whom North Korea has kept imprisoned for over a decade; and Yalkun Rozi, a Uyghur intellectual imprisoned in China.
International democratic solidarity can be defined as the support provided by an external actor — an individual, an organisation or a state — to those who resist under repressive regimes. It is often the sole source of hope in contexts where civic space is heavily restricted. Authoritarianism locks us into labyrinths with no way out and, as Leopoldo Marechal put it, the way out of labyrinths is through the top.
Democratic solidarity is characterised, first and foremost, by its broad scope. While power only acts where it has a self-interest to serve – leaving the vast majority of those suffering repression around the world with no real options – democratic solidarity is not bound by expediency: it is activated even where no geopolitical interest is at stake. It does not discriminate between victims, nor between perpetrators: it condemns authoritarianism whatever its political hue, without succumbing to double standards. Selectivity, on the other hand, offers authoritarian regimes an argument worth its weight in gold: the claim that human rights are not a universal standard but — as China and its allies repeat ceaselessly at the United Nations — an instrument of Western power.
The Latin American context, still marked by the ideological divisions of the Cold War, makes it necessary to clarify that democratic solidarity is with the people, not with their government. Nothing further from such solidarity than the so-called Solidarity Committees, professional cheerleaders who shield the Cuban dictatorship from international scrutiny in United Nations human rights processes and mechanisms.
Last but not least, democratic solidarity, in stark contrast to the US intervention in Venezuela, is exercised by relinquishing decision-making power, not by exercising it on behalf of — let alone over — its beneficiaries. In other words: it follows the agenda that the recipient society has already set for itself.
From boomerang to spiral
In the late 1990s, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink described democratic solidarity’s basic mechanism and called it the ‘boomerang effect’. This is a process through which local activists, trapped in the authoritarian labyrinth, circumvent a state that blocks their voice and doesn’t respond by connecting with transnational networks abroad. In this way, they ensure that pressure is exerted ‘from outside and from above’ on the regime repressing them, driven by powerful external actors, including individuals, states and international organisations.
Of course, pressure by itself does not guarantee results. As Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp and Sikkink herself later showed with their spiral model, authoritarian regimes tend to go through a phase of denial before moving on to instrumental concessions, yielding only the bare minimum necessary to alleviate external pressure. Real change requires an internal counterpart: local networks, opposition groups and social movements capable of exerting pressure from below, monitoring the regime’s commitments and capitalising on concessions to make them permanent.
How a demand is framed matters just as much as the demand itself. ‘Grounded’ strategies — those that link the demand for rights to narratives already perceived as legitimate within the local context — have greater impact than those presented in the language of those funding or pushing them from outside. Kenya offers us a textbook counterexample: ahead of an official visit in 2015, 700 Kenyan evangelical pastors demanded then US President, Barack Obama, to refrain from discussing ‘gay issues’ while in their country, where same-sex relations are criminalised under the Penal Code. Obama did so anyway: at a joint press conference with President Uhuru Kenyatta, he publicly defended LGBTQI+ rights. He no doubt had the best of intentions, but his intervention had the opposite effect to that intended: the government’s stance hardened and other leaders intensified their anti-rights rhetoric. Kenyan LGBTQI+ organisations themselves, prior to the visit, had called for something different: for the United States to support the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which had already issued a landmark resolution on the matter in 2014. But their calls went unheeded.
Five concrete ways
Democratic solidarity can be practised in at least five ways. The first is to name and shame, that is, to publicly highlight repressive practices and those responsible. During the Argentine dictatorship, foreign correspondents could ask about the disappeared at press conferences in a way Argentine journalists could not: expelling or silencing them would have cost the regime dearly in international opinion. By asking anyway, they stood alongside the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and closed off the regime’s usual escape into silence. The Fernández Meijide Prize operates on that same principle.
The second takes this principle a step further: it consists of giving victims the access and tools to speak out in their own voice, rather than having someone from outside speak on their behalf. This takes the form of training in the use of international human rights mechanisms, organising advocacy tours, making joint submissions to the Universal Periodic Review, and facilitating participation in sessions of the Human Rights Council in Geneva. In 2018, for instance, shortly after the crackdown on the Nicaraguan protests, CIVICUS organised a workshop in Managua in partnership with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to train Nicaraguan activists in the use of the Universal Periodic Review.
The third approach comes into play when there is no longer any scope for action from within. It involves supporting those in exile by providing safe haven, emergency visas and the opportunity to continue their activism from abroad, so that exile does not mark the end of their work. Chile and Spain, for example, offered citizenship to Nicaraguans whom the authoritarian regime had declared stateless. This form of solidarity also extends to protection against the transnational repression that an increasing number of authoritarian governments are inflicting on their exiled opponents.
The fourth is the use of sanctions targeting the individuals responsible for the repression. When a democratic government freezes the assets of judges, prosecutors or military commanders implicated in the repression or bars them from entry, it individualises the political cost and denies the regime the nationalist argument of external aggression that is inevitably associated with blanket sanctions – which, moreover, end up having a negative impact on the entire population.
And the fifth, perhaps less visible but probably the most decisive, is to provide sustained funding to the organisations and individuals who carry out the work of documentation, legal defence and support for victims. This form of solidarity underpins the other four: without funding, there is no one to gather the evidence needed to name and shame, nor anyone to defend the victims or compile the case file that will eventually enable those responsible to be held to account.
These five forms of solidarity have something in common: in none of them does external support replace the work carried out from within. Solidarity names and shames, helps others to do so, offers protection, pushes for accountability or provides funding – but it does not make decisions on anyone’s behalf.
