While the left cries, Venezuelans celebrate

The news is not the capture of Nicolás Maduro. The news is Venezuela's liberation. Everything else is noise, ideological weeping, and moral contortion. Millions of Venezuelans are celebrating the end of one of the most brutal dictatorships of the 21st century, while from the comfort of Western democracies a terminal left enters a state of shock over the fall of one of its last regional totems. They claim to love democracy, but they despair when a people celebrate their freedom. That contradiction is not new: it is structural, constitutive of a worldview that never put people ahead of power.

For years they justified the unjustifiable. They looked the other way while Maduro stole elections, repressed protests, kidnapped opposition leaders, tortured dissidents, and turned Venezuela into a failed state ruled by drug trafficking. Eight million exiles were not enough to move them. The impoverishment of almost the entire population was not enough either. The destruction of the productive apparatus, the collapse of the health system, and systematic hunger were not enough. The limit for them was not the dictatorship: it was its end.

Suddenly, experts in "international law" sprang up. Instant Twitter jurists, overnight professors, defenders of a selective sovereignty that is only invoked when a friendly regime falls. Where were they when human rights were being systematically violated in Venezuela? Where were they when media outlets were being shut down, opposition leaders were being imprisoned, people were being tortured in clandestine centers, and elections were being rigged? They had two decades to invoke charters, doctrines, and principles. They remained silent. Because it was not ignorance: it was ideological complicity.

That's why Kirchnerism and its local franchises do not disappoint. They condemn with indignation the action that put an end to a narco-regime, but they never condemned the regime itself with the same vehemence. Kicillof speaks of peace, non-intervention, and sovereignty, while in practice he endorses a criminal dictatorship. Frente Renovador and Partido Justicialista repeat the worn-out script: democracy is not imposed by force. It is a curious theory, upheld for years to cover for friendly tyrannies. Never to defend oppressed peoples.

Maduro killed, kidnapped, tortured, repressed, disappeared people, stole elections, and expelled millions of human beings from his country. But for Cristina Kirchner and regional progressivism, the real problem was that the United States captured him and put an end to his impunity. That is the moral hierarchy of 21st-century socialism: the dictator can do everything except fall. Crime is tolerated; defeat never is.

Not even now do they have the minimum decency to demand the immediate and unconditional release of Nahuel Gallo, an Argentine citizen kidnapped by the regime. Silence in the face of the kidnapping of a compatriot is not neutrality: it is endorsement. Endorsing the kidnapping of Argentines marks a point of no return. There is no coming back from that.

In the face of that moral misery, Javier Milei decided to stand without hesitation on the right side of history and to lead a common front of Latin American countries to stop the advance of narco-terrorism in the region. With a clear foreign policy, without ambiguities or double talk, aligned with freedom and Western democracies, the President supported the military intervention and sent an unequivocal message: Argentina will no longer be a refuge for criminals.

The new migration restrictions for officials, businesspeople, and accomplices of the Venezuelan regime mark a turning point. Drug traffickers and dictators do not hide here. Diplomatic impunity and humanitarian cynicism, used for years as a pretext to protect criminal regimes, are over.

When a dictator falls, the world becomes a freer place. There are no gray areas at these moments. There are no lukewarm, no neutral actors, no broad middle roads. There is no possible moderation in the face of systematic crime. There are those who defend freedom and those who, out of ideological affinity or political convenience, cover up criminals under empty legalistic speeches. The so-called "Center Korea" doesn't exist when it comes to dictatorships.

Fifty years from now, a horde of activist historians will try to rewrite history. They will say that Peronism fought the dictatorships of the 21st century. It will matter little. The record is relentless. Social media preserves every statement, every silence, every selective condemnation, and every uncomfortable embrace.

Venezuela is celebrating its liberation while progressivism is panicking. The collapse of the narrative exposes decades of political, moral, and intellectual complicity. In that historic break, Latin America is once again breathing something that the left has always tried to suffocate: freedom.