From Caracas to Cambridge: Venezuelan activists discuss human rights in their country at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum
Introduction
By Susan A. Hughes
November 14, 2025
Much of the Trump administration’s focus on Venezuela has centered on military actions against boats suspected of running drugs. But to the Venezuelan people, those efforts are sidestepping the greatest humanitarian challenge in their history.
The Institute of Politics (IOP) hosted three Venezuelan activists to talk about the injustice in human rights at a recent John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.
Remembering Setti Warren
This Forum was the first since the untimely death of its director, Setti Warren.
HKS dean Jeremy Weinstein took to the stage to pay tribute to Warren in his “beloved Forum.”
“When Setti became the IOP director, he cited a quote from our School’s namesake, President Kennedy. ‘It is time for a new generation of leadership to cope with the new problems and new opportunities, for there is a new world to be won.’”
After a lifetime of public service, Weinstein said, the Forum was Setti’s pride and joy. He believed strongly in a diversity of opinions and made it his mission to present a wide variety of speakers and viewpoints.
“I can picture him in the back of the room. He always stood in the same place by the glass doors on the JFK street side, ensuring that everything was running smoothly, beaming with pride and gathering strength from all who come together here to engage with the politics of our time,” he said.
In his introduction, Mathias Risse, faculty director of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, extended a tribute as well. “Setti Warren’s abrupt passing is a painful reminder of the fragility of life. Our lives, the lives of all around us,” Risse said. “The fragility of life means we all ought to think long and hard on how to live meaningful lives.”
Risse went on to introduce the program for the evening, Venezuela Under the Lens: Human Rights Crisis and Pathways to Justice, co-sponsored by the Carr-Ryan Center and Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
Venezuelan voices
Kathryn Sikkink, the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy, moderated the panel of Venezuelan human rights advocates.
Freddy Guevara MC/MPA 2024 is the cofounder of Venezuelan progressive party. Guevara, a democracy visiting fellow at the Ash Center, was the top voted congressman in Venezuela in 2015, the vice president of Venezuela’s Parliament in 2016, and the leader of a nonviolent civil uprising against Maduro in 2017.
“I didn’t want to be a politician,” he said. “I wanted to be the Bono of Venezuela, but once [Hugo] Chávez came into power, I decided the best contribution I could give my country was not through music.”
Génesis Dávila is a Venezuelan lawyer and founder of Defiende Venezuela. “As any other lawyer, I wanted to one day become a prosecutor, a judge, or one of the justices of the Supreme Court of Venezuela,” she said. “But as soon as I graduated from law school, I realized that that dream was fading because the judicial system was already co-opted by the executive branch. I didn’t go to law school for that.”
Miguel Alejandro Pizarro Rodriguez is the former deputy to the National Assembly of Venezuela. He was the youngest elected deputy to the National Assembly at age 21, serving from 2010 to 2018. “I am the son of a guerilla fighter,” he said.
“In 2018 I was prosecuted by the [Nicolás] Maduro regime, spent three months in clandestinity and was able to escape the country with the help of the French government and some European partners, Rodriguez said. “Now I am the diplomatic shuttle of the Venezuelan opposition to the United Nations.”
Rodriguez provided some context about politics in Venezuela. “Since 2015 it is clear that there has been a big majority of the country that wants a different government,” he said. “We have been mutating to a full-fledged dictatorship, a police state that is pretty similar to Nicaragua or a Caribbean version of North Korea,” said Rodriguez.
In the 2024 presidential elections, Maria Corina Machado, winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, was the unity candidate for the opposition party. “Machado was banned from the elections by the Maduro government, so we ran Edmundo González,” against Maduro, Rodriguez said. “But the current regime has a policy to erase every form of opposition from the inside.”
It’s a regime, Rodriguez said, that funds itself with illegal economies and creates safe havens for criminal activity. “This is like the bar in Star Wars,” he said. “Every bad guy from the galaxy has a representative in Venezuela."
Turning to the evolution of the human rights movement in her country, Dávila called out important turning points in both the Chávez and Maduro presidencies. “Everything started as a severe crisis of human rights violations that step by step turned into crimes against humanity and finally evolved into terrorism of the state,” said Dávila.
The response to Maduro’s first election in 2013 was massive protests around the country. And those protests were met with repression. “The government was targeting opponents, those who were considered opposition, and they were politically persecuting them,” she said. “In this school, in a class that Professor Sikkink was leading with students, the International Criminal Court was asked to open an investigation for crimes against humanity in Venezuela. This was promoted by the organization of the American states,” Dávila said.
Last year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights described the government of Venezuela as conducting state terrorism with the forced exile of Edmundo González, who had run in opposition to Maduro in the 2024 presidential election. “They said the Venezuelan regime is using terror to stay in power. They kill their own population. They rape opposition leaders. They torture students like you, just because they want change in Venezuela,” said Dávila. “They were brave enough to be organized against a regime even when they knew that voting against a regime and defending those votes they could be tortured or that they have to leave the country.”
Despite this repression, Guevara noted that Venezuelans see hope for a change.
“If you ask Venezuelans today if they want the United States government to exert military force to take down Maduro and the regime, they will say yes,” he said. “We tried negotiations, we went to the International Criminal Court.”
But he cautioned that help from the United States must come from the perspective of understanding.
“Don’t be offended,” Guevara said, “but sometimes Americans have the capacity to transform global problems into their problems, to see the world through their lenses. The discussion about Venezuela many times is just about Trump and not what is happening in our country, but about your history,” he said.
“And I understand that the United States has a recent history of trauma with Afghanistan, with Iraq, with Libya. But at the same time, I think it’s very important to understand that Venezuela is not the Middle East. And I think we need to fight the vision that after Maduro we will have chaos,” he continued.
Guevara noted the cultural, political, economic, and social compatibilities between Venezuela and the United States, something he thinks positions Venezuela to be successful in a post-Maduro regime. “It’s a very homogeneous country. It’s a country that all their life has been aligned with the United States. We are an oil country, industry people. We play baseball.”
The complete discussion can be streamed from the Institute of Politics YouTube channel.
Photography by Mike DeStefano