The Outrage Is Selective. The Reality Is Venezuelan.

Let me begin by relating something that happened years ago, during the reign of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, whose authoritarian model Nicolás Maduro not only inherited but deepened and further brutalized.

Returning home from LAX, I struck up a conversation with the taxi driver. He told me that just two months earlier he had been living in Caracas.

“My father began a small but very successful chain of shoe stores,” he said.

I asked him why he was now driving a cab.

“The last of the four shoe stores were under my management after my father died. One day, two men came into my store. Each carried a suitcase. I was asked if I wanted to sell. I told them it was not for sale. One of the men replied, ‘That’s okay—we don’t have any money to purchase your store anyway.’”

“Each man then opened his suitcase, removed a handgun, and pointed it at my face. That’s when I was asked to sign over the last of my father’s stores to the government.”

It got worse — and this is the part that stays with me.

The man, around my age at the time, was now penniless. He had come to the United States to work as a taxi driver. “There is no medicine for my wife,” he said. “She is very sick. I have to buy antibiotics here and send them in a special way so the government doesn’t seize them. My children don’t have food. I send canned goods the same way.”

The man began to cry.

Let’s start with something basic. Nicolás Maduro is not merely an enemy of Donald Trump. He was indicted by the United States in 2020 on charges of narco-terrorism and massive corruption. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. maintained a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest. A literal wanted poster. Like something from an old Western or a comic book. No ambiguity there.

And of course, nothing happened.

Why? Because diplomacy, sanctions and “engagement” repeatedly fail when aimed at criminal regimes and terror-aligned states — Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, North Korea — that have long since stopped caring about legitimacy at all.

Maduro has ruled Venezuela since 2013. Under his watch, one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America collapsed into economic ruin. Hyperinflation obliterated savings. Food and medicine became scarce. Elections turned into theater. Political opponents were jailed or exiled. The result: between 7 and 8 million Venezuelans fled the country, one of the largest mass migrations in modern history, surpassed only by Syria.

This is not an abstraction. These are families, just like yours and mine, walking across borders. Children growing up without grandparents. Doctors driving taxis in Bogotá. Engineers washing dishes in Miami. Entrepreneurs in Los Angeles sending packages of food and medicine back home. Ask them whether Maduro is a “complex figure” deserving of procedural delicacy.

Now consider the alliances. Iran operates freely in Venezuela. Hezbollah has long had a presence there. Cuban security and intelligence personnel have been embedded within the apparatus that guarded Maduro. Hamas-aligned voices publicly condemned Maduro’s removal. Iran’s Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the U.S. action, calling it a “blatant violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and a breach of the United Nations Charter.

This tells you almost everything you need to know. Criminal regimes recognize one another instinctively.

And yet the loudest voices today are not Venezuelan mothers or exiles. As expected, they are Western activists suddenly discovering an intense concern for “sovereignty” — the very concept they abandon when the villains are less ideologically convenient.

On “Meet the Press” and again with George Stephanopoulos, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued what should not be controversial: that Maduro’s regime lacked legitimacy, and that accountability delayed for political comfort is still accountability denied. He did not celebrate violence. He did not argue for chaos. He argued that the world has grown accustomed to letting monsters age out of consequences.

That is not triumphalism. It is not chest-thumping. It is a statement of fact—one that millions of Venezuelans have lived with for more than a decade.

And when you listen to Venezuelans themselves, the response is not hand-wringing or moral confusion. It is relief. Nobel Peace Prize–winning Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado put it plainly: “Venezuelans, the hour of freedom has arrived.” She did not speak in the language of geopolitics, but of justice, saying that “Nicolás Maduro faces international justice for the heinous crimes committed against Venezuelans and citizens of many other nations.” And she framed the moment not as vengeance, but as restoration: “We are going to bring order, free political prisoners, build an exceptional country and bring our children back home.” That matters.

It is also worth noting the exquisite irony now playing out in New York. Zohran Mamdani, who has flirted with the idea of arresting Benjamin Netanyahu—the elected leader of a democratic ally defending itself against genocidal enemies — now finds himself rhetorically aligned with those objecting to the detention of a man whose rule produced famine, exile and alliance with terror organizations.

Was this operation legally pristine? International law rarely is when dealing with regimes that have already turned the law into a weapon against their own people. The United States did not kidnap a poet or a dissident. It apprehended an indicted narco-state leader whose government functioned as a criminal enterprise and provided safe haven to sworn enemies of the United States and its allies.

The deeper question is this: what do you say to the people of Venezuela who are cheering?

Do you tell them their joy is misplaced, naïve? That their relief is morally suspect? That their suffering must wait for a more aesthetically pleasing form of justice — one that satisfies graduate seminars and NGO panels? Or do you admit something harder: that in a world of bad options, this one moved reality a few inches closer to the moral axis?

Maduro’s fall does not magically heal Venezuela. No serious person thinks it does. Institutions take time — especially after more than a decade of fraudulent elections, kleptocracy and governmental violence. Trust takes even longer. Selective outrage of the sort we’ve seen is not the luxury of those whose livelihoods were taken at gunpoint. Of families forced to flee on foot. Of people who did nothing wrong except refuse to surrender everything they had built.

For millions of Venezuelans, this was not a violation of justice.

It was the first glimpse of it.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.