By Tribuna Popular
April 20, 2026
Editorial in Tribuna Popular, newspaper of the Communist Party of Venezuela:
The “Transparencia Soberana” [Sovereign Transparency] website launched by Delcy Rodríguez’s administration [to purportedly detail repatriated money from US-brokered oil sales] is, in itself, a mockery. The numbers add up as if by magic: $300 million comes in, $300 million goes out. Everything is perfectly organized… except for one fundamental detail: that money does not go toward wages or pensions—which have been frozen for four years—but is instead diluted into discretionary bonuses that generate neither rights nor stability for the working class.
Meanwhile, official spokespeople and certain well-off economists repeat the same refrain: “there is no money.” But no one explains — or publishes — essential data. How many workers are on the government payroll? How many pensioners are actually enrolled in the Social Security system? What is the actual revenue from oil? Is it unrealistic to demand wages indexed to the basic basket of goods? The answer is always the same: silence.
This opacity is no accident. It is the backdrop to the social catastrophe the country is undergoing. Without verifiable public information, without accountability, a narrative is constructed that attempts to justify the unjustifiable: starvation wages in a country with enormous resources.
Reality, however, is making itself felt in the streets. Protests for decent wages and pensions have resurfaced across the country. Workers and retirees are demanding compliance with Article 91 of the Constitution and denouncing that their incomes are not enough to survive. They demand wages, not bonuses. They demand rights, not handouts.
And the response from those in power has been the same as always: intimidation, police harassment, and shock troops to try to contain social unrest. At least they can no longer accuse anyone of being a CIA agent because the head of U.S. intelligence came and, to no one’s surprise, met with none other than the acting president and the recently appointed defense minister.
At the same time, the country is witnessing another revealing spectacle: the closed-door “debate” to appoint a new ombudsman. A figure who, in theory, should guarantee citizens’ rights, but who in practice has been as absent as the real figures on the oil business. Institutional frameworks are being hollowed out while speeches are filled with empty formalities.
In the case of the Attorney General’s Office, the departure of Tarek William Saab — whose tenure leaves a trail of impunity that is difficult to erase — does not represent a fundamental change, but rather an internal reconfiguration of a system that remains unaccountable. There is no justice without truth, and there is no truth without transparency.
All of this is taking place amid a supposed “transition to democracy” that is nothing more than a carefully constructed illusion. While there is talk of institutional integrity, the country’s legal framework is being redesigned to suit the interests of transnational capital, particularly U.S. capital. Legal reforms, economic agreements, and political signals all point in a single direction: the country’s adaptation to new forms of dependency.
The repeated statements and gestures of support from Washington, including Donald Trump’s own praise for Delcy Rodríguez’s administration, are not gratuitous. They are confirmation that an agenda is being carried out. An agenda that does not serve the interests of the Venezuelan working class, but those of international capital.
In this scenario, the “transition” is nothing more than a farce. There can be no democracy with wages in tatters, opaque institutions, and decisions made behind the people’s backs.
The real struggle is not between factions of power—much less are we facing an anti-imperialist crusade—but between a model that condemns the majority to precariousness and the need to build an alternative based on sovereignty and the real rights of the working class.
