Tom Yorke (fictional name) is a well-known American professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, affiliated with the Democratic Party and identified with its progressive wing. Since 2002, when he wrote an academic paper on Venezuelan participatory democracy after a one-week visit to the country, he became a reference voice on what was happening in the Caribbean country under the Bolivarian revolution. Although he did not consider Nicolás Maduro a legitimate or democratic president, he was very critical of the presence of U.S. warships in the Caribbean Sea and of the accusation that Venezuela benefited from drug trafficking. After the attacks and detention of Maduro on January 3, he has been very active writing opinion articles. In one of the latest, Yorke addressed Venezuelans who were celebrating what happened, asking them to “stop looking at their own navel.”

The Venezuelan case offers a particularly clear ground to observe the functioning of a phenomenon that we will call “minor colonialism.” Not because it is exceptional, but because it condenses a series of structural tensions between ideological universalism, intellectual authority, and concrete suffering that today run through much of the international debate on authoritarianism, the left, and geopolitics.

For years, Venezuela has been the object of intense discursive production from distant and external places. Academics, public intellectuals, activists, and analysts —mainly from the Global North, but also from metropolitan lefts in the Global South— have built interpretations of the conflict centered in Caracas that circulate with greater international legitimacy than the voices of those who live under the regime. This asymmetry is neither accidental nor neutral.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian philosopher and literary theorist who wrote an illuminating text, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in 1988. Spivak retrieves and expands Gramsci’s term. The subaltern is not simply “the oppressed,” but also the one excluded from dominant circuits of representation, both political and discursive. It is not only deprived of power: it lacks a place from which its voice is recognized as meaningful. The subaltern is not the one who does not speak, but the one who is not heard as a subject of meaning.

Spivak refutes leftist thinkers who argue that the oppressed can speak for themselves and that the intellectual should simply “let them speak.” She responds that this view ignores the power structures that determine who is audible; it hides the fact that the intellectual continues mediating, even while denying it, and reproduces a form of epistemic imperialism under a seemingly solidaristic and anti-authoritarian appearance.

In a provocative way, this author introduces the concept of “epistemic violence”: it is not physical violence, but the production of knowledge that erases, distorts, or invalidates the experience of the subaltern. This occurs when academic knowledge, generated in distant places, defines what counts as rational; lived experience is treated as anecdotal, irrational, or “non-theoretical.” The translation performed by the intellectual replaces the testimony of concrete people.

Speaking for Venezuelans. Not with them

The concept of minor colonialism seeks to name a specific form of symbolic domination that emerges in contexts of peripheral political conflicts —such as the Venezuelan one— when external actors, shielded by universal principles or critical credentials, assume the authority to interpret, rank, and ultimately replace the voices of those who directly experience violence.

This is not classical colonialism, nor a direct imperial relationship. Nor is it a coercive imposition. Rather, it is a form of soft power exercised in the field of discourse, morality, and knowledge, which does not manage territories but administers meanings, does not control populations but governs narratives, which end up becoming hegemonic in the interpretation of what is happening.

This colonialism is “minor” not because of its impact —which can be profound— but because of its low visibility, its apparent respectability, and its progressive self-image. Paradoxically, it relies on an abstract moral universalism that ends up producing blindness toward a historically situated reality.

Here Hannah Arendt’s warning becomes key: human rights, when separated from real conditions of belonging, become empty formulas. The “right to have rights” is not a moral abstraction, but a situated political condition.

Minor colonialism is expressed in a form of inverted pedagogical solidarity: Venezuelans must learn from external actors how to interpret their own tragedy. They are required to show historical patience, geopolitical understanding, and political maturity. Meanwhile, nothing equivalent is demanded of those who interpret from afar. This relationship is not horizontal. It is a disciplinary one, where solidarity functions as a reward for narrative docility.

Naming this dynamic is not about breaking with international solidarity, but about rescuing it from its colonial, imperial, and hegemonizing drift. True solidarity does not immediately translate, does not correct testimony, does not rank suffering. It begins with a radically simple and deeply political gesture: recognizing that those who live the violence have priority in naming it.

Tom Yorke’s exhortation that Venezuelans should “stop looking at their own navel” is not just an unfortunate phrase, but the synthesis of a deeper asymmetrical relationship: the presumption that those who observe from afar possess a broader, more rational, and morally superior view than those who experience violence firsthand. The problem is not the criticism of celebrating violence —a legitimate concern— but the dispossessing gesture that accompanies it: the denial of the right of those affected to interpret their own present, to name their dilemmas, and to decide which tensions are politically relevant to them.

When distance becomes authority and abstract principle becomes a disciplinary yardstick, solidarity ceases to be a bridge and turns into a device of tutelage. In the face of this, the task is not to demand silence from the intellectual nor to shield suffering from all critique, but to restore a basic ethical hierarchy: in concrete conflicts, the first word —and also the last— cannot belong to those who look from the outside, but to those who carry the weight of history on their own bodies