On October 27, 2020, in the heart of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, unidentified black vehicles blocked the car of veteran journalist Roland Carreno. Men emerged, dragged him from his vehicle and abducted him. For 24 hours, his whereabouts were unknown, until it emerged that he had been detained by the regime's intelligence services. He was released three years later, only to be arrested again in August 2024, days after presidential elections widely alleged to have been rigged. He remains in detention.
Carreno is not alone. Ana Guaita, a journalist working for an independent news website, was also arrested after the summer 2024 elections and held for four months before being released last December. Dozens of journalists have been detained in Venezuela in recent years. Media equipment has been confiscated, the printing of roughly 100 newspapers has been halted, around 200 radio stations have been shut down, and access to some social media platforms, including Twitter and TikTok, has been blocked.
Professional journalists were not the only ones targeted by the regime. Ordinary citizens who criticized the government online also found themselves in dark interrogation rooms. According to reports, the authorities use technological surveillance tools to monitor private WhatsApp groups in order to identify users who criticize the government. A state run campaign encouraged citizens to inform on regime opponents on social media. It is therefore hardly surprising that in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, Venezuela ranked 160th out of 180 countries.
These facts alone, even before addressing the regime's broader human rights abuses, its close ties with Iran, its support and assistance for terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, and its role in flooding the West with drugs, should be enough, one would think, for anyone concerned with global peace to support the US operation to arrest Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
But expectations and reality are two very different things. Haim Har-Zahav, chairman of the Israeli Journalists Association, wrote on X: "Nothing happened. Just a leader of one country kidnapped from his country on the orders of another country's leader. Everything is normal. We can move on."
In recent weeks, Har-Zahav, in his official capacity, has been highly active in opposing the government's decision to shut down Army Radio. As a reminder, this is a military radio station staffed by soldiers, with no parallel in any other democratic country. He has also warned against Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi's proposed media law, claiming it would harm news broadcasting in Israel, and has broadly accused the government of trying to "silence" journalists it does not like.
So where is a word of support at this dramatic moment for his colleagues in South America? Don't make Har-Zahav laugh. In his defense, he would say that he is not in favor of Maduro, only opposed to Trump's method. But that is precisely the Western problem. For decades, the West has operated with its hands tied by its own rules. Non-Western states, and of course terrorist organizations, have taken advantage of this to destroy the West from within.
Israel, standing on the front line of the West, is the first to suffer from this tied-hands policy, which imposes on it nearly impossible constraints. On the night between Friday and Saturday, half a world away, Trump made it clear that the rules have changed: a brutal dictator cannot enjoy immunity simply because the West chose to restrain itself. And Har-Zahav? He will keep clucking his tongue.
