If you won't hold America accountable, we don't need you
En las orillas de un orden internacional que muchos sienten como asimétrico, Venezuela ha propuesto esta semana abandonar la Corte Penal Internacional, el tribunal fundado para juzgar los crímenes más graves de la humanidad. Jorge Rodríguez, al frente de la Asamblea Nacional, articula una pregunta que resuena más allá de Caracas: ¿puede una institución ser legítima cuando sus investigaciones siguen el mapa del poder y no el del sufrimiento? La propuesta, bautizada como Ley para Palestina y la Humanidad, convierte un agravio nacional —más de ochenta muertos en operaciones militares estadounidenses en el Caribe desde agosto— en una denuncia de alcance civilizatorio.
- Desde agosto de 2024, operaciones militares de EE.UU. en el Caribe han dejado más de ochenta muertos, según Caracas, muchos de ellos sin vínculo demostrado con el narcotráfico que Washington invoca como justificación.
- Venezuela presentó su queja ante la CPI y encontró silencio: el mismo silencio, señala Rodríguez, que el tribunal guarda frente a las muertes civiles en Gaza, lo que convierte la inacción en un argumento político.
- La paradoja que Caracas pone sobre la mesa es incómoda: Estados Unidos moldea una corte a la que nunca se ha adherido, mientras el tribunal persigue a naciones que sí firmaron el Estatuto de Roma.
- La propuesta de retirada formal de la CPI avanza en el parlamento venezolano como rechazo explícito a lo que el gobierno de Maduro describe como un sistema de justicia selectiva al servicio de intereses occidentales.
- Si Venezuela consuma la salida, podría abrir una grieta simbólica: otros países que se sienten juzgados de forma desigual podrían encontrar en este precedente un lenguaje y un camino.
Jorge Rodríguez se plantó ante la Asamblea Nacional venezolana esta semana con una pregunta retórica que escondía una propuesta concreta: que Venezuela abandone la Corte Penal Internacional y el Estatuto de Roma que la vincula a la justicia criminal internacional desde hace más de dos décadas. Su argumento central no es técnico sino moral: la CPI, dice, no sirve a la justicia sino a los intereses de Estados Unidos, un país que nunca firmó el tratado que la rige y que, sin embargo, orienta sus prioridades.
El detonante inmediato es la presencia militar estadounidense frente a las costas venezolanas desde agosto de 2024. Bajo la llamada Operación Southern Lance, fuerzas de EE.UU. han atacado embarcaciones en el Caribe y el Pacífico en nombre de la lucha antidroga. Caracas contabiliza más de ochenta muertos y sostiene que muchos de ellos no tenían relación demostrable con el tráfico de estupefacientes. La queja venezolana ante la CPI no ha producido respuesta visible, lo mismo que el silencio del tribunal ante las bajas civiles en Gaza. Para Rodríguez, ambas omisiones revelan la misma lógica: justicia para unos, impunidad para otros.
La propuesta lleva un nombre cargado de intención: Ley para Palestina y la Humanidad. Con él, el gobierno de Maduro inscribe su propio agravio en una narrativa más amplia de injusticia global, y rechaza la premisa de que retirarse de la CPI equivale a huir de la rendición de cuentas. Es, en su lectura, la denuncia de un sistema viciado. Datos de la ONU y la DEA añaden una capa incómoda al relato de Washington: más del ochenta por ciento de la droga que llega a EE.UU. transita por el Pacífico, no por el Caribe, lo que debilita la justificación oficial del despliegue militar.
Si el parlamento aprueba la retirada, Venezuela no solo cerrará un capítulo jurídico: lanzará una señal a otros estados que cuestionan la legitimidad del orden internacional tal como está construido, y pondrá sobre la mesa una pregunta que la CPI tendrá dificultades para ignorar.
Jorge Rodríguez, who leads Venezuela's National Assembly, stood before parliament this week and posed a question he clearly did not expect answered: What is the International Criminal Court actually for? The rhetorical flourish masked a serious proposal—that Venezuela formally withdraw from the institution altogether, abandoning the Rome Statute that has bound the country to international criminal justice for more than two decades.
Rodríguez's frustration, he argued, stems from what he sees as the court's fundamental corruption. The ICC, in his telling, serves not justice but the interests of the United States—a country that has never even signed the Rome Statute itself, yet somehow exerts decisive influence over the court's priorities and investigations. He called the institution "useless" and accused its judges of being mercenaries for Washington. The paradox was not lost on him: America shapes an international court it refuses to join.
The timing of Venezuela's withdrawal proposal is not abstract. Since August, the United States has maintained a significant military presence off Venezuela's coast, framed officially as part of anti-narcotics operations. Under what Washington calls Operation Southern Lance, American forces have conducted strikes against suspected drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific. According to Venezuelan officials, these operations have killed more than eighty people. Rodríguez argues that many of these deaths occurred without evidence that the victims were involved in drug trafficking at all. He described the casualties as "extrajudicial"—killed outside any legal process, pulverized by military weapons.
Venezuela's complaint to the ICC about these deaths has, from Caracas's perspective, gone nowhere. The court has not moved decisively on the matter. Meanwhile, Rodríguez pointed out, the ICC has been similarly inactive on the war in Gaza, where civilians have died in far greater numbers. The court's silence on both fronts, he suggested, reveals its true nature: an instrument of selective justice, deployed against nations the West wishes to pressure and withheld from nations the West wishes to protect.
The legislative proposal carries a symbolic name: the Law for Palestine and Humanity. It signals that Venezuela sees its own grievance as part of a larger pattern of international injustice. The country's government, led by Nicolás Maduro, has long maintained that American pressure—including accusations of drug trafficking that Maduro denies, and a bounty on his capture that Washington has doubled—is really about regime change and access to Venezuela's vast oil and gas reserves. The ICC withdrawal, from this angle, is not an admission of guilt but a rejection of a rigged system.
The facts on the ground complicate the narrative somewhat. The United Nations and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration both acknowledge that Venezuela is not a primary trafficking route to American soil; more than eighty percent of drugs destined for the United States flow through the Pacific instead. This undermines Washington's stated rationale for the Caribbean military deployment. Yet it does not resolve the question of who those eighty people were, or whether their deaths were justified, or whether an international court should have investigated.
What Venezuela is doing, in effect, is calling the ICC's bluff. If the court cannot or will not investigate alleged American military actions in the Caribbean with the same rigor it applies to other nations, then what legitimacy does it claim? Rodríguez's crude language—his repeated insistence that the court is "useless"—masks a more sophisticated argument about institutional hypocrisy. Venezuela's withdrawal, should parliament approve it, would be a statement that some nations have concluded the international criminal justice system no longer serves their interests, or perhaps never did.
Citações Notáveis
What is the International Criminal Court actually for? Its owners are obviously the U.S. State Department, and they are not there to dispense justice or defend human rights—they are there to attack free peoples.— Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela's National Assembly
For four months the Caribbean has been a field of horror. More than eighty people have been killed, exterminated, pulverized by military weapons in extrajudicial fashion. That court is useless.— Jorge Rodríguez
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does Venezuela care what the ICC thinks at all? If they believe the court is corrupt, why not simply ignore it?
Because ignoring it and formally leaving are different things. Withdrawal is a statement—it says we see through this, we're not pretending anymore. It also removes the possibility that the court might someday act against Venezuelan officials in ways the government fears.
But Rodríguez's real complaint seems to be that the ICC hasn't investigated American actions. Isn't that the actual grievance?
Yes. He's saying the court applies one standard to powerful nations and another to everyone else. The hypocrisy bothers him more than the court's existence.
The eighty deaths in the Caribbean—does Venezuela have evidence those people were killed without cause?
They claim the victims were not drug traffickers, that the operations were extrajudicial. But "extrajudicial" is their word for it. The U.S. says these were legitimate anti-narcotics strikes. The ICC could theoretically investigate, but it hasn't.
So Venezuela is essentially saying: if you won't hold America accountable, we don't need you.
Exactly. And by naming the law after Palestine, they're linking their complaint to a much larger global argument about whose suffering the international system recognizes.