The battle for Venezuela’s soul

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By Wolfgang Fernandez - Posted at Evangelical Focus:

In contemporary Venezuela, the dictatorship does not merely tolerate but actively promotes a spirituality rooted in Cuban Santería and occult practices. This spirituality is presented not as folklore, but as a source of legitimacy—openly contradicting the Christian faith.

I write as a Venezuelan missionary to the church in the United States, where news about my country is often filtered through fragmented headlines or simplified narratives. To understand Venezuela’s crisis, one must look beyond politics and economics. What we are living is a human, social, and spiritual tragedy.

The crisis appears in daily life: families torn apart by forced migration, fear and imposed silence, arbitrary detentions, and hundreds of political prisoners. This is not merely the result of poor leadership, but of a system deliberately structured to prevent change—sustained by repression, intimidation, and the systematic denial of human dignity.

Recent international pressure has secured the release of some prisoners, yet hundreds—perhaps thousands—remain detained. Survivors testify that many detention centers function as places of physical and psychological torture. This is not religious rhetoric or ideological exaggeration; it is a documented reality confirmed by international organizations and by those who survived imprisonment.