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The Global Fight for Freedom
- Venezuela: Fake President, Real Opposition
- Peru: Nobody Left to Believe In
- "Marg bar Mojtaba" Echoes Over Tehran
- Rapper Disses "Looting Thieves" with Generational Victory
- China Winning the War the West Forgot
Country names are followed by their 2025 freedom scores according to Freedom House, which will publish its 2026 scores later this month. Not a ranking.
For years, María Corina Machado fought Nicolás Maduro from inside Venezuela — organizing, defying arrest, eventually fleeing by boat in disguise. She arrived in Washington carrying the mandate of a stolen election and the credibility of someone who had paid dearly for it. In February, she met with Trump, handed him her Nobel Peace Prize, and left believing she had his ear.
She doesn't.
For the two months Machado has lobbied Capitol Hill for a democratic transition, Trump has praised Delcy Rodríguez for delivering “extraordinary economic gains.” Rodriguez has opened the country's oil reserves to American investors and welcomed cabinet secretaries to Caracas for photo ops. In his State of the Union, Trump called Rodríguez — who helped steal the 2024 election for Maduro — “the new president.” Machado wasn't in the chamber.
The concessions matter. So does the amnesty law Rodríguez signed in February, which freed roughly 500 political prisoners — real freedom fighters, free to fight again. But a Venezuelan exile I spoke with in Colombia put the underlying reality plainly: "Cabello runs the country." Diosdado Cabello — Maduro's most hardline enforcer — remains Interior Minister, controlling intelligence services, police, and the armed colectivos still terrorizing the streets. This same exile warned that if Machado returned today, "Cabello would put a bullet in her head."
Maduro is gone. His apparatus is not — it is rebranded and hosting American oil executives.
Which leaves Trump with a choice his own advisers have drawn for him. Longtime confidant Roger Stone calls Machado the "fake opposition." Secretary of State Rubio says Venezuela needs elections before serious investment can follow. Nearly 70% of Venezuelans want exactly that, in a race polls show Machado would win overwhelmingly.
But will Trump follow his real Secretary of State, or his fake advisor?
On February 17th, as dragon dancers wound through Lima's Chinatown, Peru's Congress voted to remove its eighth president in a decade. José Jerí had lasted four months. His sin: undisclosed meetings with a Chinese businessman whose store, shuttered by municipal regulators, was mysteriously reopened three days later by a national authority. He left the presidential palace to shouts of "thief."
Peruvians call it "Chifagate" — after chifa, the local term for a Chinese restaurant where some of the meetings took place. But the scandal is less about one compromised president than about why Peru keeps producing them.
The mechanism is structural. Alberto Fujimori's 1993 constitution handed a single legislative chamber the power to remove presidents by simple majority, appoint judges, and control prosecutors — concentrating every lever of accountability in one body with no institutional check above it. The result: nine presidents since 2016, zero officers prosecuted for 49 protesters killed in 2023’s crackdown, and 67 of 130 sitting legislators facing criminal investigation. Interim presidents serve mere months with no leverage.
The April 12th election introduces the first Senate in 30 years — 60 seats with sole authority over judicial appointments, breaking the single chokepoint through which one faction has controlled everything. But splitting legislative power isn't the same as checking it.
The frontrunner, Rafael López Aliaga, is conservative, Trump-aligned, and promising closer U.S. ties. But the record is cause for alarm: as Lima's mayor, he called for the death of a journalist critic and is himself under financial crimes investigation. That's less Javier Milei — free-market reformer — and more Nayib Bukele: populist, authoritarian, and entirely comfortable bending institutions to his will.
A staggering 42% of Peruvians are still undecided — the sign of an electorate with nobody left to believe in.
The chant rose from one high-rise to another, near then distant, a wave rolling across the Tehran skyline through a haze of smoke: "Marg bar Mojtaba." Death to Mojtaba.
In the streets below, regime loyalists howled in defiance: "Khamenei javan shod"—Khamenei became young again.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
On March 8th, Iran's Assembly of Experts named Mojtaba Khamenei—son of the slain Supreme Leader—as Iran's third supreme leader. The regime's message was unmistakable: it would not surrender.
The appointment is a betrayal of the revolution's own gospel. Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 revolution overthrowing the dynastic Shah, explicitly condemned hereditary power transfer as "un-Islamic"—the revolution's entire moral foundation rested on the idea that power flows from divine mandate, not bloodlines. Khomeini’s successor, the elder Khamenei, agreed. Now the Islamic Republic has become what its founders despised: a dynasty.
Sons of dictators occasionally evolve. The Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, fled to California and became a democracy advocate. Mojtaba regressed. When protesters flooded Tehran's streets after Iran's disputed 2009 presidential election—the “Green Movement”—he commandeered the Basij paramilitary militia, directing a crackdown that killed dozens. Leaked IRGC intelligence later confirmed he personally supervised the suppression. Many believe he is more extreme than his father.
He is not backing down. The strikes also killed his mother, wife, and a son. He launched missiles within hours of his election.
His victory reveals a regime still functioning under bombardment, elevating a ruthless enforcer, and defying Trump.
Yet it wasn't even the worst news for Iranians this week. On March 6th, Trump told CNN he wasn't insisting on democracy in Iran—only a leader who would "treat the United States and Israel well."
But leaders die. Systems endure.
More on this Friday.
In September, Nepal's Gen Z protesters torched the government headquarters and forced Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli — a 74-year-old career politician — to resign. This week, as votes are counted, Balendra Shah, the rapper whose lyrics branded Nepal's politicians “looting thieves” and “fools,” is projected to replace him — leading Oli in his own longtime stronghold, with his party headed toward a clear parliamentary majority.
This newsletter has been skeptical of Gen Z revolts — all sugar and fizz, no substance. Bangladesh's student uprising ousted Sheikh Hasina in 2024, then watched its caretaker government flounder before voters turned back to the establishment to restore order. Nepal seemed headed the same script.
But Balen is different. Nepal's old order failed because three decades of coalition horse-trading handed party bosses the power to loot the state with no accountability. When protests finally erupted, the government's response was to ban social media. A viral campaign targeting "nepo babies" — the pampered children of political dynasties living lavishly while 21% of Nepali youth couldn't find work and a million emigrated last year — crystallized exactly who the system served.
Balen, a civil engineer who rebuilt homes after Nepal's 2015 earthquake, has already proven himself: as Kathmandu's mayor, he locked a corrupt official out of city hall even when it delayed his own salary payments for months. His platform appears substantive and freedom-friendly — double per capita GDP from $1,500 to $3,000, create a million jobs, cut the red tape strangling entrepreneurs.
The Soda Pop Revolution just added real nutrients. Now it has to govern.
Last week, a junta warplane bombed a village 30 kilometers north of the state capital of Sittwe, killing six children and 12 women — civilians the regime had forcibly relocated into the city it now uses as a human shield. The Arakan Army is now closing within 2 km of Sittwe's center, one of only three towns the junta still controls in the western Rakhine State.
Those civilians are just a few of the nearly 90,000 killed in the war the West has forgotten — and the U.S. just conceded to China.
The junta controls less than a quarter of Myanmar's territory. Resistance forces control or actively contest the rest. The junta should be losing decisively.
But it isn't. China has closed border gates and strong-armed two of the resistance’s “Three Brotherhood Alliance” into capitulation. The MNDAA surrendered Lashio under pressure last year; the TNLA handed Mogok and Momeik back to regime forces in November under a China-brokered deal. Only the Arakan Army fights on with full force, forcing China to withdraw from a $140 million power plant in Rakhine last month.
Meanwhile, China's ambassador is hailing "new heights" of cooperation with the brutal regime as the junta reclaims territory in the North and East.
My strategic case for U.S. engagement is simple: support freedom by backing the resistance, and deny Beijing a Belt and Road initiative victory. Businessman Adam Castillo made a more transactional but similar case directly to JD Vance's advisers last July. He hit a brick wall. Yes, the ethnic fault lines are real, the alliances are fractious, and the battlefield is complex. Vance's skepticism is rational.
But complexity isn't an excuse for Kristi Noem calling Chinese-backed sham elections "free and fair." And it isn't an excuse for ignoring what the resistance is building. In December, 19 armed groups formed the Spring Revolution Alliance — 10,000 fighters under a central command structure. On February 27th, they held their first formal dialogue with the democratically elected “National Unity Government” (in exile).
America doesn't have to solve Myanmar. It could start by not blessing the junta, by backing the only institution trying to unify the resistance, and by denying China an easy win.
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