Algeria, the Venezuela of Africa

In our region, there is growing interest in the African continent, and for that reason, I will refer to the serious situation in Algeria, an Arab country—the largest in Africa, with an area of 2,381,741 km2 and a population of 46.81 million—which, like Venezuela, continues to have one of the strongest and most abusive regimes in the world in the 21st century, where the rule, as in Caracas, has been fraud, to ensure the survival of the rigid militaristic leadership that retains power in this country with coastlines only on the Mediterranean and with the geopolitical frustration of not having the Atlantic virtuosity of the Kingdom of Morocco, its northwestern neighbor, which, due to geopolitical obsession, it has never ceased to see as a rival or enemy, coveting its phosphate deposits in the Sahara and its access to the aforementioned ocean.

An unquestionable truth has been that, just as dictator Maduro destabilized Latin America—emulating his mentor, the late Hugo Chávez—causing one of the largest diasporas in the history of international migration, in Algeria, the so-called Le Pouvoir, the renowned political-military elite, has retained real power in the country since it gained independence from France in 1962, it was undoubtedly Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who ruled for 20 years until his resignation in 2019 as a result of the Hirak Movement, those massive protests that ultimately ended up consolidating Algerian militarism. 

Then, with Abdelmajid Tebboune, a politician appointed president from that year to the present, and all together, accused protagonists of one of the greatest political destabilizations in the Maghreb region (area of Arab-Berber identity in North Africa) - the last 50 years have been conspiring against Morocco, seeking unsuccessfully to wrest Western Sahara from it, which we must call, with historical and geopolitical accuracy, Moroccan Sahara, and therefore against the territorial integrity of the kingdom—and tormenting the Sahrawi populations they hold in the Algerian camps of Tindouf—the largest open-air prison on the planet—further increasing the imbalances and instabilities in the Sahel (the transition zone between the desert and the African savannah), one of the most violent and anarchic areas in Africa.

Like Maduro, who has only had the verbal rhetoric of Putin and Xi Jinping in his favor, in practice he lies completely abandoned in New York—the same inexorable fate that awaits Delcy Rodríguez, Diosdado Cabello, and Vladimir Padrino, the puppet triumvirate still at the helm of Venezuela—the Algerian regime suffers from Russia's weariness and China's indifference, which did not lift a finger against the UN's support for the autonomy proposed by the King of Morocco (2007) for the Sahara, which was enshrined in the recent Resolution 2797(2025), leaving Algiers, which is fighting with everyone, isolated as a pariah.

Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Mackay. Former Foreign Minister of Peru and Internationalist

Article published in the Diario Expreso newspaper in Peru