When Salt Lake City began enforcing an urban camping ban several years ago, hundreds of Utahns picked up their belongings and headed toward the Jordan River.

For centuries, the river has been a trading post, a border, and a nexus of nomadic activity. But most of all, it has been “a place of refuge,” says Søren Simonsen, executive director of the Jordan River Commission.

Today, growing numbers of encampments filled with Americans without permanent homes dot the banks of the river. And Mr. Simonsen is on the front line of what to do about it.

A decade ago, Utah claimed it had largely “solved” homelessness, reducing it by 91%. Now it is considering an idea, supported by Mr. Simonsen, that is gaining traction across the United States: outlawing unsanctioned camping and instead creating government-sanctioned tent encampments as steppingstones for those without homes to find more permanent housing.

For much of the recent past, one assumption in addressing homelessness has been that everyone wants a solid roof. The debate over encampments is shifting those assumptions. Increasingly, cities and states are exploring whether there can be a sense of dignity and agency in “safe outside spaces” as an end in themselves. As some carry out sweeps to clear out encampments, others are experimenting with the idea of making them more humane, hygienic, and livable as one potential part of the solution to the housing crisis.

“I get that civilization has progressed, and we’ve become people that live in cities, but why does civilization have to be one way or one thing?” says Mr. Simonsen. “Can’t we make space for people that aren’t ready, aren’t capable, aren’t interested in living such a fixed-address kind of lifestyle?”

“We can do better than that”

The situation is Utah is common across the country. Tent encampments have “definitely become more of a visible issue since the pandemic,” exacerbated by a national housing shortage, says Courtney Anderson, an expert on social welfare law at Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta. “It’s a problem that people can see, so they need a solution where they can’t see it.”

Under pressure from voters, officials are taking action.

Authorities in Rhode Island cleared an encampment from the steps of the state capitol in December. Washington, D.C., conducts regular camp removals. New York City has conducted hundreds of “sweeps” under Mayor Eric Adams. Residents have largely hailed the efforts, but the majority of those affected haven’t moved into more permanent housing.

The concern is that simply clearing camps can strip people of their agency and dignity.

“The raiding of camps is really tragic,” says Professor Anderson. “The more you dehumanize people, the easier it is to do that kind of thing.”

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it is unconstitutional to ban sleeping in public if there are no other sleeping options available, and some municipal courts have made similar rulings. But this year, Tennessee made camping away from sanctioned areas a felony. Other states are following suit.

The Georgia Senate is considering a bill that would criminalize camping and force municipalities to comply. But the bill would also allow the state to designate areas for sanctioned camps.

In Savannah, Georgia, Shirley Walkowicz says the move to criminalize what she is doing – living in her car – “just shows that people don’t [care] about me and people like me.”

But for Rachel Potter, a Savannah college student who also has no home, an option to move into semi-permanent housing – even tents – would be appealing. “A lot of these people out here choose to live in tents. They like it. It’s a lifestyle.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Rachel Potter, who has been homeless off and on for most of her life, takes a break from doing homework for a college class outside a homeless shelter in Savannah, Georgia, on March 2, 2023. Solving homelessness is quixotic, she says, because everyone comes to the situation in different ways.

The Georgia bill is significantly based on the thinking of Judge Glock, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Cicero Institute. Dr. Glock saw the early potential of “housing first” – an Obama-era policy that ended requirements such as drug testing for housing recipients. But he now says the policy has largely failed. An average of five homeless people die on the streets of Los Angeles every day, he says – more than twice as many as a decade ago.

“This is a crisis situation,” he says. “It’s about what we can do this month, this year. We can’t just sit on our hands until the housing [shortage] is solved.”

He points to cities such as Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, which are banning makeshift encampments but creating safe spaces for people without homes.

“The argument is, if cities are going to allow it, make sure they provide the things you need: sanitation, social services, security,” says Dr. Glock. “If the cities don’t make a conscious decision about where to put them, they are outsourcing that decision to wherever a camp happens to spring up and wherever people are yelling the loudest about it.”

Birmingham, Alabama, has just voted to erect a tiny house village to accomplish many of these goals. For City Council member Hunter Williams, the logic is clear.  

“People have thoughts whether the city should or shouldn’t [erect camps] – whether it’s outside the realm of municipal government,” he says. “But the reality is, our fire and rescue and our police and our city jail are already involved, at a much greater cost than this program.”

“We don’t have to have tent cities under every overpass in America, and we’ve all seen some of that,” he adds. “We can do better than that.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Shirley Walkowicz, who has been homeless for about four years, hangs out in her makeshift home – a car – in Savannah, Georgia, on March 2, 2023. Ms. Walkowicz says a bill that would criminalize unsanctioned camping shows that “people don’t [care] about me or people like me.”

Athens’ answer

Residents in Athens, Georgia, faced that same decision – what to do with the residents of “Cooterville,” a large camp under a railroad trestle.

Trash, sanitation, and drug use all became issues. But as authorities began to knock down the encampments, the Athens-Clarke County Commission looked at the flip side: If not Cooterville, then where? Two shelters were full. And there was a recognition that not everyone living under the trestle could cope with living in a shelter.

Mayor Kelly Girtz has spent most of his life in Athens, much of it as an educator, and he knew students who didn’t have a permanent residence. In recent years, he had seen students in line at one of the city’s homeless shelters.

The pandemic, to him, humanized their problems. “I saw stories about alcohol abuse going up during the pandemic. Those same issues were hitting people with perfectly good roofs over their heads.”

After a polarized debate, the council deadlocked 4-4 on whether to give the residents of Cooterville a tent city to move into. Mayor Girtz broke the tie by voting yes.

Today, 55 tents are lined up neatly on wooden platforms. Trash is nowhere to be found. “It looks a little like the TV show ‘MASH,’” says Mayor Girtz. The $5 million investment includes adding crisis beds at a local mental health clinic.

“The point was to move people from unstructured camping to a more structured, clean, stable, and healthy environment,” says Mayor Girtz.

Utah’s Mr. Simonsen, for one, senses a shift in focus toward a greater responsibility for those who make the banks of the Jordan River their home.

“We still have a large vision for” an individualistic country, where dignity is earned by overcoming obstacles – natural, man-made, and personal, he says. “Yet people being rugged and individual are often considered outcasts. It’s a complex and very fraught question that’s now in the forefront.”

Leah Millis/Reuters

A person pays their respects on Jan. 28, 2023, at the site where Tyre Nichols was fatally beaten by Memphis police officers. The incident occurred in Hickory Hill, a sprawling neighborhood in southeast Memphis where middle-class life and managed decline line up on the same block.

The two Hickory Hills sit on either side of 6100 Winchester Road. 

On one side is New Direction Christian Church, a ministry central in community organizing. Here, in a building deeded by a closing retailer, 1,000 residents worship each Sunday.

On the other is the Hickory Ridge Mall, once home to 100 stores but now nearly vacant. Inside, elevator music plays from loudspeakers like a call eternally on hold. 

The intersection is only a few miles away from Power Center Academy, one of the city’s best charter schools. And it’s only a few miles away from Castlegate Lane, a street surrounded by two-story brick homes, tidy lawns, and cul-de-sacs, now marked by a shrine of flowers. It’s where police fatally beat Tyre Nichols.

Hickory Hill is a sprawling area in southeast Memphis where middle-class life and managed decline line up on the same block. The contrast, sometimes feeling like two different neighborhoods altogether, speaks to something more systemic: the challenges many Black middle-class communities face around the country.

The story of Hickory Hill is the story of white flight, Black resettlement, disinvestment, and gradual decline. For decades, white residents left their neighborhoods out of a refusal to integrate, and middle-class Black residents replaced them, in pursuit of lower crime and better schools. This cycle opened up a corridor of transience across South Memphis, where many Black families – with less inherited wealth than their white counterparts – uprooted from their old communities but struggled in new soil.

Across America, post-white-flight areas are known for their instability. But instability can become free fall in Memphis, where the Black poverty rate is 26.5% and the government often fails to meet residents’ needs. Hence a Hickory Hill today with a reputation for crime and poverty but with vastly different outcomes. In some areas, the median income is $91,000; in others, it’s $21,600. 

Mr. Nichols’ death portrayed a neighborhood in decline. But Hickory Hill is a neighborhood in transition. It’s neither in its heyday, nor, as outsiders once nicknamed it, “Hickory Hood.” The question here and in many Black middle-class communities elsewhere is whether it can be something else altogether. 

“If you drive through here, you see evidence of a once-flourishing community,” says Dr. Stacy Spencer, pastor of New Direction Christian Church. “There is a hint of what used to be, and the promise of what can be.”

Eastward expansion

Seventy years ago, Hickory Hill was little more than scattered farmland and cotton fields. But by the 1950s, the Memphis area had entered a postwar building spree. A line of neighborhoods built for manufacturing and warehousing workers began marching farther and farther east. Then, it arrived in this corner of Shelby County. 

The Hickory Ridge Mall opened in 1981. Retailers, grocery stores, and department chains entered formation around it, a suburban vanguard of strip malls and a Target.

Noah Robertson/The Christian Science Monitor

Inside Xclusive Hair Extensions on Feb. 9, owner Cedric Horton displays his own clothing line – "Xclusive Money" – and other merchandise, including lit candles that have the scent of "champagne toast." But the Hickory Ridge Mall in Memphis isn't what it used to be, he says.

“You see this huge explosion,” says Wayne Dowdy, a local historian. “There was a period of time where everybody wanted to live in Hickory Hill.”

Meanwhile, the city was incorporating these areas for additional tax revenue. Memphis decided the “key to growth was annexation,” says Mr. Dowdy. But many white residents, knowing annexation meant integration, did not want to be a part of Memphis. The city began annexing Hickory Hill in 1987, residents sued, and the neighborhood lost in 1998. 

White residents fled in an exodus. In the decade before 2003, the Black population grew 450% and the white population fell by half.

Such migration patterns were not exclusive to Memphis. 

White flight drove neighborhood change across America throughout the 1960s, says John Logan, a sociologist at Brown University who studies migration and census data. Since the 1980s, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American growth in the suburbs has outpaced that of white Americans, he says.

For many Black families moving into the area, Hickory Hill was an opportunity to enter a thriving middle-class community, with better schools and an active retail economy. 

“For a time, those neighborhoods remain middle class,” says Phyllis Betts, a former University of Memphis sociologist who researched the city’s neighborhoods, including Hickory Hill. “People have good jobs, and it seems to have succeeded. And then it doesn’t.”

The decay in Hickory Hill began with the city’s failed expansion. Memphis got minimal tax revenue and maximum sprawl. Some 20 miles from City Hall, Hickory Hill received lower-quality services than the rest of the city, says Mr. Dowdy. 

At the same time Hickory Hill was being annexed, the city was also closing thousands of public housing units downtown. The redevelopment project displaced thousands of people, many of whom resettled in the other area of the city with federally subsidized housing: southeast Memphis, in and around Hickory Hill. 

“When I came in 2001 on the heels of that annexation and that white flight, I was handed a community that was destabilized,” says Dr. Spencer.

Cycles of transience

The instability seen in Hickory Hill and similar neighborhoods nationwide is partly rooted in the nature of the Black middle class itself. 

Overall, Black families on average hold more debt and fewer assets than their white counterparts, says Rachael Woldoff, a sociologist at West Virginia University. That means far more income goes to rent or mortgage payments, and finances are more vulnerable to shocks like recessions or the pandemic. In 2000, the upper Black middle class – earning above $100,000 – rented at the same level as the core white middle class – earning between $50,000 and $99,000. 

Among the lower Black middle class, which makes between $30,000 and $49,000, people rarely work jobs that require a college degree. They are almost just as likely to rent as they are to be homeowners, writes Karyn Lacy, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, in an emailed response. 

“Many of the rewards associated with middle class stability – a safe neighborhood with coveted amenities, quality public schools, job security – are out of reach for this group,” writes Professor Lacy. 

The core of these discrepancies is discrimination. In the postwar era, while subsidy programs like the GI Bill were giving white families a boost into America’s suburban middle class, Black families were denied the same benefits. Today, Black Americans face additional barriers to accessing loans or other capital, says Professor Logan at Brown University. 

And businesses, especially in a city like Memphis, are prone to follow white residents. 

“I think they see the demographic shift and they decide, ‘Oh, the Black folks moving in don’t have any money,’” says Olliette Murray Drabot, a city activist. 

Noah Robertson/The Christian Science Monitor

The Rev. Ayanna Watkins heads MICAH, an interfaith activist group in Memphis, Tennessee, Feb. 9, 2023. Wearing a gold Ida B. Wells necklace, Ms. Watkins says that Black residents across the city face discrimination when trying to access capital or hold on to their homes.

From these steps, a cycle emerges: White flight encourages Black resettlement, but Black resettlement leads to disinvestment and transience. From South Memphis to Hickory Hill, neighborhoods have experienced decades of turnover, almost in a straight line.

Britney Thornton, Shelby County commissioner for District 10, which includes South Memphis, regularly watches her constituents migrate along this path – sometimes in search of federally subsidized housing, and sometimes “as a launchpad to get out to Collierville,” a wealthier neighborhood outside the city limits. 

It’s not uncommon for students in city schools to report moving four to six times in a single year, she says.

“As long as people see Hickory Hill ... as one of many stops that they will make throughout the year because they’re just going to float around, then that’s going to always disadvantage Hickory Hill,” she adds.

From Hickory Hill to “Hickory Hood”

By the early 2000s, columnists in the local newspaper were calling it “Hickory Hood,” a nickname that summarizes the reputation often attached to post-white-flight parts of Memphis.

The share of Hickory Hill residents defined as “poor or struggling” by the American Community Survey – whose income is less than twice the 2020 poverty level – is 41.2%. That’s higher than the county rate of 38.5%. But tracts vary widely, from 78% to 17.9%.

Of the 90,000 or so residents, more than 83% are Black.

“People see us and they think it’s a bad neighborhood,” says Ayanna Watkins, executive director of MICAH, an interfaith activist group started by Dr. Spencer. 

As is true throughout Memphis, Hickory Hill residents often feel like crime is a reputation reinforced by outsiders, yet also still a problem that needs solving.

Last year, the neighborhood experienced 717 cases of aggravated assault and 31 murders; both were double-digit drops from 2021. At the same time, passenger motor vehicle thefts increased 111%, consistent with a citywide wave of car-related crime. 

Perceptions can vary widely depending on where you are in Hickory Hill. “If ... you live in an apartment community, you think crime is terrible because it is where you live,” says Janine Heiner, director of operations at SafeWays, a city crime-reduction group. “But if ... you live in a neighborhood of single-family homes, then your perception isn’t going to be as bad.”

In Memphis, crime orbits low-income apartment complexes, says Ms. Heiner. Those complexes, she says, are disproportionately concentrated in the Hickory Hill area. Crime repels investment, and a lack of investment propels crime. 

Taped on front doors of the Hickory Ridge Mall are signs that loitering and firearms are prohibited. Cedric Horton, owner of Xclusive Hair Extensions, flashes an electric “open” sign near the front window. But his store is locked; to enter, customers must first ring a doorbell.

“I’m not letting you in until I see who you are,” says Mr. Horton, who lives in Olive Branch, about 15 minutes south and across the Mississippi border. 

Hope of renewal

But Mr. Horton does open the door. A mother and young daughter walk in, listen to the sound of Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.” from the speakers, and smell the balmy candle lit on his desk: “champagne toast.”

They walk out with a purchase and a bag carrying his trademarked logo, past a table of business cards advertising other stores in the mall and nearby.

“Everybody has their own people that come in,” says Mr. Horton, who opened his business in the mall last year because of its affordable rent. Scarce foot traffic aside, he says, customers know where to find him from his social media presence. 

Businesses like his are what some residents hope could bring renewal. 

Along Winchester Road, there’s blight in the mall’s empty anchor stores. But there are also local businesses. Some, like Ceed Fragrance, expanded by redeveloping abandoned buildings. 

Gestalt Community Schools, which runs the neighborhood charter school, recently purchased an old movie theater, which will be converted into another campus, says Dr. Spencer. The local community development corporation plans to redevelop some 40 acres into affordable housing and retail space. 

“Where other people see trash, we see treasure,” he says. “There is this movement among stakeholders to secure property to secure the narrative.”

In 2019, MICAH held financial summits in areas where incomes are low but property values are rising, drawing interest from developers. Two took place in Hickory Hill. 

“It was one of those places where if Black and brown people weren’t given access to buy property in their own neighborhoods, then outside developers would come in, buy it up from them, and give it back to them as a rental property,” she says.

Capital, she adds, is still scarce for poor and Black Memphians. 

MICAH, like much of the neighborhood’s other activism, began after 2015, when Darrius Stewart – a Black teenager – was killed by Memphis police on New Direction church grounds after an altercation with an officer. A Department of Justice civil rights investigation determined there wasn’t enough evidence to charge the officer. 

The death of Mr. Nichols was another painful moment for the community. It was a reminder to “keep our foot on the gas pedal in terms of justice work,” Dr. Spencer says. “It’s like [the biblical book of Ezekiel], where it says, ‘And that place that used to lie in ruins will now be called the Garden of Eden.’”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Britney Thornton’s name.

In November 1976, eight months into a military dictatorship, Graciela Lois’ husband disappeared. A month later, nursing their 3-month-old daughter, she joined other spouses, siblings, and parents searching for missing loved ones.

Collecting evidence of the dictatorship’s atrocities was dangerous, heartbreaking work. Over the next seven years, an estimated 30,000 individuals would disappear, many tortured and murdered in clandestine detention centers across Argentina.

“We all felt fear,” says Ms. Lois. “But it came second to wanting to know the truth.”

On Sunday, the drama that portrays their real-life courage, “Argentina, 1985,” is up for an Academy Award in the international feature film category. The movie, which leans heavily on actual events that unfolded in 1985, takes place only two years into Argentina’s fledgling democracy. For the first time in history, a civil court condemned and prosecuted a military dictatorship for its crimes – and it was made possible by victims like Ms. Lois, daring prosecutors, and a ragtag team that took great personal risks to ensure democracy prevailed.

Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA

Graciela Lois, of the Argentine victim organization Familiares, speaks at the inauguration of an exhibit at the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, a former clandestine detention center. Ms. Lois says "Argentina, 1985" is for the next generation.

In an era of “democratic recession,” where faith in democracy is faltering worldwide, the film is hitting a chord in Argentina and abroad with those who believe democracy is still worth fighting for. In 2022, 84% of people surveyed globally by watchdog Freedom House said democracy is important for their country, but only 56% said they lived in a democratic country. “Argentina, 1985” offers a poignant reminder: Democracies don’t stand on their own, but require courageous commitment from all.

“It’s not about choosing some official that’s going to make the decisions and tell us what democracy looks like,” says Ms. Lois. “It means collaborating and committing, not waiting and watching as a spectator.” She celebrates the film, but says it’s not for people like her – who lived through the terrors of that dark period – but instead for the younger generations who may need reminding about what is required of citizens for democracy to thrive.

“Democracies work,” she says. “But they work because we make them work.” 

The cost of freedom

Argentina has a strong track record of producing winning films about its dictatorship. But most, like “The Secret in Their Eyes,” which won an Oscar in 2010, focus on the horrors of the “dirty war.” Santiago Mitre’s “Argentina, 1985,” available in theaters here since September, digs into the aftermath.

What stands out is the humanity of its remarkably ordinary protagonists. Instead of seasoned human rights activists or politicians, the film’s heroes are civil servants, youth, victims, and family members of the disappeared, who suddenly find themselves responsible for holding leaders of the dictatorship to account. Their resolve earned the movie a nine-minute standing ovation during its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Amazon Studios

Ricardo Darín stars as Julio Strassera in "Argentina, 1985." In the film, as in real life, Mr. Strassera at first doesn’t want any part in prosecuting the dictatorship’s most powerful military officers. He goes on to head up what would become the world’s first truth commission.

In the movie – as in real life – Argentines had little reason to trust their new democracy in 1985. The previous democratic government had lasted a mere three years before the military took over. So, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the chief prosecutor, Julio Strassera, played in the film by Ricardo Darín, at first doesn’t want any part in prosecuting the dictatorship’s most powerful military officers. He goes on to head up what would become the world’s first truth commission. He and his deputy, who heralds from a family with deep military ties, turn to a loyal band of helpers in their early 20s who don’t have careers to put on the line. They traverse the country collecting evidence for the trial.

One of these young figures is played by Leyla Bechara. The casting crew for “Argentina, 1985” discovered her on Instagram. She’d graduated into the pandemic with a degree in political science, and began posting videos about politics on social media. In preparation for her role, Ms. Bechara interviewed the real people who helped Mr. Strassera collect evidence back in 1985, and she was struck by what she calls their “courageous innocence.” These weren’t revolutionaries.

“But they were certain that something had to be done,” she says. “Sometimes it’s necessary for there to be a group of people who are naïve enough to believe that things really can change – because that’s the way they do change.”

Mariana Papagni/Courtesy of Leyla Bechara

Leyla Bechara, who lives in Buenos Aires, plays one of the young people helping the prosecution in “Argentina, 1985.” The casting crew for the film discovered her through her videos about politics on Instagram.

What worries her in Argentina today is the despair, or worse, the apathy, she sees among peers who have grown disillusioned with the political system. Ms. Bechara says the movie creates space for tough conversations: “It’s motivating, because there’s a history behind you, there is someone who faced worse monsters.”

On a recent Wednesday evening, the movie is not over, but a downtown Buenos Aires movie theater breaks out in triumphant applause along with spectators in the onscreen courtroom following the closing arguments. When the theater lights come up, viewer Norberto Caffieri is flush with emotion, thinking back to 1985 when he was 14 years old.  He says the veil of terror from the dictatorship lasted into the 1990s.

“Young people [today] don’t know how costly their freedom was,” Mr. Caffieri says.

Some do. Alyona, who left Russia for Buenos Aires when the war in Ukraine began, saw the film with a group of Russians also opposed to the war. She cried throughout.

“The movie gives me hope that nothing is forever,” she says, giving only her first name out of fear of retribution for speaking out against Russia. “No dictatorship is forever. Things can change, and there can be justice.”

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Filmgoer Norberto Caffieri pauses after an interview in downtown Buenos Aires in February. “Young people [today] don’t know how costly their freedom was,” he says after watching “Argentina, 1985.”

Never easy

The 1985 Trial of the Juntas was a first step for democracy, but the fight for truth and justice didn’t end there. The dictatorship garnered significant support among the middle class, many of whom were unaware – or in denial – of its crimes.

Were it not for the efforts of organizations like Familiares, of which Ms. Lois is still a key member, and collective memory sites, including former detention centers, Argentina’s history could have been swept under the rug.

Courtesy of Guillermo Rodolfo Pérez Roisinblit

Guillermo Rodolfo Pérez Roisinblit (left) shows a photo of himself and his biological father, who disappeared alongside his mother during Argentina's military dictatorship. He was born in a clandestine detention center and raised by a military family before his biological grandmother, Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit (right), now 103 years old and the former vice-president of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, found him.

Indeed, when Guillermo Rodolfo Pérez Roisinblit learned in 2000 that the family who raised him were not blood relatives, that he had been born to kidnapped parents in Buenos Aires’ most infamous clandestine detention center, he knew little about the dictatorship. His supposed father was in the Air Force, his high school on a military base. Since his biological grandmothers – both part of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo – found him, he has given hundreds of talks nationwide about the human rights abuses that shaped his life. He sees “Argentina, 1985” as a powerful tool for historic understanding, combating the ignorance he still encounters today.

“Every time I tell my story, no matter how many times I’ve told it, it touches another fiber,” says Mr. Pérez Roisinblit, whose biological parents remain missing.

“It has never been easy, but it has always been necessary.”

“Argentina, 1985” is available on Amazon Prime Video. The film, in Spanish with English subtitles, is rated R for language. 

AP

Opposition leader Juan Guiadó (center) arrives for a Feb. 15 political event in Caracas, Venezuela.

Ten years ago, Venezuela had the fourth-largest economy in Latin America, anchored by the largest oil reserves in the world. Since then, its economy has collapsed by more than 86%. More than 1 in 5 Venezuelans have left, forced by economic hardship, persecution, or criminal violence to seek freedom and opportunity elsewhere.

The exodus is an oft-cited measure of the misrule of socialist autocrat President Nicolás Maduro.

Yet the flip side of that picture reveals another story. Nearly 80% of Venezuelans have stayed put, reflecting in part an expectation among many that justice and equality will return.

“The Venezuelan case ... is an example of a country where democratic forces refuse to die,” Amherst College political scientist Javier Corrales said in an Americas Society/Council of the Americas podcast. “And this has meant that autocracy hasn’t really consolidated. There is a story here of hope – that is, the resilience of democratic forces in Venezuela.”

The resiliency has lasted a long time. In 2013, Mr. Maduro inherited the rule of the late Hugo Chávez as well as an economy kept aloft with petrodollars. A crash in oil prices then led him down a harsh autocratic path. A 2018 presidential election resulted in an awkward political cleft. Mr. Maduro claimed victory. Parliament declared his rival, Juan Guiadó, as president, a move backed by nearly 60 countries and followed up with tougher economic sanctions.

Yet last year the winds shifted. A new, leftist government in neighboring Colombia espoused engagement with Venezuela over isolation. The war in Ukraine sent the West in search of new petroleum. International recognition of Mr. Guiadó has fallen off. The Biden administration enabled Chevron to resume limited oil production in Venezuela. Talks hosted by Mexico between the government and opposition parties restarted last fall to prepare for elections next year.

Backed by his patrons Cuba, Russia, and China, Mr. Maduro now seems to be enjoying a new lease. But autocrats have a way of revealing their weaknesses. In January, he pitched new legislation effectively criminalizing civil society organizations and further curbing freedom of speech and assembly.

It isn’t hard to see why. The hope of elections has added to popular demands for change. The Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflicts, a human rights watchdog, counted 1,262 protests during the first 42 days of 2023, a 136% increase over the same period a year ago. Teachers and trade unionists have turned out in swelling protests. “This time we’ve lost our fear,” one protester told Bloomberg.

Such sentiments are echoed in a new book, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator,” by Filipino American journalist and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa. “I refuse to live in a world like this,” she wrote. “I demand better. We deserve better.”

Mr. Maduro may be emerging from international isolation. But his people demand a just and equitable society. By that measure, he has already been handed defeat.