Jose Pereira was ready to retire.
He was in his final weeks as CEO of CITGO Petroleum, one of the most prominent Venezuelan-American executives in the energy industry, and he had booked what he believed would be his last official trip to Caracas. Routine business. A proper sendoff. The kind of closure a long career deserves.
He never made it back.
In 2017, as the Trump administration imposed sweeping sanctions on Venezuela and Nicolas Maduro’s regime grew increasingly paranoid about foreign interference, Pereira and five colleagues were detained. The accusation: they were American spies. The evidence: none that would survive scrutiny in any court operating under rule of law. The sentence: no formal sentence at all, because no legitimate trial ever occurred. Just detention, indefinite and total, in a country that had transformed in the span of two decades from Latin America’s wealthiest nation into one of its most desperate.
Pereira spent five years in Venezuelan custody. He came home in 2022 without a career to return to, but with a framework for human functioning under extreme conditions that he had built, tested, and refined across half a decade of captivity. That framework is what he has spent the years since his release trying to articulate, share, and teach to other leaders.
What he learned is not what most leadership programs teach. It is something more fundamental: what the mind needs to remain intact when the normal structures of professional life, status, autonomy, information, and future planning, are stripped away entirely.
The Architecture of Helplessness
In his first year of captivity, Pereira was still operating like a CEO.
He was accustomed to being the person with the most information and the most leverage in any room. He was trained to identify problems, develop solutions, and coordinate action. So from inside a Venezuelan detention facility, he tried to run his own rescue operation. He analyzed the geopolitical situation. He developed theories about which officials could be pressured or persuaded. He gave instructions to his family on what they should do, who they should contact, how they should escalate.
His family thought he had lost his mind.
They were not wrong, exactly. He had not lost his sanity, but he had lost his model for how the world worked. A CEO operates on the assumption that the right analysis followed by the right action produces the right outcome. That assumption is never fully accurate even in a functioning corporate environment, but it is accurate enough to be useful. In Venezuelan political detention in the Maduro era, it was not accurate at all. The outcomes were determined by forces that had nothing to do with Pereira’s analysis or his family’s actions: by geopolitical negotiations between governments, by the calculations of a regime using American executives as leverage, by the patience of diplomats working channels Pereira could not see.
The breakthrough came when he accepted this reality rather than fighting it. He could not control his release. He could not manage his rescue. He could not optimize the situation from inside it. What he could control was narrower and more immediate: whether he slept, whether he exercised, whether he prayed, whether he maintained enough mental clarity to remain himself rather than becoming one of the men he watched deteriorate around him.
Once he accepted this division of the world into what he could and could not influence, his captivity became, in his own telling, more bearable. Not easy. Not acceptable. But bearable. He gave external advocacy to his family. He gave physical and mental health to himself. He stopped trying to cross between domains.
“There are things that people maybe cannot control,” he has said, “and there are things that they can control. For example, try to take care of themselves.”
The Processing Speed of Hope
Pereira observed something consistent across his fellow detainees: the ones who adapted fastest to captivity were the ones who processed the reality of their situation most quickly.
This is not an intuitive finding. One might assume that the most effective coping strategy was to deny the severity of one’s circumstances, to tell oneself that this was temporary, manageable, certainly not what it appeared to be. But Pereira saw the opposite. The men who spent weeks or months in denial, who could not move past the initial shock of detention into some productive relationship with their situation, suffered more in the long run than those who moved through shock into a kind of grim acceptance relatively quickly.
The newspaper taught him this lesson personally. In the early days of his detention, during a period in a courthouse waiting room, a handyman handed him a newspaper. The front page carried the story: six American CITGO executives, accused of being spies. Pereira saw his own name in print as an enemy of the Venezuelan state.
Something in him shifted. The story was large enough that someone had written it, published it, and distributed it before he had even arrived at his destination. This was not a misunderstanding that would be corrected tomorrow. This was a situation with political dimensions, official characterizations, and a life of its own that existed entirely outside his ability to manage it. Understanding that clearly, even though the clarity was painful, gave him something more useful than the fog of disbelief: it gave him a starting point.
“Slow processors suffer,” he has observed. “Fast processors adapt.”
The leaders he saw break most completely under captivity were those who could not move from denial to adaptation. They consumed themselves raging against the injustice, demanding explanations, refusing to accept the premise of their situation. The injustice was real, the demand for explanation was reasonable, and the refusal was entirely understandable. But none of it changed anything about the situation, and the energy spent on it was energy not available for the work of remaining intact.
The Luggage That Waited
In year four of his detention, an ambassador visited to discuss potential negotiations for Pereira’s release. The conversation was not definitive, not a promise of freedom, but it contained something concrete: evidence that the matter was actively under negotiation, that the U.S. government was working toward a resolution, that the situation was not forgotten.
After the ambassador left, Pereira called his wife.
He asked her to bring him a carry-on bag.
She assumed he was losing his mind.
He was not. He knew he had no idea when he would be released, and he had learned better than to place his sanity on predictions about timing. But he had received something he had defined as the threshold for belief in a concrete outcome: observable evidence that his release was being actively pursued. Hope, he had decided, was not a feeling. It was a conclusion drawn from evidence. You could not manufacture it from nothing without sliding into delusion. But you could maintain it as long as you could point to facts that supported it.
The carry-on bag was not an expression of optimism. It was a practice. Every morning, for a full year, Pereira took out the bag and told it to be ready. He talked to it. He prepared it. He made it real, physically present, the object that would leave with him when he was released. One year after he started the ritual, he walked out. The bag came with him.
“Never lose the faith,” he has said since. “Believe it. See yourself when you’re released. See yourself out. See yourself freed.”
This is sometimes characterized as visualization, the psychological practice of imagining desired outcomes in vivid detail. But Pereira’s version has a specific structure that distinguishes it from wishful thinking. The visualization was anchored to concrete evidence of possibility, not to abstract desire. He did not talk to the bag because he felt hopeful. He talked to the bag because he had seen an ambassador, which was a fact, and facts supported the conclusion that release was coming. The ritual maintained that conclusion through daily reinforcement when the immediate circumstances of detention offered nothing else to support it.
What the Five Men Around Him Taught About Leadership
Pereira spent his years in captivity surrounded by other political prisoners: former military officers, members of Congress, religious leaders, business executives. These were not ordinary inmates. They were people who had, in one form or another, been consequential figures in Venezuelan public life before Maduro’s regime became hostile to anyone who had ever held power, expressed dissent, or simply been in a position of influence that the regime now wanted to vacate.
The shared experience of detention produced a particular kind of intimacy. There are no status signals in a prison cell. There is no prestige hierarchy, no organizational rank, no reputational scaffolding that survives a detention order. What remained was character, and Pereira had five years to observe character under conditions that stripped everything else away.
What he observed confirmed something he had believed before his detention but understood more deeply afterward: the leaders who remained themselves under extreme pressure were those who had oriented their identities around something other than their organizational roles.
The men who had defined themselves primarily through their positions, through the authority they had exercised, the decisions they had controlled, the deference they had received, found captivity most destabilizing because captivity took away everything their identity depended on. The men who had grounded themselves in family, faith, intellectual curiosity, or a sense of purpose that existed independently of their professional functions had more to stand on when everything professional was gone.
This has obvious implications for how executives think about their own development, and less obvious implications for how they think about developing others. An organization full of people who understand themselves entirely through their organizational roles is vulnerable in ways that are not visible in normal operating conditions. The vulnerability becomes apparent precisely when circumstances become abnormal: during crises, restructurings, market collapses, or any situation that disrupts the normal operation of the organization and strips away the role definitions that people depend on for their sense of who they are.
The Venezuela That Exists Now
In January 2026, United States forces captured Nicolas Maduro and brought him to Manhattan to face narcoterrorism charges. Pereira watched the news with a particular combination of vindication and complexity that only someone who had spent five years as Maduro’s prisoner could feel.
His assessment of the capture was direct: “The only way that this regime was taken out was the way Trump did it. There was no other way.” He characterized the event as divine justice. But he was careful, in conversation after the news broke, to distinguish between the immediate fact of Maduro’s removal and the longer process of what comes next.
Venezuela is not one thing. It is at least two things that exist simultaneously and experience the same political events differently.
There is the Venezuela inside the country’s borders, where millions of people who remained through 25 years of authoritarian deterioration are navigating a transition that is occurring while the regime’s instruments of social control, the colectivos, the militias, the paramilitaries that Maduro built to enforce his rule, remain operational. The people in that Venezuela feel fear. Their hope is cautious because the apparatus of repression that shaped their daily lives has not vanished simply because its patron was arrested.
There is the Venezuelan diaspora, more than nine million people dispersed across South America, North America, Europe, and beyond, watching events in their former country from positions of geographic safety but emotional intensity. They feel uncertainty and skepticism, not because they lack hope for Venezuela’s future, but because they have watched the collapse of a wealthy nation unfold in real time and understand that political transitions do not automatically reverse institutional decay.
On the question of economic recovery, Pereira is cautiously optimistic and specific about why. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves. It has substantial gold and coltan resources. It operated a functional modern economy within living memory. The Apertura Petrolera of the 1990s, when Venezuela opened its petroleum sector to international investment, demonstrated that American energy companies including ExxonMobil and Chevron were ready to invest at scale when the political conditions permitted it. Those conditions are now changing.
“I’d say that the economic recovery could come relatively fast,” he has said, “but the cultural transformation is going to take a generation.”
The distinction matters and deserves emphasis. Economic activity can restart when investment arrives. Infrastructure can be rebuilt when capital flows. But 25 years of a regime that systematically dismantled civic institutions, educated a generation in a specific ideological framework, and cultivated a culture of dependency and resentment does not reverse itself when a government changes. Cultural transformation, the rebuilding of the social trust, civic competence, and shared values that a functional society requires, takes approximately the time it takes to raise and educate a generation of children who never lived under the regime.
The model Pereira points to is South Africa after apartheid: a society that chose truth, reconciliation, and forward orientation over retribution, and managed a transition that many observers had predicted would collapse into violence. Venezuela will need its version of that process, and it will need figures who can embody and lead it. Pereira believes Maria Corina Machado, the opposition leader who won Venezuela’s 2024 primary elections with 93 percent of the vote, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, and was banned by Maduro from appearing on the ballot, will eventually serve as president. “She’ll be president,” he has said simply. “She deserves it.”
The Servant Who Leads
What Pereira has carried out of five years of imprisonment is a particular theory of leadership that stands at some distance from most contemporary frameworks.
He describes it as servant leadership, but with a precision that the term does not always receive when it is used as a generic affirmation of nice management behavior. For Pereira, servant leadership is not about being pleasant or accommodating or deferential. It is about the sequence of concerns: what a leader holds as primary versus secondary when those concerns conflict.
“The true leaders are those that are empathetic and are human centered,” he has said. “The servant leader.”
He came to this conviction not through reading management theory but through watching what happened to human beings under extreme duress. The leaders who held authority through hierarchy and title lost it instantly when the hierarchy was dissolved and the title was worthless. The people who retained influence among their fellow prisoners were those whose authority had always rested on something the detention order could not take: on the quality of their attention to other people, on their demonstrated capacity to put others’ wellbeing ahead of their own comfort.
That kind of authority turns out to be portable in a way that organizational authority is not. It travels across the dissolution of hierarchies because it was never dependent on them.
For young leaders, Pereira’s advice is specific rather than general. Identify what you actually care about rather than what rewards signal you should care about. Map where you want to end up, not as a title but as a human being. Connect with people as people rather than as functions, resources, or means to organizational ends. Never stop pursuing your goals, not because persistence is morally virtuous, but because the evidence of his own life suggests that what seems impossible can eventually become actual.
He runs his consulting and advisory practice through joseconnect.com and his humanitarian nonprofit, Angels Helping in Earth, through angelshelping.earth. Both extend the same basic project: translating five years of extreme experience into frameworks that help other people navigate the ordinary and extraordinary difficulties of their own lives.
Key Takeaways
The most important insight from Jose Pereira’s five years of political imprisonment is also the most transferable: the recognition that the world divides into what you can influence and what you cannot, and that the error of trying to control uncontrollable things is not merely inefficient but actively destructive to the capacity to manage controllable ones.
Leadership development programs rarely teach this principle because it is uncomfortable. It requires acknowledging limits on individual agency that run against the cultural narratives most organizations promote. It suggests that some situations cannot be improved through cleverness, effort, or sufficient application of executive will, which is a message that does not sell well in a culture oriented toward optimization and control.
But the leaders who maintain integrity under genuine adversity, under conditions that strip away all the normal supports and signals and status markers that executive life provides, are those who have learned to make this distinction before they need it. Pereira made it in his second year of captivity, under conditions that forced the lesson. The leaders who absorb it earlier, voluntarily, through reflection rather than through crisis, carry it more lightly.
Hope is not sentiment. It is a conclusion drawn from evidence. The ritual of the carry-on bag worked not because it created feelings of optimism but because it anchored a reasoned conclusion in a physical practice that maintained that conclusion through daily reinforcement. Leaders who can build evidence-based hope during crises, and maintain it through ritual and routine when the evidence is thin, demonstrate a psychological competence that is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable.
Cultural transformation requires generational patience. The economic arguments for Venezuela’s recovery are reasonably optimistic. The cultural arguments require a longer timeline and a different kind of institutional effort. The same principle applies in organizational contexts: changing the behaviors that a culture produces is faster than changing the underlying culture, and changing the underlying culture is faster than changing the assumptions so deeply embedded that most members of the culture cannot name them.
Notes for Leaders, Strategists, and Students of Resilience
Pereira’s experience with the division between controllable and uncontrollable domains maps closely onto Stoic philosophy’s distinction between what is “up to us” and what is not, formulated by Epictetus, himself a former slave who developed his philosophy under conditions of extreme powerlessness. The parallel is worth noting: the framework that helped Pereira survive Venezuelan imprisonment is a practical application of ideas that have been tested under conditions of captivity and powerlessness for more than two millennia.
The pattern Pereira observed, that fast processors adapt while slow processors suffer, has empirical support in the psychological literature on trauma and resilience. The capacity to move through denial and bargaining into acceptance, in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s formulation, does not mean accepting that a situation is good or right. It means accepting that it is real, which is the prerequisite for responding to reality rather than to one’s preferred version of it.
On Venezuela’s political transition: the post-Maduro period is unfolding in real time as of this writing. The structural conditions Pereira identifies as favorable for economic recovery, the world’s largest proven oil reserves, historical relationships with American energy majors, and a diaspora that retains both technical expertise and emotional investment in the country’s future, are real. The structural challenges he identifies, the colectivos, the institutional decay, the cultural reconstruction project, are equally real. Anyone analyzing Venezuela’s prospects should hold both sets of facts simultaneously.
The Angels Helping in Earth organization (angelshelping.earth) represents Pereira’s direct translation of his experience into institutional form. The nonprofit works on trauma recovery and leadership development for communities affected by political persecution and displacement. It is worth attention from philanthropic organizations and impact investors who think seriously about the long-term human costs of political violence and forced migration.
Jose Pereira speaks and consults on leadership resilience, Venezuela’s political and economic transition, and servant leadership principles. He can be reached through joseconnect.com. His humanitarian work continues through angelshelping.earth.
