Ding ding ding - this guy got it right when the supposed "IT professional" couldn't.  Sites are blocked by tampering with DNS so lookups lead to the wrong IP or are blackholed. Meanwhile, IP, which is operating on a whole different layer, is untouched. The content filter doesn't block routes, it changes the destination addresses associated with domain-names; so when the guy who clearly IS from Venezuela creates a tunnel to a network in another country (for our purposes we'll say the US) where the VPN host is located, his computer is now using their correct DNS server instead of the ISP's tampered one, and so his lookup requests return the real IP addresses for the domain names and the sites are accessible.