The Venezuela Paradigm: Is Trump’s Model Intervention a Mirage?
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Fri, 03/27/2026 - 16:26
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The US flag flutters at the US embassy in Caracas on March 14, 2026, ten days after the restoration of diplomatic relations following the capture of ousted leader Nicolas Maduro in a US military raid. Maryorin Mendez / AFP Commentary / Latin America & Caribbean 27 March 2026 17 minutes
The Venezuela Paradigm: Is Trump’s Model Intervention a Mirage?
The startling U.S. seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife for transfer to a U.S. jail has emboldened the Trump administration to flex its military muscle elsewhere. But in Venezuela itself the medium- and long-term consequences of the U.S. action remain uncertain.
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Phil Gunson Senior Analyst, Andes Region
https://twitter.com/philgunson
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Shortly after the new year began, and following months of sabre rattling by President Donald Trump’s administration, the U.S. staged a lightning raid on the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, seizing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and transferring them swiftly to a jail cell in New York. But instead of installing opposition leader María Corina Machado as Venezuela’s new leader, as many might have expected given their mutual affinity at the time, Trump opted to do a deal with Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, leaving her in the presidential palace in exchange for U.S. supervision of oil exports and a broad-brush plan for economic and – at an undefined future time – political change. Throughout, Washington’s touch has been anything but light, and the terms of the new arrangement are stark: Rodríguez will be allowed to remain in power so long as she follows U.S. diktat. Caracas is even expected to get its budget approved by U.S. officials before the proceeds of oil sales are disbursed to the state.The 3 January intervention violated international law, including the UN Charter, and was a shameless display of unilateral muscle flexing. But Washington perceives it as an extraordinary success, particularly as the U.S. suffered no fatalities, lost not a single aircraft bearing its commandos and caused only two civilian casualties. (Almost 80 Venezuelan and Cuban military personnel lost their lives.) The aftermath has also pleased Trump, who has lavished praise on the interim leader: “Delcy Rodríguez … is doing a great job, and working with U.S. representatives very well. The Oil is beginning to flow, and the professionalism and dedication between both Countries is a very nice thing to see”, Trump wrote on Truth Social on 4 March. A few days later, Washington announced that it was re-establishing diplomatic relations with Caracas, which the first Trump administration had broken off in 2019.
Presented by Trump himself as the paradigm for a new era of interventions abroad, the Venezuela experiment is emblematic of a period of immense turbulence in U.S. foreign policy. The seizure of Maduro came just weeks after the White House launched its new National Security Strategy, with a fresh emphasis on asserting control of the Western Hemisphere and its vital resources. Seemingly in preparation for that doctrine, the U.S. built up a massive naval presence in the Caribbean, carrying out 43 attacks both there and in the eastern Pacific on boats allegedly carrying drugs, killing 160 people. Toppling the 67-year-old dictatorship in Cuba might be next, according to Trump himself, a prospect that has led to anxiety there and in neighbouring Caribbean countries, which fear a wave of instability. Simultaneously, the Maduro raid and the move to lay claim to power over Venezuela emboldened President Trump beyond the Americas, sending shock waves around the globe. In the first days after the swoop into Caracas, senior U.S. officials rekindled the ambition to annex Greenland. Pushback from Europe and jittery financial markets stayed Trump’s hand. But the prospect of repeating the decapitation strike on other recalcitrant adversaries and gaining their subsequent compliance continued to tantalise the U.S. president, as he has himself admitted: “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario”, Trump told The New York Times on 2 March in relation to his plans for Iran. The much more expansive U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, which began on 28 February with a missile barrage that killed the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seems in many ways to be the consequence of the Venezuela intervention’s perceived success.
Stability First
In the U.S. president’s eyes, events in Venezuela amount to a victory for the ages and a model for what is to come. But the feelings of most Venezuelans are rather more mixed, even as many are glad to see Maduro gone. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, considered the main architect of the plan to grab Maduro, has laid out a loosely defined three-stage plan for the country: stabilisation, recovery and last of all, transition. Rodríguez’s smooth ascent to power has certainly avoided the violent chaos that many, including Crisis Group, feared could be triggered by a regime change operation. In Rubio’s words, Venezuela has made “good and decent progress” toward economic stability. The threat of a return to hyperinflation has been headed off for now. It is encouraging as well that the Central Bank, which ceased regular publication of most economic statistics a decade ago, released its first inflation data since November 2024. Less encouraging, however, is what the bank reported: annualised inflation remains in excess of 600 per cent, giving Venezuela the highest rate in the world. But if stabilisation, both political and economic, seems for now to be largely on track, it is less evident that the plan’s second and third stages will proceed as smoothly. It will be months, at least, before most Venezuelans begin to feel the effects of economic reforms, and there is no clear evidence as yet that the billions of dollars in inward investment required for a robust nationwide recovery are on their way. “This month is worse than last, and last month was worse than the one before”, said Luis, a driver for a ride hailing company, referring to the growing gap between his income and expenses. He agreed that it would take time for economic improvements to have an impact on ordinary consumers, reflecting most people’s moderate optimism about the future, as seen in recent polls. Even so, it is clear that stores of patience are limited. Over 80 per cent of the country continues to live in poverty, electricity and water cuts are a daily reality, and hospitals and schools are in a decrepit state.Equally uncertain are prospects for a long-awaited transition from authoritarian rule toward a more diverse, competitive political arena, in which differences of opinion can be managed without recourse to violence or coercion. As Rubio himself has made clear, without functioning state institutions and clear regulations, investors will remain leery and the economic recovery will stall. Free and fair elections may not be a sine qua non for the public sector’s ability to galvanise economic growth, but businesses need to know that their property will not be confiscated or their employees subjected to arbitrary detention if recovery and an end to the Venezuelan conflict are to be achieved.
The Dizzying Pace of Economic Reform
Even though most Venezuelans are still waiting to feel the effects, steps toward a more open, investor-friendly economy have come thick and fast. In February, the National Assembly approved a major overhaul of the law governing the oil and gas industry, reversing the 2006 reform by President Hugo Chávez that imposed high taxes and restrictive conditions on foreign private companies. These foreign firms will now be able to produce – and directly market – Venezuelan oil without having to become junior partners in a joint venture with the state, while their tax burden is greatly reduced. Royalties, previously charged at 30 per cent, can be as low as 15 per cent if a higher rate would affect the viability of the project. Combined with other measures, these changes reduce the effective tax burden to around 50 per cent of gross income, compared with the previous 80 per cent. Companies will also be able to refer disputes to U.S. courts. The radical nature of the reform, which puts the clock back to before Venezuela’s oil nationalisation of 1976, startled many experts. Expected future reforms could shrink the role of the state oil corporation Petróleos de Venezuela, turning it into more of an administrative entity while the private sector takes on more of the industry’s operations.As Crisis Group has explained, natural resources, particularly oil, will be central to Venezuela’s medium-term recovery after an economic collapse beginning in 2013 that slashed the gross domestic product by more than 75 per cent. The country has no other industry that can generate the capital required to rebuild infrastructure at scale, and the return of cash-rich multinational companies will be needed if an oil industry devastated by years of corruption, mismanagement and U.S. sanctions is to flourish again. Washington has already issued a series of licences allowing multinationals (and a handful of European firms) to operate in the country despite restrictions on Venezuela’s oil industry.
Expectations of a rapid influx of foreign investment [in Venezuela] so far remain un-fulfilled.
Yet expectations of a rapid influx of foreign investment so far remain unfulfilled. Oil companies have been dismissive of the idea of returning to Venezuela under current conditions. Chevron, for example, the only U.S. oil company that has maintained facilities in the country since 2007, said it will focus on reinvesting profits rather than bringing in fresh capital. With oil prices spiking after the Middle East war started, companies like Shell and British Petroleum are exploring investments in oil and gas on Venezuela’s borders with Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, respectively. But they are unlikely to commit on the basis of short-term price changes alone, and longstanding concerns about political risk, legal stability and infrastructural decay continue to weigh on investment decisions. Exploratory visits by potential investors have nonetheless proliferated in recent weeks. On 24 March, a large group of hedge fund representatives and oil executives met with acting President Rodríguez. Jesse Cole, president of Sky Drop Capital, told Reuters that the country is a “coiled spring of opportunity”.Less developed, but certainly important, are mining prospects. While international interest in Venezuela’s gold and critical minerals reflects their growing strategic importance – particularly amid competition with China – the conditions for large-scale extraction are far less favourable. Much of the country’s resource-rich south remains outside state control, with non-state armed groups dominating mines and adjacent territories. Establishing security and building infrastructure there will be slow and costly, limiting the degree to which the sector can contribute to economic recovery in the short term.
Transition on Standby
On the political front, despite bold headlines, progress is even less evident. Within days of the 3 January incursion, Jorge Rodríguez (Delcy’s brother and the president of the National Assembly) announced the release of “a significant number” of political prisoners. The process turned out to be plodding and opaque, causing frustration among prisoners’ relatives and rights activists, but by 8 March the legal NGO Foro Penal put the number of freed people at 670. On 19 February, the National Assembly approved an amnesty law, which while falling well short of international standards established by the UN, has already led to thousands of pending cases against political opponents being dropped (the government says over 7,000 people have had charges dismissed, but human rights organisations put the number around 2,000). Protests from prisoners’ relatives and human rights groups over a number of aspects of the law have led to procedural changes, such as speeding up the processing of individual applications for amnesty and allowing potential beneficiaries – including those outside the country – to apply through their legal representatives or other third parties. Meanwhile, reform of the judicial system to guarantee its independence and dismantle the repressive apparatus that helped sustain chavismo in its latter years has made no major advances. On 19 February, the interim president revived a much-needed, but hitherto dormant, judicial reform commission. But it remains under the control of Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, as it has been since Maduro created it in 2021. Cabello, who is also in charge of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, is no ideologue and was once regarded, even in opposition circles, as a competent manager. But his intolerance of dissent is on display weekly in his live television program, when he stands behind a desk on top of which sits a bulbous wooden club. Cabello enthusiastically uses this platform to vituperate against whichever dissident has roused his wrath that particular week. Since he runs the police, a swathe of the intelligence services and the much-feared para-police squads known as the colectivos, his diatribes are not mere rhetoric. The NGO Transparencia Venezuela (which was forced to cease operations in the country in 2025 on account of “violence and intimidation” suffered by its members notes drily that the commission’s history “does not allow us to be optimistic” that it will fulfil its original task of ending overcrowding in jails and making the justice system more efficient, let alone purging it of corruption, inefficiency and political subservience. Ever since the 2009 imprisonment and torture of María Lourdes Afiuni, a judge who had dared to order an end to the arbitrary detention of a high-profile prisoner, in compliance with the law but in defiance of then-President Chávez, the judiciary has been completely under the executive’s thumb. Efforts to release political prisoners have in fact revealed that estimates by human rights groups of the number incarcerated fell well short of the real total, in part because of families’ fear of reprisal if they decried arrests. The labyrinthine nature of the penal system in Venezuela, in which no central record of political detainees appears to exist, means that some remain “disappeared” for weeks or months, and that prisoners with judicial release orders are often held because powerful individuals in the state’s forces want it that way, making it hard to reach an accurate assessment of numbers. A prominent human rights lawyer, who has spent months visiting jails in and around Caracas searching for information about “disappeared” prisoners, said details about their whereabouts were systematically withheld. Some have yet to be found. “What’s more, the courts are increasingly beginning to deny amnesty applications”, he added, especially of applicants linked to Machado.
At least 500 political prisoners remain behind bars, and very few military prisoners have been let go.
Prisoner releases, which continue, are to be celebrated. But only when repressive laws are repealed and the judicial, police and military institutions responsible for arbitrary detention and torture are reformed will it be possible to say a transition to a more open, peaceful political system is genuinely under way. Moreover, those still in jail continue to be subject to ill treatment and denied rights – for example, access to legal counsel of their choice and to the case against them – that are enshrined in law. At least 500 political prisoners remain behind bars, and very few military prisoners have been let go.Repressive laws that target legitimate opposition or oversight are still on the books. Among them are those restricting the operations of NGOs by imposing onerous registration conditions that place their financial viability at risk, making dissent a “hate crime” and turning criticism of official institutions into a form of treason. Registering an independent party or NGO remains impossible; ordinary citizens can be thrown in jail for long periods for what they write on social media; and trade union activity is in effect outlawed. Opposition political parties have almost all been deprived of their legal status by the Supreme Court and the electoral authority, and many of the country’s leading opposition politicians are among the hundreds still banned from standing for office. Censorship also remains in place, despite tentative signs of increased tolerance. In the weeks since 3 January, the government telecommunications agency National Telecommunications Commission (known as Conatel) has closed four independent radio stations, compared with seven in the whole of 2025. On the other hand, the appointment of a new Conatel chief with experience in the sector has come as heartening news, while independent media outlets have been allowed access to parliament and the presidential palace for the first time in many years. But as Carlos Correa of the human rights group Espacio Público put it in testimony before the Inter American Human Rights Commission on 11 March, progress on press freedom remains “precarious and reversible”.Perhaps the main cause for celebration with regard to the justice system has been the demotion to acting human rights ombudsman of Chief Prosecutor (fiscal general) Tarek William Saab. A major cog in the machinery of judicial repression, Saab is a former legislator and state governor for the ruling party who, according to the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, “led the state action that resulted in human rights violations” following the 2024 presidential election, in which Maduro fraudulently claimed victory. The mission concluded that Saab was part of the “government’s repressive apparatus to give a semblance of legality to the serious human rights violations committed”. The process of naming a replacement is unlikely to end with the appointment of an independent chief prosecutor, but it could mark a step forward in efforts to dismantle the coercive state apparatus.
The State of the Opposition
Opposition leader and Nobel laureate Machado, who has said she will return to Venezuela but remains abroad, has derided the political process triggered by the U.S. intervention. She has described the Rodríguez government as a “corrupt regime” and says the National Assembly decisions are null and void because it was elected in 2025 under a rigged system. She scorns the opposition wing that decided to participate in that year’s regional, local and legislative elections, branding them as government collaborators for contradicting her advice to abstain after her candidate saw victory snatched from his hands following the 2024 presidential poll. Asked about efforts by opposition figures with seats in parliament to negotiate with the government, Machado’s close ally Delsa Solórzano responded curtly, “We are the opposition”, adding that “certain things are non-negotiable”. This inflexibility, and the Trump administration’s fear that Machado would derail plans for a transition by mounting protests that might trigger a hardline backlash from the government and its forces, has cooled her relationship with Washington. Trump and Rubio are reportedly seeking to dissuade Machado from returning to the country in the immediate future. Instead, she has mounted an international tour, with the first stop in Chile, where she attended the 11 March inauguration of right-wing President José Antonio Kast.
The [Venezuelan] government is ... adamant that [Maria Corina] Machado and her allies are traitors whose political rights cannot be restored.
Opinion polls suggest that, for now at least, Machado retains the support of a substantial majority of Venezuelans and would win a free election were one to be held. Understandably, therefore, she has been pushing for a vote as soon as possible, saying nine or ten months would be enough time in which to organise one. Other sectors of the opposition think an election should be the culmination of a complex process that has barely begun, and which would necessarily have to include not only root-and-branch reform of Venezuela’s politically subservient institutions, but also an agreement on political guarantees that the incumbent government will demand if it is to hand over power. For now, the government is in any case adamant that Machado and her allies are traitors whose political rights cannot be restored. A push for immediate elections in these circumstances risks, at best, repeating the 2024 debacle, in which Machado was not allowed to stand and the opposition was unable to overcome Maduro’s manipulation of the tally.The government has nevertheless taken a few halting steps in the direction of a negotiated political opening. These include the presidential Commission for Democratic Coexistence and Peace, a handpicked body with a scattering of moderate opposition members, as well as a political reform commission under Assembly chair Jorge Rodríguez, which met once but has not reconvened. Additionally, a cross-party parliamentary commission is overseeing the amnesty law. Progress has been sporadic in all these spaces, however, and even those who insist on giving the new administration the benefit of the doubt acknowledge that these various commissions are not representative of Venezuelan public opinion.That said, should Machado and her supporters continue to boycott the tentative political opening offered by the government, whether for fear of reputational damage or out of justified scepticism that chavismo is acting with any sincerity, they risk derailing the process entirely. Despite the defects, these are steps in the right direction. If they were to be overturned, the likelihood is that Venezuela would return to little more than sterile confrontation.
A Strong Counterweight
Scholars have pointed out transitions can only be defined as such once they are over – or at least substantially complete. History suggests democracy often proves elusive: Venezuelans had to wait over a decade after the end of the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (who ruled from 1908 until 1935) to bring Rómulo Gallegos, the country’s first popularly elected president, to power. Gallegos was then overthrown after just nine months, and democracy was only fully established after another dictator, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, fell in 1958. While the Venezuela of March 2026 is clearly different in many respects from that of December 2025, there is no guarantee that the pace of change will be maintained or that the country’s longstanding political conflict will finally be arbitrated via the ballot box. If a genuine political transition is under way in Venezuela, it is being led – like it or not – by the siblings Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez, acting to a greater or lesser degree at the behest of Washington. It is logical to assume that they want to remain in power, taking advantage of what is likely to be a period of economic growth and – perhaps – political stability to bolster their own position and even win a free election, if convening a vote becomes inevitable. They will no doubt be counting on U.S. demands for a return to democracy remaining in the background as Trump’s transactional approach to foreign affairs remains ascendant, the credibility of the U.S. military threat (already considerably diminished with the dispersal of the forces that acted on 3 January) recedes, and his administration weighs the risk of instability against the economic and geopolitical benefits it is already obtaining from Venezuela.
The missing piece of the puzzle … is a strong, unified democratic movement capable of articulating the demands of the majority of Venezuelans.
The missing piece of the puzzle, for now, is a strong, unified democratic movement capable of articulating the demands of the majority of Venezuelans and acting as both a counterweight and a negotiating counterpart to the powerful forces that have the means to resist change. The potential components of such a movement, including the political parties, lack resources – both human and material – and are in urgent need of rebuilding. They include the labour unions, the NGO sector and the student movement. All are showing signs of revival, but they need to come together quite quickly around a set of demands that put pressure on the Rodríguez government as well as establish a basis for negotiations and a degree of distance from Trump. For now, not only is there no consensus on the if, how and when of a transition, but there is also no clear and universally accepted mechanism for negotiating such an agreement.Much has improved in Venezuela since 3 January. The government is beginning to loosen its hitherto iron grip on the economy and permit a measure of political freedom that is slowly producing a more open public debate. Relations with the U.S., but also with Europe and Venezuela’s regional neighbours, have improved markedly and the country feels less isolated. But by far the greater part of the pending task still lies ahead.
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