Reordered, Not Dismantled: The Authoritarian Compact in Post-Maduro Venezuela
by Leonardo Carreño, Juan Diego Cubillos, Dorian Kantor
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You can read the article in Spanish on the website of El Espectador.
Democratic Restoration
In the wake of the January 3, 2026 military operation — designated Operation Absolute Resolve — the widespread expectation that Maduro's removal would trigger an immediate democratic restoration has collided with the persistence of a state apparatus that remains, in its essential architecture, intact. Regime change without a political project rooted in the actual exercise of power produces precisely this outcome: a change of faces, not of systems. Last November, ahead of the intervention, we drew on the cases of Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan in
The Hard Power Mirage: The Limits and Risks of a U.S. Intervention in Venezuela to argue that a genuine transition requires not only a clear end-state objective, but institutions capable of sustaining it — and expectations calibrated to its actual intent.
The intervention was framed in the language of narco-terrorism: Trump declared fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction, effectively extending the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force. A December 2025 Government Accountability Office report found, however, that it is Mexican cartels — not Venezuelan ones — that are responsible for virtually all illicit drug flows into the United States. The charges against Maduro do not mention fentanyl once. The public justification and the documented record point in fundamentally different directions.
Delcy Rodríguez's assumption of the interim presidency on January 5 opened a phase best understood as a Washington-supervised transition — one in which the United States opted to collaborate with key figures from the old regime in order to preserve stability and secure access to energy resources. If the stated pretext was narco-terrorism, the operation in practice unfolded more as a transactional economic arrangement.
It is difficult to envision a Venezuela genuinely committed to human rights when Washington is deepening its ties with central figures of the Chavista apparatus. Delcy Rodríguez was not only removed from the Clinton List on April 1 and saw diplomatic relations restored — the President of the United States publicly praised her as a "fantastic person." And yet her record is unambiguous. Between 2018 and 2021, she exercised direct hierarchical control over the SEBIN, the intelligence service that functioned as a political police force against the opposition; a 2020 UN report concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe she knew or should have known about the arbitrary detentions and torture carried out under her supervision. Under this diplomatic umbrella, the repressive infrastructure is not dismantled: it mutates and endures, operated by the same actors who made it possible. Human Rights Watch warned in February that "the repressive apparatus remains intact," demanding genuine reforms under threat of confronting a "false transition."
The passage of the Amnesty Law on February 19, 2026 resulted in the release of 621 political prisoners through early March, but multiple international bodies have warned that the legal machinery and mass surveillance systems that enabled the repression continue to operate. The absence of genuine democratization has pushed the traditional opposition toward mounting irrelevance. On the morning of the operation itself, María Corina Machado declared that "the hour of freedom has arrived"; months later, Trump has publicly questioned her capacity to assume that role, asserting she lacks the necessary support base within the country.
The critical tension is now concentrated on the electoral timeline. While broad segments of the population and opposition leaders believe elections should be held within less than a year, Rodríguez's inner circle has avoided setting dates, prioritizing economic recovery over democratic legitimacy at the ballot box. That stability is not an end in itself — it is the mechanism Washington requires to restructure Venezuela's petroleum industry on its own terms.
Washington has a long tradition in Latin America of trading democratic legitimacy for operational stability and resource access: Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, Panama in 1989. What distinguishes the present moment is not the transactional logic but the candor with which it is embraced. Trump's intervention in Venezuela is not driven by any democratic idealism: it is strategic nihilism. American power is deployed because it can be, dressed in the language of law and order, with no pretension of articulating what comes next. Marco Rubio captured the horizon in a phrase that speaks for itself: a Venezuela that serves "our interests, but also those of the people." The word order says everything.
Energy Interests
Following Nicolás Maduro's capture, it became clear that control over Venezuela's energy resources was not a secondary effect of Operation Absolute Resolve but one of its core strategic objectives. The President himself acknowledged that access to oil had been a central motivation — consistent with his 2023 declaration that the United States should take "all that oil." That admission lays bare the tension between the rhetoric of democratic liberation and what has been characterized as resource imperialism.
The centrality of oil was equally visible in the White House's own political messaging. On February 24, 2026, during his State of the Union address, Trump claimed the United States had already received more than 80 million barrels of Venezuelan crude. However, maritime tracking data and financial analysts' estimates showed that actual volumes mobilized were far below what was proclaimed. That gap between triumphalist rhetoric and available evidence reveals the extent to which Venezuelan crude became part of the narrative through which Washington sought to justify its intervention — commercially and politically.
On January 20, the interim government confirmed receipt of the first $300 million under a supply agreement with the United States. Days later, Rodríguez promulgated a reform to the hydrocarbons law that opened the door for private and foreign companies to assume control of production — dismantling one of the foundational pillars of the statist model constructed under Chávez. While Trump was promising $100 billion in investment, the CEO of ExxonMobil warned that Venezuela remained "non-investable" given the instability of its legal framework — and Trump's response was to threaten to exclude Exxon from future contracts. The episode made clear that the new petroleum architecture was not designed as a conventional business partnership, but as a framework of access conditioned on strategic deference to Washington.
By February, Energy Secretary Chris Wright was reporting sales already exceeding $1 billion, with projections of reaching $5 billion. Yet a substantial portion of those revenues was deposited into accounts overseen by the U.S. Treasury and funds held in Qatar, designated to finance humanitarian assistance and reimburse Washington for the costs of the operation. Venezuela's petroleum wealth is being managed in venues where Venezuelans have no voice.
The Trial of Nicolás Maduro
The proceedings opened in New York transformed Maduro's capture into a new front of political and legal contestation. The charges — narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, related weapons offenses — are not oriented toward establishing accountability for crimes committed against the Venezuelan population, but toward prosecuting an alleged criminal enterprise that purportedly introduced drugs into U.S. territory. The case does not close out the intervention: it extends it by other means, transposing a national security logic onto judicial terrain. The trial should therefore be read not simply as an accountability exercise, but as the criminal translation of a grammar of war — one in which the language of drug trafficking serves to justify legal exceptions and coercive decisions.
But even with a conviction, the proceedings would be unlikely to deliver comprehensive justice. Argentina's extradition request under universal jurisdiction speaks more directly to that gap, by placing crimes against humanity at the center — though its prospects appear slim while Washington retains jurisdictional control over Maduro. The principal face of Chavismo may ultimately be tried not for the full scope of the harm inflicted on Venezuela, but for that portion of that harm which the United States can translate into an offense against itself.
The Transition That Never Arrived
Trump has suggested Cuba could be the next case, and the open conflict with Iran has exposed a self-evident constraint: Washington does not command infinite strategic attention. That shift in priorities represents the real risk for Venezuela. On January 3, many celebrated Maduro's fall as the beginning of a democratic transition; months later, Washington's gaze is moving toward another front while the promised transition remains unrealized.
What has emerged is neither a neoconservative agenda of freedom promotion, nor a nation-building project, nor even a coherent democratic diffusion strategy. It is something considerably older and cruder: a classical exercise in hemispheric dominance recast in the language of counterterrorism and rule of law — an update of the Monroe Doctrine for the era of Trump's imperial presidency. Venezuela has not produced a democracy in transition, but something more perverse: a Washington-certified kleptocracy, in which authoritarianism has been reordered, not dismantled. Meanwhile, the Venezuelans who voted for change — and who saw in Trump a liberator — are still waiting for a liberation that remains nowhere in sight.
