The Venezuelan crisis is often framed in Northern scholarship as a binary struggle between authoritarianism and democracy or as a peripheral arena of the so-called Second Cold War. Such framings appear persuasive at first glance, yet they obscure deeper structural dynamics that become visible when the crisis is examined from a South American perspective. The crisis reveals the erosion of a regional project designed to preserve autonomy in defense and security. What is at stake is not only the fate of a regime, but the dismantling of an institutional architecture that once allowed the region to manage its own crises.

The unilateral military operation carried out by the United States on 3 January 2026, which resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro, crystallized this process. That intervention did not emerge in a vacuum. It became possible because South America had already dismantled the political instruments capable of containing escalation and preventing the externalization of regional crises. The normalization of direct military intervention marks a qualitative shift in the regional security environment and exposes the costs of privileging ideological alignment over institutional solidarity.

The internationalization of the Venezuelan crisis is neither inevitable nor simply the result of domestic authoritarian drift. It is the outcome of deliberate regional choices, especially the abandonment of the Union of South American Nations and its Council of South America Defense. By trading institutional constraint for short-term ideological convergence, South American governments surrendered control over their immediate strategic environment and reopened the door to extraregional intervention.

South American efforts to construct autonomous security arrangements long predate contemporary ideological divides. Early projects of regional coordination were driven less by opposition to the United States than by strategic necessity. Initiatives such as the Congress of Panama in 1826 emerged from fears of European reconquest in the aftermath of independence. At that moment, the United States was perceived not as a threat but as a potential partner in a hemispheric defensive arrangement.

The original interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine reflected this expectation. Many Latin American elites understood it as a collective shield against external powers........

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