Last month, the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the country’s largest opposition coalition resumed negotiations to address Venezuela’s decades-long crisis. Maduro, who succeeded Hugo Chávez as president in 2013, has rebuffed opposition attempts to remove him from office as Venezuela slid into economic and humanitarian catastrophe. In a first step toward a political solution, at an October 17 meeting in Barbados, the delegations signed a set of agreements establishing plans for a competitive presidential election in 2024. Although the United States is not formally a party to these negotiations, Washington has indicated that it would ease the economic sanctions it began imposing in 2017 if the Maduro administration made democratic concessions to the opposition. Indeed, the day after the breakthrough in Barbados, the U.S. Treasury Department suspended some of its sanctions on Venezuelan oil.

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But disagreements that could derail the negotiations emerged almost immediately. The main point of contention is the ban the Maduro government has imposed on some opposition candidates’ participation in elections. The main opposition coalition named one of the banned politicians, María Corina Machado, its presidential candidate after she won a decisive victory in a primary election on October 22. The Office of the Comptroller General—nominally an independent entity but in practice controlled by Maduro—accused Machado of filing false financial disclosure statements in 2014 while serving as a legislator. Machado has denied the accusations.

Candidate qualification was not the only issue the Barbados agreement left unresolved. The deal included hardly any concessions from the Maduro government that would make a free and fair election possible. Venezuela’s electoral council, which tallies the votes for all elections, is still dominated by Maduro’s allies; strict media censorship largely keeps opposition views off the air; and government loyalists continue to have preferential access to public employment and social programs. On top of this, sanctions relief will deliver Maduro around $10 billion in additional revenue—more than one-tenth of Venezuela’s GDP—just in time for the government to increase its spending ahead of the elections.

American foreign policy hawks were quick to criticize the easing of sanctions as too great a concession to Maduro. Their criticism, however, misses the mark. Washington’s support for the Barbados deal is an overdue acknowledgment that previous U.S. efforts to push Venezuela back toward democracy have failed. In fact, with each unsuccessful attempt, the Venezuelan opposition has grown weaker. The deal the opposition signed last month is a near carbon copy of one it turned down in 2018, a clear illustration of its limited bargaining power.

Initially, the United States promised to reverse its sanctions relief if the Maduro government did not begin to lift candidate bans and free political prisoners by November 30. Just before the deadline expired, Venezuelan negotiators announced that disqualified candidates would be able to petition the country’s Supreme Court. The decision offers little hope for Machado’s candidacy, however; the government clearly does not want her to run for president, and the Supreme Court rarely rules against the government.

In any case, the United States likely will not walk back its easing of sanctions. The Biden administration’s priorities appear to be normalizing relations with Venezuela, stemming migration flows, and clearing the way for the country’s oil industry, which controls the world’s largest reserves of oil, to once again be a reliable supplier to global markets. 

For the past five years, Washington and its Venezuelan partners have been insisting that Maduro step down. Dropping that extreme demand is a welcome development. But as the current negotiations proceed, focusing narrowly on the conditions of the 2024 presidential election would be a mistake. The country’s winner-take-all political system and economic instability virtually ensure continued confrontation between the government and its opponents. The talks that began in Barbados must therefore evolve into a broader conversation about national reconciliation. By taking regime change off the table, all parties can enter negotiations with more modest but, ultimately, more workable goals for humanitarian relief and economic and political reform. Venezuela’s conflict may seem intractable, and achieving even slight progress toward resolution will not be easy. But leaders in Caracas and Washington owe it to Venezuelans to........

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