When U.S. forces swooped into Caracas in January to seize President Nicolás Maduro, many Venezuelans inside and outside the country rejoiced. Maduro’s ouster seemed to signal the imminent end of a regime that had for years oppressed and immiserated its people. Thanks to bold U.S. action, a government that had rankled its neighbors and sowed instability in the region now appeared destined to fall.

But something peculiar happened. Unusual in the long annals of U.S. intervention in Latin America, the United States removed the dictator but kept the dictatorship. In the past, when Washington decided to intervene militarily to remove a regime, it delivered. Except perhaps for the foiled 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, U.S. military actions in Latin America catalyzed change, deposing regimes or defeating foes in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and elsewhere. Democracy did not always follow, but the United States did remove its adversaries. In Venezuela, however, the United States got rid of Maduro but left in place his party and allies. Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, has become the country’s president. Venezuela’s long-suffering opposition now has reason to fear that Washington will do little to advance a meaningful political transition in the country.

U.S. President Donald Trump is in no hurry to dislodge the old order now that Venezuela under Rodríguez is accommodating Washington’s economic interests. U.S. oil companies have received licenses to resume operations in the resource-rich country, and according to the White House, the United States has already received tens of millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil. “We have a great situation going over there, with a wonderful president . . . Delcy,” Trump said in March. “And she is doing a great job, and they are all doing a good job.” He also welcomed back to the White House that month the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025. She had come to seek clarity about Trump’s plans for democratization and a political transition in Venezuela; in January, she had bestowed on Trump her Nobel medal—an award he has publicly craved for years. But in March, Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered Machado little in the way of assurances, advising her not to return to Venezuela for the time being.

Democratization may very well not be on the horizon. The Trump administration is not prioritizing a political transition in Venezuela. The regime in Caracas already insists it is running a democracy. By officially styling Rodríguez as merely an “interim president,” the regime avoids the constitutional requirement of holding an election quickly to find a successor for Maduro. It has offered no timeline for future elections. Venezuelans could reasonably conclude that although their country’s relationship to the United States has changed, their government’s relationship to its people looks likely to remain the same.

But political liberalization is still possible. Maduro’s removal means the long-awaited end of the regime’s original rulers: the founding fathers of the dictatorship, Hugo Chávez and Maduro, are truly gone. Chávez died in 2013, and Maduro is now in a U.S. jail awaiting prosecution on charges relating to drug trafficking. The chances of a country’s democratization tend to increase when the founders of that country’s dictatorship disappear. The regime’s heirs end up facing forms of internal turmoil and unforeseen incentives that can precipitate political change. Venezuela’s own history offers examples of this process: democratic transitions eventually occurred after the long-ruling general Juan Vicente Gómez died, in 1935, and after the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez was deposed, in 1958.

Despite the current unpropitious circumstances, Venezuela could still return to democracy. It would happen slowly, traumatically, and most likely as the result of cracks within the dictatorship and continued inventiveness and doggedness on the part of the opposition. The problem is that those seeking greater democracy and freedom in Venezuela now face another challenge that their predecessors did not: they will likely have little help from the United States.

PERESTROIKA WITH NO GLASNOST

When U.S. forces extracted Maduro, they achieved what a decade of economic and diplomatic pressure could not: the removal of a brutal autocrat. The operation was, in some ways, a recognition that the policy of “maximum pressure” through economic sanctions had failed. Only a spectacular abduction managed to bring Maduro down.

The operation was impeccably executed. In a matter of hours, U.S. forces found, captured, and whisked away Maduro and his wife without suffering any American fatalities. The United States brushed aside Venezuela’s military defense systems, with Venezuelan officials essentially watching the incursion unfold, unable or unwilling to respond. It was the first overt U.S. military operation against a ruler in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama—and probably the cleanest ever operation of its kind.

And yet the outcome of the operation was far murkier. The democratic opposition did not surge into the halls of power. Washington kept the dictatorship in place, belying the notion that the central motivation for action in Venezuela was to bring about regime change. Maduro’s number two, Rodríguez, has become Trump’s number one person in Caracas. As the new, U.S.-recognized president of Venezuela, she has retained all the institutions she inherited from Maduro and many hard-line members of the ruling party. Rather than regime change, this is regime preservation. Rather than dismantling the coercive apparatus that Maduro built, the United States has allowed it to endure.

This outcome is very odd. Every U.S. president since George W. Bush has decried the atrocities committed by the rulers in Caracas. Trump was probably the loudest critic, and his criticism was justified. Venezuela has the worst human rights record in Latin America: close to 20,000 politically motivated detentions since 2014, according to nongovernmental organizations; the widespread use of torture; a reliance on thuggish paramilitary groups to repress protesters and plunder neighborhoods; and deep ties with drug traffickers, criminal gangs, gold smugglers, shell companies, and even foreign guerrillas. Under Rodríguez, the regime has released some political prisoners in recent months and replaced some Maduro loyalists in the cabinet, but the state’s repressive apparatus remains unreformed.

The United States removed the dictator but kept the dictatorship.

In January, the Trump administration announced a three-stage plan for Venezuela that consisted of first stabilizing the country, then guiding an economic recovery, and only after that encouraging a political transition. This proposed sequence is unusual. Trump reversed the typical order of priorities in regime transitions. Most Venezuelans outside the ruling party wanted the country to embrace democratization first and then turn to economic reform. Trump has focused entirely on economic matters and almost exclusively in relation to extractive industries, allowing democratization to slip down, and perhaps altogether off, the agenda.

The content of the plan is also disquieting. The first stage, stabilization, seems particularly perverse. The Maduro regime was already delivering a form of stability through systematic repression, paramilitary violence, and the control of political prisoners. For the Chavista elite, hearing a call for “stability” from Washington could easily be interpreted as a license to continue with business as usual.

The second stage, economic recovery, aligns comfortably with what the dictatorship has long sought: respite from its economic plight through significant new investment in its oil sector. The problem with prioritizing recovery before transition is that a recovery could provide the dictatorship with resources to survive. The Maduro regime plunged Venezuela into an unprecedented economic collapse: some estimates suggest that his tenure saw the Venezuelan economy contract by more than 70 percent. This implosion was the result of disastrous economic policies, mismanagement of the oil sector, and, starting in 2019, comprehensive oil sanctions imposed by the United States. Since the early 2020s, the regime had been desperately seeking a way out of the crisis and out of the chokehold of U.S. sanctions.

Now, the Trump administration has provided the regime with an economic path forward: a detailed plan to rebuild its oil economy, sell oil to the United States, and attract foreign investment. Reports suggest that U.S. officials, along with executives from U.S. oil corporations, even helped design Venezuela’s new hydrocarbons law—the most important economic reform introduced since Maduro’s removal. The law, which allows private companies much greater access to Venezuela’s oil sector, is highly favorable to foreign investors, partly because it reflects their input. It will likely usher in the largest wave of investment Venezuela has seen in its oil industry since the boom of the early 2010s. That might lead to greater consumption, but this injection of capital into the economy on its own will not pave the way for real development. By prioritizing oil and mineral extraction while leaving all other economic institutions intact, the United States is effectively reinforcing an economic model in which foreign and local elites capture rents from the export of natural resources yet do not channel profits into other productive activities, encourage greater economic efficiency, incentivize innovation, address inequalities, or become more accountable. Even if guided by the U.S. State Department, such an economic model will only benefit some Venezuelans.

The post-Maduro regime would have preferred not to make so many economic concessions to the United States, but its leaders are aware that they have much to gain from accommodating the Americans: Washington is effectively bailing Caracas out. That is why the Venezuelan legislature approved the law swiftly, less than a month after Rodríguez assumed power, and without much protest.

If the second stage outlined in the U.S. plan—the attempt to revive Venezuela’s economy—has come with detailed conditions imposed by the United States, the third stage—a political transition—lacks detail. U.S. officials have spoken of a political transition, but they rarely mention democratization. They have vaguely mentioned holding elections at some distant date but have not even discussed any negotiations about timelines or, more alarming, the institutional reforms needed to ensure that future elections are free and fair.

Such reforms would need to include measures that create an independent electoral board, organize party primaries, repeal laws that repress political activity, legalize banned political parties, dismantle the state’s coercive apparatus, ban torture, abolish the secret police, restore freedom of expression and freedom of the press, and invite international observers to monitor the polls. Unless these details are ironed out, any future elections could unfairly grant the ruling party an ostensible victory at the ballot box and provide only the mirage of democratization.

The current arrangement between Washington and Caracas involves liberalizing the economy exclusively for the oil and mineral sectors, while postponing any meaningful political reform. This might be called a partial perestroika and a delayed glasnost, borrowing from the Soviet-era Russian terms for economic restructuring and political reform, respectively.

Opposition groups have been reduced to spectators.

This partial perestroika has clearly been designed with U.S. oil companies in mind. Many oil executives have supported Trump’s election bids in the past decade. The U.S. Treasury has issued licenses allowing U.S. firms to trade in Venezuelan oil, make upstream investments in the country’s oil industry, and embark on contract negotiations with the Venezuelan government. To be sure, the U.S. oil industry isn’t entirely sold on the current outcome in Venezuela. For U.S. oil majors to truly reap the rewards, they first need to make huge investments in Venezuela to repair the crumbling oil infrastructure—but at the moment, they do not seem eager to do so. In addition, Venezuela’s new law still stipulates that the state oil company must be part of all oil operations, a major win for Rodríguez but a condition that may lead to widespread corruption to the benefit of the regime. Understandably, many U.S. investors seem wary of getting entangled in Venezuela. Without their investments, it could be a while before U.S. firms enjoy the potential oil gains of Trump’s Venezuela gambit.

The delayed glasnost, of course, benefits the ruling party in Venezuela. The regime has had to sacrifice some dignity by making concessions to the United States that it finds ideologically unpalatable, such as granting the White House control over oil export revenues. But it has also scored important wins. Rodríguez got a promotion; she is now president. And the state oil company remains a key actor in the oil industry, allowing Rodríguez to extend her tentacles into whatever new business grows between Washington and Caracas. She also won a great legitimizing partner in the United States, which, despite the unpredictability of the Trump administration, is now a major guarantor of stability in Venezuela. Rodríguez also secured a potential path out of economic misery. She can sell oil to the United States at market prices, access international credit, and oversee an economic recovery that she hopes will allow her party to recover politically. And the U.S. government appears to have accepted the regime’s most important demand of all—the exclusion of the opposition from any power sharing.

The biggest losers, of course, are Venezuela’s democratic forces. In addition to Machado, opposition groups across the political spectrum have been reduced to spectators. They have been excluded from negotiations between the regime and U.S. officials and given no clear timeline for the promised transition.

Trump likes to say that Washington is in full control of Caracas. But in reality, the United States faces a significant “principal-agent problem” in its dealings with Venezuela. To use a corporate analogy, Trump has contracted out Rodríguez to act as his agent in Venezuela, but the agent’s interests and methods—surviving in office, dealing covertly with mafia organizations, maintaining secret ties with other powers, and relying on deceit and repression—are matters that the United States cannot easily control. If the Venezuelan government does not reform its criminal justice system and repressive apparatus, the United States will not be able to encourage the protection of human rights in the country. If Caracas does not create greater transparency in its electoral processes, Washington will not be able to ensure a future free and fair election. And if Venezuela’s state oil company is not reformed, U.S. officials will have little control over how the regime manages the economic recovery.

GRADUALLY, NOT SUDDENLY

U.S. officials have made some noises about ushering in political reform in Venezuela. Rubio mentioned shortly after the removal of Maduro that Venezuela could copy Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, in 1975, but the Rodríguez regime has taken few steps to replicate that model. In that transition, the heirs to the regime immediately legalized all opposition parties and unions, signed pacts of power sharing and mutual tolerance with the leading political parties, and designed a new and democratic constitution. Four months after Franco’s death, his heirs proposed disbanding the old legislature, which was controlled by his supporters. Elections took place less than a year after Franco’s death. This was big-bang democratization, a souped-up version of glasnost. But the United States and its partner in the Venezuelan regime seem intent on moving much more slowly.

Given this lack of urgency, the best that proponents of democracy in Venezuela can hope for is a kind of democratization that proceeds incrementally. Instead of a sudden overhaul, the regime would agree to more circumscribed reforms, such as sharing oil revenues with opposition groups, dismantling the coercive apparatus, abolishing some of the most repressive laws, and reforming a few governing institutions. This opening could give the opposition new opportunities to exert more pressure on the regime and win more reforms.

Mexico liberalized in this gradual way in the 1990s and early 2000s. Three decades ago, when it faced a huge debt crisis, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) chose to take incremental steps. First, it focused on fixing the economy through privatization and formalizing trade openness with the United States under the North American Free Trade Agreement, not unlike what Venezuela might be pushed to do under Trump. It then agreed to minor political and electoral reforms that initially did not appear too threatening to the regime. These included professionalizing the electoral supervisory board, strengthening judicial independence, and ensuring greater funding for an array of political parties. Those institutional reforms proved monumental: they made it harder for the PRI to manipulate electoral rules, allowed its leaders to get comfortable with the possibility of ceding power, and further incentivized opposition parties to pressure the regime at the ballot box.

To be sure, these Mexican reforms occurred at a time when international actors—the United States, Canada, European partners, and even newly established democracies in South America—were all pressuring Mexico to embrace democratization. In the wake of the end of the Cold War, many regimes felt compelled to democratize. Today, by contrast, democratic backsliding and illiberal populism are more common. Few international actors are willing to expend political capital to encourage democratization.

But the Mexican case is not simply a story of the benefits of outside pressure. Domestic forces played a crucial role. Opposition groups denounced corruption, demanded greater electoral transparency, and competed (rather than abstained) in every electoral opportunity they could. In this regard, Venezuela has a huge advantage. Unlike in other dictatorships such as Cuba and Nicaragua, the democratic forces in Venezuela were never fully defeated. During the Biden administration, Venezuela’s democratic opposition recovered substantially under Machado. And more important, Machado and her team have demonstrated that they know how to mobilize voters. Her new challenge is to persuade the ruling party that if it were to lose electorally, it would not lose everything. This may require the opposition to signal its willingness to engage in some type of power sharing with the ruling party, however ethically repugnant it might be to make concessions to the regime that has inflicted so much pain on the Venezuelan people.

Pressure for liberalization could also come from within the regime. Despite its survival under Rodríguez, the regime remains decrepit and somewhat directionless, focused mostly on guaranteeing its survival. No dictatorship is a monolith. Factions within the regime have, in the past, sought to take a more soft-line approach on various issues, particularly when dealing with dissent. Often, the regime severely repressed these soft-liners, leading to the imprisonment of several military officials and leaders of the ruling party or their defection to the opposition. Now that Venezuela’s security ties with Cuba, which helped the regime surveil and scrutinize its own members in the past, have weakened, the government may be less able to repress the soft-liners. These moderates could reorganize and persuade Rodríguez that the best chance for the regime’s survival is a move away from repression.

Venezuela’s own history, not just that of other countries, offers important lessons. During the reign of Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s, the refusal of the ruling authoritarians to liberalize led to their overthrow. Pérez Jiménez’s faction became irrelevant after it was ejected from power. By contrast, the socialist opposition of the time, known as Democratic Action, agreed to moderate its policies and sign a power-sharing deal with its opponents, the so-called Punto Fijo Pact of 1958. This move allowed Democratic Action, which won elections in 1958, the ability to govern with impressive stability, free of major insurrections and coups. Chavistas could consign themselves to the irrelevance of Pérez Jiménez’s faction, or they could recognize that in the face of low popularity, a smart strategy is to negotiate with the opposition and, in the event of electoral defeat, establish the terms of their survival as an opposition force.

Obviously, the odds of this sort of change remain slim. Venezuela is not on the verge of turning into the Mexico of the 1990s or the Venezuela of the late 1950s and 1960s. Their starting points are vastly different. Small steps brought Mexico, a country that could be described in the 1990s as a semiautocracy, closer to democratic rule. Such small steps won’t be sufficient in today’s Venezuela, which can very much be described as a hard autocracy.

An incremental process will also be difficult to put in place. The regimes of Mexico and Venezuela in those past eras were not as brutally coercive or as deeply tied to criminal enterprises as the current Venezuelan state. The regime is trying to gain time, not strategize about how to survive and recover as an opposition force. Furthermore, the population’s hatred of the current ruling class makes a managed, gradual transition very difficult for many Venezuelans to tolerate. And of course, in the case of Mexico, a crucial external actor put pressure on the PRI to accept democratic reform: the United States.

One of the most significant works about Venezuela in the late twentieth century is The Magical State by the Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil. The book argues that Venezuela’s oil riches always give its rulers the illusion of wealth, convincing them that everything can be fixed with the lucre that comes from oil. This delusion distorted realistic assessments of the country’s conditions and needs.

That magical illusion has now entered a new phase, seeping well beyond Venezuela’s borders. Many Americans, particularly within Trump’s MAGA base, think that the Venezuelan problem has been fixed. Trump is under the impression that he runs Venezuela. The regime still in power in Caracas also operates under the assumption that a mere change in its foreign policy—becoming friendlier to the United States—is enough to placate its critics.

As Washington turns on the oil taps, the political system remains padlocked. But the entire state apparatus is dilapidated, and the ruling party is demoralized. Its leaders are massively unpopular and viewed as illegitimate at home, even if they currently enjoy Washington’s indulgence. Opposition forces, as well as factions within the regime, can sense those weaknesses. And they could find ways to pressure the regime to effect meaningful change or, alternatively, destabilize it from within.

The opposition can still find ways to outsmart the government.

In addition to fighting the dictatorship, the opposition now must push the United States to help secure it a place at the table. But it also knows that the dictatorship has absorbed a tough blow with the removal of Maduro and that citizens are less convinced of the regime’s strength. Democratic forces can still challenge the regime, even in unfavorable conditions.

The opposition did so in 2024 when it managed to defeat the regime, which had tried to heavily rig the elections. Of course, the state apparatus clamped down and ignored the verdict of the ballot box, but the episode was a reminder of the popularity of the opposition and the fragility of the regime. Even if Washington does not encourage the overhaul of political rules in Caracas, the opposition could find ways to outsmart the government. The regime never managed to abolish elections. It rigged them, no doubt, but never eliminated them. At some point, it will have to offer elections, which will not be free and fair. But the opposition could repeat some of the strategies that worked well for it in 2024: participate in elections (even if they appear rigged), encourage electoral unity (even if the opposition is ideologically diverse and fragmented), discourage abstentionism (even if people are tired of voting), and work to monitor the polls (even if that invites the brutality of the state). Through such action, the opposition can push Venezuela toward democracy.

The United States wants Venezuela to be a stable petrostate that could, in time, become a cash cow for U.S. firms. The dictatorship in Venezuela has realized that it can deliver exactly that outcome while keeping the United States from demanding more meaningful change. This arrangement could help the dictatorship stay in power for years to come. It is now up to opposition forces to find ways to pressure both the United States and the regime. No one else is coming to their rescue.

You are reading a free article

Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access.

Paywall-free reading of new articles and over a century of archives

Six issues a year in print and online, plus audio articles

Unlock access to the Foreign Affairs app for reading on the go

Already a subscriber? Sign In

© Foreign Affairs