Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado greets supporters in Maturin, Venezuela, in July, 2024.Matias Delacroix/The Associated Press
One thing almost everyone agrees on: The world would be much better off if Nicolás Maduro and his regime were driven out of office.
The Venezuelan President, whose 12-year rule has become a corrupt military-backed dictatorship after his refusal to accept the loss of two elections, has destroyed and plundered Venezuela’s once-prosperous economy, plunging an estimated 20 million people – more than two-thirds of the population – into “multidimensional poverty” and 14 million into serious malnourishment.
He has effectively forced more than 8 million to flee and often live terrible, stateless lives on the road or in hiding, a flood of human misery that has created political crises up and down the Americas. He has murdered and tortured thousands in death-squad attacks. He has permitted, and perhaps assisted in, the spread of terrifying organized-crime cartels across the region.
In short, Mr. Maduro is this hemisphere’s biggest problem. On that, there is agreement. The question is whether Venezuelans and their allies should persuade Donald Trump and the U.S. military to do the job for them – or whether getting Washington involved would permanently end the possibility of a democratic transition in Caracas, and plunge the country into a generation of even deeper polarization and misery.
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It’s far from an abstract question. This week, the United States moved an aircraft carrier and its strike group into the Caribbean Sea, following weeks of legally questionable attacks on alleged drug-smuggling vessels and amid reports that Mr. Trump’s inner circle is divided on the issue. One faction wants to use threats of force to persuade Mr. Maduro to step down or strike a deal; another, dominated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and adviser Stephen Miller, wants to bring about regime change using a military invasion.
Before 2025, you wouldn’t have bet that Mr. Trump would turn hostile toward the Venezuelan strongman. After all, he is prone to making friends with nominally left-wing dictators – witness his boastfully chummy approach to North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un or his friendly overtures toward Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko. And in fact he continues to work behind the scenes with Mr. Maduro, including striking a deal this summer to keep the U.S. oil giant Chevron operating freely in Venezuela despite sanctions.
Then Maria Corina Machado came along. Long before she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month for her democratic organizing efforts, she sought to strike a Faustian bargain with the MAGA movement. In the first week of January, weeks before Mr. Trump assumed office, she flew to Washington and met the president-elect, Mr. Rubio and other figures. She reportedly persuaded Mr. Trump that Mr. Maduro was controlling the Tren de Aragua gang and its drug exports (at least partly true) and that he was responsible for sending a flood of migrants, including many gang members, into the United States (untrue). And she convinced at least some of them that it would be a profitable move for Washington to engineer Mr. Maduro‘s ouster.
This approach has deeply alarmed some in Venezuela’s multiparty democracy movement. Unlike in highly polarized countries such as Chile or Argentina, Venezuela’s governments until the late 1990s were moderate social democratic or centrist, and the authoritarian-left movement launched by Hugo Chavez was not matched with a Washington-backed hard right.
Ms. Machado, who in the early 2000s raised eyebrows by accusing Mr. Chavez of being a Cuban-style autocrat, was described as “a niche figure” in the democracy movement well into the 2010s. Her unpopular blend of economic conservatism and social liberalism – she is among the few Venezuelan politicians who endorse same-sex marriage – attracted less than 5 per cent in polls. But other parties attempted to strike deals with Mr. Maduro, and lost credibility. Ms. Machado is almost universally understood to have won the presidential election last year (with her proxy Edmundo González on the ballot, after she was banned from running).
Even some more left-leaning opposition figures have tolerated her courtship of the Trump movement, as an act of desperation against a deeply entrenched Maduro regime.
Yet there’s a real possibility that U.S.-led regime change, either by force or by coercion, would produce an even worse outcome.
“There’s not enough thought being given to post-Maduro scenarios,” Brazil-based political analyst Oliver Stuenkel said in an interview this week. “You could have the military substituting Maduro for someone who basically keeps the regime in place. And you could also have internal conflict … Military intervention would inevitably delegitimize the incoming government, because it would be seen as dependent on the United States.”
Nicolás Maduro and his military backers need to be defeated by the Venezuelan people. The democratic world needs to support and fund them. But there is nothing to cheer when its own worst representatives try to do the job for them.