Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro talks to high-ranking military officers on his inauguration day for a third term, in Caracas, in January, 2025.Ariana Cubillos/The Associated Press
Venezuelans are legendary partiers, and the images of dictator Nicolas Maduro in handcuffs aboard a U.S. ship early Saturday morning provided the first excuse in a very long time for a mass celebration – not just on the streets of Caracas, but in Bogota, Buenos Aires, Santiago, New York and places between, where a third of Venezuela’s population has been forced to flee the misery and violence spread by Mr. Maduro’s rule.
But by Sunday, while the rest of the world focused on the legality of U.S.’s President Donald Trump’s stealth military raid and the morality of externally imposed regime change and potential occupation, Venezuelans had begun to ask more sober questions: Had the regime really changed at all? Or was it just the same old far-left “Chavista” administration, the one that had ignored an overwhelming election defeat in 2024 and banned opposition parties from running in the 2018 election, in a more Washington-friendly flavour?
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Had Venezuelans really won their country back – and, importantly, was it the sort of country they could return to?
Mr. Trump’s claim at his Saturday morning press conference that “we’re going to be running” Venezuela and taking control of its oil industry didn’t sound terribly alarming to members of the country’s opposition majority.
Economic and social conditions in Venezuela, for almost anyone except Mr. Maduro’s graft-funded circle of supporters, have become so painful that the prospect of the decimated oil industry being restarted – and thus employment and incomes returning – was far more significant than the technicality of who’d be running it. Even some left-leaning members of this group were apparently willing to accept a Trump intervention as a Faustian bargain.
Venezuela's toppled leader Nicolas Maduro was in a New York detention centre on Sunday after President Donald Trump ordered an audacious raid to capture him, saying the U.S. would take control of the oil-producing nation.
Reuters
Much more alarming was Mr. Trump’s next statement: That Delcy Rodríguez, Mr. Maduro’s vice-president and an ardent Chavista, would be accepted as the ruler of Venezuela, and that he had found her agreeable to work with.
This alarmed even Venezuelans aligned with Mr. Maduro’s politics. “The end of a dictatorship should be a cause for celebration, but today is not a popular victory; it is the imposition of force as the unifying standard,” Juan Jacobo Yepes wrote on Sunday in Aporrea, a far-left outlet that supports the Chavista movement but is often critical of Mr. Maduro’s rule.
Mr. Trump made no mention of Edmundo González Urrutia, who independent international monitors agree won the 2024 presidential election with a two-thirds majority. And Mr. Trump was actively dismissive of Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, the leader of the ideologically diverse coalition behind Mr. González’s victory (Mr. González was considered a proxy for her).
“She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”
Ms. Machado had spent 2025 actively courting Mr. Trump and his circle, and is widely considered the mastermind behind the idea of a military operation to remove Mr. Maduro. But she evidently did not consider other aspects of Mr. Trump’s taste: His disdain for right-wing women (something Germany’s Angela Merkel or Britain’s Theresa May witnessed in his first term), his courting of left-wing dictators (such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko), and his short attention span.
Mr. Trump’s “respect” remark likely refers to Ms. Machado’s lack of influence over Venezuela’s military – and indicates that Mr. Trump and his administration are unwilling to devote the time, money and possibly armed force needed to give Ms. Machado’s elected government such control. That may be good news for those concerned about the prospect of another U.S. occupation, but it also means Venezuela’s illegitimate regime will stay.
“Maduro and Cilia [his wife] fell, but not the dictatorship,” Venezuelan political consultant Enderson Sequera told the opposition-supporting outlet Tal Cual on Sunday. “The transition involves understanding that the country has an elected president, Edmundo González Urrutia, and that an orderly transfer of power must take place.”
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But it remains unclear what Venezuela will transition into. On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio provided a list of conditions for Ms. Rodríguez remaining in power, backed by Mr. Trump’s threat that failure to meet them would cause her to “pay a very big price, possibly bigger than Maduro.”
Most of the conditions were either largely symbolic (such as ending her regime’s nominal endorsement of Iran and other anti-American powers, and its alleged ties to drug gangs) or things she was already doing (such as allowing U.S. oil companies to continue operating there). Notably, they did not include recognizing the election result or making Venezuela safe for the return of its 8 million fleeing citizens.
For now, Venezuelans will be led by something unique to our time: A far-left autocracy propped up by a far-right strongman in Washington.