The significance of events can often be diluted by hyperbole, but it is no exaggeration to describe the US decision to mount a military operation to seize Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, as a seminal moment. Not since Panama’s dictator Manuel Noriega was extracted by US troops in 1990 - also on 3 January - has the US staged any comparable military intervention in Latin America. This will send shockwaves through the region and beyond. Widely reviled in Latin America as providing justification for unilateral interventionism by the US, and assertion of hegemony in its backyard, the Monroe Doctrine is very much alive and kicking again as a central tenet of US foreign policy. Venezuela’s future is unclear but the US government plans to use coercion to compel the Bolivarian regime, shorn of its leader, to do its bidding, focusing, in the short-term at least, on oil rather than restoring democracy.
The US had amassed a huge armada off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, with military strikes on suspected narcoboats for several months ratcheting up the pressure on the Venezuelan regime, and on Maduro in particular; the US had doubled the bounty on his head to US$50m in July last year, accusing him of leading the Cártel de los Soles, which it designated as a foreign terrorist organisation. The US alleges this is a drug-trafficking organisation led by high-ranking officials in the regime, who deny its existence. In recent weeks the US had also begun seizing oil tankers that were under sanctions off Venezuela’s coast.
US President Donald Trump had been saying for some time that land strikes would follow. But the Venezuelans appeared to be completely taken by surprise by Operation Absolute Resolve, which unfolded in the early hours of 3 January with the bombing of military infrastructure in and around Caracas, swiftly overcoming the air defences purchased at great expense from Russia. Special forces then stormed a compound in the Fuerte Tiuna military complex in central Caracas where Maduro was based, overwhelmed his largely Cuban security detail and flew him and Flores out by helicopter to a waiting warship for onward transit to the US.
Trump authorised the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela in October. Maduro’s movements and routines were closely tracked by a CIA team, with reports that it had used an asset inside his inner circle to pinpoint his precise location. While this claim sows distrust within the regime, the ease with which Maduro was taken, with no loss of life sustained by US military personnel, however great their proficiency, points towards some kind of high-level complicity. The lack of a subsequent power struggle has also prompted speculation that a deal might have been negotiated as the regime remains intact, with the US revealing that it would work with Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez as the country’s new leader.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi said on social media that Maduro would “face the full wrath” of the US justice system. He appeared in a New York courtroom on 5 January charged, inter alia, with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and possession of machine guns and destructive devices. The US Department of Justice revised an earlier indictment against Maduro, cutting the vast majority of references to the Cártel de los Soles, and Maduro’s alleged role within it, and focusing instead on his role “atop a corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking”. Maduro protested his innocence and insisted he had been kidnapped.
What next for Venezuela?
Trump said the US would “run” Venezuela “until such time as a proper transition can take place”. He was vague on how it intends to do this beyond saying that it would work with Rodríguez as she has “no choice”, suggesting the existing regime would be kept in place sans Maduro but that it would now cooperate with the US. Rodríguez, who the Venezuelan supreme court (TSJ) has appointed as interim president, moved to disavow this, accusing the US on state television of kidnapping Maduro and of seeking “regime change in Venezuela…to capture our energy resources, mineral resources, and natural resources”, prompting Trump to threaten her with a fate “worse than Maduro’s” if she failed to play ball.
In various media interviews, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to clarify Trump’s remark that the US would “run” Venezuela, suggesting that in practice this would mean bringing huge pressure to bear on the regime to adopt policies deemed acceptable by Washington. He was also unfazed by the tough rhetoric of Rodríguez, saying he would judge her by her actions and not her words. Notably, Rodríguez has lurched between forcefully condemning the US and asserting that it is a “priority” to move towards a “balanced and respectful” bilateral relationship.
Rodríguez has to play to different audiences at home and in the US. She is at the head of a regime espousing 21st century socialism, the core ideological premise of which for over two decades has been irrevocable opposition to US imperialism. If she deviates too far from this she could face a counter-coup. Within the regime’s tangled web of factions and alliances she is essentially a figurehead of its civilian wing along with her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, the head of the national assembly and next in the line of succession. This means her survival depends on preserving the loyalty of the military and the colectivos, armed paramilitary groups with a reputation for using violence to enforce the regime’s social and political control, and to avoid violent clashes breaking out between armed factions vying for power.
Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López has pledged his support for Delcy, and the top brass is likely to align behind her, but factions of the military, roundly humiliated by the extraction of Maduro, could object to the new course being chartered and rise up, especially if there is a perception that their influence in the regime and extensive control over lucrative legal and illicit economic activities is under threat. The often heavily armed colectivos embedded throughout society are more disparate and less predictable. Many owe allegiance to Bolivarian strongman Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister, who also controls the intelligence agency (Sebin), which is presided over by his cousin Alexis José Rodríguez Cabello.
- Cabello
The Trump administration has warned Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello that he could be next if he fails to provide support to preserve order and stability in Venezuela and assist President Delcy Rodríguez to meet US demands. Rival factions have managed in the past to set aside their differences in the interests of preserving the regime, but the internal and external pressure has never been this pronounced before, especially given the suspicion that some senior figures in the regime could merely be keeping up the pretence of anti-imperialist rhetoric to preserve their credibility within the regime.
While Venezuela has seemed preternaturally calm since Maduro was seized, Diosdado Cabello has been trying to organise street protests in defence of the Bolivarian Revolution, which could be construed as an attempt to keep the pressure on Delcy not to stray too far from its credos and start kowtowing to the US. At the same time, she must wrestle with the geopolitical reality Venezuela faces of becoming a client state of the US, amid an ever-present US military threat and economic strangulation through a maritime blockade and continuing seizure of oil tankers to cut off the government’s primary revenue source.
Rubio placed an emphasis in media interviews on the US use of “leverage”, using its navy presence to “seize any sanctioned boats coming into or out of Venezuela loaded with oil”. He said that would continue “until the people who have control over the levers of power in that country make changes”. Rubio elaborated upon this after addressing the US Congress on 7 January on Maduro’s seizure. He said the US would implement a threefold plan of stabilisation, recovery, and transition.
Rubio focused primarily on the first stage, saying that sanctioned oil would be sold and distributed for profit. “We are going to take between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil…sell it in the marketplace…and control how it is dispersed in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people, not corruption, not the regime”. He provided no details on how the regime will function if it is starved of cash or how this money would reach the Venezuelan people and nothing at all on the transition.
While much of the Venezuelan population will have celebrated the demise of Maduro, the US preparedness to work with the regime and sidelining of the opposition will have come as a disappointment, and Venezuelan public support for US intervention could quickly fade if the focus shifts to perceived plundering of its oil wealth rather than the restoration of democracy, with no prospect of political prisoners being released and no timeframe for elections being held.
Trump promptly dismissed the idea of the opposition figurehead and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado assuming office, saying she lacked “support” or “respect” in Venezuela. Machado enjoys widespread popularity in Venezuela, although it is true that as power resides with the regime she would not be able to provide stability.
Genuine regime change, imposing an opposition-led government, would come with a far greater risk of violent internal conflict. History is littered with past examples of US regime change failures, which may in part explain why the Trump administration has opted against trying to oust a regime that controls all of Venezuela’s institutions, pointedly the military and co-opted judiciary, and impose an opposition which is weak and fragmented, with many opposition figures imprisoned or exiled.
Trump instead has placed the focus squarely on oil rather than the restoration of democracy. He unambiguously stated that “very large US oil companies” would “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure...We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela…and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused by that country”, an apparent allusion to past nationalisation of Venezuela’s oil industry, and “that money will be controlled by me”.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, with an estimated 303bn barrels. While the US produces vast quantities of oil through fracking, this is light crude oil. Venezuela produces heavy crude, which US East Coast refineries need for making diesel, aircraft fuel, asphalt, and petrochemicals. But Venezuela’s oil industry is in a parlous state. Crude production has declined dramatically from around 3m barrels per day when Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) came to power at the head of his Bolivarian Revolution to 800,000 bpd now.
Even if US oil companies flood in, enormous investment in decayed infrastructure is needed, with oil industry experts estimating that it will take well beyond the end of Trump’s term in 2029 to drive up production to 2m bpd. At present, the large majority of Venezuela’s crude exports go to China as payment-in-kind for substantial loans amounting to upwards of US$60bn to the Maduro government. China has large quantities of sanctioned crude in floating storage and should be able to replace the loss of Venezuelan oil imports with Iranian or Russian crude, but it could be left shouldering a big debt while losing a key ally in the region.
The Trump administration has been seeking to reduce China’s influence in Latin America and will be hopeful that the shift to the right in recent elections in the region should help in this regard. Upcoming presidential elections, especially in Colombia in May, could give an indication as to whether stoking resentment at US interventionism in the region is a vote winner and could hinder the Trump administration’s strategic objective.
What next for the region?
Maduro’s government was authoritarian and illegitimate, with little doubt that it stole the 2024 presidential elections, and it was responsible for egregious human rights violations, but his seizure by the US government is problematic. Not just from the perspective of international law and the huge uncertainty for Venezuela but also for the potential repercussions as a result of its forceful assertion of primacy in the region after years of comparatively benign neglect.
It’s only a few short years since President Barack Obama promised an “equal partnership” with Latin American countries and consigned the Monroe Doctrine to history. Now it has been revamped. “They now call it the ‘Donroe Doctrine’, Trump said, adding that it had “superseded [the Monroe Doctrine] by a lot”. Trump said “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again”, or as Rubio put it “This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live — and we’re not going to allow [it] to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States.”
Trump proceeded to warn Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro to “watch his ass” or he could suffer the same fate as Maduro. He also said the US might need to “do something” about drug cartels “running Mexico” and that “Cuba is going to be something we’ll end up talking about”. Trump’s comments, in the immediate wake of the US military’s operation in Venezuela, will have caused profound disquiet across the region that a new age of US unilateral interventionism has dawned.
- Could Cuba be next?
“If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned,” Secretary of State Rubio said after the US military operation in Venezuela. Rubio said the Cuban regime was in “a lot of trouble”. The economy is already in dire straits and widespread power outages will be exacerbated as subsidised oil supplies from Venezuela are likely to dry up. Cuba also suffered the heaviest losses in the US military operation in Venezuela. Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz Canel said 32 Cubans, members of the armed forces and intelligence services providing Nicolás Maduro’s security detail, had lost their lives, in an indirect acknowledgement of the scale of Cuban involvement in Venezuela’s security apparatus.
Drugs have been cited as a pretext for intervention in Venezuela and other geopolitical goals. On the one hand, the Trump administration has made the eradication of drug cartels a central pillar of its foreign policy, designating them as foreign terrorist organisations. On the other hand, Trump decided last month to pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández (2014-2022), a political conservative who was sentenced in US courts to 45 years in jail for drug trafficking during the administration of Joe Biden.
This points to a degree of policy inconsistency. However, it is consistent once again with Trump’s staunch support for ideological allies and brings to mind former US president Franklin Roosevelt’s possibly apocryphal comment in 1939 on Nicaragua’s dictator Anastasio Somoza – “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”. This has long been cited by the Latin American left as a pithy axiom expressing what they see as a guiding principle of US foreign policy: support for a litany of anti-democratic strongmen and authoritarian regimes in past decades to secure national interests. Maduro was not Hernández, choosing to ally himself with traditional US adversaries such as China, Iran, Russia, and particularly Cuba.
UN response
In an emergency session in the United Nations on 5 January Secretary General António Guterres said in a statement that he was “deeply concerned about the possible intensification of instability” in Venezuela. While acknowledging that democracy had long been “undermined” in Venezuela, he also underscored the importance of respecting the principles of sovereignty, stressing that “the power of the law must prevail”. Guterres had previously warned that the US had set a “dangerous precedent” for the world order.
