Is the U.S. Pushing Venezuela toward a Brink?

To many officials in Washington, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro appears to be on the ropes. The U.S. military has built up its largest naval deployment in the southern Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis of the 1960s, blown up small boats allegedly carrying drugs, and sent an aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R.Ford, to the region. In October, President Donald Trump authorized the CIA to mount covert operations in venezuela. Top members of Trump’s team insist that Maduro is losing his grip on power and will soon either resign or be ousted by his own military. As James Story, the former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, told Politico the Trump administration sees three options for Maduro: “Exile him, extradite him, or send him to meet his maker.”

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October, is equally confident about Maduro’s imminent downfall. “With or without negotiation, Maduro is leaving,” she said in an interview after she was granted the award.Machado has been vocally supportive of the U.S.military pressure on Maduro, even as she insists that a full invasion of Venezuela will not be necessary. “Maduro started this war, and Trump is finishing it,” she declared this month. Top government figures in Venezuela are certainly aware of the growing possibility of targeted U.S. drone, rocket, or missile strikes. Trump has long claimed to advocate restraint in foreign policy, but the United States’ attacks on iranian nuclear sites in June sent a message that the administration is willing to intervene beyond U.S. borders.

A clear majority of Venezuelans want Maduro gone. But the assumption that forcefully overthrowing the current government will lead to a smooth transition to democracy is hazardous. Venezuela is full of armed groups that would resist the regime’s collapse and undermine any effort to restore the rule of law. Generals currently loyal to Maduro might install an even more repressive leader. Without a viable strategy for what comes after the government falls, ousting Maduro could lead to even greater repression and hardship for Venezuelans.

Rather than attempting to force Maduro to fold at gunpoint, Americans and the opposition shoudl focus on the only strategy likely to lead to a lasting, peaceful transition: complete, internationally backed negotiations. Such talks would be challenging, and they would take time. With a $50 million bounty on his head, an outstanding U.S. grand jury indictment for drug trafficking, and an ongoing examination by the international Criminal Court for possible crimes against humanity, the Venezuelan president knows he is safest staying where he is. The conditions for diplomacy, simply put, are not yet in place. But violent shortcuts are only likely to make matters worse.

HARD-LINERS ASCENDANT

the main opposition has not always been hawkish. Control has oscillated between hard-liners and moderates over the past two decades. But in 2014,when Machado was still a relatively minor political figure,she and two prominent opposition politicians broke with the moderate leadership to pursue what they called the exit or “the way out,” which led to months of mass demonstrations designed to pressure Maduro into immediately stepping down. Maduro responded with a brutal crackdown in in which 43 people died. Similar mass protests in 2017 and 2019 met with similar results. Machado thus concluded that removing Maduro required foreign military intervention.

Other senior opponents of Maduro disagreed. The opposition’s U.S.-backed parallel government, which claimed to be the legitimate leadership of Venezuela from 2019 to 2023 though it had little sway, incorporated both moderates and hard-liners. Machado, who remained on the sidelines, bitterly criticized this interim government for what she saw as its reluctance to call for a regional intervention force to overthrow Maduro under the terms of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, better known as the Rio Treaty, a hemispheric collective security pact that Venezuela signed in 1947 but which Maduro has publicly rejected.

The collapse of the interim government at the end of 2022 and the flight into exile of its leader, Juan Guaidó, left most of those associated with it discredited. Machado’s independent stance and perceived integrity saved her from that fallout. Despite her long-standing preference for direct action over electoral competition, she sensed an chance to become the leader of the opposition through the ballot box. In Oct

The risks of Regime Change in Venezuela

For years, the international community has sought a resolution to the political and economic crisis in venezuela. While the removal of Nicolás Maduro is frequently enough presented as a straightforward path to stability, a closer examination reveals a complex web of potential risks and unintended consequences. Replacing Maduro isn’t simply about installing a new leader; it’s about navigating a volatile landscape of armed groups, entrenched interests, and a deeply fractured society.

One significant concern is the potential for a power vacuum and the rise of even more repressive forces. While the United States and other nations might prefer a democratic transition, there’s no guarantee that the opposition will coalesce around a moderate figure. If the opposition were to determine that Maduro is a liability and move to replace him, there is no reason to believe that its first choice would be to empower opposition hard-liners such as Machado. One possible outcome is the installation of an equally repressive-and perhaps even less competent-regime.

The fall of Maduro could also empower Venezuela’s patchwork of nonstate armed groups, including Colombian guerrillas and criminal gangs. These powerful organizations fear what might come after the current regime and are likely to resist any restoration of the rule of law. The National Liberation Army, a Colombian Marxist guerrilla group that first took up arms in the 1960s, may have thousands of armed combatants in venezuela. To the extent that these fighters are held in check under Maduro, it is because of the organization’s alliance with the current government.

The same applies to other armed groups. The so-called collectives-bands of armed civilian thugs who serve leading politicians-are entrenched in several major cities. Despite Trump’s claims,Maduro is not the head of the infamous Tren de Aragua,a powerful criminal network that has spread across the Venezuelan diaspora over the past decade and that Trump has officially designated as a terrorist group. But government officials have benefited from close relations with the gang. After Maduro became president in 2013, his government began trying to curb a soaring murder rate by signing nonaggression pacts with Tren de Aragua and other armed groups, an arrangement that ultimately allowed them to become more powerful. Recently, Chilean prosecutors asserted that Caracas hired gang members to assassinate an exiled Venezuelan dissident.

It is unlikely that all military officials would back Machado if she won power.

The precarious stability between these groups and the government would be likely to collapse with maduro’s exit,especially if change were to come suddenly and challenge the hold that the president’s allies have on the levers of power. As Juan González, a former top adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden on Latin America, has noted, conditions in Venezuela are ripe for protracted low-intensity warfare.This could make Venezuela look more like Colombia or Mexico, rife with selective assassinations, bombings, and occasional street battles, yet lacking the kind of stable elected government that exists in Bogota.