Maduro Is Gone—Venezuela’s Dictatorship Is Not
Bloodied and humiliated, the regime could turn even nastier.
First things first: the stunningly audacious raid that extracted Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Venezuela is a genuinely history-making victory for Donald Trump. At a cost of zero American lives, the United States captured a singularly destructive force: a dictator whose record of criminality and misrule blighted millions of Venezuelan lives and destabilized politics in the entire Western hemisphere.
After clumsily stealing an election he had plainly lost by a landslide eighteen months ago, Nicolás Maduro kept running the Venezuelan state as a sprawling criminal syndicate. Along with his powerbroker wife, Cilia Flores, he belongs in a prison cell as surely as anyone I can think of. Which is why you’ll be hard pressed to find a Venezuelan who doesn’t, on some level, rejoice at last night’s news.
In the weeks leading up to this history-making raid, I more than once rolled my eyes at reports that the United States might be planning an extraction operation to effectively kidnap a sitting president. The idea seemed just fantastical and theatrical, not to say harebrained. Well, they did it, and anyone who tells you they’re not at least a little bit impressed by the feat is probably lying.
Venezuelans today are waking up to an unrecognizable country. Like every dictatorship, Maduro’s had invested heavily in the myth of its own invincibility. And yet the regime is very much still in place, albeit in a weird, decapitated state. State TV is still running regime propaganda, Vice President (soon, one surmises, to shed the “vice”) Delcy Rodríguez is still fulminating on behalf of the Venezuelan government, the hardline interior minister Diosdado Cabello is still giving fire-breathing speeches condemning American aggression, Maduro’s notoriously repressive attorney general, Tarek William Saab, is still out mining the night’s events for propaganda points. The entire ghastly apparatus of state repression that Hugo Chávez built and Nicolás Maduro perfected appears, for now, to be fully in control of the country.
Maduro is gone. It’s tempting to think that, without him, the regime will implode. But Maduro’s was never the kind of personalist system that depends on a single leader. It was always more of a team effort, with a constellation of influential figures like Rodríguez and Cabello teaming up with Cuban intelligence to keep dissent at bay. In other words, the kind of regime that could very well survive decapitation. And if it does, Venezuelans will get the worst of it.
For three decades, the most trustworthy principle for interpreting Venezuelan affairs has been a simple heuristic: whatever outcome makes Venezuelans’ lives most miserable is always to be treated as the odds-on-favorite. If, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio apparently told Senator Mike Lee, the United States really isn’t planning any follow-on actions against the rump regime, then for Venezuelans on the ground nothing may change. Things could get even worse: you can easily imagine a wounded and humiliated Chavista successor ratcheting up state repression to rebuild the regime’s now tattered aura of invincibility.
Maduro’s abduction could easily become an all-purpose excuse to crack down on any and every sign of dissent: any expression of dissatisfaction will surely be used as evidence of connivance with the American enemy. Trump’s stunning one-day win could be remembered for heralding an even darker stage in Venezuela’s path towards totalitarianism.
At the same time, as the post-9/11 era showed, if the United States did attempt to install a democratic government, that too could go wrong in a million ways. This is not to mention the fact that the operation was carried out illegally, with no Congressional authorization, and that the precedent of superpowers deciding which foreign leaders to capture may not always lead to the downfall of people as evil as Maduro.
All through this latest round of American pressure, the specter of half-measures has loomed large over Venezuela’s future. The Bolivarian regime is always at its most vicious when it feels most threatened, and, right now, it must feel enormously threatened. Time and again, when the regime feels threatened, it’s ordinary Venezuelans who pay the price.
Donald Trump and Marco Rubio will take a victory lap today. They deserve it. They’ve struck an enormous blow against a genuinely evil regime. But they’ve not overthrown it. Chavismo is very much still in control of Venezuela. Bloodied, weakened, humiliated, yes, but still in control, and newly motivated to exert even more state terror in a bid to stay in power.
Venezuelans all around the world are celebrating the fall of a vicious tyrant. But if the regime manages to ride out this storm, we won’t be celebrating for long.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion and the founder of Caracas Chronicles. Like eight million other Venezuelans, he was forced to flee Venezuela’s dictatorship.
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Oh, I don't know... Good riddance to Maduro, but what kind of precedent does this blatant incursion of sovereignty set (or re-affirm) in our super-volatile times? Doesn't this play straight into Putin's hands, who can now say with much greater conviction and perceived legitimacy, well, that's what I've been trying to do with Ukraine and its 'Nazi regime' all along - help me out here, Donald!?
A victory for Trump? Balderdash. This was little more than macho posturing by an American president who in his own way is little better than Maduro. Maduro stole an election. Trump tried to, and half failed, using his false victim hood and a campaign of lies and distortions that would have made Goebbels proud to con a set of American suckers to help him regain the office four years later.
If Maduro was indeed running Venezuela like a criminal enterprise, Trump is running this country like his personal cash cow while overseeing the most corrupt administration in American history, all while blowing through our Constitution as if it wasn’t there.
Trump has no more concern for the people of Venezuela than he does for the people of the Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin could use an identical excuse for sending Russian troops to Washington to abduct Trump, leaving Vance in charge.