by Felix Maradiaga, President of the WLC. (Substack)
Washington has achieved a historic strategic gain in Venezuela. It must now ensure that stability does not become a euphemism for authoritarian continuity.
The capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3 radically altered Venezuela’s political landscape. It removed a dictator indicted in United States federal court on narco-terrorism charges — a man American prosecutors accused of running the Cartel de los Soles from the presidential palace — weakened the influence of Cuba and Iran, expanded American access to Venezuelan oil, and created an opening that millions of Venezuelans had awaited for a generation.
Let there be no ambiguity about the starting point. Maduro was a dictator and, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, a narco-trafficker: a ruler who stole the 2024 election, presided over the collapse of what was once Latin America’s richest nation, filled prison cells and torture chambers with students and journalists, and drove nearly eight million people from their homeland in the largest displacement crisis in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
The manner of his removal was controversial, and that debate will continue among lawyers and historians. But two things should not be controversial. Venezuela today is closer to a democratic transition than at any moment since Hugo Chávez began dismantling the republic a quarter century ago. And the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans are better off — freer, safer, more hopeful — than they were under Nicolás Maduro.
Yet removing a dictator is not the same as dismantling a dictatorship.
A new report from the Congressional Research Service offers a sobering assessment of Venezuela’s post-Maduro reality. Delcy Rodríguez — Maduro’s former vice president, oil minister and longtime political ally — remains acting president. Her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, presides over the National Assembly. Diosdado Cabello, one of the most powerful figures of Chavismo and an alleged leader of the Cartel de los Soles, remains interior minister. The institutions responsible for repression — the security services, the politicized courts, the compromised electoral authority — are largely intact.
Maduro may be in American custody, but the political machinery he built is still operating.
The Trump administration’s initial emphasis on stability was prudent. After years of economic collapse, mass migration, criminal penetration and institutional decay, an abrupt vacuum of authority could have produced chaos — a Libyan-style disintegration on the Caribbean coast of South America. Working temporarily with figures from the existing state apparatus prevented violence and enabled cooperation against terrorist and criminal organizations.
That approach has generated tangible results. The Rodríguez government has distanced itself from Cuba and Iran, cooperated with the United States on security operations, opened parts of Venezuela’s economy and released hundreds of political prisoners. Venezuela is once again engaging with international financial institutions. These are meaningful achievements, and the administration deserves recognition for securing them.
Yet they do not yet constitute a democratic transition. The strategic question is no longer whether Washington can work with Delcy Rodríguez. It is whether that cooperation is moving Venezuela toward democracy — or giving a more presentable version of Chavismo the time it needs to consolidate power.
The distinction matters because authoritarian systems are remarkably skilled at adaptation. When repression becomes costly, they change their vocabulary, replace a few officials, release selected prisoners and offer economic concessions. They promise moderation while preserving the institutions that make genuine political competition impossible.
As a Nicaraguan who has spent decades confronting Sandinismo, I know this playbook intimately. When Daniel Ortega returned to power in 2007, he persuaded much of Nicaragua’s private sector — including the country’s most powerful economic groups — that he was a changed man: an apostle of “responsible populism” who would guarantee stability in exchange for acquiescence. Some of Nicaragua’s wealthiest interests went further, underwriting lobbying firms in Washington to polish the regime’s image. The arrangement felt comfortable for years. Then the bill arrived, and it was ordinary Nicaraguans who paid it: they live today under one of the most entrenched dictatorships in the world — while many of the very elites who vouched for Ortega ended up expropriated, imprisoned or exiled.
There is a name for the road Nicaragua traveled: the U-turn. It describes nations that escape dictatorship, pass through a democratic transition, and then — because that transition was shallow, incomplete or badly executed — drive straight back into authoritarian rule. Nicaragua is the textbook case: the democratic opening of 1990 gave way, within a generation, to a dynastic dictatorship harsher than the one it replaced. Venezuelans know the road from the other direction: four decades of imperfect but genuine democracy dissolved into Chavismo. Russians and Belarusians who briefly tasted freedom in the 1990s know it as well.
U-turns are not accidents of fate. They happen when a transition changes the man in the palace but not the architecture of power — when courts, security services and electoral authorities remain in the hands of the old regime; when strongmen keep their networks in exchange for promises of moderation; when economic elites prefer accommodation to reform; and when international partners declare victory early and move on. Every one of those conditions is present in Venezuela today. A transition that removes the dictator but preserves his machinery has not completed the journey; it has merely paused at the top of the U. That is precisely where the remnants of Chavismo — and their patrons in Havana — intend to keep it.
In my academic work I have called the fuel of this pattern democratic conformism: the tendency of the very actors expected to drive change — political parties, business leaders, judges, civil society, foreign allies — to adapt to authoritarian normalization rather than resist it. Conformism never announces itself. It simply accepts the tolerable and stops insisting on the necessary. In ordinary times it is corrosive; during a transition, it is fatal.
The warning signs are already visible. Hundreds of political prisoners reportedly remain behind bars. Many of those released are still under surveillance and travel restrictions. The laws that strangled independent media and civil society remain in force. The judiciary and the National Electoral Council have not been reformed. And María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia remain outside the country, even though the available electoral evidence indicates that González won the 2024 presidential election decisively.
On this point there should be no diplomatic ambiguity: the safe, immediate and unconditional return of María Corina Machado — the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate — together with her team, Edmundo González and the rest of Venezuela’s democratic opposition, is not a symbolic gesture. It is the single clearest test of whether Venezuela’s transition is real. No serious transition in modern history has succeeded while its most legitimate leaders were kept at the border. A dialogue that excludes, or cannot guarantee the safety of, the leaders Venezuelans actually chose is not a transition; it is a negotiation among custodians of the old regime. Machado belongs in Caracas, and the United States should say so plainly, publicly and soon.
Dialogue is necessary, and the administration is right to test it. But negotiations cannot become a substitute for an electoral calendar. Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who has understood the nature of these regimes longer and more clearly than most in Washington — has stated that Venezuela must hold multiparty, free and fair elections, and that the transition should require “not years, but certainly months and weeks.” He is right. Congress can help ensure that this vision is translated into public benchmarks and enforceable deadlines that no one in Caracas can quietly renegotiate.
The devastating June earthquakes make this more urgent, not less. More than 6,100 people have died, and reconstruction may exceed $37 billion. The United States has responded generously — with humanitarian assistance, personnel and logistics — and Venezuelans desperately need that help. But humanitarian urgency must not become political immunity for the Rodríguez government. Reconstruction funds must be independently monitored and delivered without partisan discrimination. A national tragedy cannot become the pretext for postponing democracy indefinitely, or for allowing the same institutions that impoverished Venezuela to control billions of dollars without oversight.
Congress has an essential role to play — not as a critic of the administration’s policy, but as the guarantor of its success.
First, building on President Trump’s own disclosure that the United States has collected billions of dollars from Venezuelan oil sales, Congress should establish a transparent framework for those funds: where they are held, how they are spent, and who audits the process. Transparency is not a concession to skeptics; it is the strongest shield for the credibility of American policy — and the guarantee that Venezuela’s oil wealth serves the Venezuelan people rather than a recycled nomenklatura.
Second, sanctions relief and access to international financing should be tied to measurable democratic progress: the unconditional release of all political prisoners, the restoration of civil and political rights, an independent electoral authority, freedom for political parties and the press, and credible international election observation.
Third, the United States should insist on guarantees for the safe return of exiled leaders and citizens. Venezuela cannot hold a legitimate election while millions of its citizens abroad are effectively disenfranchised, or while its principal opposition figures risk prison for coming home.
Fourth, Congress should sustain the democracy assistance already appropriated for Venezuela and preserve the institutions that deliver it — above all the National Endowment for Democracy, created under President Reagan for precisely such moments. Economic reconstruction without independent journalists, election monitors and civic organizations will rebuild Venezuela’s roads while leaving its authoritarian foundations untouched.
Fifth, Washington should press for a clear timetable for presidential and legislative elections. Conditions must be built carefully, but “conditions” cannot become an endlessly movable target controlled by the very people who benefit from delay.
The circumstances that led to Maduro’s capture were extraordinary: a ruler under federal indictment, at the head of what American prosecutors described as a narco-terrorist enterprise, presiding over a direct security threat to the hemisphere. Those circumstances are not a template. In Nicaragua and Cuba — the region’s two other long-postponed transitions — the path to freedom will have to be opened chiefly from within: by citizens, civic movements, churches, entrepreneurs and exiles working in concert, with the United States and the democracies of the hemisphere acting as allies who deny dictators resources, legitimacy and impunity. I say this as a Nicaraguan who prays for the liberation of my own country: every dictatorship is a different lock, and each requires its own key. What must remain constant is not the method but the objective — the right of nations to choose those who govern them.
None of this is an argument against pragmatism. It is an argument for disciplined pragmatism: cooperating with interim authorities on humanitarian relief, energy, migration and security while insisting on democratic reforms that cannot be reversed.
Democracy, after all, is not separate from America’s strategic interests; it is the precondition for securing them. A legitimate Venezuelan government would be a more reliable energy partner, a stronger ally against transnational criminal organizations, and a firmer barrier against Cuba, Iran, Russia and China. It would mean fewer desperate migrants at America’s border and less cocaine on America’s streets. And it would allow millions of Venezuelans to do what most have wanted all along: go home.
Latin America has learned, repeatedly and at great cost, that authoritarian “stability” is an illusion. Dictatorships manufacture migration, corruption, organized crime and foreign interference — and they export those crises to their neighbors and, eventually, to the United States.
The Trump administration has created an opportunity that seemed impossible only a year ago. History, however, will not judge American policy solely by whether Nicolás Maduro was removed. It will judge it by what replaced him. The objective cannot be Chavismo without Maduro, repression with better public relations, or an oil arrangement dressed up as a political transition. The objective must be a Venezuela in which citizens — not armed officials, party bosses or foreign patrons — decide who governs them.
Maduro is gone. The United States must now help ensure that his dictatorship leaves with him.
