By Leopoldo López, WLC Co-Founder.
Venezuela is a country in transition. On January 3, 2026, a U.S. military operation captured Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores and removed them from power. Whatever one thinks of the way it happened, I have spent years arguing for pressure on the dictatorship, and I stand by the result. The man who stole an election, jailed thousands, and wrecked my country’s institutions is gone. The regime he built is not. Delcy Rodríguez now presides over the same structures, the same military high command, the same courts, and the same party machinery that made Venezuela a dictatorship for more than a decade. Same regime, new faces.
And yet a transition has begun. Not because Delcy woke up one morning a democrat. She did not. The reason is that the geopolitical ground beneath the regime has shifted in a way that cannot be reversed. Venezuela has moved out of the orbit of Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Havana, and into the United States’ sphere of influence. That single fact is the engine of everything else that may follow and change.
The framework that I have carried with me to understand this transition, and to help it succeed, in these months is simple: stop thinking of it as a single process. It has four layers, moving at different speeds, at different depths. Significant change has already happened in some of them. Others have barely begun. When we fail to see them separately, when we demand that one layer deliver what only another layer can deliver, transitions get misdiagnosed. And then they fail.
The first layer is geopolitical, and to a significant degree, it has already happened.
Before January 3, Venezuela was not simply a dictatorship. It was a hostile platform. Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Cubans, and the narcos of Colombia and Mexico all operated from Venezuelan territory with the blessing and the participation of the regime. Russian military aircraft. Iranian drones. Cuban intelligence advising the secret police. Drug routes managed by the Cartel de los Soles, a structure embedded at the highest levels of government, which the United States has designated a foreign terrorist organization and which U.S. prosecutors allege Maduro himself led. This was a national security problem for the entire hemisphere, sitting on the southern flank of the United States, financed by the largest oil reserves on the planet.
That architecture is broken. Venezuela today is under American influence, not under the influence of the adversaries of the United States. Whatever else remains unresolved, this change is real, and it matters. It removes the primary platform for extra-hemispheric powers in South America, it degrades the narcotics corridor, and it makes Colombia, Brazil, and the Caribbean safer. I give credit where it is due. This was achieved by the Trump administration’s decisiveness, and the region is better for it. But let us be honest about what it means. This layer of the transition was accomplished largely by and for the United States. By itself, it delivers nothing to the Venezuelan people. It is the foundation. It is not the house.
The second layer is economic. It has started, but its results have not yet reached ordinary Venezuelans.
On August 28, the United States and the Rodríguez government announced an oil agreement of extraordinary scale: 17 fields, 65 billion barrels, 21.5 percent of Venezuela’s certified reserves, a 25-year contract, $100 billion in committed investment, and an effective production arrangement giving the United States 55 percent. On September 2, Chevron’s expansion was signed in Caracas with Energy Secretary Chris Wright standing in the room, and a new vehicle was created to structure the arrangement. Beyond oil, there are investment commitments in electricity generation and transmission, which matters more than any headline about barrels because blackouts are the daily reality of millions of Venezuelans. Ask a family in Maracaibo or in the barrios of Caracas what their worst problem is, and they will not say Maduro. They will say the refrigerator that died in the last blackout, the water that never runs, the elevator that never moves.
The plans for an economic recovery exist on paper, and paper is not nothing. Investment commitments of this scale did not exist six months ago. But ultimately, I measure this layer in three words: megawatts, dollars, and barrels. Megawatts first, because electricity is what directly affects the daily lives of Venezuelans. Dollars second, because salaries must recover their purchasing power or nothing else is sustainable. Barrels third, because oil finances the state. If — in a year — the megawatts have not increased, if the dollars have not reached workers’ pockets, if the barrels flow only to the benefit of the regime and its partners, then the economic layer will have served the new faces of the old regime, not the Venezuelan people. People are not fooled by announcements.
The third layer is Venezuela’s military. It is the least discussed, and it may be the most decisive one.
Nobody likes to talk about the Venezuelan armed forces because the conversation is uncomfortable. The same high command that backed Maduro remains in place. The same officers who fired on protesters in 2014 and 2017, who ran the black-market economy of the borderlands, who answered to Cuban advisers, are still there, wearing the same insignia. If we are serious about a democratic transition, this cannot be avoided. The military is a critical pillar of any transition. It can guarantee the process, or it can strangle it.
Here I want to be concrete, because the hemisphere has already run this experiment, and it failed. Consider Nicaragua in the 1990s. The Sandinista army was left in place, rebranded, kept as the institutional power behind a nominally democratic government, the self-appointed guarantors of the democracy they had just lost at the ballot box. What did that guarantorship produce? The conditions for Daniel Ortega’s return to power, and then the dictatorship that stands in Managua today. Nicaragua is the warning. A military transition that does not happen is not a neutral outcome. It is a loaded weapon left in the hands of those who lost.
The counterexample is Plan Colombia: more than 20 years of sustained, bipartisan American commitment, security assistance, intelligence cooperation, and institutional reform that produced real results against terrorist groups and narcotic networks and left Colombia’s armed forces under democratic civilian control. That is the model of patience the third layer demands.
I say to my American interlocutors directly: the military transition in Venezuela must be a U.S. priority for two reasons. First, for hemispheric security. An unreformed officer corps is exactly the constituency through which narcos, cartel structures, and foreign intelligence services will try to re-enter Venezuela. Second, for the stability of the transition itself. Once Venezuela holds a free election, an institution must guarantee that the losing side accepts the result. In Venezuela, that institution is the armed forces. If they are left untouched, the guarantors of the new democracy will be the same actors who guaranteed fraud for a decade. We know how they keep their promises.
The fourth layer is political. It has begun, and it has a milestone: the election.
On September 23, Delcy Rodríguez stood before the United Nations General Assembly and declared: “There will be elections in Venezuela.” She gave no date. She said only that the Venezuelan people would decide when the moment is right. The day before, she had met President Trump in New York, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio described free and fair elections as the goal, to be reached only after the economy is kept from collapsing. I welcome the words, and I note where they were spoken: the regime has now promised elections in front of the world. But a promise without a date is not a commitment. It is a postponement. The task of the fourth layer is to enter that declaration into a calendar, and the leverage to do it is on the table today.
The political layer is where I live, professionally and personally. The negotiation process is real. Talks
sponsored by the United States are under way between the regime, led by Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly and Delcy’s brother, and the democratic opposition, led by Dinorah Figuera, president of the 2015 National Assembly, the last legislature freely elected by Venezuelans. Two rounds have taken place, and I want the American public to understand what has already been achieved because it is bigger than most commentary acknowledges.
In the first round, which closed on August 12, the parties agreed to change the Supreme Court entirely. The entire court. I want that to land. For years the Tribunal Supremo de Justicia (TSJ) has been the regime’s great legitimizing machine. It validated stolen elections, it authorized expropriations, it stripped my colleagues of their seats, it approved the persecution of civil society, and it rubber-stamped every constitutional violation the regime required. According to the World Justice Project, Venezuela ranks last in the world on the rule of law, and the TSJ is the primary reason for that ranking. An agreement to replace the TSJ in its entirety is not a technical adjustment. It is the dismantling of the regime’s judicial weapons factory.
The second round, which closed on September 25, turned that agreement into an institutional mechanism: a seven-member credentials council, with a majority chosen by the 2015 National Assembly, that will screen the candidates for 32 new magistrates to be named by December. The next rounds turn to the two instruments that make an election real rather than theatrical. One is a new electoral council, the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE), which in regime hands has been the arbiter of fraud. The other, on the agenda of the third round that opens October 14, is political guarantees for all actors: winners and losers. That last phrase is not diplomatic decoration. Venezuelans have learned that transitions collapse when one side believes that losing means prison, exile, or death. Guarantees for the losers are what make the winners safe. That is how a democracy stabilizes itself after its first free contest.
And then comes the milestone: the election Venezuelans are waiting for, a presidential election and a National Assembly election in the same cycle, so that the legislature is renewed alongside the executive. I hear the argument that says stabilize first, then hold elections. I understand the impulse behind it, but Venezuelans have waited too long and sacrificed too much to be sold open-ended transition management by the same regime under a different name. Elections are not the reward at the end of stabilization. Elections are how stabilization acquires legitimacy.
So what must the United States and the international community do?
First, hold the two tracks together. The geopolitical layer is won. The economic layer is contracted. Use that leverage—the oil agreement, the investment pipeline, and the presence of American companies—as the guarantee that the political layer is not indefinitely deferred. What matters is having the right framework in place so that the election can happen and stability can hold afterwards. That is why a new Supreme Court, a new electoral council, and a reconstituted institutional order are not side issues. They are the difference between an election and a lasting democratic settlement.
Second, make the military transition explicit policy, not a taboo. Tie the lifting of military sanctions and the normalization of defense relations to a verifiable process: the retirement of compromised commanders, the expulsion of officers implicated in crimes against humanity, professionalization under future democratic control. Plan Colombia took two decades of patience. Nicaragua took one decade of negligence. We must choose which precedent we are following.
Third, protect the negotiation and its achievements. The agreement to replace the Supreme Court and the coming agreement on the CNE need international verification. Electoral observation with a real mandate, monitoring of the judicial transition, and clarity that sanctions relief corresponds to compliance, not to promises.
Fourth, and most important, remember for whom this is being done. The megawatts must reach the barrios. The dollars must reach the workers. The votes must reach the ballot box. If the transition delivers security for Washington and barrels to Houston and nothing for the Venezuelan family living in the dark, the transition will not survive. And it will not deserve to.
I spent seven years in prison, four of them in solitary confinement, for the crime of believing Venezuela could be a democracy. I do not say that to claim moral authority. I say it to explain why I refuse to confuse movement with arrival. A transition in four layers is a transition in motion, and motion is precious, but only the fourth layer, the political one, crowned by a free election, will let Venezuelans say that they are free. The first layer is finished. The second has promise. The third is being avoided. The fourth has started. Finish all four, and Venezuela becomes what it was always meant to be: a democracy, and an ally, in the heart of the Americas.
The transition has begun. History is watching what we do with it.
Leopoldo López is a Freedom Activist from Venezuela. He was a political prisoner from 2014 to 2020 after being sentenced to fourteen years in prison for leading non-violent street protests and civil resistance in 2014. After spending seven years in confinement, he managed to escape the autocratic regime of Nicolas Maduro in October of 2020 and was able to travel to Spain where he lives with his family. Leopoldo López is married to Lilian Tintori and has three children. From 2000 to 2008 Leopoldo López was mayor of the Municipality of Chacao in Caracas and was later illegally disqualified to run for office. He won his case at the Inter American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). In 2009, he founded the political party and freedom movement called Voluntad Popular (Popular Will) and became its national coordinator. Leopoldo López is the co-founder of the World Liberty Congress, an organization launched in 2022 that seeks to serve as the counterweight against the global autocratic alliance by connecting non-violent, prodemocracy activists and leaders from across the globe.
Also, presently Leopoldo López is a visiting fellow at the Wilson Center and The Institute and has also been a lecturer in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in Stanford University.
