The Peril of Ousting Maduro

To many officials in Washington, Venezuelan President Nicolás 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 dangerous. 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 should focus on the only strategy likely to lead to a sustainable, peaceful transition: comprehensive, 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 investigation 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, in other words, 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 la salida, 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 opportunity to become the leader of the opposition through the ballot box. In October 2023, she won the presidential primary and became the candidate of Venezuela’s main opposition coalition, the Democratic Unitary Platform, poised to challenge Maduro in the July 2024 presidential election.

Without a viable strategy, ousting Maduro could lead to even greater hardship for Venezuelans.

Machado was promptly banned by the government from standing in the election. But she eventually agreed to support a substitute candidate, the retired diplomat Edmundo González, and campaigned with him despite the many obstacles the government put in her way. González won more than twice as many votes as Maduro, according to the opposition’s rigorously verified official tallies. Yet the government refused to acknowledge the result and swore Maduro in for another term.

After the authorities proclaimed him the winner, thousands of angry voters took to the streets in protest. But Machado and her team failed to take advantage of the moment. A top Machado adviser, Carlos Blanco, admitted in a recent interview that the team thought the July 2024 election result would force Maduro to negotiate his exit. Instead, government forces killed two dozen protesters and jailed more than 2,000 others in the days after the voting. Dissenters learned their lesson. Fear of repression has, for now at least, crippled the opposition’s capacity to mobilize the masses.

Machado’s failure to oust Maduro caused her standing with voters to fall. But she remains popular and projects optimism. As one leading pollster in Caracas explained to me, although Venezuelans are skeptical that Machado will be able to fulfill her promises—her credibility had fallen to half of what it was before the 2024 election—“her image remains strong. She could bounce back if things change.” In other words, if the United States successfully forces regime change and the opposition manages to take power, Machado is positioned to be the prime beneficiary.

STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE

Between threats of U.S. intervention, fears of more intense repression, and a lack of confidence in the opposition’s next moves, Venezuelans find themselves facing another destabilizing crisis: mass economic hardship. The Venezuelan economy, which began to grow over the past few years after collapsing between 2013 and 2021 to around a quarter of its former size because of economic mismanagement, falling oil prices, and U.S. sanctions, is once again showing signs of severe strain.

Annual inflation, which only last year was in the double digits, is projected to rise to nearly 700 percent in 2026, according to the International Monetary Fund. The gap between the official government exchange rate and the parallel rate, the market exchange rate used for unofficial transactions, has widened rapidly, suggesting that the national currency is massively overvalued. In January 2025, the two rates were nearly the same; today, the official rate of 226 bolivars to the dollar is far behind the parallel rate of over 300 to 1.

The minimum wage of 130 bolivars a month, now worth less than one U.S. dollar, is far too low to allow workers to survive. Even with large bonuses, many public-sector employees are lucky to earn more than the equivalent of $100 per month. Feeding a family in Venezuela now costs about five times that amount.

The government in Caracas denies that the economy is in dire straits. In fact, in October, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez boasted that the country had experienced 18 consecutive quarters of GDP growth and projected an expansion of 8.5 percent this year—highly optimistic statistics that are primarily based on increased oil production. But 80 percent of Venezuelans live in poverty, and the middle class is vanishing. A car repairman I spoke with this month said that 2024 was the worst year he had ever experienced economically and calculated that his income has dropped about 60 percent since 2023. Roughly eight million Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years, mostly because they could no longer afford to live there.

Given the scale of hardship, many Venezuelans are prepared to back a violent end to Maduro’s reign, as long as it is swift. This has emboldened many opposition supporters to endorse any approach that could accelerate regime change, regardless of the risks. Machado’s allies dismiss talk of potential instability after a government collapse as fearmongering and accuse critics of U.S. military intervention of being Maduro sympathizers. But such an attitude is dangerous.

WHAT LIES BEYOND

No matter how bad Maduro’s regime is, some of Venezuela’s possible futures could well be worse. If a powerful military faction 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 colectivos, 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 Bogotá or Mexico City. Machado speaks confidently of an ambitious 100-day plan she has readied that includes restoring institutional rule, stabilizing the economy, reforming the armed forces, and addressing a poverty-driven humanitarian crisis. But if the Trump administration declined to contribute significant U.S. ground forces to Venezuela, an incoming opposition government would be reliant on the same generals it now accuses of running drug cartels to survive.

Machado and others say that plenty of military officers are ready to switch sides, which would mean that in the event of a coup, Maduro could be handed over to U.S. authorities. But similar assumptions have turned out to be hollow in the past. In 2019, a few months after establishing the interim government, Guaidó and other opposition leaders waited in vain outside a military air base in Caracas for the coup they had been told would ensue but never happened.

Machado could be right in predicting that some military officials would back her if she managed to win power. But it is unlikely that all of them would. And if the military were to split into competing factions or if a post-Maduro administration were to dissolve the army and dismiss civilian officials, the chances of violent chaos would increase further. A Machado-González government without sufficient military backing, domestic or foreign, would be unlikely to be able to fend off a campaign of violent harassment by armed groups seeking to destabilize it.

DURABLE DEMOCRACY

The Venezuelan opposition’s biggest gains in the quarter century since Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s mentor and predecessor, became president in 1999 have been achieved through negotiation and at the ballot box, not violence. In a 2007 referendum, citizens successfully voted down an attempt by Chávez to enshrine socialism in the Venezuelan constitution. In the 2015 legislative elections, a united opposition comprising over a dozen parties emerged with a supermajority, which would have allowed them to change the composition of the country’s Supreme Court and electoral authority in their favor had the government not stripped parliament of its power as a way of thwarting opposition control. And although Maduro held on to the presidency after losing the 2024 election, those elections may have been the opposition’s greatest political victory so far. By collecting and digitizing over 80 percent of the vote tallies, Maduro’s opponents presented irrefutable evidence that the president had no legitimate claim to power.

Negotiations led by international mediators have also created room for the opposition to make gains. It was the so-called Barbados agreements between the government and the opposition Democratic Unitary Platform in October 2023, backed by the Biden administration’s offer to ease sanctions on the country, that paved the way for Machado’s primary victory that month and González’s July 2024 triumph in the presidential election. Maduro agreed to an internationally monitored election only because it was part of the terms of these agreements.

Rather than encourage them to build on their successes, these victories have pushed opposition hard-liners to pursue quicker paths to unseating Maduro. In doing so, they risk repeating the same mistake Maduro’s opponents made when they set up the interim government in 2019: outsourcing strategy to a foreign power with overlapping but fundamentally different objectives. Machado and others seek the rule of law and the end of Chávez’s failed legacy, but the United States is focused on curbing drug trafficking, migration, energy costs, and China’s expansion in the region. That means Washington is unlikely to give the opposition the deliverance it seeks even if American troops invade. Trump is once again talking about reopening negotiations with Maduro, offering a glimmer of hope for diplomacy. But such a strategy is only likely to work if Washington and the hard-line opposition in Venezuela understand that a power transition is a gradual process, not a single event.

Venezuela, in other words, cannot be promptly transformed into a free country. No matter how unreliable Maduro’s government is at the negotiating table, trying to force regime change through violence will ultimately undercut the goal of both the opposition and the vast majority of Venezuelans to set up a safe, stable, and law-based system to replace Maduro’s rule. Attempting a shortcut could leave the country even worse off than it is today.