On January 3rd, the US government launched a military operation in Venezuela – not to undertake regime change, as many hoped, but a restructuring.
In a night raid, US special forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Hours later, US President Donald Trump confirmed that Maduro would be replaced by regime loyalist Delcy Rodríguez. The country’s democratic opposition was purposefully excluded from the operation and its aftermath.
In several press conferences, Trump and his administration have been transparent about their objective: to remove Maduro and introduce a new actor into Venezuela’s ruling coalition – US oil companies.
This restructuring of the regime has been entrusted to interim president Delcy Rodríguez, a canny political operator and long-time Chavista. She now faces the daunting task of managing the sprawling web of actors that comprise the Venezuelan dictatorship.
Rather than a monolithic organisation, over the past decade the Venezuelan state has been parcelled into a patchwork of fiefdoms controlled by a variety of actors: from armed guerrillas along the Colombian border, to scheming politicians and state governors, organised crime groups in the vast Amazonian hinterland, and corrupt military officers who control their units as private armies.
Trump is now demanding that US oil companies are added to the complex spiderweb of the Venezuelan regime.
Rodríguez thus has to walk a political tightrope. Oil revenues, which serve as the glue of this unlikely coalition, will now have to be stretched to accommodate a new player.
An easy way out of her predicament would be for US companies to invest in Venezuela’s oil infrastructure and increase production. US oil majors would capture the majority of these new revenues, while existing regime partners kept their current share.
However, expensive infrastructure investment is unlikely in a context of political volatility.
Instead, a more likely outcome is that US companies will take a large share of existing oil reserves and production. Meaning that every oil dollar heading to the US will be an oil dollar taken away from a corrupt military officer, an ambitious politician, or a criminal warlord.
Rodríguez will have to discipline the coalition through this transition. This might involve reducing the number of existing partners – which could prove difficult for a civilian president with little influence among the country’s different armed factions.
She will have to navigate through external pressure from the US administration, and backlash from disgruntled domestic actors.
Among the latter, interior minister Diosdado Cabello stands out. He has held a long-time rivalry with Rodríguez and, unlike her, holds influence over the regime’s paramilitary force (known as colectivos) and leads the ruling party, the PSUV.
During Maduro’s rule, Cabello and Rodríguez jockeyed for position and influence, unable to fully unseat each other. With Maduro gone, their rivalry might explode into the open. If the deadlock between them continues, we might see a lesser-known figure rise over the coming months as a compromise leader.
But if Rodríguez succeeds in creating a new arrangement, she could breathe new life into the Venezuelan dictatorship.
There’s a close historical precedent in the Dominican Republic. In 1961, the CIA supported the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo, who had ruled the country for three decades. Rather than push for a democratic transition, the US government propped up Trujillo’s right-hand man, Joaquín Balaguer. With US support, Balaguer would go on to rule until 1978, when European leaders pressured him to recognise an electoral defeat.
In other words, US intervention in the Dominican Republic did not bring about regime change. Instead, it restructured the existing regime, allowing it to continue for another two decades.
There is a distinct possibility of something similar occurring in Venezuela, whether under Rodríguez, Cabello, or a currently little-known figure.
While the political future of Venezuela remains in the air, something is becoming increasingly clear: US foreign policy in the hemisphere – or the so-called Donroe Doctrine – appears to amount to little more than rent-seeking.
The Trump administration’s ultimate objective is to capture resources across the Americas, by any means necessary. In this context, US diplomacy does not appear to make ideological distinctions between friends and rivals, but rather, between those who cooperate (Argentina, El Salvador, perhaps now Venezuela?) and those who don’t (Canada, Brazil).
This type of behaviour is not new in the region. If Trump has potentially revitalised the Venezuelan dictatorship, he has definitely made a century of anti-imperialist literature seem relevant again. In the coming years, expect Latin Americans to reach for the bookshelves and dust off books that appeared obsolete just a few years ago.
Dr Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano, senior Latin America analyst and author of Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War.
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