For many Venezuelans, this is a disorienting moment. For a quarter century, our government has been using the threat of an American military attack to justify more and more authoritarian control over the country. Venezuelans got accustomed to dismissing it all as noise, just a pretext the dictatorship employed to stamp out civil rights. Suddenly, it’s not just noise. President Donald Trump is very visibly preparing to do what Nicolás Maduro spent decades swearing the Americans would one day do: use military power to put an end to Venezuela’s socialist revolution.
The United States has been bombing Venezuelan fast boats, which it alleges are ferrying drugs north, while massing naval forces in the Caribbean. Trump has vacillated between hinting that air strikes inside Venezuela will be next and saying that he doubts the U.S. will go to war with Venezuela. The administration keeps portraying its actions as part of a counternarcotics operation—ostensibly the first such operation in history to require the use of an aircraft carrier. And yet, the White House doesn’t seem to have committed anything like the number of ground troops necessary to invade a country the size of Venezuela. Rather than an old-fashioned ground invasion, then, the U.S. seems to be preparing a bombing campaign from the air.
In the absence of a spelled-out plan, we’re left to try to infer one. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—a Cold War–style anti-Communist—describes Maduro as the leader of a designated narco-terrorist organization, rather than a government, leading many to conclude that the endgame here is to depose him. Perhaps the idea is to use military pressure to push somebody within the Venezuelan security apparatus to move against Maduro. Even if such a plan succeeds—which is very doubtful—it is likelier to deliver Venezuela to a different style of military dictatorship than it is to bring a return to democracy.
Contemplating an imminent American assault on my country of origin is painful. But the Venezuela about to be attacked has little in common with the place where I grew up. The messy, vibrant democracy of my youth is a distant memory, snuffed out by a quarter century of ever harsher authoritarianism. Even the combative Venezuela of eight years ago, where kids with homemade shields assembled in the streets day after day to battle the dictatorship’s goons, is a fading memory.
Brutally put down by Maduro’s thuggish regime, that protest movement gave way to a mass exodus. Nobody has reliable numbers, but one commonly cited guess is that about a quarter of the population has left in the past decade: a shocking 8 million people. The numbers tell only part of the story. The rest is about who left: young, ambitious, high-agency people, many of whom are now delivering meals on bikes in Bogotá, Madrid, and Washington, D.C.
[Gisela Salim-Peyer: Authoritarianism feels surprisingly normal—until it doesn’t]
Mass migration has ripped the demographic heart out of Venezuela. Many of those left behind are, well, the mirror image of those who emigrated: too young or too old or too sick to face a brutal migrant journey. They stayed behind in an economy in ruins, many of them living off of the remittances sent by migrants, under the control of a hyper-corrupt state that is feeding parasitically on the few resources Venezuela still has.
We know that a large majority of the Venezuelans who remain in the country want to get rid of the government, because the opposition won last year’s presidential election in a landslide—67 percent to Maduro’s 30 percent, according to domestic monitors—before Maduro announced himself the winner. That brazen theft met with a scattering of protests that were quickly put down. The regime has become much more repressive: At checkpoints around the country, uniformed men now routinely stop drivers and go through their phones looking for anything that suggests anti-regime sentiment—a stray WhatsApp message, a photo, anything—and pack people off to jail if they find it. People in Caracas are now careful to delete any potentially offending message before they go out. The climate of fear would make organizing any type of resistance challenging even if most of the people who once led protests in Venezuela hadn’t left. Many of those still there seem to have internalized long ago that the time for protests is over. This is the Venezuela that Rubio seems to expect to overthrow the regime.
The opposition, now mostly in exile, also seems to have internalized the impossibility of challenging the regime from within. Its leader—and the newly minted Nobel Peace Prize Laureate—María Corina Machado has assiduously courted the Trump administration, to the point of lending credence to the crackpot theory, already rejected by the U.S. intelligence community, that Maduro personally controls the notorious Tren de Aragua prison gang. The plan seems to be to goad the U.S. into military intervention—a shabby, desperate posture for a leader of stunning personal courage but questionable political judgment.
Maduro has in any case outwitted dozens of attempts to depose him over the years. Hanging on to power seems to be the only thing he’s relatively competent at. His regime has spent lavishly on a huge, Cuban-backed military intelligence apparatus devoted to detecting any sign of disloyalty in the ranks. If and when American bombs start to fall, Venezuela’s military counterintelligence system will certainly be put to the test. But it could very well pass that test.
Then again, it might not. One truism in Latin American politics is that nearly every revolt is fueled by the frustration of junior army officers. Maduro’s junior officers must be nothing if not frustrated. A generation of senior officers has ignored army regulations and failed to retire on schedule, blocking their path to promotion. The classic case here is that of General Vladimir Padrino, a defense minister, who ought to have retired five years ago but has received special dispensation to remain in uniform year after year. Other generals have likewise stayed on past their retirement dates.
These generals stand to profit from the wide range of businesses, legal and illegal, that the armed forces now control. That includes drug trafficking but goes much further: illegal mining in the country’s ecologically sensitive southern region, construction, retail, imports, and more. Generals capture by far the biggest share of those profits; the colonels and captains who serve under them likely get table scraps.
[Anne Applebaum: Why María Corina Machado deserved the Nobel Peace Prize]
Alarmed at the prospect of facing an American bombing campaign, junior officers could well calculate that they’re better off pushing Maduro aside than dodging American missiles. The power play, if it came, would likely be bloody. And risky. But Rubio’s supposed fantasy could conceivably happen: A brave young lieutenant colonel pushes Maduro aside, wrapping himself in the American flag and thanking Trump for liberating the country as he shows Hugo Chávez’s successor the door.
Even if this happens, though, it’s unlikely to herald a return to democracy—first, because in Venezuela’s hyper-militarized society, Nobel Prizes count for a lot less than automatic weapons. No young officer who takes over from Maduro is likely to empower a figure as uncompromising as Machado. Second, because the American backers of this strategy are so palpably indifferent to democracy themselves.
Steeped in a culture of corruption, those who would take over from Maduro would continue to prioritize enriching themselves. If they needed to flatter Trump to get their chance at the spoils, they’d do so. A new government could then loot Venezuela hand in hand with the Trump administration. The Venezuelan oil industry could once again raise capital and market its product in the United States, opening up new vistas for extraction on both sides of the trade. That the Trump administration could be induced to do business with fellow kleptocrats rather than press Machado’s suit seems too obvious a point to belabor.
But all of that assumes that a putsch does succeed, and this is dubious. There is virtually no known instance of air strikes alone forcing regime change anywhere in the world. Much will depend on how, exactly, the Americans conduct their campaign. And that, in turn, will depend on how long Trump can remain focused on it. If an assault doesn’t yield immediate results, will he stay the course, or will his attention wander?
The maximally stupid outcome—which, by that very fact, seems all too probable—is that Trump gets bored of the whole affair and stops the air strikes after a putsch has been discovered, but before it’s succeeded. An American assault would then be remembered mostly for helping Maduro identify the next set of tenants for his torture chambers. That’s a grim prospect—but then, in Venezuela, yesterday’s grimmest prospects become tomorrow’s headlines with dreadful regularity.
