A More Pliant Chavista
February 12, 2026 issue
Emin Özmen/Magnum Photos
A mural depicting former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, Caracas, 2019
History sometimes repeats itself out of sheer malice. For example, in 1898 the United States stepped in to help Cuba in its long struggle for independence from Spain, and won. Cubans were grateful but not yet free. American troops were in control of the island, and the US refused to remove them until Cuba accepted eight conditions presented to Congress in 1901 by Senator Orville Platt. The most important provisions of what became known as the Platt Amendment were that Cuba was required to lease land indefinitely to the US for naval stations (thus Guantánamo), that it could not make treaties with other nations, and that to preserve Cuban independence or maintain a stable government, the US retained the right to intervene on the island militarily, which it did four times before the humiliating provisions (but not the lease on Guantánamo) were repealed in 1934. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the child of Cuban émigrés—must know the Platt Amendment well: the text was burned into every Cuban’s heart, fomented Cubans’ fervent nationalist sentiment, and for decades contributed to the willingness of many of them on the island to put up with Fidel Castro, the great defier of the United States.
Until last year, those provisions were the baldest formulation of America’s imperialist ambitions, but Donald Trump has refashioned and extended the terms under which subject countries can expect to live. Moments before 2:00 AM on the third day of the New Year, explosions and the roar of aircraft were heard over Caracas. The US, claiming the right to depose at will the leader of an independent nation, captured the de facto president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, and his wife, Cilia Flores, and in doing so shredded the principle that makes peaceful international coexistence possible. It was still January 3 when the couple was transported to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. A buffoonish man to begin with, Maduro was perp-walked wearing something hat-like on his head that Goofy might have loved. Reporters who gathered in haste at Mar-a-Lago hardly knew how to formulate their questions about an act of war unauthorized by Congress that amounted to a kidnapping. (The administration called it “an extraction.”) The whole thing was grotesque and stupid and horrifying in equal measure, and gaspingly unbelievable, until one remembered what the Platt Amendment revealed about America’s sense of itself.
For weeks we had been watching as the US assembled the largest display of naval and air power in decades around the sunny islands of the Caribbean, with the intention, one foolishly thought, of sticking around for a bit, playing superpower at the expense of American taxpayers, and cowing Maduro into resigning. But no, the Trump administration was both dead serious and reckless. The proof was Maduro in his ridiculous headgear.
María Corina Machado, the stubborn leader of the Venezuelan conservative opposition and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, contributed to the disaster. In the months before the July 2024 presidential elections, she was polling so strongly that the Venezuelan government thought it prudent to ban her candidacy. Never one to give up, Machado appointed the aging politician Edmundo González to run in her place. According to virtually all qualified observers, on election day he won easily over Maduro, former president Hugo Chávez’s appointed successor, who had been in power since 2013 and who proclaimed himself the winner.
This was openly fraudulent but not surprising, and it seems to have reinforced Machado’s long-held belief that a bloodless transition to democracy was not feasible. In the first days of the second Trump administration she spoke with Rubio, an old acquaintance who was the brand-new secretary of state. Rubio is a foreign policy wonk and an old-style anticommunist with a special hatred for the collapsing socialist regime in Cuba and for Venezuela, Cuba’s longtime ally and provider of fuel. Maduro would never allow fair elections, Machado insisted; he was an illegitimate president, he was ruining Venezuela, and he should be kicked out—by force, if necessary. After the election she had prudently gone into hiding, but if she were president, she said in online interviews and meetings, she would open the country to foreign investment and especially to foreign oil companies, most of which had been expelled by Chávez in 2007.
Her argument coincided with the thinking of the new Trump administration, which in its previous incarnation had appeared to care little for Venezuela or adventures abroad. In February 2025, shortly after Rubio’s meeting with Machado, in what no longer seems like an unrelated event, the US designated eight Latin American drug cartels—three of them with members operating in Venezuela—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. In August the US military parked three guided-missile destroyers just off the Venezuelan coast and soon added assault ships, an aircraft carrier, thousands of troops, and large and small planes. In September the Department of Defense was renamed the Department of War, three days after eleven people—name and nationality unknown—were killed in their motorboat in the Caribbean by a US air strike. More than a hundred others have been killed since then.
Machado approved these actions. She called the administration’s strategy “absolutely correct” and said that “Maduro started this war, and President Trump is ending it.” This was after she received the Nobel Peace Prize and gushed that he was the one who really deserved it. (Rubio and seven other Republican lawmakers had actually promoted her nomination.) But Trump, who inexplicably thought he was in the running for the Nobel, was not amused: the administration’s communications director, Steven Cheung, regretted on social media that the Nobel Committee had put “politics over peace” in failing to give him the prize. On January 3, during an eerie morning press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump made it clear that neither Machado nor González would be taking power: “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”
To give Machado credit, she fought Chávez and his designated successor from the start, and even if it meant going into hiding she never left her country for Miami or Madrid, unlike so many of her light-skinned, well-off supporters who called Chávez “monkey.” (In turn, he took grinning pleasure in describing himself as un poco indio, un poco negro.) Machado, the daughter of an industrialist, could have had an easy life, but she chose instead to shout herself hoarse at endless protest marches and to live with intimidation and threats for more than twenty years, sensing that Chávez, the left-wing populist who was first elected president in 1998, did not want just a one- or two-term presidency and would ruin Venezuela. She was brave, but it was foolish to expect that by calling for the invasion of her own country she would earn the invader’s gratitude.
“They stole our oil,” Trump told reporters that day. Perhaps his most entrenched belief is that everything he wants—Greenland, the Nobel Prize, a woman—belongs to him, even if it is deep underground in a nation some thousand miles away. A gripping moment came when Trump made it clear that the invasion of a nonbellicose country had not much to do with human rights or freedom or anything else with no monetary value.
Would he see to it that the Maduro regime’s political prisoners were freed? “We’re going to take back the oil,” he said. “They stole our assets like we were babies.” Oil was always at the forefront. “We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be.” “We’ll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries.” Members of his administration listed other riches Venezuela could provide: diamonds, rare earths, gold. But those diamonds and rare earths are found in hard-to-reach, jungle-bound areas virtually ruled by the continent’s oldest guerrilla group, the Colombia-based Ejército de Liberación Nacional, together with assorted other gangs.
How about democracy and free elections? “We’re going to run the country,” Trump answered blandly. Run the country, as in an occupying force? But who was in charge there now? It transpired that the person the United States had chosen to tolerate or support as the new president of Venezuela—“I understand she was just sworn in,” Trump noted casually—was Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez. Really? But then…wait! Just one more question! If Maduro was about to be replaced by the politician closest to him, who was an equally hard-line and corrupt Chavista, then why had all the corpses and terror and fighter jets and hoopla involved in extracting him even been necessary?
A partial answer is that the Trump team doesn’t care who the ruler of Venezuela is right now as long as she or he keeps everyone quiet and provides access to the oil, and their view so far is that Rodríguez appears to fit the bill. When he was dying of cancer, Chávez chose Maduro—his amiable vice-president and a devotee of the guru Sathya Sai Baba—as his successor. Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader and not, by all accounts, a brilliant man, was soon floundering as the markets and agriculture collapsed, food disappeared from grocery shelves, inflation spiked so high it made people weep, and the oil industry that Chávez had run into the ground simply refused to start up again. Some eight million people—nearly a quarter of the population—left the country, many on foot and with little more than the clothes on their backs.
To stay in power, Maduro relied on the huge network of grassroots organizations that Chávez left behind, systematic repression—a network of spies embedded in those organizations came in handy—and a web of corruption and influence that tied every enterprise, government agency, and illegal source of income back to him. He distributed corruption like largesse wherever there was money to be made. Still, throughout the years, he remained faithful to the legacy of Chávez, the man who gave him his destiny.
The Rodríguez siblings, Jorge and Delcy, are not typical I-come-from-the-pueblo Chavistas. Their father was a member of a militant group that kidnapped an American businessman in 1976. He died while Jorge and Delcy were children, after being tortured in prison, and they were old enough to remember. They became talented professionals (he’s a psychiatrist, she’s a lawyer); she learned French and English, acquired a taste for fine clothes and travel, and is cosmopolitan but also radical. Both belong to what Venezuelans call the Caviar Left. Delcy has been, among other things, the minister of foreign affairs, the head of the intelligence services, and the president of the Constituent National Assembly. Jorge now runs the National Assembly and knows how to talk to foreigners, notably Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell, with whom he negotiated all last year about how Venezuela could avoid invasion.
Maduro appointed Delcy as his vice-president in the 2018 elections and put her in charge of the state oil industry. At once she began to reorder its finances, opened Venezuela to the free market, and indicated that the country would not be averse to some foreign investment in the oil industry. It could be that she is a Chavista though not a socialist, but Maduro kept her close because he saw that she was producing results. The Trump team noticed too. Apparently, while Jorge was talking to Grenell, she was talking to Rubio.
In an interview with The New York Times Trump said they talk constantly. Do they talk about whether she really is in power or if that’s just a façade? Maybe their chats are about the 30 to 50 million barrels of oil that Trump says Venezuela has promised to “give” the US. Or maybe Rubio is trying to figure out, like Venezuelans everywhere and all the rest of us, who Delcy Rodríguez really is, because on one day she will “extend an invitation to the US government to work together on a cooperative agenda” and on another she will claim that drug trafficking and human rights “were an excuse” for the US intervention, “because the real motive is Venezuelan oil.” Rumors are everywhere that Rodríguez, the daughter of a radical socialist who refused to bend under torture, a woman who is known for getting her way and trying to barge into meetings she has explicitly been disinvited from, has signed a two-year Platt-like agreement to let the United States take over Venezuela’s oil industry while she runs the country’s day-to-day business with a bureaucracy and security apparatus that will be left mostly untouched. If so, she can hardly still be thinking of herself as a Chavista at all, for Chávez was nothing if not antiyanqui.
Who knows how long she will last or where her real loyalties lie. Who knows what sector of the armed forces or which generals are willing to support her in the coming months or whether the hundreds of political prisoners will be freed or their numbers multiplied. Who can even tell what Chavismo is at this point, other than some two million individuals linked by state jobs and self-interest. It is possible to read news sites and search the Internet for hours without understanding what happened on January 3.
Trump’s long-term plan for Venezuela has yet to be formulated. He has repeated that the US will be in charge of the country for at least the near future, or “much longer” than a year, he said in the Times interview. But Trump is supposed to leave office in three years. The longer the US is involved in the country, the harder it will be to disengage. Who will have to face at last the chants of “US out of Venezuela”?
January 3 marked the end of Soviet socialist–style governance, not only in Venezuela but in Nicaragua and Cuba, too; the end of US efforts to be a good neighbor; the end of the ability of democratically elected presidents throughout the hemisphere to trust that they can govern freely. An entire world order is in question, but there is nothing to fill the void, not even a realistic plan to bring back the Venezuelan oil industry. Again: What was it all for?
—January 15, 2026
Alma Guillermoprieto is a regular contributor to The New York Review. Her most recent book is The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America. (February 2026)