The United States decapitated the Venezuelan regime and is dictating policy in Venezuela, running the country like an American colony. But the regime remains in place. Washington has been forced to exercise its dominance overtly through thuggish economic and military coercion rather than covertly by installing the pro-U.S. opposition.
There are at least four reasons for this failure. The first is past failures. Many of them. Guillaume Long, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador and currently a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me that “regime change (meaning getting the pro-US opposition into power) failed in Venezuela, because there have been so many US-supported failed coup attempts in Venezuela in the last few years, that there is literally no one left to organize and support a coup attempt.” That means that to pull off complete regime change would have required a military uprising or coup in Venezuela that the U.S. could support. “The Venezuelan security apparatus,” Long says, “is too tight for that right now.”
The second is that the most recent failures of U.S. supported coups in Venezuela left the Trump administration feeling that the opposition was incapable of taking over the country. The Trump administration had consistently asserted that Nicolás Maduro was an illegitimate leader who had stolen the last election from the María Corina Machado led opposition. Following the capture of Maduro, Machado declared that “Today we are prepared to assert our mandate and seize power.” But if she was, Trump wasn’t. Trump spurned Machado, saying “it would be very tough for her to be the leader if she doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect within [Venezuela].”
That reversal and rejection “blindsided Machado’s aides” and “landed like a gut punch” for Machado. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump was leery of the Machado led opposition “after concluding it failed to deliver in his first term.” The U.S. had broken Venezuela with sanctions that had reduced oil production by 75 percent, that led to the “worst depression, without a war, in world history,” and caused tens of thousands of deaths. They had, to a large extent, diplomatically isolated Maduro, and they had done everything they could to catalyze a military uprising. But the armed forces did not rise up, the people did not rise up, and the opposition failed to take power. The Trump administration assessed “the opposition overpromised and underperformed.”
“Senior U.S. officials had grown frustrated with her assessments of Mr. Maduro’s strength, feeling that she provided inaccurate reports that he was weak and on the verge of collapse,” The New York Times reports. They had become “skeptical of her ability to seize power in Venezuela.” After repeatedly asking Machado for her plan “for putting her surrogate candidate, Edmundo González, into office,” they came to the realization that she had “no concrete ideas” on how to achieve that goal.
The third reason is that Machado is too radical to unite the opposition and the people of Venezuela. She “represents the most hardline faction” of the opposition, William Leo Grande, Professor of Government at American University and a specialist in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, told me. Yale University history professor Greg Grandin says, Machado has “constantly divided… and handicapped the opposition” by advancing a “more hardline” position.
When Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize, Miguel Tinker Salas, Professor of Latin American History at Pomona College and one of the world’s leading experts on Venezuelan history and politics, reminded me that Machado supported a coup against a democratically elected government, was a leading organizer of the violent La Salida insurrection that left many dead, and endorses foreign military intervention in her country. She was a signatory to the Carmona Decree, which suspended democracy, revoked the constitution, and installed a coup president.
Machado has supported the painful American sanctions on Venezuela. According to The New York Times, this strategy lost her support among the people and the elite. The business elite were threatened by sanctions and had “built a modus vivendi with Mr. Maduro to continue working.” The general population were anxious to improve living conditions, and Machado’s message alienated them. But as Trump tightened sanctions, Machado “remained largely silent.”
Her loss of support led to the loss of control of the levers required to come to power. Leo Grande told me that Machado’s hardline approach made her “the least acceptable to the armed forces.” “Trying to impose her,” he said, “would be very risky.” Tinker Salas told me that Machado is both “unacceptable to the military and the police forces” and to the ruling PSUV party structure. “Her imposition,” he said, “would have been a deal breaker.”
A classified U.S. intelligence assessment came to the same conclusion. The CIA analysis recommended working with the vice president of the current regime over working with Machado. The assessment convinced Trump “that near-term stability in Venezuela could be maintained only if Maduro’s replacement had the support of the country’s armed forces and other elites,” which Machado did not.
The CIA briefed Trump that Machado’s surrogate, Edmundo González, who ran against Maduro in the last election, “would struggle to gain legitimacy as leaders while facing resistance from pro-regime security services… and political opponents.”
So, despite framing the regime change as, amongst other things, a defense of democracy and the removal of a strong man who had held on to power illegitimately, the Trump administration side lined the opposition they said won the last election and assessed that their aims in Venezuela were best achieved by working, through economic and military coercion, with the vice president and inner circle of Maduro’s government.
