Venezuela: unfinished business for the U.S.

Experienced imperialists understand that you can’t just take over a country and expect it to run itself. It takes time and work to turn it into an obedient and profitable colony and two months is not enough. Donald Trump moved on to his next target too soon and given how Iran’s been working out for him, he probably hasn’t thought of Venezuela in months.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who acts as Trump’s viceroy for Venezuela, hasn’t been there since the U.S. kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in January. (In fact, he may never have been there at all — I can find no evidence of it.) But he does think about Venezuela. In fact, he controls the country very tightly from his Washington office.

He and Trump’s choice for interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, talk online every day, we are told. (She was the vice-president under Maduro, so she was the obvious choice if Trump wanted a local collaborator with supporters in the army and the secret police.) Rubio collects the government’s income and he tells her what she can spend her share on.

It’s an awkward arrangement, because the cabinet is still the core Chavista leaders, minus only Maduro himself. Trump thinks Rodríguez is a “terrific person” and doesn’t worry about elections: Venezuelans “wouldn’t even know how to have an election right now.” But Rubio understands that they really do expect an election to be part of the “transition.”

Rubio’s real job, therefore, is to find somebody who will do whatever the U.S. government wants without totally alienating ordinary Venezuelans. He is slow-walking the return to free elections while he works on that puzzle: “I think it’s going to require some persistence and a little bit of patience, not years, but certainly months and weeks.”

He already has an obedient acting president in Rodríguez and for a while after the takeover it looked as if she could be acceptable. She wasn’t hated by half the population like Maduro had been, she made a few positive gestures, such as releasing more than half the long-stay political prisoners — and she willingly signed any oil contract that the U.S. put before her.

But the failure of her government to respond quickly and adequately to the devastating earthquakes of June 24 completely discredited her in the eyes of most Venezuelans. As one opinion pollster put it: “The mismanagement of the disaster destroyed her numbers. Ninety per cent of the population reject her. In electoral terms, there’s no coming back from that.”

The obvious alternative is María Corina Machado, a conservative politician who would have become president in the 2024 election if Maduro’s tame Supreme Court had not barred her from running and rigged the election against the man nominated to run in her place.

In a recent opinion poll pitting Machado against Rodríguez, she was chosen by 82 per cent of those polled, Rodríguez by only four per cent. However, Machado hasn’t been back to Venezuela since she went to Norway eight months ago to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She has met Trump at least twice, even gave him her Nobel to win his favour, but she still hasn’t got home.

It’s very likely that Machado is not being allowed to go. She’s even farther to the right politically than Trump is, so it’s probably not about politics in the left-right sense. It may simply be one of those extreme dislikes that Trump conceives in a moment and carries around with him ever after. Maybe she argued with him.

She can’t be kept out of the country forever, but she is definitely out of the running so far. Instead, Rubio last month invited another prominent figure from the exiled opposition to the Chavista regime to come home — Dinorah Figuera, who had been living in Spain since 2019.

Figuera has now been made the leader of an opposition delegation that will discuss the details of an eventual transition to a genuine democratic system with a government delegation led by Delcy Rodríguez’s brother, Jorge. They can discuss as much as they like, but there is neither a roadmap nor a timetable for this enterprise.

It looks very much like a distraction meant to keep the opposition busy while the regime and the U.S. State Department do the real work on redesigning Venezuela elsewhere. It will succeed for while, but the smart money says that Trump and Rubio will find themselves facing a big “Venezuelan problem” in the streets by the end of the year.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.