Trump's Venezuela raid topples Maduro but leaves authoritarian grip intact

On the morning of January 3rd, Ángel Linares was jolted awake by a sound he couldn't place—a strange buzz, then an explosion that shattered his windows and tore the facade off his apartment building in Catia La Mar, a seaside town twenty miles north of Caracas. His eighty-five-year-old mother, Jesucita, thought an earthquake had struck, like the one she remembered from 1967. Next door, Elizabeth Herrera jumped from bed in her pajamas. When the post-blast silence filled with gunfire, the reality became clear: this was something far worse than a natural disaster. Just before two in the morning, Donald Trump had ordered an invasion of Venezuela—not a full-scale military operation, but a surgical strike to abduct the country's president, Nicolás Maduro. The residents of Urbanización Rómulo Gallegos found themselves at the center of it all as air-to-surface missiles rained down on military installations and helicopter-borne Delta Force fighters swept toward the capital. Herrera's autistic son, terrified and confused, asked her if Venezuelans were the bad guys, if they were going to be killed. She told him it was just a dispute between governments. "So why are they shooting at us?" he demanded. The logic made no sense to him, and it would make little sense to many Venezuelans in the months that followed.

Operation Absolute Resolve lasted two and a half hours. Scores of Cuban and Venezuelan troops died, along with at least three civilians. Maduro was captured. But what happened next defied expectation: Trump recognized Maduro's vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, as the new leader. Four months later, Venezuelans were still struggling to understand what had actually occurred. The country had endured thirteen years of Maduro's increasingly despotic rule, deepened after he was accused of stealing the 2024 presidential election. His capture seemed to promise liberation. Yet the transition that followed was bewildering—not a clean break toward democracy, but something far more ambiguous.

There were undeniable changes. Murals of Maduro were painted over. His portraits disappeared from government offices. Foreign journalists were allowed back into the country for the first time since the 2024 election. Hundreds of political prisoners were released. Dissidents emerged from hiding or returned from exile. On one recent evening, hundreds gathered outside El Helicoide, Venezuela's most notorious political prison—a shopping mall converted into a torture center—to demand fresh elections and the release of the estimated five hundred detainees still held inside. Police filmed the protesters but did not intervene. "People have lost their fear," said Jeisi Blanco, a human rights campaigner, as colleagues chalked the names of the imprisoned on the pavement. Jesús Armas, a former political prisoner and ally of exiled opposition leader María Corina Machado, spoke of hope. "I feel great," he said. "I know that we are going to change this country. We're going to bring back freedom, and I know Venezuela will be a democracy in the next few months."

But the optimism collided with a troubling reality. Rodríguez had given no indication that elections were coming. When asked when a vote might be held, she deflected: "I don't know, some time." More perplexing still was the sudden alliance between Washington and Caracas. Trump praised Rodríguez as a "terrific" partner. Venezuelan officials who had spent years at loggerheads with the United States now rolled out the red carpet for Trump's representatives. Jarrod Agen, director of Trump's national energy dominance council, arrived in Caracas on the first U.S. commercial flight to the country in more than seven years. "We're moving at Trump speed," he said, flanked by smiling Venezuelan officials. Diplomats stationed in Caracas expressed astonishment. "It's the theatre of the absurd, it's Beckett," one foreign envoy said, noting that Rodríguez's team had simply moved from point A to point B without explaining why they had abandoned the anti-imperialist ideology that had defined the Bolivarian revolution for more than two decades.

Experts traced the unlikely partnership to mutual self-interest. Trump wanted access to Venezuela's vast oil reserves and a foreign policy victory amid troubles elsewhere. Rodríguez wanted to preserve power and save the political movement Hugo Chávez had founded. Tom Shannon, a U.S. diplomat with decades of experience in Venezuela, explained it plainly: the goal was not to make Venezuela a puppet state, but to maintain and preserve the Bolivarian revolution to whatever extent possible, allowing the political leadership that had defined it to survive. Rodríguez, Shannon suggested, likely found the arrangement humiliating. But it was, in her calculation, necessary.

For those who had suffered under Maduro's rule—who blamed the movement for an economic and humanitarian catastrophe that had forced roughly a quarter of the country's population to flee—the incomplete transition left a bitter taste. Elizabeth Herrera, sitting outside her home next to a government memorial to the victims of Trump's attack, recalled her initial exhilaration. "I thought it was all over," she said. "I thought, thank goodness we're going to escape this situation which is strangling us." But as days passed, excitement turned to dismay. The news spoke of oil and gold being extracted. Meanwhile, nothing changed for ordinary people. "If Trump came here, I'd ask him to think about Venezuelans and not just the natural resources that Venezuela has," she said. "I feel hope but I also feel fear. Our fear is harbouring hope that the situation is going to change and then this not happening." Jesucita Linares, Ángel's mother, had converted her shopping trolley into an emergency go-bag filled with clothes and medicine, preparing for another attack. "I've been asking God for this never to happen again," she said. "But you never really know."