Dear Editor,
The pressures on Venezuelan dictator Maduro increased last week from several directions, in addition to the US armada positioned off Venezuela’s coast. The US OFAC imposed new sanctions on a) three nephews of Maduro’s wife who had been convicted of narco-trafficking but had been released in a prisoner exchange; b) a Maduro-affiliated businessman and c) six shipping companies operating in Venezuela’s oil sector. The latter was enforced in the seizure of a Venezuelan-loaded supertanker by armada forces and the cargo taken to the US. This will severely hurt Maduro’s staunch ally Cuba, which is dependent on Venezuelan crude and may nudge it to support a regime transition.
The second was a report from a U.N. Fact-Finding Mission that substantiated the brutal nature of Maduro’s regime which has forced eight million Venezuelans to flee their country. The report asserted that Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard, a bulwark of the Maduro regime, committed serious human rights violations and crimes against humanity over more than a decade in targeting political opponents, often with official impunity.
The last was the saga of Maria Corina Machado, who had been barred by Maduro from participating in last year’s elections, which yet had to be rigged against her selected replacement. In collecting her Nobel Prize for her efforts to return democracy to Venezuela, she performatively highlighted Maduro’s Gestapo state. She revealed to the international press in Norway that she had to be smuggled out of the country in which she had been hiding for the last year, and yet was late for the ceremony. She again reiterated her support for the US moves to remove Maduro and vowed cryptically: “I’m going back to Venezuela regardless of when Maduro goes out. He’s going out, but the moment will be determined by when I’m finished doing the things that I came out to do.”
It would appear that the US is striving to avoid a direct kinetic attack on Venezuela to remove Maduro, who they have described as the head of the Cartel de los Solos that ships narcotics to the US, killing thousands annually. President Trump has spoken directly to Maduro to leave but the latter demanded concessions that were unacceptable to the US. The moves described above would be part of the unfolding US programme for Maduro to accept their offer and might be what Machado referred to when she spoke of finishing what she came out to do. At a minimum, she can persuade EU leaders to back the US strategy for regime change in Venezuela by supporting her in a peaceful transfer of power that does not involve an invasion, which they would have to oppose because of their stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Such a scenario is also positive for us, since our position is that unlike the unilateral annexation of our Essequibo that Maduro has been pursuing, the ICJ’s judicial process is the best course. But a Machado (or a proxy) becoming a symbolic electoral victor in Venezuela to replace Maduro also presents challenges for us since, while she offers external credibility, she would not have institutional control. We must concede that with the ground reality, real power would be shared with the remnants of the military high command and their security services; the economic oligarchs that they have joined and also the armed collectivos. As such, a Machado-led transition would not be a revolutionary break but an elite bargain where Venezuelan ownership of Essequibo remains an article of faith.
Under a Machado-aligned transition, pressure on us will not only come from the above mentioned forces inside Venezuela but from friends outside who will frame their efforts as “peace, stability, and pragmatism”. Caricom, for instance, may continue placing their Zone of Peace mantra above our territorial integrity while the US priority will shift from punishment to stabilizing Venezuela for “normalization” of Venezuelan energy supplies, within their hemispheric premises.
Our focus must be to insist that the ICJ process for settling Venezuela’s border controversy is the only path forward and here the US, Caricom, the EU, and Commonwealth etc have been in agreement. We should lobby all and sundry that as part of the transition with or without Machado as the nominal head, there must be a written agreement on the primacy of the ICJ process. In 2023 when Maduro was conducting his referendum on Essequibo, Machado had indicated she supported the ICJ process.