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Nicolás Maduro wins presidential elections in Venezuela
Since the attempted coup d’état against Chávez in 2002, Venezuela has been preparing for an armed conflict with Washington. The strategy is clear: as they cannot win militarily, they will make the country impossible to govern.
As tensions between Washington and Caracas increase, the Venezuelan leadership believes it is entering the initial phase of a long-anticipated confrontation with the United States, a scenario for which he has been preparing since the early 2000s.
The alert appears in a context of strong intensification of military presence in the Caribbean, including the arrival in November of the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, in the waters off the Venezuelan coast, as well as the seizure of an oil tanker that Caracas denounced as “”.
US President Donald Trump also announced a total blockade of all sanctioned oil ships entering and leaving Venezuela, having also offered a multimillion-dollar reward for the capture of President Nicolás Maduro. More recently, Trump confirmed the North American to Venezuelan territory.
“This has been a somewhat surreal period,” he said. Pablo OshuaPhD student at the Institute of the Americas at University College London (UCL). “I think we are, in a way, sleepwalk into this situationbecause she moves discreetly towards something very dangerous.”
Speaking to the podcast, Oshua explained that Venezuela sees the current escalation as the culmination of years of pressure and an unfinished dossier for Trump, who repeatedly described the country as a lost opportunity during his first term.
“Venezuela is unfinished business for Donald Trump“, said Oshua, recalling statements in which Trump stated that sanctions imposed between 2017 and 2019 almost led to the country’s collapse. “There was always this feeling that Donald Trump could now return with a real strategy.”
According to the investigator, Venezuela’s preparation for a North American invasion dates back to 2002when a coup attempt temporarily removed then President Hugo Chávez from power. Although Chávez was returned to office in less than 48 hours, the episode was decisive and led to a profound transformation in Venezuelan military planning.
“The investigations that followed the coup revealed that a lot of money from US taxpayers was sent to Venezuelan opposition organizations who were directly involved in the coup,” Oshua said. “Therefore, although the coup was an internal matter, it was largely carried out and conducted with the support of the United States.”
From that moment on, Chávez began to view national security as a project simultaneously military and social. “Security was not just his own protection,” Oshua explained, “but also how to make sure people had food, how to distribute the oil, and how to make sure the military wouldn’t do another coup against him.”
Chavez removed opponents from the Armed Forcespromoted allies and reformulated military doctrine based on three perceived enemies: the United States, Colombia, which was a close ally of Washington, and the internal opposition. Crucially, he accepted that Venezuela could not defeat the US militarily.
“They will not defeat the United States,” Oshua said. “Therefore, they have to create some kind of framework for asymmetric warfare.”
Inspired by the conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq, Chávez sought to ensure that any invading force would have enormous difficulty governing the country. “The basic idea here is that the fight is not just army against army,” Oshua said. “It’s a fight between an army against the people.”
This thought led, in 2008, to the creation of Bolivarian Militiaa civilian-based force that has since become the fifth branch of the Venezuelan Armed Forces. The militia, which according to the government currently has around five million members, was conceived as the nucleus of a national resistance.
“There is no way to train these people as soldiers at the same level,” Oshua said. “So the militia is based on the idea that if an army comes in, they will create resistance. That’s what they call the second phase of the war.”
The expert believes that the Venezuelan authorities may now see the current moment as the “first phase” of this conflict. The second phase, he explained, would be a prolonged insurgency.
“What are they trying to simulate? It’s a kind of Vietnam“, he said. “They want to ensure that no one force can control much of the territory, enough to create a lot of chaos and make it extremely expensive for Americans to remain.”
The strategy intensified after Chávez’s deathin 2013, and the rise of Maduro, who did not inherit the same electoral dominance and began to depend more heavily on the military to remain in power. “Before, Chávez didn’t have to choose between authoritarianism and democracy because he won elections,” said Oshua. “With Maduro, we begin to see the use of a different manual.”
Under Maduro, the military has expanded its role in food distribution, economic management and internal security, while neighborhood watch networks and reporting apps have turned civilians into what the President called “the eyes and ears of the revolution”.
“In a volatile scenario, this idea that spies can be everywhere is reinforced,” said Oshua, noting that some police operations are already dubbed “Operation Tuntún”, in reference to the nightly knocks on doors.
Despite this, Oshua sees no signs that neither the Trump administration nor the Venezuelan opposition fully understand the scale of resistance that such a system could generate. “We talk about power as if it were enough to change the person in the presidential palace,” he said. “But the task would be to sustain. It has to go beyond Maduro, beyond the main figures.”
At a regional level, an invasion by the Americans would have profoundly destabilizing effects. “An American invasion is something obviously unacceptable for most leaders. But they would have to manage the internal political implications to define the exact position”, especially in a context in which neighboring countries in Latin America welcome thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.
For the Venezuelan leadership, however, the calculation seems clear: survival does not depend on winning a war, but on make it impossible to complete.
