Four months after the North American military operation that captured Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela is experiencing a political opening that was unthinkable a short time ago. But, between released prisoners, opposition still waiting and an unexpected rapprochement between Caracas and Washington, the question that crosses the country remains unanswered
The first explanation was the simplest. Fireworks.
That should be it.
Ángel Linares heard a strange buzzing sound, then an explosion, and thought that someone was celebrating the New Year late, or too early, he described to . His mother, Jesucita, 85, searched her memory for another fear: the 1967 earthquake, still alive in a country where land, politics and history are rarely quiet for long. Next door, Elizabeth Herrera jumped out of bed in her pajamas and realized it wasn’t a party when the silence of the explosion was followed by the sound of gunfire.
It wasn’t an earthquake. They weren’t rockets. It was also not, at least in the classical sense, a coup d’état.
In the early hours of January 3, Donald Trump ordered a lightning military operation in Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro, then President of the country, in an incursion called Operation “Absolute Resolve”. The attack hit defense systems and radars on the Caribbean coast, before special forces headed towards Caracas. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, would be taken out of the country. What was left behind was the wreckage, the dead, the fear and a political succession that few expected.
In Catia La Mar, about 30 kilometers from Caracas, the residents of Urbanización Rómulo Gallegos found themselves at the center of a war they did not choose. Herrera told the British newspaper that those ten minutes “felt like an endless hour.” Two elderly neighbors died. His son, who is autistic, asked him if Venezuelans were “the bad ones”. His mother tried to explain that perhaps it was just a problem “between the White House and Miraflores,” the Venezuelan presidential palace.
The child asked him back the question that, four months later, still sums up a part of the country: if it was a matter between governments, “why were the missiles falling there”?
Since then, Venezuela has entered a kind of post-Maduro without post-Chavism.
The fall of the man who governed the country for 13 years did not open a direct path to the opposition led by María Corina Machado, nor to a clear democratic transition. Trump recognized Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, as the new head of power in Caracas. And the former Bolivarian elite, for years fueled by anti-imperialist rhetoric, received North American officials with a cordiality that left diplomats, opponents and ordinary citizens without sufficient political vocabulary to describe the moment.
There are signs of thawing, yes. Murals of Maduro were erased. Portraits discreetly disappeared from some public offices. Foreign journalists once again entered the country. Hundreds of political prisoners were released. Militants who lived in hiding or in exile reappeared. And next to Helicoide, a former shopping center transformed into a political prison and symbol of repression, hundreds of people gathered to demand elections and the release of detainees who remain in prison.
Not long ago, such a concentration would have been almost unimaginable.
Opening or just a door ajar?
“They lost their fear,” Jeisi Blanco, a human rights activist, summed up to the Guardian, while the names of prisoners still detained were written on the floor. They weren’t numbers, he remembered. They were people, families, stories suspended for years in a cell.
But opening is not a clean passage to another regime. It is a half-open door, guarded by the same corridors. Delcy Rodríguez did not schedule elections. When asked when they might happen, he simply replied: “I don’t know, one day.” The opposition, which saw in Maduro’s capture the possibility of a historic turnaround, remains on the sidelines of the reorganization of power.
Jesús Armas, a former political prisoner and ally of Machado, described to the Guardian the contradictory feeling of this time: “Everything is so confusing.”
Sometimes, he added, it feels like “an illusion.”
The word can be used for almost everything. Illusion of fall, because Maduro is gone. Illusion of change, because many of your people continue. Illusion of sovereignty, because Caracas, after years of denouncing North American imperialism, now seems to accept informal tutelage from Washington. Illusion of democracy, because there is less fear in the streets, but there is still no electoral calendar. Illusion of normality, because North American commercial flights have returned to the oil-rich country, while neighborhoods affected by the operation continue to live with broken walls and emergency bags prepared at the door.
Welcome, gringos
In the United States, the operation is presented by the Trump administration as a demonstration of strength and effectiveness.
Jarrod Agen, director of the national energy domain council, arrived in Caracas on the first North American commercial flight in more than seven years and spoke of “Trump speed”. The phrase says more than it seems. Venezuela is a political crisis, but also an energy reserve. And, according to experts, the rapprochement between Washington and the new Venezuelan power is born of reciprocal convenience. Trump seeks access to oil and an external victory. Rodríguez tries to preserve what remains of the Bolivarian revolution and guarantee the political survival of his camp.
Tom Shannon, a former North American diplomat with long experience in Venezuela, described the situation to the Guardian as an attempt to save the essence of the Chavista project, even if this requires negotiating with the historical adversary. The objective, he explained, will not be to become an instrument of the United States, but a partner of the United States. At least to the extent necessary to retain power. For Rodríguez, Shannon admitted, the position will be “humiliating”, but also “historic”.
It is this humiliation that many Venezuelans observe with bitterness. For years, Chavismo explained the internal crisis through external aggression. Now, after a real external aggression, it chooses to negotiate with those who ordered it. The contradiction was not digested.
A diplomat quoted by the Guardian compared the moment to the “theatre of the absurd”. The image is cruel, but difficult to shake: the actors are still on stage, the scenery has changed, and no one has explained to the audience whether the play is over or whether it has just entered another act.
For those who lived through the explosion of Catia La Mar, geopolitics always arrives late. First comes the broken glass, the body on the floor, a child’s question.
Elizabeth Herrera also began believing that the end of Maduro could be the end of asphyxiation. “I thought it was all over,” she told the newspaper. Then he heard about oil, gold, agreements, flights, smiling authorities. And he continued in the same neighborhood, in front of an official memorial to the victims of the attack, with his life still waiting for a change that does not arrive by foreign decree or new paint on the walls.
Venezuela is breathing better than it was four months ago. There are prisoners outside their cells, voices in the streets, journalists entering, opponents returning. But the air remains thick. Breathable but thick.
And perhaps this is the most disconcerting mark of this new era: after so many years of waiting for a fall, many Venezuelans have discovered that the next moment can also be a form of uncertainty.
