Regime Change in America’s Back Yard

The operation to remove Maduro came precisely thirty-six years after President George H. W. Bush sent the U.S. military to invade Panama and depose General Manuel Noriega. A former American proxy, Noriega had begun criticizing the United States in rallies and machete-waving speeches; he was taken into custody and, like Maduro, accused of drug trafficking. When I met Noriega in prison, in 2015, two years before his death, he largely insisted on his innocence but expressed regret at having taken on the Americans. If he had the chance to do things over, he said, he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Trump insisted in Saturday’s press conference that, by deposing Maduro, he had removed the “kingpin of a vast criminal network” that trafficked huge amounts of cocaine into the U.S. Ironically, just weeks before, he had extended a full pardon to the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who in 2024 was convicted in the Southern District of New York of cocaine trafficking and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. Trump’s reasoning was that, like him, Hernández had been “treated very harshly and unfairly” by political opponents.

When I met with Maduro in 2017, he spoke bluffly about the limits of the effort to remove him from office. “They want me out, but, if I leave this chair, whom shall we put in it?” he said. “Who can be the President?” Many Venezuelans support Edmundo González and María Corina Machado, the apparent winners of the Presidential election that Maduro stole in 2024. González was the Presidential candidate, but the real power is Machado, a conservative Catholic from a wealthy family who built a following as an ardent critic of the Maduro regime. Both have been in hiding, though Machado appeared in Oslo last month to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. Cannily, she dedicated the award “to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump.”

In the press conference, Trump called Machado “a very nice woman” but said that she doesn’t have the “respect within the country” to lead. Instead, he said, the U.S. would “run” Venezuela in the immediate term, as part of a “group” that also apparently included U.S. oil companies. They will have to contend with Maduro’s senior officials, who remain largely in place. They include the hard-line military chief General Vladimir Padrino López; Diosdado Cabello, the equally hard-line interior minister; and Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, a tough-minded operator. All have denounced Maduro’s abduction. Padrino, in a press conference of his own, condemned “the most criminal military aggression” and declared the activation of a national-defense plan, including widespread mobilization of Venezuelan forces on land, sea, and air. Reportedly, in response, Trump said that the U.S. was prepared to mount a second military intervention. Yet many questions remain unanswered. Why take out Maduro and leave his supporters in place? Can his loyalists still carry the timeworn Bolivarian revolution forward? Will Trump offer Maduro refuge in another country—perhaps Turkey—in exchange for his asking his comrades in Caracas to stand down? Or will the remaining officials find a way to hold on to power? (In the press conference, Trump praised Delcy Rodríguez, saying that she had been exceptionally coöperative.)

It remains to be seen how Venezuelans, both in government and in the street, will respond to the increased presence of U.S. power in their country. Twenty-four years ago, I spoke with Hugo Chávez in Fuerte Tiuna, a military headquarters in Caracas that was bombed in last night’s raid. He told me that he would never let the Americans take him alive, to parade him around like a trophy. Chávez, who died of cancer in 2013, avoided such a humiliation. Maduro did not have the insight, or the instincts, to forge a different destiny for himself. ♦