In the analysis we published on January 3rd, we described the situation in Venezuela as a controlled transition. As the hours passed, new elements emerged that necessitate a more detailed analysis, based on attempts to interpret the reasons why Trump said what he said at that day’s press conference and the consequences of his statements for a transition to democracy.
Trump left out opposition leader María Corina Machado, claiming that ” She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect to govern.” Faced with such a categorical and offensive statement, some have tried to justify Trump’s snub of Machado with different arguments.
One argument is that Trump is protecting Machado for another time, because it would be impossible for her to govern Venezuela now. Following this reasoning, one might ask whether she could have governed (with González Urrutia, the election winner) the Venezuela of January 10, 2025. The Venezuela of a year ago is not very different from today’s, in terms of the loyalties of the Armed Forces, the type of activity of the collectives and armed groups from Colombia, and the control of the ruling party over the State, so Trump’s protective intention does not seem to have much basis.
According to another interpretation, it was not convenient for Machado to assume power immediately, because she would have been perceived as a puppet of the empire. In the realm of perceptions, there are already strong questions about her relationship with Trump and other allies with a questionable track record from the point of view of respect for human rights and international law. The world was divided when the Nobel Committee announced that it was awarding her the Peace Prize in October 2025, not on January 3rd.
A third narrative has insisted that all transitions have been carried out with the outgoing leadership, citing the cases of Chile with Augusto Pinochet and Spain with Adolfo Suárez as examples, which leads us to the main question of this analysis: are we facing a transition to democracy?
So far, the scenario unfolding in Venezuela appears to be one of a controlled transition, imposed by a foreign power, in which the opposition was excluded and an agreement was reached with the person next in line to succeed Maduro. This bears no resemblance to what happened with Pinochet or Suárez. Pinochet called a plebiscite, which he lost and attempted to disregard, but the rest of the military junta did not support him, and he was forced to relinquish power, retaining some important prerogatives, but for a defined period of eight years, with a clear path toward leaving power and the beginning of the restoration of democracy. Suárez, for his part, was a Francoist appointed by King Juan Carlos to lead the country through a transition in which he legalized all political parties, including the communist party, and guided Spain toward a social and democratic state under the rule of law.
Similar situations occurred in South Africa, Peru, and Argentina. Although each case is different, they all share common characteristics: they were not transitions imposed by a foreign power, they were not negotiated in the absence of the opposition and civil society, and their goal was the restoration of democracy and the rule of law, based on a somewhat flawed but existing institutional framework. In all cases, except for Spain, there was some model of transitional justice, truth commissions, and vindication of victims’ rights.
Afghanistan and Iraq, on the other hand, are transitions imposed by a foreign power, negotiated without the participation of the opposition, in contexts of weak institutions. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, foreign powers designed the new state with 25 prominent Afghans with profiles of regional strongmen, excluding broad sectors of the opposition and with an almost nonexistent institutional framework. In Iraq, after the U.S.-led invasion, the Coalition Provisional Authority was created with the presence of the invading power and representatives of the previous regime who agreed to cooperate. The local opposition and grassroots movements were not included.
In cases where the transition was agreed upon internally and without foreign intervention, there is now a democratic system that may be imperfect, but it meets the basic criteria of separation of powers, the rule of law, and alternation of power. The same cannot be said of the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the withdrawal of the invading forces led to a new wave of chaos, which seems to disprove the thesis that Machado was protected to prevent her from being caught in a chaotic situation, when chaos has occurred in transitions involving foreign powers and where the opposition is excluded. In addition to a new stage of chaos, these experiments involved a transition, not towards democracy, and therefore, transitional justice to vindicate the victims was also absent.
US spokespersons have stated that Venezuela cannot be compared to Afghanistan or Iraq because Venezuela does not have ethnic or religious factions. This thesis has been repeated by some Venezuelan analysts. While it is true that these factors do not exist in Venezuela, fragmentation is not the only element to consider. Cohesion was broken in Venezuela after decades of sowing distrust. Fragmentation was the basis of Apartheid in South Africa, and even so, a transition with cohesion and undoubtely democratic features was achieved.
It is a fact that Machado was excluded because Trump is not interested in a transition to democracy or the reconstruction of the rule of law (words always absent in his references to Venezuela), and in politics, silences are decisive insofar as they mark the distancing from what is not acknowledged. The US President is primarily concerned with a new order based on the Monroe Doctrine. Born for hemispheric defense against European colonialism, this doctrine eventually mutated to promote the hegemonic positioning of the United States over the Americas, giving rise to the justification of different types of interventionism in countries whose relations or internal affairs affected its strategic interests. Today, the Monroe Doctrine is, in real terms, not even about the interests of the United States, but rather the personal interests of Donald Trump, who is characterized by acting unilaterally and outside of any national or international institutional framework. In effect, Trump not only acts in defiance of international law and multilateralism, but also of the checks and balances of his own country.
Applied to the Venezuelan case, this doctrine means that any political action in Venezuela must first pass the test of aligning with the “American” interest; again, that of its president. Suffice it to say that any authoritarian arrangement of power can perfectly well serve certain interests. Thus, a transition to democracy in Venezuela will only be possible insofar as Trump considers it valuable for his objectives. Today, when he still does not recognize Edmundo González as president and does not even mention the word democracy in his speeches, it is evident that this issue is far from moving him in any way. If the authorities elected on July 28 are not supported and the tutelage of the de facto government continues, whatever is agreed upon in Venezuela can only lead to a worsening of the existing crisis.
At this point and with the elements we know, the transition overseen by a foreign power in Venezuela closely resembles the transitions in Afghanistan and Iraq and very little those of Chile, Spain, Peru, or South Africa. The Venezuelan issue has its own unique characteristics that make it an unprecedented case, but the comparison is necessary to raise the alarm about the common elements that loom as a threat and could bring the national political scenario closer to that of those countries than to a democratic transition.
That is why the call to the international community is for the urgent rescue of multilateralism, in the search for a negotiated solution with the participation of the opposition, which truly aims at a transition to democracy, and with the inclusion of civil society to ensure that the victims of Maduro’s crimes do not go without justice. Although the United States is not responsible, under the current circumstances, for what the de facto regime does against its population, it has become so intensely involved in the conflict that, if it continues its tutelage, enforceable responsibilities may arise in that area; that is, by the behavior of the de facto regime.