From Rogue State to Failed State?: The Perils of Intervention in Venezuela

On January 3, 2026, U.S. special forces executed a spectacular raid on Caracas, resulting in the abduction of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, who now faces charges of drug trafficking in the Southern District of New York. Hours later, President Donald Trump proclaimed that his administration intends to “run Venezuela.”¹ The raid took place exactly thirty-six years after Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega’s capture over the same charges by the George H. W. Bush administration. But where Noriega’s regime fell with him, Maduro’s regime has been left largely intact, with the Trump administration sending mixed signals as to what course it intends for Venezuela’s future. At various times, officials have suggested that they intend to coerce regime change, occupy the country, or cut a deal with interim President Delcy Rodríguez. Above all, the White House has displayed a singular interest in both reviving and exploiting Venezuela’s ruined oil sector.

Washington’s latest foreign adventure once again runs the risk of creating another failed state at the cost of Venezuelan and American lives. It likewise marks a new chapter, or possibly the devastating conclusion, of Venezuela’s Bolivarian regime, founded by the late Hugo Chávez. More broadly, the intervention will test the limits of the Trump administration’s new Monroe Doctrine in the Americas. Whether or not Maduro’s ouster is eventually viewed as a strategic success in and outside of the hemisphere will likely depend on the White House’s understanding of the country’s pre-intervention crises.

A Legacy of Dependence

Even prior to independence, Venezuela has been prone to stark cycles of boom and bust based on the sale of volatile primary products. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Venezuela ranked among the poorest colonies in the Americas, relying on cacao exports while its neighbors profited from mining gold and silver.² By the start of the nineteenth century, however, the country’s fertile lands led to a boom in cattle ranching. In 1800, Venezuela reportedly had higher GDP per capita than Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Peru.³ A year earlier, the geographer Alexander Humboldt remarked on the “immense” consumption of beef in Caracas, estimating that per capita consumption was more than seven times that of Paris. The devastation wrought on cattle fields from the wars of independence and subsequent civil wars once again drove the country into poverty, with growth falling far below peers during much of the nineteenth century.⁴

In 1914, oil was discovered in the Maracaibo Basin, and the country experienced an oil boom during the 1920s. Thereafter, Venezuela’s political economy would be coterminous with the sale of heavy crude oil. As in centuries past, state capacity and civil unrest ebbed and flowed in tandem with revenues from the new commodity staple. Between 1920 and 1975, GDP per capita increased more than tenfold under a market regime dominated by foreign multinationals. Oil production peaked at 3.8 million barrels per day (bpd) in 1970, and the country transformed once again into one of the richest in the Americas, though the distribution of wealth remained unequal.⁵

Having progressively increased its fiscal intake from oil via taxes on exporters, the administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez executed a thoughtful and strategically savvy nationalization of the oil industry in 1976. Occurring near peak production and amid soaring oil prices resulting from the energy crises of the 1970s, Pérez’s nationalization maintained the operational structure of existing multinationals. Majors such as Shell and Mobil in Venezuela were compensated and thereafter run as Venezuelan companies, operating as subsidiaries to the newly created state firm Petroleos de Venezuela (pdvsa), which retained its predecessors’ employees. Government revenues boomed in the short term with pdvsa later becoming the largest company in Latin America and the tenth most profitable in the world.⁶

Naturally, however, Dutch disease firmly engulfed the Venezuelan economy as the value of the bolívar skyrocketed, with consecutive governments doing little to counter appreciation and promote industrialization outside of the oil sector throughout the twentieth century. After Franklin Roosevelt suspended the gold standard for U.S. currency in 1933, most states in Latin America devalued their currencies in order to maintain export competitiveness. Venezuela, conversely, kowtowed to its financier class, which dominated the oil sector and stood to benefit from a strong bolívar.⁷ Today, the country’s economy is one of the least diversified on the planet, with hydrocarbons accounting for 80 percent of exports in 2023.⁸ It likewise failed to create a reliable sovereign wealth fund in the spirit of Norway or Saudi Arabia.⁹

Exactly like their Latin American peers, policymakers in Venezuela failed to save oil revenue during the 1970s and financed excessive spending in dollar-denominated debt. The Volcker Shock delivered a “lost decade” in Latin America as states struggled to service interest on debt, often leading to spiraling inflation.¹⁰ In Venezuela’s case, debt-to-GDP rose from 17 to 62 percent between 1980 and 1989 with inflation rising from 25 to almost 100 percent. To make matters worse, oil revenues plummeted from $45 billion in 1980 to $10 billion by 1986, following the resolution of the 1979 oil crisis.¹¹

In 1988, Carlos Andrés Pérez was reelected to a nonconsecutive term in the presidency, and the leader who previously nationalized the oil industry became a champion of neoliberal shock therapy. With poverty rates rising precipitously, the ensuing austerity drive led to the 1989 Caracazo riot, in which residents from the capital’s hillside slums descended upon the city center. A subsequent crackdown led to as many as a thousand casualties.¹² Three years later, a young colonel by the name of Hugo Chávez led a failed military coup against Pérez; soldiers loyal to the future president went on to lead another coup attempt months later while the colonel was in prison. Then, in 1993, Pérez was impeached and removed from office over charges of embezzlement. His successor, Rafael Caldera pardoned Chávez and allied officers in a gesture toward national reconciliation.¹³

During this period, oil production, which crashed during the 1980s, gradually recovered, though revenues and economic growth remained tepid due to low market prices throughout the 1990s; foreign multinationals were also invited to return to the oil sector and compete with pdvsa. Like so many of his populist counterparts, including Donald Trump, Chávez rode a wave of discontent against elites and free market globalism in the 1998 presidential election, winning 56 percent of the vote.¹⁴ Assuming the presidency in 1999, the nationalist leader pronounced the start of a “Bolivarian Revolution.” Since then, the political regime that took hold remains in power after more than a quarter century.

The Bolivarian Revolution

In his early years in power, Chávez, like Fidel Castro before him, was more of a national populist (admired by none other than Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro) than an anti-American Marxist.¹⁵ As in Cuba, the consolidation of a multidecade, anti-American regime in Venezuela was directly enabled by the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

Castro formally professed adherence to Marxism-Leninism in November of 1961, six months after the U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion. The propaganda boom was instrumental to the codification of one-party rule as well as an alliance with the USSR; at Cuba’s behest, the Soviets ultimately agreed to place nuclear missiles on the island as a deterrent to further U.S. aggression.¹⁶ In Venezuela, the George W. Bush administration lent vital support to the 2002 coup, led in part by future Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, that temporarily ousted Chávez. Mass counterprotests ultimately returned Chávez to power, and the colonel proceeded to purge the military and pack pdvsa with cronies. Three years later, an emboldened Chávez declared himself a socialist ahead of elections the following year in 2006.¹⁷

Around the time of the coup, oil production had recovered to near its 1970 peak. After the coup, however, pdvsa lost almost half of its employees, including experienced engineers who were replaced with Bolivarian faithful lacking basic expertise. Between 2000 and 2010, year-on-year production dropped from around 3.5 million to around 2.5 million bpd where it remained stagnant until 2015. But because oil prices surged after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, oil revenues quadrupled to $70 billion a year by 2012; Chávez also expropriated parts of multinationals’ oil operations, overseeing a more hostile process than the nationalization of 1976.¹⁸

Unlike his MAS ally in Bolivia, moreover, which amassed large sums of foreign reserves during the 2000s, Chávez neither saved windfalls nor committed to productive investments during the oil boom.¹⁹ Instead, the regime squandered revenues on poverty reduction measures, which (however well intentioned) only produced ephemeral gains that ultimately evaporated following the oil bust.²⁰ In 2005, the same year he declared himself a socialist, Chávez began lavishing mostly Caribbean allies with discounted oil shipments via the PetroCaribe program.²¹

The regime also created the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA), a grouping of anti-American, left-wing governments consisting at its height of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, and various Caribbean states. Around this time, the Bolivarian and Cuban regimes formed a lasting symbiosis centered around security and oil patronage. As I described in a previous essay in this journal, Caracas is estimated to have subsidized its Cuban ally to the tune of $122 billion in oil between just 2007 and 2017.²²

Exactly like his predecessors, Chávez failed to promote industries outside of the oil sector, believing that oil prices would forever remain at historic highs. Unlike his predecessors, his regime perpetuated itself in ways that circumvented the popular will. Upon assuming office, Chávez rewrote the Venezuelan constitution to extend his term from five to six years. Then, in 2009, he held a referendum allowing for indefinite reelection, which voters narrowly passed.²³ Yet another lasting legacy of the leftist icon was an explosion in criminality that overtook the country. Between 1999 and 2013, Venezuela’s homicide rate more than doubled from thirty-seven to seventy per hundred thousand.²⁴

Crisis and Stabilization

Chávez’s successor Nicolás Maduro squeaked past opposition candidate Henrique Capriles in the 2013 snap election by just 1.2 percentage points. This razor-thin margin should have moderated Maduro’s approach; instead, it radicalized his economic decision-making in ways that defy conventional explanations of incompetence or ideology. Within months of Maduro’s 2013 victory, oil prices crashed amid a glut from the shale boom in the United States. Oil revenues collapsed from $70 billion a year in 2012 to $20 billion a year in 2015.

Facing an urgent need to cut spending after Chávez’s pre-election splurge, Maduro could have pursued orthodox adjustment: devalue the currency, eliminate fuel subsidies, and accept short-term inflation in return for stabilization in the medium term. Instead, he chose to adjust via quantities rather than prices, maintaining a massively overvalued exchange rate, price controls, and fuel subsidies while slashing imports by 28 percent. The result was devastating shortages, hyperinflation, and a recession unlike any seen since independence.²⁵

Venezuela’s relentless electoral cycle likewise explains much of Maduro’s masochistic decision-making. The U.S.-subservient Venezuelan opposition is arguably as responsible for the country’s crisis as the regime. Nationwide elections occurred in three of the first five years of Maduro’s term; in the other two, he endured nationwide protests. In this environment, shifting costs into the future was preferable to accepting short-term pain for longer-term gains.

For its part, the opposition embraced economic hardship as a strategy for regime change. In 2015, the opposition won control over the unicameral National Assembly and subsequently blocked new contracts for pdvsa, a fact conveniently omitted in mainstream coverage of the crisis.²⁶ In response, Maduro packed the supreme court, which proceeded to strip the National Assembly of its powers, invalidate the 2016 drive for a recall referendum, and ban dozens of opposition candidates from the 2018 presidential election.²⁷

In addition to extending presidential terms to six years and suspending term limits, Chávez’s reforms allowed the president to control promotions in the military, call popular referenda, and convene constitutional conventions that could override other institutions, such as Maduro’s 2017 Constituent Assembly. In the end, this immense concentration of power delivered a destructive zero-sum electoral calculus across the political spectrum.

Just four years into Maduro’s term, Venezuela’s economy contracted 40 percent, with inflation rising to over 1,000 percent, all before the onset of U.S. sanctions.²⁸ In the same way that Miami neoconservatives argue that a sixty-year embargo has had no impact on the Cuban economy, so-called “anti-imperialist” apologists of Maduro argue that Washington singlehandedly engineered Venezuela’s ongoing crisis. Comically, the solidarity group Venezuelanalysis, which until recently supported the regime, notes that American sanctions against pdvsa began in August of 2017. By that point, 1.5 million Venezuelans had already emigrated to neighboring countries.²⁹

While Washington decidedly did not instigate Venezuela’s economic collapse, in stark contrast to post-pandemic Cuba among others,³⁰ it’s once again exceedingly clear that its actions worsened the crisis. Having remained remarkably stable since 2008 at around 2.2 million bpd, oil production began to decline in 2016 after prices dipped below $30 a barrel. After 2017, joint ventures between pdvsa and multinationals with access to foreign financing suffered steep production drops as a result of sanctions coveted by the Venezuelan opposition.³¹

By the time the Trump administration imposed an embargo on Venezuelan oil imports in 2019, production, which had already halved to one million bpd, fell to 500,000 bpd by the start of the Covid pandemic. With all U.S. oil majors forced to divest from the country, only Chevron—which has long held favor with the regime—wrangled a carve-out from Washington in 2022. Wracked by mismanagement and crippling sanctions, GDP per capita contracted by 72 percent, the second-largest peacetime economic collapse in the world since 1950.³²

Against all odds, the Bolivarian regime, and especially Maduro, proved extraordinarily resilient. Despite his mismanagement, Maduro was a relentless political operator, excelling in backroom deals and extensive political patronage. Up until his January capture, the leftist strongman survived multiple waves of mass protests, a crime epidemic, a failed military uprising, and a cartoonish, U.S.-sponsored mercenary incursion. Between 2016 and 2023, opposition boycotts, lawfare, and intimidation by security forces allowed the regime to retain the presidency as well as regain control over the National Assembly and a majority of local governments.

With hegemonic control over all state institutions and lacking competitive electoral challengers, the one-party regime of the Socialist and Unity Party of Venezuela (PSUV) finally took meaningful steps to stabilize the country. Security forces took to curbing crime via so-called Operations of the Liberation of the People (OLPs), consisting of thousands of extrajudicial killings—over five thousand in 2018—in poor neighborhoods.³³ The regime likewise cut deals with armed groups over illicit industries; homicides fell from ninety per hundred thousand in 2016 to twenty-six per hundred thousand in 2024.³⁴

While apologists of the Cuban regime claim that market reform is impossible in light of sanctions, the evidence from Venezuela directly undercuts that contention. Maduro ushered in a reform program that the opposition Communist Party denounced as neoliberal.³⁵ Social services were cut, price controls relaxed, and the once shunned use of the imperialist dollar began to be actively encouraged by the state.³⁶

By the start of the 2020s, shortages were no longer commonplace, though the average Venezuelan could scarcely afford the exorbitant prices of domestic staples. Hyperinflation of 1 million percent fell to 25 percent in 2024, with the country finally experiencing positive economic growth during the 2020s. The two-tiered economy that subsequently emerged saw a small minority of upper-class Venezuelans and party members with access to foreign currency prosper as the broader population remained impoverished.³⁷

The regime thoroughly outsmarted the Biden administration’s attempt at détente, which granted limited sanctions relief in exchange for electoral preconditions in the 2024 presidential election. The so-called Barbados Agreement granted Chevron a limited license in 2022; the U.S. oil major retained control over oil but could no longer pump the resource in Venezuela due to the 2019 embargo. Thereafter, oil production recovered to around 1 million bpd with broader sanctions relief lasting during parts of 2023 and 2024. That year, Vice President and Economy Minister Delcy Rodríguez oversaw a crackdown on pdvsa, uncovering payments to prostitutes and gold bars belonging to executives within the firm.³⁸

Caracas, of course, failed to honor the terms of the Barbados Agreement. Having finally chosen to participate in the 2024 elections, Edmundo González, a placeholder for the banned opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, ran against Maduro, who engineered a historic fraud against his opponent. The regime also de jure annexed the disputed Essequibo province on the border with Guyana, conducting military incursions into the territory, in a bid to stimulate turnout in the election and lay claim to Guyana’s newfound oil wealth.³⁹ Both factors would ultimately seal the dictator’s fate.

Previously, opposition boycotts, voter intimidation, and low turnout allowed the regime to certify verifiable victories without so much as altering a single vote. But in 2024, electoral witnesses from the Venezuelan opposition managed to collect and upload around 80 percent of electoral tallies corroborating a roughly forty-point victory by González. One legacy inherited from Chávez was the view that the Bolivarian regime could only fall via fraud from its elitist opponents. Thus, Chávez instituted an otherwise foolproof process whereby all electoral participants signed and received tallies with unique QR codes from electronic voting machines (the very same system that Trump contends rigged the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden).

To date, Caracas has yet to publish precinct-level results from the election after having proclaimed that Maduro won the election with a doctored 51 percent of the vote.⁴⁰

Having spent decades promoting Venezuelan soft power in the region, Maduro sponsored guerrilla violence against Colombia’s Gustavo Petro for failing to recognize his reelection.⁴¹ His belligerence against Guyana also spooked Brazil’s Lula da Silva and turned most of the Caribbean against him, much of which served as the staging grounds for his ouster. Resorting to the imperialist game of attempting to plunder Guyanese oil, Maduro won the imperialist prize of kidnapping via U.S. intervention.⁴²

Playing God on Caribbean Shores

The fluid spectrum of scenarios for a post-Maduro Venezuela do not bode well for the country’s future. The gravity of the situation in Venezuela does not yet appear to have dawned on much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. In times past and present, Washington has cut deals with as well as deposed autocratic regimes, replacing them with pro-American governments. Never before, however, has the White House attempted to puppeteer the day-to-day decision-making of an otherwise hostile autocratic government. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s proposed three-point plan consisting of (1) stabilization, (2) recovery through ensuring access to oil by multinationals, and (3) transition, therefore, faces steep challenges.⁴³

Trump has shown a reluctance toward committing U.S. troops to prolonged military engagements. Much like the Twelve-Day War in Iran, his decision to kidnap Maduro while leaving the entirety of his regime intact suggests a fear of quagmires in the vein of Iraq or Libya. At the same time, the administration’s interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine may also suggest a greater tolerance for risking American lives and resources in the Western Hemisphere. The president appears committed to the prospect of plundering Venezuela’s vast if mostly inaccessible oil reserves and has intimated that the country’s hydrocarbons sector will be administered indefinitely by the White House.⁴⁴

In the first Trump administration, the White House pursued a doctrinaire “maximum pressure” policy against Venezuela. The second Trump administration, however, has oscillated erratically between maximum pressure and engagement over energy and immigration policy. At various times, the administration secured deals with Maduro, rescinded and later restored Chevron’s oil license, bombed alleged Venezuelan drug runners, and, finally, captured the dictator.⁴⁵ While neoconservatives yearn for regime change in Caracas, pragmatists focus on oil and deportations. The problem is the difficulty of securing either, let alone both goals, without creating a quagmire.

Venezuela’s current oil production consists almost entirely of the western Maracaibo Basin at 300,000 bpd and the Monagas Basin and Orinoco Belt near the border with Guyana at 140,000 and 500,000 bpd, respectively. Oil from the Maracaibo and Monagas basins is of mixed quality, making it easier to extract with only modest investment. By far the biggest winner of the current investment environment, Chevron has stakes in all three regions and has stated that it can increase production by 50 percent, mostly from its Maracaibo and Monagas wells in the next two years. This additional production stands to reduce oil prices modestly in the United States during Trump’s term.⁴⁶

U.S. refiners in the Gulf Coast are specifically designed for heavier Venezuelan crude, meaning that additional output would increase supply in the American market. At the same time, this further disincentivizes additional investment in future production. The vast majority of Venezuela’s reserves, over 90 percent, consists of heavy crude from the Orinoco Belt that is harder to extract. Years of neglect, sanctions, and prolonged crisis have devastated the country’s broader oil infrastructure. An estimated $100–$180 billion of investment over a course of ten years would be necessary for any significant increase in oil production; just maintaining current production of one million bpd would require $53 billion over the next fifteen years.⁴⁷

With oil trading around $60 a barrel, prices are already too low to support some domestic drilling in the United States, let alone abroad in a quasi-failed state. Hours after a televised meeting with oil executives, Trump threatened to block ExxonMobil from operating in Venezuela over CEO Darren Woods’s comment that the country was “uninvest­able.”⁴⁸ One anonymous executive said the following to the Financial Times: “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”⁴⁹

Among its many concessions, the Rodríguez government has reportedly agreed to a mercantilist arrangement whereby Venezuela exclusively purchases American goods with revenues from U.S. oil exports.⁵⁰ Seemingly lost on many MAGA realists is the fact that most of the decline in trade between the United States and Venezuela was a result of sanctions.⁵¹ When asked why Halliburton stopped doing business in Venezuela, CEO Jeff Miller humiliated the president noting that the firm was forced to leave the country due to Trump’s 2019 embargo.⁵²

Trump’s favor toward Delcy Rodríguez seemingly stems from her relative success in reviving oil production. Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the National Assembly, who is also her brother, has cultivated significant political influence yet maintains a tenuous position within the regime. After all, Chavismo is a self-described “civico-military” movement which, in recent years, increasingly resembled a military dictatorship, and the locus of the regime’s military authority lies with Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López.⁵³

The former was a participant in Chávez’s 1992 coup and was widely regarded as the second most powerful man in the regime due to his influence within the Armed Forces. Maduro, a civilian, reportedly maintained an intense rivalry with Cabello, who in large part maintained his stature within the movement as Chávez’s anointed successor.⁵⁴ Less than forty-eight hours after the dictator’s capture, Cabello reportedly directed a column of soldiers toward the presidential palace, exchanging gunfire with opposing security forces. Thereafter, the White House listed Cabello as a target for a future strike.⁵⁵

A bizarre state of affairs has since emerged whereby security forces and pro-regime paramilitary Colectivos scour the streets for U.S.-sympathizers, at the same time as the regime releases dozens of political prisoners at the behest of Washington.⁵⁶ Speaking with ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance, Trump implied that the firm would not be allowed to collect around $12 billion in debts owed by the Venezuelan state; he subsequently issued an executive order blocking courts and creditors from seizing the country’s oil revenues.⁵⁷ A sight to behold, the horse­shoe propaganda of neoconservatives and solidarity anti-imperialists has respectively praised the White House and the regime’s righteousness.

The reality, however, is that the more the regime capitulates to Washington, or suffers lethal retaliation, the more likely that fractures within Chavismo will result in state collapse. The logical solution is simply to treat the existing government like any other oil-rich autocracy (e.g., Gulf monarchies) and cut a deal based on shared interests. Still another option is for the administration to broker a power sharing agreement between the regime and the opposition, a move backed by Colombia and Brazil.⁵⁸ Of course, the more ideological actors in U.S. foreign policy circles demanding regime change are a natural impediment to such an arrangement.

Dreaming of Panama: Regime Change in Caracas

The rosy, Panamanian scenario that Miami neocons foresee for Venezuela is that the regime holds free and fair elections, thereby ushering Maria Corina Machado or Edmundo González to the presidency. Like Panama’s Guillermo Endara, the new pro-American government would augur a new age of Venezuelan democracy and free market capitalism ensuring the necessary frameworks for multinational oil production.

In fairness to proponents of regime change, Venezuela has points in its favor that its Middle Eastern counterparts lacked. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or Libya, the country had a relatively strong democratic tradition in the latter half of the twentieth century, as discussed above. In spite of years of repression and humanitarian crisis, civil society in Venezuela continues to be relatively vibrant.⁵⁹

At the same time, even the most seamless transition to democracy would portend a weak government overseeing a country bordering on failed state status. Unlike Panama under Noriega, the Venezuelan government doesn’t exercise a monopoly of force within the country, though it acts as first among equals within the country’s broader criminal landscape. A sophisticated set of armed actors, including Colombian guerrillas such as the National Liberation Army (ELN), FARC dissidents, and pro-regime Colectivos, could inevitably launch an insurgency against a democratic and collaborationist government—or possibly even the current one.

The most apt example for illustrating what a guerrilla insurgency would look like in Venezuela is the height of Colombia’s Armed Conflict during the tail end of the twentieth century. During the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the FARC and ELN conducted hundreds of car bombings, massacred civilians, and even captured the Palace of Justice in the heart of Bogotá. Colombia, however, avoided the kind of economic collapse and inflationary chaos seen recently in Venezuela and has a highly sophisticated military, hardened by more than sixty years of experience in counterinsurgency tactics.⁶⁰

It is likewise worth noting that the roughly forty-one years of continuous democratic government between 1958 and 1999 is partially overshadowed by Chavismo’s twenty-seven years of rule. While it’s also true that Chavismo’s descent into autocracy was gradual, the fact is that restoring functional post-regime institutions, particularly under conditions of vassalship to Washington, will take years if not decades. To give an idea, Transparency International ranks Venezuela as the third most corrupt country on the planet. Taking corruption as a meaningful indicator, nation-building in the South American basket case would be comparable to the index’s first, second, and fourth placeholders, respectively, South Sudan, Somalia, and Syria.⁶¹

The reality is that if the White House wishes to install an opposition-led government capable of enabling a long-term recovery in oil production for foreign multinationals, it will need to commit to an occupation to support counterinsurgency efforts and protect oil majors’ investments. Such a move, of course, would face a justifiable backlash from parts of the administration, the American public, and even within the president’s own electoral base.

While Venezuela has a more promising institutional history than other recent targets of U.S. interventionism, it sadly features uncanny similarities with failed states like Libya, Niger, and Afghanistan. Not far from Caracas, mercenaries employed by a Miami-based conspiracy assassinated Haiti’s autocratic president, Jovenel Moïse in June of 2021. Within a year, the country descended into a proper failed state amid gang conflict. Today, the country still lacks an identifiable government as gangs continue to clash with one another as well as a Kenyan-led peacekeeping force.⁶²

Venezuela, in contrast, has a comparatively consolidated security apparatus. By no means, however, does this eliminate the risk of state collapse. Thousands of ELN and ex-FARC guerrillas control vast swathes of the country and have decades of experience combatting security forces, sabotaging vital infrastructure, and conducting acts of terror. Members of the military similarly stand a realistic chance of carving out fiefdoms in conjunction with criminal and insurgent groups. Whether or not the country descends into a Haitian or Libyan-style collapse, each of these actors poses a serious threat to the current and future occupants of Miraflores palace.

Insurgent Actors: The ELN and FARC

Founded in 1964 by Colombian students trained in Cuba, the ELN represents Latin America’s oldest continuous insurgency. The first of its kind, the group is a transnational guerrilla force, exercising territorial control within but also exerting influence far beyond border regions in Colombia and Venezuela.⁶³ Colombian intelligence estimates that the ELN fighters number around five thousand in both countries with around ten thousand civilian supporters.⁶⁴

Unlike the more vertically integrated (now defunct) FARC, the ELN operates through a decentralized paramilitary structure. Regional blocs composed of individual fronts and columns ranging from a few dozen to upwards of one hundred fighters maintain substantial autonomy from the five-to-seven-member central command. The group’s horizontal organization has proven remarkably resilient to leadership decapitation. Many commanders at the head of individual fronts prioritize revenue generation over ideology, a fact demonstrated by their extensive involvement in illicit sectors to varying degrees along respective chains of production. Some fronts, for instance, actively renounce rents from drug trafficking, preferring instead to extort local commerce.⁶⁵

Historically, both the ELN and FARC exploited borderlands as safe havens but avoided sustained violence beyond Colombia for fear of stoking reprisals from joint operations by state security forces. Under Chávez and Maduro, Caracas actively supplied both guerrillas with weapons and safe havens in Venezuela to varying degrees since 1999.⁶⁶ After the FARC’s 2017 demobilization, however, the ELN dramatically expanded its activity in Venezuela. The group now exerts significant control over roughly half of the Colombia–Venezuela border and is active in a majority of Venezuela’s twenty-three states.⁶⁷

Despite maintaining a stated commitment to the Bolivarian Revolution, ELN fighters have occasionally clashed with Venezuelan security forces, mostly over control of illicit enterprises. At the same time, eyewitness accounts have documented ELN guerrillas operating jointly with Venezuelan forces against rival ex-FARC factions.⁶⁸ Notably, international sanctions have prompted Caracas to exploit illicit gold mining as an alternative source of revenue with the help of the ELN. The group dominates mining sites in Amazonas state, competing and cohabitating with other armed actors, including the Venezuelan military itself.⁶⁹

The ELN is also notoriously proficient in drone warfare, kidnappings, car bombings and other acts of terror. In 1999, the group hijacked Avianca Flight 9463, later holding the plane’s forty-six occupants for ransom after landing in a clandestine airstrip in Bolívar, Colombia. Of particular note to the Trump administration are the guerrilla’s routine sabotage and extortion of oil infrastructure. Between 1987 and 2015, the ELN conducted around 1,300 attacks against the Caño Limón–Coveñas pipeline in northern Colombia; routine losses to the country’s oil sector due to attacks often rise to as much as $500 million a year.⁷⁰

And then there are the remnants of the infamous Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Founded in 1964 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party, the FARC demobilized following a 2016 peace agreement with the Colombian government. At its height at the turn of the century, the group commanded upwards of twenty thousand fighters, a figure which fell by more than half in subsequent decades. In 2017, around seven thousand fighters demobilized under the terms of the peace agreement, though some fronts dissented from the process. Other fighters such as alias Iván Márquez subsequently remobilized citing negligence on the part of Bogotá’s obligations under the agreement.

Today, the disperse collective of FARC splinter groups, known popularly as FARC dissidents or ex-FARC, number between two thousand and four thousand fighters. The Segunda Marquetalia and Estado Mayor Central (EMC) currently make the largest competing federations of remnant fronts with the EMC being the larger of the two groups. Even more so than the ELN, ex-FARC fronts similarly maintain significant autonomy with one another and are increasingly active in Venezuela.⁷¹

While Chavismo maintained good relations with the FARC proper and was crucial to the peace process with Bogotá, the relationship between Caracas and ex-FARC fronts has been comparatively fraught, oscillating between accommodation and open warfare depending on local dynamics and regime calculus. In 2021, a confrontation in the border Apure state between the Venezuelan military and the Tenth Front, a Segunda Marquetalia faction, resulted in weeks of sustained combat, displacing thousands of civilians into Colombia. Notably, the ELN played a key role in assisting the Venezuelan military’s efforts against FARC dissidents in Apure.⁷² Nonetheless, ex-FARC maintain an ostensible commitment to the permanence of the Bolivarian regime.

State-Aligned Actors:
Colectivos and the Bolivarian Armed Forces

Emerging from leftist neighborhood associations and motorcycle clubs during the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called Colectivos were actively cultivated by Chávez as a “popular” counterweight to security forces distrusted by his government prior to and after the 2002 coup attempt. Each individual Colectivo has a discrete history, modality, and political orientation that is not necessarily aligned with Chavismo. To varying degrees, Colectivos can be described as political shock troops, crime syndicates, and community defense militias.⁷³

Some Colectivos have been directly supplied with assault rifles and motorcycles by the regime and regularly mobilize pro-government demonstrations, intimidate opposition activists, and control territory in Caracas’s sprawling slums. Estimates of Colectivo membership vary wildly within various major cities in Venezuela. The most prominent Colectivos like the Tupamaro operate openly in the capital and distribute subsidized food through government CLAP boxes, mediate local disputes, and enforce regime loyalty through a combination of patronage and coercion. Diosdado Cabello reportedly exercises significant influence over many prominent Colectivos.⁷⁴

Separately, Venezuela’s National Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB) trace back to the 1999 constitution ushered in by Chávez. In addition to the four traditional branches of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and National Guard, Chávez added a fifth branch, the National Bolivarian Militia, in 2005 as a response to the 2002 coup. The militia functions as a paramilitary reserve explicitly designed to defend the revolution from internal and external threats. After 2002, Chávez also centralized promotions, purged disloyal officers, and invited Cuban intelligence to restructure the military intelligence apparatus.⁷⁵

The regime’s strategy of military control relies on a sophisticated architecture of patronage, surveillance, and factional balancing. Senior officers received lucrative appointments to pdvsa subsidiaries, governorships, and control over import licensing schemes. This economic entrenchment creates powerful incentives for regime preservation even as it breeds corruption and operational decay. The FANB are estimated to have approximately two thousand active and retired generals, the most of any military in the world and a direct means for dividing spoils and coup-proofing its leadership.⁷⁶

Speaking with a former National Guardsman due to cross the perilous Darien Gap in 2021, a deserter explained that he had grown tired of beating protestors and surviving off underhanded deals; his general’s personal racket consisted of selling government-procured concrete on the black market. Any post-regime successor will confront around two thousand problems in attempting to extricate the military from its numerous rackets or prevent its splinter.

As discussed, it’s best to describe the FANB as the most powerful actor within Venezuela’s plural and fragmented armed landscape. At the same time, this does not exactly equate to the military nor the Venezuelan government functioning as a traditional organized crime syndicate. The so-called Cartel of the Suns is an informal term predating Chavismo, referring to corruption within the armed forces. While there are credible accounts that security forces have collaborated with traffickers, conclusive evidence has yet to surface that the regime or Maduro were operating a vast narcoterrorist cartel. The day of his arraignment, the U.S. Justice Department quietly dropped its claim that Maduro was the head of the Cartel of the Suns.⁷⁷

In the event of an expanded insurgency and/or state collapse, it is almost certain that the relative peace struck between the armed forces and non-state actors would come undone. Ironically, this would undo the regime’s significant gains in reducing homicides and likely lead to an increase in transnational cocaine trafficking from the country.

The Limits of the New Monroe Doctrine

The Trump administration’s ongoing reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, or “Donroe Doctrine,” has been most effective at coercing small, U.S.-dependent states. In Panama, the pro-Trump leader, José Raúl Mulino was blindsided in response to Trump’s inaugural comments about retaking the Panama Canal. Mulino’s administration capitulated almost immediately, agreeing to audit the Hong Kong-based CK Hutchinson’s port concessions along the Canal and pull out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.⁷⁸ Maduro ally Xiomara Castro similarly bent to U.S. pressure on migration in Honduras with voters recently electing the Trump-endorsed Nasry Asfura over fears of U.S. controls on remittances; Trump also pardoned former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernández, days before the vote.⁷⁹

Both Panama and Honduras are deeply reliant on U.S. trade and security. This is increasingly different from larger and more self-sufficient states such as Brazil and Colombia. After initially refusing to accept deportation flights in January of 2025, Trump successfully coerced Colombia’s Gustavo Petro via threats of 25 percent tariffs. Tellingly, however, the White House has since opted for alternative methods of coercion, including targeted sanctions and drug decertification, to much lesser effect.

Bogotá’s saber rattling with Washington has seemingly buoyed Petro’s domestic agenda and increased the viability of the ruling coalition in upcoming elections. Colombia, moreover, has subsequently deepened ties with Beijing; Chinese exports to the country rose to a record $7 billion in the first four months of 2025.⁸⁰ Recognizing Colombia’s importance to securing his interests in Venezuela, Trump is now seeking a rapprochement with Petro.

Remarkably, Lula da Silva’s Brazil has not only weathered U.S. tariffs and sanctions but actively outflanked them. After Trump imposed sanctions in August over former president Jair Bolsonaro’s trial by the country’s Supreme Court, Brazil’s exports to China rose 31 percent by October; tariffs likewise delivered a 40 percent spike to coffee prices in the U.S., provoking backlash among inflation-wary consumers.⁸¹ In November, the White House then unilaterally dropped most of its previous tariffs; its purported concessions over rare earths have yet to materialize.⁸²

Washington’s intervention in Venezuela validates comparable belligerence from Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China within their respective spheres of influence. Defenders of the January 3 raid can point to the 1989 invasion of Panama as a successful precedent, but the comparison in many ways underscores the rationale of the Venezuelan intervention. Noriega was a School of the Americas–trained CIA asset whose rise was in large part thanks to the agency. His involvement in drug trafficking was known and enabled by Washington.⁸³ His capture brandished an internal coherence: Washington reined in its own asset in a jurisdiction home to what was at the time a U.S. territory: the Canal Zone.

If Trump is truly serious about “running Venezuela,” he may find that the benefits of neo-imperial conquest are much less than he imagined them to be.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume X, Number 1 (Spring 2026): 172–89.

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Notes