Since the capture by the US of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Venezuela has undergone sweeping – if uneven – changes.
Washington has restored relations with Caracas; a new oil deal, touted by US president Donald Trump as delivering 80 million barrels of Venezuelan crude to the US, has taken effect; and the government has pushed through new laws on opening up the oil industry and providing an amnesty for political prisoners.
But one of the most striking absences is political: no representative from the movement that won a majority in the disputed July 28th, 2024 elections has been invited to join the transition.
It is a stark contrast to the US invasion of Panama in 1989 when those who had denounced electoral fraud were brought into a supervised transition within days of Manuel Noriega’s removal.
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Nothing comparable has occurred in Venezuela. Two months after “Operation Absolute Resolve”, the post‑Maduro landscape is being shaped not by democratic consensus but by US pressure over oil and by a tight circle of political actors loyal to the old order.
Opposition leader María Corina Machado – in Washington at the time – did not attend Trump’s state of the union address last month. Nor did Edmundo González Urrutia, the figure many Venezuelans believe was the rightful winner of the 2024 election, and whose contested victory helped propel Machado to a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
Instead, Trump praised Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice‑president and now interim leader, while Venezuelan opposition figure Enrique Márquez was honoured at the ceremony. Recently released from detention, Márquez described satisfaction with the US operation and has since returned to Venezuela without interference.
Yet, despite the political theatre, structural power in Caracas has barely shifted. Attorney general Tarek William Saab resigned – only to be immediately reappointed as ombudsman. Sensitive posts in security and defence remain untouched. And the “state of external disturbance” decree – which allows the arrest of any citizen deemed to “promote or support” foreign intervention – is still in force, giving security forces sweeping discretion.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio has promised a phase of democratic restoration, but Venezuela’s national electoral council – the body that administers elections – remains unchanged, and no new presidential vote has been announced.
In response to Rodríguez’s warnings that Machado must answer to Venezuelan authorities, Trump said such remarks reflected Rodríguez’s political obligations. But he also added that he would “love” to involve Machado in future plans for Venezuela – an awkward shift, given that only hours before the transition began, he had argued that Machado “lacked the respect of her people” required to lead the country.
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Civil liberties remain frozen. Broadcast licences revoked from more than 400 radio stations, along with television channels such as RCTV – whose closure in 2007 marked, for many analysts, the beginning of former president Hugo Chávez’s electoral decline – have not been restored.
Instead, what has been normalised is continuity: the same governing elite, now engaged in new oil deals that raise difficult questions about transparency and about the diminishing emphasis on restoring democracy and protecting human rights.
The oil‑sector reforms are moving slowly and with little clarity about where the newly unlocked funds are going – a reminder that, despite the dramatic images of Maduro’s fall, Venezuela’s deeper political transformation remains tenuous, partial and tightly controlled.
