Vexed by Venezuela: the Maduro Problem

By: Joseph Ledford

Research Team: Applied History Working Group , Hoover History Lab

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has so far managed to steal a third term. By all honest accounts, he lost to his opponent, Edmundo González, in the July presidential election. After eleven years of autocratic rule, Venezuelans overwhelmingly exercised their right at the ballot box to oust Maduro. Predictably, however, the wily dictator denied the result and celebrated his stolen victory, ignoring the subsequent international outcry and ordering a crackdown on his political opposition.

President Joe Biden will bequeath Donald Trump a world in disorder, not the least of which is the instability in the Western Hemisphere. Of all the geopolitical problems confronting the incoming Trump administration, few will prove as challenging as Venezuela and its dictator, Maduro.

Origins of a stolen election

On July 28, 2024, Venezuelans headed to the polls. The election itself resulted from a couple of years of negotiations between the Maduro regime and its democratic opposition, referred to as the Unitary Platform. Hosted in Bridgetown, Barbados, and brokered by Norway, the October 2023 Barbados Agreement finally scheduled a free and fair election for the latter half of 2024. It was to take place between candidates selected by their respective parties. The agreement also guaranteed that outside observers, like the UN Panel of Electoral Experts and the Carter Center, could monitor the process. In return, the Biden-Harris administration issued General License No. 44, which granted temporary relief from economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela’s oil and gas sector.

True to form, Maduro violated the deal in short order. In January 2024, the rubber-stamp supreme court prevented María Corina Machado, the Unitary Platform candidate, from running in the presidential election despite her decisive primary win. Machado had appealed her fifteen-year ban on holding public office handed down in June 2023 by Elvis Amoroso, who was the corrupt comptroller general of Venezuela. Amoroso predicated her disqualification on the false allegations that she engaged in corruption and encouraged US sanctions through her involvement with the democratic opposition.

Others faced similar obstacles. Machado’s supporters endured harassment and arbitrary detainment. Her potential successor, Corina Yoris, was unable to register as a replacement candidate for the Unitary Platform. Eventually, Edmundo González, the former ambassador to Argentina, evolved from a placeholder into the actual candidate in April, gaining access to the ballot as Machado’s replacement.

For every positive step forward, the Maduro regime enforced two repressive steps backward. In early March, Amoroso, now the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), made public the official date for the presidential election. Election day would occur on Sunday, July 28, a date that happened to coincide with Hugo Chávez’s birthday. Not lost on anyone, the revolutionary symbolism portended the outcome.

Several weeks later, Attorney General Tarek William Saab issued arrest warrants for members of Machado’s campaign, alleging anti-government activities. After González officially became the candidate, his campaign staff would fare no better against state-sanctioned intimidation.

By mid-April, with a free and fair election unlikely, the Biden-Harris administration reimposed sanctions through “a limited wind-down authorization” after debating whether the action would affect the price of oil and create another migration crisis because of the economic consequences. It was not, however, a blanket ban on the sector, as the “OFAC [Office of Foreign Assets Control] will consider specific license requests on a case-by-case basis.” Under a November 2022 authorization, Chevron continued its operations as well. Undeterred, of course, Maduro took to the airwaves to denounce the measures. “We are not a gringo colony,” he proclaimed. “Venezuela is going to continue its economic march.” He also persisted in thwarting efforts to ensure a transparent election. On May 28, the National Electoral Council rescinded its invitation to the European Union to dispatch election observers, another rank violation of the Barbados Agreement.

Theft, repression, and standoff

Despite the setbacks, the limited official campaign season began July 4. Although deprived of both money and media, the democratic opposition held a sizable polling advantage. Maduro, however, possessed the power of the Venezuelan state. As the Carter Center observer teams declared in the aftermath, “Venezuela’s electoral process did not meet international standards of electoral integrity at any of its stages and violated numerous provisions of its own national laws.”

Unsurprisingly, after millions voted, the CNE announced that Maduro had captured 51.2 percent of the vote against González’s 44.2 percent. The Unitary Platform, in contrast, released tally sheets showing González had received roughly 66 percent of the vote, which corresponds with an exit poll conducted by Edison Research. To date, the CNE refuses to produce reliable voting data to counter the democratic opposition’s evidence. Nor can anyone expect the Maduro regime to offer transparency. Maduro lost decisively.

Across the Western Hemisphere and Europe, leaders recognized the outright fraud, not Maduro’s victory. China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, and Russia, where Maduro always garners a warm welcome, applauded the autocrat’s re-election. On August 1, the United States officially congratulated González on his triumph, although it was not a time for celebration and peaceful transition. Within a month, upon being subjected to an arrest warrant, González departed Caracas courtesy of the Spanish air force for asylum on the Iberian Peninsula. To burden his life abroad, Maduro recently issued a notice to the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) for his arrest.

In the meantime, President Biden, alongside Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, attempted to mediate the ongoing crisis. Presidents Biden and Lula quixotically called for new elections, a request that both Maduro and opposition leaders dismissed entirely. Instead, intimidation and violence, the twin hallmarks of Maduro’s regime, answered the demands of Venezuelans for a peaceful transition. Maduro launched “Operation Knock-Knock” to crush dissent over the election and break his political opposition. His regime arrested and abused thousands.

As brave protests mounted, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed new sanctions on sixteen individuals from the CNE and the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, in addition to several officials carrying out Operation Knock-Knock. The State Department also added more people from the Maduro regime to its ever-growing list of visa restrictions, which presently exceeds almost two thousand Venezuelans. In conjunction with a fresh round of sanctions, the United States and Argentina amassed at the United Nations General Assembly the support of fifty-plus countries to release a joint statement calling for an end to repression and a beginning to the peaceful transfer of power.

Although Brazil and Colombia did not sign the statement, Venezuela’s next-door neighbors escalated tensions. Colombian President Gustavo Petro vowed to consider Maduro’s government illegitimate unless the CNE releases evidence that proves his victory by January 10, 2025. Against the wishes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, President Lula stopped Venezuela from joining BRICS over the stolen election, even though Maduro had traveled to a Russian-held BRICS summit in anticipation of entering the organization. Venezuela recalled its ambassador to Brazil in protest. Lula, on the other hand, wishes to keep diplomatic channels open for the moment in hopes of persuading Maduro to step aside, but his patience may not last.

Tempting fate with Trump

After Trump’s electoral victory, Maduro sought to make nice with the next American president, claiming a change in Washington could bring “a new start” in US-Venezuelan relations. Soon thereafter, he inked seventeen brand-new defense and energy agreements with Putin, in which Russia and Venezuela will cooperate on weapons and oil technology, as well as intelligence and counterintelligence matters. Maduro sees reasons for such confidence. He currently does not face a credible threat of force to remove him from office, and Biden’s sanctions work to no avail. Reaching its highest capacity since 2020, the Venezuelan oil industry booms, pumping out roughly 947,387 barrels daily, the majority of which flow to China and the profits of which fill Maduro’s coffers.

Increasingly hemmed in by neighbors and wedded to America’s enemies, however, Maduro may now find himself too clever by half. Arriving in office on January 20, 2025, President Trump will not abide his destabilizing behavior and threats to the region. Trump’s nomination of Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state should give Maduro a clear indication of the direction of US policy. Given Trump’s planned bid to bring stability to the international order and promote the security of the United States, why would the new president tolerate an illegitimate leader who serves as an appendage of the anti-American axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, especially one who exacerbates the migration crisis plaguing the Western Hemisphere?

In the aftermath of his electoral theft, Maduro’s repression inspired nearly twenty thousand people to traverse the Darién Gap, a marked increase in emigration from just before the election. Venezuelans already account for the largest share of migrants crossing the Darién Gap and second-largest for illegal entry into the United States. Over the past decade, more than 25 percent of the country’s population has fled in desperation. Colombia hosts almost three million Venezuelan migrants and refugees while more than seven hundred thousand reside in the United States. Maduro’s crackdown will create an even worse migration crisis in the months to come.

The Western Hemisphere will not experience peace and stability until the end of Maduro’s regime. Guided by apprehension, the Biden-Harris administration’s incremental, incentive-based approach yielded a stolen election, further repression, and an ensconced dictator. Any policy dependent on an autocrat acting in good faith invites grave risk and courts disaster. The Trump administration will have to determine how much agency the United States has in forcing a transition of power, but Brazil and Colombia stand by as allies in restoring democracy to their neighbor. A negotiated peaceful transfer of power is the ideal outcome but will be difficult to achieve in practice. Still, hard choices are the president’s province. Trump must decide how to solve the intractable problem of Maduro. As the old adage goes, scared money can’t win.

Joseph Ledford is a Hoover Fellow and the Assistant Director of the Hoover History Lab at the Hoover Institution, where he also serves as the Vice Chair of the Applied History Working Group. A historian of US foreign relations, his research focuses on the individuals and institutions responsible for the exercise of American power in the world and the domestic politics of foreign policy, broadly construed. His other interests include the uses of history in policy-making.