Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, has overcome the first major obstacle facing him in 2025 after staring down domestic and foreign foes to extend his 12-year rule.
“[I’m] the people’s president … and I will forge ahead with the hurricane-like, volcanic strength of a people who cherish their homeland, cherish their future and cherish peace,” the 62-year-old proclaimed on Friday at an inauguration his opponents vowed, but failed, to disrupt.
But experts say a second, and probably greater hurdle now lies ahead: Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the unpredictable consequences that could have for Maduro’s political survival.
“The Trump administration right now is a real wild card,” said John Polga-Hecimovich, a Venezuela specialist at the US Naval Academy who, like many, is uncertain about what to expect.
One line of thinking suggests Trump could return to the hardline stance of his 2017-2021 presidency, or possibly take even more dramatic steps against Maduro, who has been accused of stealing last year’s presidential election from his rival, Edmundo González.
During his first administration, Trump tried to topple Maduro through a “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions, military threats and the recognition of Juan Guaidó’s parallel presidency. That failed policy was designed to turn military chiefs against Maduro but ended up strengthening him while piling further economic misery on ordinary Venezuelans.
Even so, Trump has nominated several leading “maximum pressure” proponents for key roles, including his pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio – a ferocious critic of Maduro’s “narco regime” – and the special envoy for Latin America, Mauricio Claver-Carone.
”Venezuela, sadly, is not governed by a government – it is governed by a narco-trafficking organization that has empowered itself of a nation-state,” Rubio said in his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, calling last year’s election in Venezuela “completely fake”.
Trump’s pick for national security adviser, the Florida congressman Mike Waltz, is also a considered a Venezuela hawk.
With inauguration day nearing, some prominent rightwing voices are even urging Trump to consider a military solution. Writing in the New York Times this week, the conservative columnist Bret Stephens said one of Trump’s first priorities should be “deposing the regime of Nicolás Maduro, through coercive diplomacy if possible or force if necessary”. Stephens said Maduro should be told he could choose permanent exile in Cuba or Russia or face “a US military intervention of the sort that in 1990 swiftly ended the regime of the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega”.
Yet if Trump’s choice of Claver-Carone, Rubio and Waltz suggests a bellicose stance towards Caracas, other hires point in the opposite direction.
Trump’s presidential envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell – who Trump has said will “will work in some of the hottest spots around the world, including Venezuela” – held secret talks in 2020 with one of Maduro’s closest allies, Jorge Rodríguez. It was Rodríguez who swore Maduro in for his third term last week.
Grenell’s nomination has left some wondering if the author of The Art of the Deal might reach some kind of agreement with Maduro involving the deportation of Venezuelan migrants from the US and access to Venezuela’s massive oil reserves for US companies in exchange for Washington accepting Maduro’s power grab.
At his inauguration, Maduro hinted he was prepared to parley, declaring: “I’m a man of dialogue. I know how to listen and I know how to learn.”
David Smilde, a Venezuela specialist at Tulane University, said Trump’s contrasting picks – coupled with his “new sort of interventionist obsessions with Canada, Greenland and Panama” – has left enormous space for speculation about the path he would take.
“If I had to bet, I’d say what’s going to happen is they’re going to make some big statements [criticising Maduro] and they’re going to publicly get rid of a couple of licenses [allowing oil companies to operate in Venezuela]. But in the end, they’re basically going to kind of continue with the Biden administration policy.”
“But I think really anything is possible at this point. With Trump, oftentimes it’s just not consistent,” Smilde added. “It will depend on what his mood is that day, and who the last person he talked to was, and who seems most loyal to him.”
Polga-Hecimovich also struggled to predict whether Trump 2.0 would see more “maximum pressure” or “the Ric Grenell approach”, where “everything is open to negotiation”.
Suspicions the latter approach could prevail were strengthened earlier this month when Republican senator Bernie Moreno told reporters: “[Trump] is going to work with Maduro because that’s who’s going to take office.”
Tamara Taraciuk Broner, the director of the rule of law programme at the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank, cautioned Trump against adopting either a turbo-charged “maximum pressure” policy or simply striking a politically convenient deal involving deportation flights and barrels of oil.
“Neither extreme is going to save Venezuela and neither extreme is going to get rid of Maduro, which is what Trump needs to address insecurity, to address migration and to address China’s influence in Latin America,” she said.
Taraciuk proposed a two-pronged approach that combined “concerted international pressure” through sanctions on key regime members and their relatives with the opening of secret conversations with figures just outside Maduro’s inner circle about the “incentives” they would need to abandon him.
“I don’t think a transition is impossible – even though it sounds naive – if those two factors take place,” Taraciuk said. “And I don’t think it’s ridiculous to think that they will.”
