It was election night in Venezuela in 2013, and among the Chavista activists at the Caracas city hall, nerves were jangling as early results showed their candidate, Nicolás Maduro, trailing his charismatic rival for the presidency, Henrique Capriles.
“We were totally surprised. We never thought Capriles would come so close,” said Andrés Izarra, a former minister for Maduro’s recently deceased mentor, Hugo Chávez, who recalls overhearing a disturbing conversation between two powerful Maduro allies.
“I remember clearly … they said: ‘We are not going to surrender power under any circumstances,’” Izarra claimed, adding: “I was surprised when I heard that … [I thought:] What the fuck do you mean, ‘We’re not going to give up power’?”
In the end, Maduro narrowly won the 2013 election. He has governed ever since, in increasingly authoritarian style. But 11 years after that overheard conversation – first reported in a book about Venezuela’s collapse called Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse – the calculation of the South American strongman and his inner circle appears to be the same, after he allegedly committed “the largest electoral fraud in Latin America’s history” last month so as to avoid losing power.
“The same thing I heard [in 2013] is the same attitude they have today,” said Izarra, who went on to serve as Maduro’s tourism minister but later fled to Europe after falling out with his boss and being accused of treason. “They will not give up power: never, never, never, ever,” he predicted. “They can’t live without it.”
Maduro’s refusal to quit – despite growing international consensus that the recent election was stolen – throws up a complex and troubling question a country already reeling from one of modern history’s worst peacetime economic and humanitarian meltdowns: what next?
Those who know Venezuela offer bleak projections, with Brazil’s former foreign minister last week warning a “very serious conflict” was possible. “I don’t want to use the expression civil war – but I feel very afraid,” Celso Amorim told the Brazilian channel GloboNews.
Tom Shannon, a veteran US diplomat, saw two possible futures: the Nicaragua model or the Romania model.
“The Nicaragua solution is that Maduro and his government just give a finger to the world and, as [President Daniel] Ortega has … [and] just move ahead with repression, arrests, expulsions [and] de-naturalizations in an effort to assert complete and utter control,” said Shannon, who first worked in Venezuela in the mid-1990s when he was a political counsellor at the US embassy in Caracas.
“The Romanian solution,” Shannon continued, “is that people become so profoundly frustrated that they turn on the government in a very violent way.”
In December 1989, Romania’s communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife were chased from the presidential palace and fled by helicopter after a military crackdown sparked a popular uprising against his brutal and corrupt 24-year rule. The pair were later convicted at an impromptu show trial and shot by a military firing squad.
Speaking in the days after Venezuela’s 28 July election – in which voters appeared to have overwhelmingly opted for change - Shannon judged the first outcome more likely. Two weeks after the vote, his prediction seems to be coming true, with Maduro launching an Ortega-style crackdown that has seen more than 1,300 people jailed and 24 killed.
“I think we have a Nicaragua situation,” Izarra, the exiled former minister, agreed as word spread about the latest opposition figure to vanish into Venezuela’s most notorious political prison, El Helicoide.
Venezuela has become increasingly authoritarian since Maduro’s 2013 election, with opposition politicians, campaigners and journalists all finding themselves in the president’s crosshairs. But the repression has intensified dramatically in recent days. Activists have been seized at home or while trying to fly abroad. Social networks such as X and Signal have been blocked. “Maduro has unleashed a campaign of terror,” María Corina Machado – the banned opposition leader who claims her replacement candidate, Edmundo González, defeated Maduro – said from hiding last week.
“It’s going to get worse before it gets any better,” predicted Tamara Taraciuk Broner, the director of the rule of law programme at the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank, who believes Venezuela is at a perilous crossroads. “One possible scenario is [that we end up] … having a corrupt mafia state govern in the middle of South America.”
Maduro’s crackdown – which authorities call Operación Tuntun (Operation Knock Knock) – has grim echoes of political repression in China, where government critics routinely disappear into secret jails after getting a knock at the door.
It is support from China and neighbouring Russia that experts say has been key to Maduro’s ability to survive years of economic turmoil, hyperinflation, social unrest and sanctions. Shannon predicted Beijing and Moscow would continue to back Maduro: “For both of those countries having this dumpster fire burning almost within sight of the United States is valuable.”
But Maduro’s recent behaviour has cost him key friends, including the leftist presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, who have not recognized his claim to victory. Some hope the Latin American trio could use their connections to Caracas to help promote a peaceful negotiated transition.
Taraciuk said Latin America had “a very bad tradition” of leftwing governments failing to challenge human rights abuses committed by fellow leftists. But the brazen nature of Maduro’s apparent attempt to steal the election and the severity of his crackdown had made him impossible to defend.
“The fraud was so blatant … that it’s very difficult for Lula or Petro or López Obrador to … support Maduro in any way,” she said. “It puts Colombia, Brazil and Mexico in a situation in which they can’t continue to claim that they defend democratic principles if they defend Maduro.”
Taraciuk thought that reality – along with widespread popular support for Corina Machado in Venezuela and rare opposition unity – meant there might now be a historic opportunity to negotiate Maduro’s exit and rescue Venezuela from the brink of becoming a full-blown dictatorship.
International criminal court investigations into Maduro’s alleged role in crimes against humanity meant he was unlikely to receive legal immunity. “His options are going to Iran, Cuba, Russia or Turkey,” Taraciuk said. But, she believed legal incentives such as amnesties or pardons could be offered to other key administration figures – “even if they are morally horrible” – to encourage them to ditch Maduro and support change.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal claimed the US had put “everything on the table” during secret talks and offered Maduro an amnesty from prosecution on drug-trafficking charges if he stood down, although a senior administration official later denied that claim.
Many believe the only institution capable of forcing Maduro’s hand is Venezuela’s military – but Izarra was skeptical about the possibility of a split within its ranks or a mutiny similar to Hugo Chávez’s failed 1992 coup.
“I don’t see a break within the military … They have total control,” he said, pointing to the ruthless treatment meted out to suspected traitors and plotters in the past. “Three hundred military men are in jail. Some have died under torture … They are not going to risk a rebellion.”
Whatever Venezuela’s future holds, Izarra is sure of one thing: Maduro would not go willingly.
“Chávez was a democrat … These guys are not democrats. These guys are totally fucking out of their minds,” said the former minister.
