Caracas Chronicles

It isn’t common for a U.S. president to celebrate the destruction of a boat, yet that’s exactly what Trump did when he announced the attack on a vessel that, according to him, was transporting drugs for Tren de Aragua. We know very little about the people who were killed or whether this will become a habit in international waters near Venezuela, but our right-wing parties clearly take Trump at his word—because, in the end, it all comes down to believing or not.

The need to believe supersedes the need to know exactly what happened there. It’s about hypothesizing about the future, and these days many people have opted to embrace a religious belief about an approaching U.S. fleet with a few thousand Marines.

That country became a matter of faith among Venezuelans in the 1960s, or maybe when Hugo Chávez said in the UN Assembly General that George W. Bush was the devil. It is not a coincidence that Maria Corina Machado, two decades after proudly meeting that U.S. president in the White House, is now talking about the Americans as messiahs.

Actually, we should be wondering and discussing what would happen if Maduro is killed by a rocket.

While chavistas once indulged in confirmation bias by exaggerating U.S. interest in Venezuela to justify their anti-imperialist rhetoric, we now see the same pattern in the opposition’s belief that Washington will topple and arrest Maduro as if in an episode of Law & Order: Caribbean Unit—after which democracy would return to deliver a utopia our country has never known.

Handing our future away

Any sensible person must wonder how our politics was reduced to a soup of blind faith, superstition, and fantasy. How Venezuelans ended up as mere spectators of their own history—to the point that some even embrace such impotence. Venezuela has a long tradition of political theology: President Guzmán Blanco turned Bolívar into a god, and Chávez drew on that patriotic religion to build a personality cult around himself.

Now, armies, warships and submarines take the place of saints, angels and demons. The mentality that sees as a miracle the end of the Maduro dictatorship reached a paroxysm, since the electoral period of 2024, when belief in “vote power” and “actas” electrified the nation. The miracle failed to occur, but faith pushed thousands to the most extreme and risky actions, until chavista repression and the return of Trump brought people back to the state when faith does not demand to do anything, but to interpret, like Tarot readers, the signs coming from the U.S. government and its military. 

Maria Corina also speaks from faith when she refers to the clandestine work that’s being done, of which there are no manifestations or visible effects. We are just supposed to take what she says at face value, and obey her when she orders to leave despair behind.

Do we have any reason to believe the U.S. would cover the costs and risks of taking over the country after such an event, and then rebuild Venezuela, as some seem to expect?

That metaphysical drift is all but natural in a society that does not see itself as a player in the political game that defines its fate, and that deposits its faith in vote tallies or warships. However, the more educated defenders of María Corina Machado remind us what the German thinker Carl Schmitt said that political ideas are grounded on religious notions. They forget to add that, in the case of Machado, it is religion dressed as politics, with constant reminders about trusting in leaders and waiting for portals of light.

While communists and calvinists, both of which believe in fate, have been extraordinary proactive, our political beliefs of Catholic influence favor passivity and reduce public debate to a fantasy competition, where “analysts” become unable to trust their own hypothesis on naval blockades or bombings, extremely worrying events with catastrophic effects that they take as if they were playing Call of Duty. They just assume that the U.S. fleet means intervention, the fall of the Maduro regime and the advent of a golden age.

The only thing we know is that Trump is projecting power on Venezuela and the entire continent, just like he does with tariffs, and that he treats every country as an enemy except for Israel and Russia. Venezuela is just an extreme case. 

Scenarios, not fantasies

What if the warships are like the wall on the Mexican border, a way of containing the undeniable flux from the developing world? 

What if this is all theatrics and ends with the bombing of a boat, because Trump just changes his mind?

Most of all, why should we assume that Trump shares the agenda of the Venezuelan opposition?

Instead of answering those questions, we are being flooded with absurd comments about the Venezuelan army running amok like during the 2018 drone attack on Maduro.

Actually, we should be wondering and discussing what would happen if Maduro is killed by a rocket.

Do we have any reason to believe the Trump administration would cover the costs and risks of taking over the country after such an event—and then rebuild Venezuela, as some seem to expect? Just remember how previous U.S. administrations, far more capable than Trump’s, fared in Iraq and Afghanistan..

In general, it is hard to grasp what Venezuelan politicians envisioned when they spoke of transition during the protest cycle of 2017 or when Juan Guaidó tried to drive humanitarian aid trucks across the border in 2019. What do they imagine would happen if the U.S. blockaded the Venezuelan coast for months, attacked more boats or vessels, bombed targets in Venezuela or neighboring countries, or even ordered U.S. troops to disembark in La Guaira? Why assume the outcome would mirror little Panama or Grenada, and not what unfolded in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya?

What Trump or Rubio end up doing is not the only thing that matters. What matters most is how Venezuelans respond to whatever happens.

Let’s assume for a moment that Maduro leaves power with relative ease. That would not mean that the criminal-military complex will fall as well and that democratization would be inevitable. True, allowing the inauguration of Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia would imply the realization of a democratic mandate, but democracy covers way more than electing people.

Can we really expect a government with democratic tendencies—led by someone like María Corina Machado or by figures from parties such as Voluntad Popular, the same party that has provided some of Bukele’s closest collaborators? If we look at the tendencies of our political class, and factor in the absence of solid institutions and an organized civil society, what we should expect is a regime more akin to Dina Boluarte’s in Peru.

To talk about this is despairing in a political culture where describing reality leads to an overwhelming sense of failure. However, we can accept reality and do something about it. Instead of just waiting for the U.S. to act, we can debate about several scenarios, including the catastrophic ones, and think how to prepare collectively.

In fact, the country remains the same, and it seems that most people developed a more stoic, healthy attitude, focusing on what they can actually control and avoiding panic or hope about a hypothetical invasion. Maybe most Venezuelans have learned that the traditional opposition’s cycle of hope and disappointment is a kind of servitude.

What Trump or Rubio end up doing is not the only thing that matters. What matters most is how Venezuelans respond to whatever happens—and whether we learn to trust one another instead of surrendering our agency to actors beyond our reach. We can unite the Venezuelan Archipelago not with bureaucracy or sentimentalism, or under the hegemony of a political chief. We can do it by organizing to debate, help each other and execute political action within networks that don’t exclude parties but are independent from them.

This is how we could act in scenarios as bad as Libya after the fall of Gaddafi or better ones, yet demanding, like Argentina after the Malvinas War and the collapse of the military dictatorship. Even if those scenarios lack certainties. Because we are not getting certainties either from warships striking little boats.