Caracas Chronicles

For years, international observers have puzzled over Venezuela’s political stalemate. Despite catastrophic economic collapse, mass emigration, and overwhelming popular rejection, Nicolás Maduro’s regime has proven remarkably resilient. The opposition has alternated between street protests, electoral participation, and international pressure campaigns, yet the ruling coalition has remained intact.

The opposition has repeatedly tried to offer off-ramps. In 2016, the National Assembly passed an amnesty law covering military and government officials for political crimes, explicitly designed to encourage defections. It was ignored. Juan Guaidó’s interim government offered guarantees and transitional justice frameworks in 2019. They made no difference. More recently, the opposition has signaled willingness to negotiate broad reconciliation arrangements as conditions for a democratic transition. These proposals haven’t even merited serious consideration from regime insiders.

The problem isn’t that these offers were poorly designed or insufficiently generous. The problem is more fundamental: for any negotiated solution to succeed, it must offer parties something better than their best alternative to a negotiated agreement—their BATNA, in negotiation parlance. For Venezuela’s chavista leadership and the military officers sustaining them in power, that BATNA has always been the status quo. Why accept any transitional arrangement when retaining absolute power remains preferable to any alternative the opposition or international community can credibly offer?

The recent U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean fundamentally alters this calculation. For the first time in years, regime insiders face a credible possibility that their BATNA is no longer comfortable autocratic rule but something far worse: military intervention, targeted strikes, or forced removal. This shift in perceived alternatives creates an opening for transitional justice arrangements that previously had no chance of success. But seizing this opportunity requires understanding both the possibilities and limits of credible commitments in the Venezuelan context.

The Self-Enforcement Problem

The core challenge facing any transitional justice agreement is credibility. Even if the opposition were to offer blanket amnesty for regime crimes today, why should government officials or military officers believe those promises would be honored tomorrow? Once the opposition controls state power, what prevents them from reneging on agreements made during their vulnerable moments?

The status quo is no longer the safe default; it’s increasingly uncertain and potentially catastrophic.

This is not mere cynicism but rational calculation. Political scientists have long recognized that transitional justice agreements face a fundamental commitment problem: the side gaining power may have strong incentives to abandon agreements once they no longer need cooperation from those they’ve made promises to. For Venezuelan regime insiders who have witnessed purges in other post-authoritarian transitions, this concern is visceral.

The conventional wisdom suggests this credibility problem makes meaningful transitional justice impossible. But game theory offers a more nuanced answer: some agreements can be self-enforcing while others cannot. The key distinction lies in the distribution of power after transition and the nature of the crimes being amnestied.

Differentiated justice: why some deals can hold

Consider two different members of Venezuela’s regime coalition. The first is deeply implicated in crimes against humanity—systematic torture of political prisoners, coordinating extrajudicial killings, or managing the criminal networks that have turned Venezuela into a narco-state. These crimes are not merely administrative corruption or political alignment; they’re internationally recognized violations so grave that prosecution seems inevitable regardless of any domestic political bargain.

The second is a regime insider who has engaged in corruption, manipulated electoral processes, or enforced economically destructive policies—serious offenses, certainly, but of a different moral and legal category. This person may hold a key administrative position or significant military command. What distinguishes them isn’t their rank but the nature of their actions: they haven’t personally ordered massacres or run torture centers. They aligned with the regime and participated in its kleptocratic governance, but their crimes fall short of the threshold that makes amnesty politically and legally impossible.

This distinction matters because it determines which transitional justice agreements can be credible. For the first category—those guilty of crimes against humanity—no transitional justice agreement can truly hold. Their crimes are too severe, too well-documented, and too central to the regime’s worst abuses. International human rights law recognizes certain crimes as beyond the scope of amnesty. Any post-transition government would face overwhelming international and domestic pressure to prosecute. Most importantly, their crimes are so unique, that prosecuting them does not necessarily mean that the government will also prosecute less pervasive crimes committed by a lot more people. These individuals know this, and therefore any amnesty promise to them rings hollow. For them, only one thing might be credible: guaranteed safe-conduct to protected exile in a country beyond the reach of international justice systems.

This group likely includes much of the regime’s political leadership—those at the apex of chavista power who have directed the machinery of repression. But it doesn’t include everyone at high levels of government, chavista political leadership or the military. Many senior officials and officers have enriched themselves and sustained an authoritarian system without crossing into crimes against humanity. They’re complicit in Venezuela’s disaster, but not in ways that place them beyond the reach of credible amnesty arrangements. For this second category, the calculus is fundamentally different. Here’s where self-enforcement becomes possible.

If a post-transition government begins prosecuting these individuals for corruption or political crimes covered under amnesty, it would trigger collective resistance. Every official in this category would recognize that if prosecutions begin with one case, they’re all potentially next. That resistance need not be—and likely wouldn’t be—an immediate coup attempt. It would manifest through institutional friction, information withholding, bureaucratic sabotage, and the gradual erosion of state capacity as those who feel betrayed withdraw cooperation.  

The message to insiders at both levels must be clear: the regime you’re defending cannot defend you.

This is crucial: the new government would need many of these same individuals to maintain basic state functions. Venezuela cannot be governed without military officers to command forces, without bureaucrats to run ministries, without regional officials who understand local power structures. If the new government alienates this entire class through amnesty violations, it doesn’t just face administrative headaches—it faces the genuine prospect of being overthrown by the very security forces it needs to sustain power.

The new government knows this ex ante. Therefore, it has powerful incentives not to violate the amnesty agreement even when it technically has the power to do so. This is what makes such an agreement self-enforcing: the very breadth of amnesty coverage creates the conditions for its own enforcement. Unlike an agreement with a single war criminal, where breaking the promise costs the government little, violating an agreement with a broad class of regime insiders would spark coordinated resistance that makes breach irrational—and potentially fatal to the new government’s survival.

The new BATNA and Fracturing the Regime Coalition

The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean—whatever its ultimate intent—shifts the strategic landscape for Venezuela’s regime coalition. Officers and officials calculating their futures must now assign non-trivial probability to scenarios they previously dismissed: targeted strikes against regime leadership, surgical removal operations, precision attacks on regime infrastructure. The status quo is no longer the safe default; it’s increasingly uncertain and potentially catastrophic.

This creates space for a differentiated transitional justice strategy with the goal of fracturing the regime coalition itself. This can happen in two ways, and the strategy must enable both paths.

First path: The leadership accepts exile before they’re forcibly removed. The top leadership—those whose crimes put them beyond amnesty—must understand that the exile option won’t remain open indefinitely, as actions against them may come from the Caribbean and/or from within the regime coalition. If other regime insiders decide the leadership has become too toxic to defend, they may move preemptively to facilitate transition. At that point, the leadership loses control over their exit and faces far worse outcomes than negotiated departure. The exile offer must therefore come with implicit time pressure: accept it while you still control the situation, because if your own coalition turns against you, all bets are off.

Second path: mid-level insiders defect from the leadership. Those who can be credibly included in amnesty arrangements must see that their interests have diverged from the leadership’s. If they believe the leadership’s position is unsustainable and that military pressure will eventually force regime change anyway, then defending that leadership becomes irrational. Better to facilitate transition, secure their place in post-transition Venezuela, and avoid the chaos of forced regime collapse and the corresponding possibility of getting caught in the middle of it. They need the new government to function and maintain state capacity; the new government needs them. This mutual dependency makes credible commitments possible.

The strategy, which must be coordinated between the US and María Corina Machado, should enable both paths simultaneously. The leadership must see exile as the least-bad option before it’s too late, while mid-level actors must see amnesty-facilitated defection as their rational choice. This pressure and differentiated amnesty approach accomplishes three things.

Previous amnesty proposals failed not because Venezuelans lack interest in democratic transition but because the strategic environment made them irrelevant.

First, credible signaling that the status quo carries an escalating risk. This isn’t about threatening a full-scale invasion—a scenario that lacks credibility. Instead, it’s about demonstrating through concrete military deployment that strikes against regime targets are feasible and increasingly likely. The buildup of military assets in the Caribbean creates a credible threat of targeted removal operations against leadership figures. The probability of such action need not be high; it merely needs to be high enough that BATNA calculations account for it. The message to insiders at both levels must be clear: the regime you’re defending cannot defend you.

Second, a narrow offer of safe-conduct to protected exile for the Chavista leadership. While terribly distasteful, this is the only credible off-ramp for actors who cannot reasonably be included in any amnesty agreement. Countries offering such asylum must provide iron-clad guarantees against extradition. Individuals in this category must understand they have one narrow window to exit on their own terms. Yes, this means some of these criminals may escape full accountability, but it may be a pragmatic off-ramp to trigger a peaceful democratic transition.

Third, broad amnesty for regime insiders whose crimes don’t constitute crimes against humanity—the corruption, electoral manipulation, and political repression that sustained the system without crossing into crimes against humanity. This group includes most military officers, government officials, and power-brokers whom the post-transition state will need to maintain basic governance capacity. This amnesty must be clearly defined, well-publicized, and understood by these actors as a credible commitment that will be self-enforcing for the reasons outlined above: because the new government cannot survive if it betrays this entire class, and because attempting to do so would invite the very coup that makes such betrayal irrational. Importantly, the offer must come from María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, with the backing of the international community.

Why this moment is different

Previous amnesty proposals failed not because Venezuelans lack interest in democratic transition but because the strategic environment made them irrelevant. When your BATNA is maintaining indefinitely the absolute power that you already have, why negotiate?

The Caribbean military buildup changes this by degrading regime insiders’ BATNA. The deployment of offensive capabilities—not  for invasion but for targeted strikes and surgical operations—introduces genuine uncertainty into what was previously a comfortable autocratic equilibrium. All insiders must now individually calculate the risk that the regime they’re protecting becomes a liability, not an asset.

But military build-up alone cannot produce peaceful regime change—it can only create conditions for the regime coalition to fracture. That fracture requires credible political alternatives that overcome the commitment problems that have plagued transitional justice throughout history. The differentiated approach outlined here does that by recognizing that different actors face different incentive structures and require different kinds of agreements.

For those whose crimes put them beyond amnesty, only exile is credible—and that option must come with time pressure. For the broader base of regime insiders—those who sustained the system but whose crimes allow inclusion in amnesty arrangements—self-enforcing agreements can work precisely because their breadth creates conditions for their own enforcement. 

What’s new in Venezuela is the combination of external pressure degrading the autocratic alternative and internal differentiation creating credible off-ramps for regime insiders. Today, for the first time in years, both elements are potentially alignable. 

The opposition and international community need to understand that this alignment is temporary. Military capabilities in the Caribbean signal resolve, but that signal will decay, as time dilutes credibility and makes the build-up harder to sustain. Transitional justice offers without changed BATNAs will continue to be ignored. But together, intelligently designed and clearly communicated, they create conditions under which rational regime insiders might conclude that their interests have diverged from the continuation of autocratic rule in Venezuela—and act on that conclusion.For Venezuela’s long-suffering population, the question is not whether justice should be perfect but whether it can be sufficient to enable transition. Logic suggests it can—if those who sustained the regime but didn’t direct its worst crimes are offered agreements they can rationally believe will hold, and if those who did direct those crimes understand their window for negotiated exit is closing. Marco Rubio’s November 24 deadline to designate Cartel de los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, together with Trump’s openness to renewed communication with the Maduro regime, indicate the urgency of credible off-ramps in the very short run. In the shadow of the Caribbean buildup, the possibility of change is closer than it’s ever been. But that window will not stay open indefinitely. The strategy must create open avenues for both the leadership to exit, or for mid-level actors to facilitate that exit. Only then will all the pieces for a peaceful democratic transition in Venezuela fall into place.