Caracas Chronicles

Our job is to doubt. Or at least doubt first, and then look for a path to certainty. This is extremely difficult when trying to analyze Venezuela, especially while being Venezuelans ourselves and vulnerable to wishful thinking. There’s a whole bunch of people trying to manifest the freedom of Venezuela, pero deseo no empreña. We try to stay course and maintain a certain level of objectivity while analyzing the country. Sometimes it’s easy, because there’s so much evidence of the disaster that chavismo brought upon us, but, frankly, more often than not, we do fail to keep a straight face while trying to be objective. We’re only human. Grays are hard—ask the gray lady herself!—, the middleground is not easy to imagine. That’s why we decided to forget about it for a while and just talk about black and white! 

Here we bring you what we think would be the best scenarios for Nicolás Maduro and María Corina Machado. The sliding doors between the eternal dictatorship and the first step in the strenuous path to rebuild our nation (objectivity out the window). But when we talk about best cases, we are not going to say that the best case for Maduro is having a wonderful phone call with Trump and that he will be left alone to rule forever while doing business with whomever he wants. Just like we’re not going to say that Machado’s best case scenario would be to have the military change sides overnight to support Edmundo González as legitimate president elect, getting Vladimir Padrino as Minister of Defense for a few years, and Machado herself as VP until Edmundo resigns three years later to leave her as Commander in Chief. No, while not diving into too many grays, we’re taking things as they are today as the base: Maduro is hunkering down and calling Trump’s bluff (and hoping it is a bluff) because he doesn’t really have any other options on his table.

Both scenarios mark the opposite ends of the spectrum within which reality will unfold, and we propose them after reading thousands and thousands of words on media, listening to interviews, analyzing official statements and propaganda (by far the main weapon in this strange war that hasn’t happened), and taking into account the insider information coming from our sources in the Maduro regime and the opposition, the ones we use for our Political Risk Report.

Here we go.

Best scenario for Maduro: “the art of the deal”

Let’s imagine that by the end of the year or the first months of 2026 we all come to terms with the fact that Trump is not very interested in regime change in Venezuela. He is satisfied with doing what supports his narrative, according to which he is saving his country from the damage done by the Democrats: deporting Venezuelans detained by ICE, cancelling the TPS for more than half a million of them in order to make them leave, and telling the American public that he stopped the arrival of fentanyl and cocaine from Venezuela and beyond. He doubles down on his position that all along his intention was to destroy the drug trafficking that poisons Americans, and revert what Biden did by accepting the criminals and insane asylum escapees sent by Maduro to destroy America. This is why he has been so ambiguous about removing Maduro and refused to enforce a deadline or an ultimatum.

This scenario might include some caveat that allows Trump to show he did or will eventually do something against Maduro, who he says is the leader of Cartel de los Soles and “Train Day Brocacua” or however it’s pronounced. His administration can continue bombing boats, trashing Maduro’s already shattered reputation with more accusations against him coming from the testimonies of General Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, and announcing an apparent negotiation process that is supposedly expected to finish Maduro’s term at some point. Another Big Deal like the ones that, according to him, ended many other wars like Gaza, Congo and the Cambodia-Thailand border conflict. Meanwhile, Chevron continues to operate, deportees continue arriving in Maiquetía, and Trump dissipates the annoying buzz by his right ear, from the MAGA world saying that meddling in Venezuela is not “America first,” and by his left ear, from the Democrats, the liberal press and many people in the world complaining about him defibrillating the Monroe Doctrine.

Maduro remains a public enemy in Trump’s narrative, and stays in Venezuela as an illegitimate ruler over a devastated economy. He proves, once again, that by hunkering down and just hunting traitors around him he pulled it off against all odds. Diosdado Cabello looks over the territory he conquered and postpones the moment to replace Maduro. The Rodríguez siblings and Zapatero stage a “negotiation” with their tailor made opposition, now represented by former oppo champion Henrique Capriles. They hear harsh rhetoric from Washington, but months pass and chavistas are still in power. Venezuelans add María Corina to their long list of disappointments and scratch their heads on the eternal problem of how to survive, with no rights to protest against goons who just confirmed that no one will punish them, and a world increasingly hostile to having them as immigrants. And all the journalists, pundits, professors, lobbyists and politicians who criticized Trump for aspiring to topple Maduro look the other way.

How plausible is this scenario?

Well, in all this time, more and more options have been crowding the table and Trump hasn’t taken a decision. Actually, after the Department of State complied with the last deadline of designating the Cartel de los Soles (which in practice means the whole Maduro regime) as a terrorist organization, what Trump wants is to talk directly to Maduro. An Axios scoop revealed on November 24 that, even if Trump is a hawk about Venezuela, he isn’t in favor of snatching or killing Maduro and that he prefers to talk to him. The next day, Trump himself told reporters that he would talk to Maduro in order to save lives, before adding that the hard way would be fine too. If you take a step back from the noise of so many headlines and footage of planes and warships, what you’ll see is that months pass, not one bullet has been shot against the chavista regime, and Trump remains reluctant to attack. Maduro can live with US warplanes strolling nearby, and use that to play the victim. And the US can live with a country in the Caribbean that they consider an enemy: just remember that the Cuban regime is still there, in power since 1959.

Best scenario for Machado: cumbersome regime change

In this opposite scenario, Trump does the trick he did with nuclear facilities in Iran: after saying he wouldn’t attack, he gives the order, and Operation Southern Spear bombs civilian and military sites in Venezuelan territory that the US links with Cartel de los Soles, destroys Russian and Iranian radars and rocket launchers, and wipes out ELN and FARC camps in Zulia, Tachira and Apure. Beijing, Moscow and Havana condemn the attacks but do nothing else. The global left describes this like a brutal military intervention against a sovereign state. In the US, people fear a second Iraq-like disaster. The Pope, the UN, the EU, Lula, Petro et al say they are deeply worried, peace must prevail, etc. There’s no invasion, no coffins with US flags on top, no neighborhoods in flames like Panama in 1989. Just an effective operation, mostly from the sky, that triggers one of the driving forces of Venezuelan history: the sudden change of loyalties when a critical mass of the military and the political chaste realize that the old caudillo is finished, that he cannot be saved. What we call, in toros coleados jargon, saltar la talanquera.

Once the US attacks provide the breaking point, the Maduro regime collapses in a matter of weeks. After the Air Force and the Navy refuse to fight the US military, betrayal en masse leads to mid-rank officers detaining Army and GNB generals. The supposed chain of command is broken. Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino is sent to an American jail. In the initial hours of the attack, Maduro and Cilia manage to flee with some relatives; people like Diosdado Cabello and Alexander Granko are not so lucky and end up in the hands of US special forces that landed on Blackhawks, or are hunted for some time until they are also betrayed by the DGCIM or SEBIN squads they were counting on. Some chavista chieftains, colectivos and hitmen involved in human rights violations are killed in drone strikes or fighting with Venezuelan officers that had been waiting the moment to clean their own pasts by helping to bring down Maduro. Because of the evident danger to the entire chavista hierarchy, the Rodriguez siblings jump into a friendly embassy. 

It happens so fast that we can’t believe it. 

Then come some complications. Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, back from Madrid, embraces his son in law, released at last as the rest of the political prisoners. But it takes a while to make him take oath as president, because the National Assembly still has a chavista majority and the whole State must be rearranged in a situation of fluidity and stress. Maria Corina roams the streets and demands patience from the masses. There’s much to do, democracies are not reborn or built overnight, San José Gregorio will help us. 

The negotiations produce a surprising combination of old and new faces. EGU becomes president and Machado his vice president while holding the real power, but some former chavistas are part of the transition government, while people that spent two decades in the opposition waiting for this moment, coming out from clandestinity or returning from exile, are upset as they are left out from the transition’s power-sharing setup. 

Thousands of Venezuelans, not millions, move back to the country. The general mood is a mix of joy, cautious hope and restless unease. People demand immediate solutions to power cuts, water scarcity and inflation. Everyone demands everything from the new government. An economic emergency package with international aid (important but insufficient for the scale of humanitarian needs) begins to appease social demands. The new leadership of the security apparatus works hard to prove they are not chavistas, by being aggressive against saboteurs and armed remnants of the Diosdado terror machine. There’s violence and people feel that crime is rising. Human rights NGOs are worried. Independent media, free of censorship, experience the first frictions with the González-Machado administration.

But the transition, although murky and uncertain, ends up being for real. Venezuela enters a new era of reconstruction.

How plausible is this scenario?

After gathering so many military assets in the Caribbean, it would look bad for the main military force in the world to do nothing against a far inferior adversary. It would be like a strong man refusing to pursue the little guy that took his wallet in front of everyone. Trump is finally convinced by Rubio and some others that all they needed was to provide a series of strategic strikes to demolish the sand castle that was the chavista regime. The Venezuelans must do the rest of the work, with no nation-building mess like in the Afghan case, and the US will collect the lion’s share of Venezuela’s new energy era. Now the rest of socialist regimes in the Americas are panicking, China and Russia lost a beachhead, and the US reigns again over its neighborhood. A rightwing, pro-Trump wave rises over the hemisphere. 

This scenario is pushed into the terrain of plausibility by hidden factors. Latin America is fed up with Maduro, a source of transnational crime and mass migration, and eager to be on good terms with Trump. China knows that whoever rules Venezuela will court them to do business. Global money will prefer a more stable, sanctions-free environment to invest. Many people would denounce a US armed incursion, but the fact is that the fall of the Maduro regime will mean more solutions than problems, opposite to the present situation.

The coin may fall here, there, or even somewhere in between. In the meantime, the noise coming out from liberal newspapers and OSINT accounts is meant to either boost or downplay your expectations. Nothing major or history-defining has occurred yet, and that mysterious what if event may not even be what we imagine.

We leave it up to you to decide which of these two scenarios is more likely.