President Nicolás Maduro is finally gone from Venezuela. He was captured by U.S. forces and flown out of the country early in the morning on Saturday. President Trump has said that the United States will run the country for the foreseeable future.
For Venezuelans, our situation will not be fixed by Mr. Maduro’s departure, let alone by a foreign occupying force. We are not a nation held together by a government or a social contract, but a collection of individuals trapped in a struggle for survival. Replacing the man at the top will not dismantle the web of bosses, private loyalties, corrupt practices and institutional ruins that have replaced public life here.
In the fall I had a conversation with a student of mine at Simón Bolívar University, the school in Caracas where I’ve taught political science for nearly three decades.
Like many students there, he was usually locked in a weary, defensive silence. But in a flash of openness, he told me a little about his life two hours outside the capital, where his mother runs a fast food stand and his father, a retired policeman, rents out a few motorcycles to delivery drivers.
His silence quickly returned when he mentioned his older brother, a member of the Venezuelan national guard. “He doesn’t like to talk about his work,” he said.
The brother, who was in a position to provide a few small perks reserved for guard members and other armed forces, is probably his family’s last thread of connection to a state that has utterly failed the people of Venezuela.
For most Venezuelans, life has become an exercise in struggle in an economy of scraps and favors, making do with a patchwork of informal jobs and relationships that can never quite fill the void left by the corruption and inefficiency of the government.
For years, this is what our authoritarianism has looked like: not autocratic socialism, but the worst kind of primitive capitalism.
In Venezuela, we have long faced a brutal paradox: an absent yet omnipotent state. It is everywhere and nowhere. It has failed to provide the essential services that once, under President Hugo Chávez, justified its monstrous growth and revolutionary ambitions — water, electricity, health care, education.
Our society has been orphaned, ground down to its most basic capacities. The government has been reduced to a mere apparatus for securing its own continuity. The old promises of Chavismo have vanished, and the well of grand stories the government used to tell has run dry.
Mr. Chávez came to power with revolutionary promises: to refund the republic, to erase the distinction between the haves and the have-nots, to give the marginalized a seat at the table of power.
His movement rested on two pillars: Mr. Chávez’s victory in democratic elections and the redistribution of oil wealth. It was through this combination that he managed to sustain his anti-establishment narrative, his hegemonic exercise of power and the country’s revolutionary fervor.
Perhaps Venezuelans still remember the splendor of the oil boom and the near-constant elections that confirmed Mr. Chávez’s political invulnerability.
But it is unlikely that we will ever forget the damage caused by the crumbling of those two pillars after Mr. Maduro took power in 2013. When the oil market crashed in 2014 and the government doubled down on ruinous currency controls, among other measures, the cost of the resulting economic catastrophe was brutally shifted onto the population.
Public spending shrank, except to strengthen the police and military apparatus, leaving our civic institutions hollow. Millions of people fled the country. The Venezuelans who remained had to learn how to survive on their own.
Of course Venezuelans want change. We said as much in the 2024 elections, in which tallies gathered by thousands of volunteers showed an overwhelming opposition victory.
