More than a week after millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to pick their new president, the autocrat Nicolás Maduro remains ensconced in the Miraflores presidential palace, despite evidence that he lost the election to his opponent Edmundo González. Shortly after the voting ended, the government-dominated National Electoral Council (NEC) announced that Maduro was the winner and that he had beat opposition candidate González by seven percentage points. The only problem: the NEC has yet to release any of the detailed data to the public in what is shaping up to be the most transparent election fraud in the history of Latin America.
Can Maduro be pushed out, and if so, how and at what price?
Maduro’s political opponents were able to acquire more than 80% of the vote tally sheets from the thousands of polling stations dotting the country. Those numbers paint a strikingly different picture, showing González demolishing Maduro by an astounding 35 percentage points. The Washington Post did its own calculations and found that, of the 23,270 tally sheets received from the opposition, González won with about 67% of the vote to Maduro’s paltry 30%. The numbers were so lopsided that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement on Aug. 1 declaring Gonzalez the indisputable victor: “Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people, that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election.” The Americans weren’t the only ones — the European Union, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama and others have either questioned the results given by Maduro’s administration or called Venezuela’s latest election a sham.
Now, U.S. policymakers are likely asking themselves some big questions. Can Maduro be pushed out, and if so, how and at what price? If not, is there a way to at least convince Maduro to establish a national unity government? Should Washington step aside and allow Latin America’s heavyweights like Brazil, Mexico and Colombia to take ownership of the issue? And is the stream of migration out of Venezuela — nearly 8 million have left over the last decade — bound to get worse?
Maduro, who has ruled Venezuela since 2013 after taking over from his mentor, the late Hugo Chavez, is no stranger to election shenanigans. The 2013 and 2018 presidential elections as well as the 2017 constituent assembly elections were all viewed in one way or another as laced with fraud or skewed to the government’s favor. Maduro has used the machinery of government to ice out opposition candidates, barring some from public life while arresting others. Popular opposition figure Maria Corina Machado was banned from running this year, forcing her to name a replacement in Gonzalez, a mild-mannered former diplomat who had virtually no national name recognition.
In the days since the election, Maduro hasn’t wavered. He held a giant rally over the weekend to brag about his victory. He blasted his opponents as fascists, criminals, coup-plotters and lackeys of the great imperial beast to the north, the United States. He’s done more than talk: approximately 2,000 demonstrators have been arrested so far; Venezuelan diplomats from seven Latin American countries who disputed Maduro’s victory were ordered back to Caracas; direct flights to Panama, the Dominican Republic and Peru were cancelled; and Maduro has called on ordinary Venezuelans to use a government-built app to report anti-government protests.
None of this is surprising. We knew, for instance, that Maduro would use all of the power at his disposal to extend his presidency for another six years. We knew the Venezuelan opposition movement would react harshly to yet another stolen election. We knew Washington and its allies and partners in Europe and Latin America would raise concerns about the voting procedures. And we even knew that Maduro would have a very tough chance winning a third term in a free and open election.
What we don’t know, however, is whether the U.S. can do anything to dislodge Maduro from power or whether any policy from Washington would fix the situation Venezuela currently finds itself in. The answer if recent history is any guide would appear to be “no.”
For the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, Maduro’s Venezuela is the very definition of an intractable foreign policy problem with no clear-cut solutions. Everything the U.S. has tried over the last decade has failed.
U.S. policy took a slightly more hawkish turn under Obama, who despite shaking hands with Chavez during an April 2009 regional summit — Chavez famously said he wanted to be friends with Obama — found the Venezuelan socialist as ornery during his term as he was during his predecessor George W. Bush’s. In 2010, Washington revoked the visa of Venezuela’s ambassador in retaliation for Caracas refusing to accept Obama’s ambassadorial nominee to the country. It only took a turn for the worst when Maduro, who succeeded Chavez after his death from cancer, took a heavy hand against demonstrators and pro-democracy advocates during protests in 2015, stripped opposition lawmakers from their committee posts and kicked out a foreign cable news network. Sanctions soon became the core tool of U.S. policy on Venezuela, with Congress passing a sanctions law in 2014 and Obama issuing an executive order months later to freeze the assets of any Venezuelan official complicit in acts of violence against civilians, restrictions on freedom of the press and public corruption. The actions were at best symbolic, a way to show Latin America that Washington was doing something.
The sanctions regime accelerated rapidly under former President Donald Trump, when U.S.-Venezuela relations were in purgatory for Trump’s four years in office. Washington prevented U.S. oil companies from operating in Venezuela or selling Venezuelan oil. Any third-party country who imported Venezuelan oil, the lifeblood of Maduro’s economy, exposed themselves to being locked out of the U.S. financial system. Venezuelan government property and assets in the U.S. were seized and handed over to Juan Guaido, the leader of the National Assembly whom the Trump administration and dozens of other countries recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate head of state in January 2019. Between 2015 and 2020, Venezuela’s oil exports declined by approximately 80%, from 2.4 million barrels a day to 500,000 barrels a day.
This maximum-pressure policy was trumpeted by U.S. officials whose braggadocio and confidence would ultimately prove short-lived. Former national security adviser John Bolton (who claimed that the sanctions would end “Maduro’s tyrannical reign”) and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (who asserted Maduro’s government was on its last legs) would later attempt to explain why they were both wrong (they still haven’t been able to). So did Guaido, whose attempted uprising against Maduro’s government in April 2019 unraveled in a day after the Venezuelan military stuck with Maduro. The Venezuelan people were the ultimate losers in this situation, forced to live with a cratering economy hemmed in by U.S. sanctions, an ever-repressive Venezuelan security apparatus and a man in Maduro whose power at the top of the system was more consolidated than ever before.
Biden came into office in 2021 knowing Trump’s maximum pressure strategy was a failure. Yet he didn’t ditch it entirely. Rather, he tailored the pressure with backchannel diplomacy in the hope that offers of U.S. financial relief would incentivize Caracas to meet U.S. demands. In October 2022, the U.S. and Venezuela struck a prisoner exchange, trading two nephews of Maduro’s wife (who were convicted in a U.S. court on drug trafficking charges) for seven Americans imprisoned in Venezuela. Weeks later, U.S. oil company Chevron was allowed to expand production in Venezuela in an effort to keep the political dialogue between Maduro and the opposition afloat. And a year later, Washington temporarily eased sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry after Maduro signed an accord with the opposition setting some rules of the game for a free and fair upcoming presidential election. The idea: to sweeten Maduro’s appetite and give him a sample of the economic goodies on offer if he stopped jailing his opponents and rigging elections.
Of course, this strategy didn’t work either. Washington re-imposed the oil sanctions in April, a consequence of ex-communicating Machado from political office for the next 15 years, preventing the European Union’s election monitors from entering the country and monopolizing coverage on the airways. The free and fair election the U.S. and Venezuela’s neighbors hoped for was anything but.
How will the U.S. react in the weeks and months ahead? Likely, the response is already baked-in: more sanctions, more diplomatic finger-waiving, perhaps building an international coalition to ensure the opposition survives to fight another day. Just don’t expect any of it to work.
Daniel R. DePetris
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.