In the immediate aftermath of Nicolás Maduro’s military extraction by the United States, protests erupted across major cities in Europe and the Americas calling for respect for Venezuela’s sovereignty. Venezuelans themselves, however, were largely absent from these protests. This contrast is not incidental. It reflects a deeper misalignment in how the crisis is being framed and debated.
For Venezuelans abroad, this moment has triggered yet another cycle of incomprehension. Many are confronted with responses that center almost exclusively on international law and precedent, while leaving aside the humanitarian and human rights crisis that has driven millions into forced migration or exile. This tension mirrors the ambivalent position of the region itself: shaken by a military intervention, yet unable to deny nearly two decades of institutional dismantling under authoritarian rule.
In the days following Maduro’s extraction, expressions of joy and relief within Venezuela circulated widely on social media platforms, often accessed through VPNs. Such reactions, however, carry real risks. Reports indicate that individuals have been detained, had their phones searched, and faced extortion when authorities discovered any reference to the intervention or signs of celebration.[1]
Critics of the intervention have rightly underscored the gravity of violating territorial integrity and the risks such actions pose to international law. Carolina Sandoval, president of Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), pointed at regional concerns by the precedent being set, particularly given the long history of US military action in the hemisphere.[2] At the same time, Sandoval also acknowledges a second, unresolved dimension: Venezuela has endured years of systematic repression under an authoritarian and violent government, and the need for accountability and a democratic transition remains urgent.
As political actors reposition themselves and new details emerge, another uncomfortable reality has become harder to ignore. Despite decades of anti-imperialist rhetoric, it appears increasingly evident to many analysts that negotiations with the United States were not imposed from the outside, but actively pursued by actors within the regime itself. This contradiction between discourse and practice further complicates efforts to interpret the moment through clean ideological binaries. Meanwhile, the continued presence of chavismo deeply hurts the hopes of a genuine transition to democracy.
As Atlantic Council senior research fellow Iria Puyosa has noted, key figures within the governing coalition now face an unprecedented challenge: meeting Washington’s demands while preventing internal fracture or a military coup. Those demands include regulatory stability and transparent property frameworks, precisely the institutional environment that chavismo systematically dismantled over years of rule.[3]
Language also matters in this context. For Venezuelans, particularly victims of human rights violations, an exclusive focus on sovereignty and legal neutrality is not a technical debate but a political act. As journalist and human rights defender Luis Carlos Díaz told me, “framing the crisis solely in terms of territorial violation without acknowledging the criminal capture of the Venezuelan state produces a concrete effect: it normalises and protects those responsible for destroying constitutional order and committing crimes against humanity. From the perspective of victims, this is not neutrality: it is discursive revictimisation”.
This is not an isolated rupture
Any attempt to understand the current moment collapses if it treats the US intervention as an isolated rupture caused by a single set of actors. Venezuela was not a space free of foreign influence prior to this operation.
Cuban involvement in intelligence and repressive structures has been documented for years, facilitated through political and economic exchanges that included preferential access to oil.[4] Russian military presence is also well established, including documented operations linked to the Wagner Group.[5] Venezuela remains deeply indebted to Chinese creditors, owing roughly 20 billion dollars in loans that have shaped economic dependency and constrained policy autonomy. Iran has provided technological support that has translated into tools of repression, including the reported use of drones during demonstrations in 2024.[6] This record complicates claims that a previously respected red line was suddenly crossed.
Venezuela’s institutional dismantling and democratic struggle did not begin recently. It spans nearly three decades, with the past ten years marking the most intense phase, one in which legal frameworks, state resources, and institutional checks were stretched or eliminated to extinguish meaningful separation of powers. Within this trajectory, the 2024 elections stand out as a critical turning point. For many Venezuelans, they represented the last available democratic mechanism, despite conditions that were neither free nor fair and despite widespread expectations of fraud.
International responses to these elections revealed a familiar pattern. While condemnations were issued, institutional action stalled. In late July 2024, the Organization of American States rejected a resolution calling on the Venezuelan government to provide transparency regarding the election results, with 17 votes in favor, none against, and a notable number of 11 abstentions.[7] To this day, Maduro’s government has failed to present evidence substantiating its claimed victory.[8]
None of this justifies violent interventions. It does, however, situate recent events within a longer history of institutional collapse, abandoned justice, and power vacuums already exploited by multiple actors across ideological lines. As the Venezuelan civil society organisation CEPAZ has warned, “the international community now faces one last major opportunity to mitigate a crisis that its own prolonged ineffectiveness helped create”.[9]
Human rights cannot be bracketed out
Any analysis of Venezuela that sidelines human rights is analytically incomplete. The situation of political prisoners offers a stark entry point. Detention in Venezuela is constantly referred to by human rights defenders as a “revolving-door” system marked by deaths in custody, forced disappearances, and torture.[10] So-called “releases” are often conditional, opaque, and reversible, functioning as instruments of control rather than steps toward justice. The pace of releases has been extremely slow, and new detentions are feared.[11]
These practices are not confined to isolated events.[12] Nearly a third of the population has fled the country, many under precarious conditions that expose them to exploitation and trafficking networks along migration routes. Inside Venezuela, the humanitarian crisis remains complex and multidimensional, affecting access to food, healthcare, and other basic services. Independent media has been blocked or captured, while transnational repression extends surveillance and intimidation beyond borders.[13] Internet access is limited, unreliable, and often dangerous.[14] Vulnerable groups, including Indigenous communities, face persistent attacks despite having once served as a central pillar of the regime’s legitimacy.[15]
This reality is often misrepresented as the consequence of international sanctions alone, despite the fact that economic collapse and institutional erosion began years before sectorial sanctions came into force.[16] The persistence of this narrative obscures responsibility and diverts attention from corruption and deliberate policy choices that hollowed out the state.
Amid widespread confusion and the difficulty of making sense of incomplete and often contested data, many of the most reliable sources on Venezuela today are civil society organisations, some of them working in exile. These organisations have been essential in documenting the multiple, overlapping layers that define the crisis, offering analyses that move beyond fixed or binary narratives. They continue to play that role despite operating under constant persecution, threats, and criminalisation inside the country, while simultaneously facing defunding and diminishing support from international partners and allies.
Weighing what already broke
It is expected that governments, political parties, and institutions interpret events through their own lenses and fears. The rupture represented by a US military extraction is serious, and the concerns it raises regarding its precedent and international law are legitimate. But treating this moment as the beginning of the problem distorts the balance of what is at stake.
The Venezuelan crisis ceased to be solely a domestic problem years ago. It has reshaped migration routes across the hemisphere, strained regional economies, and generated humanitarian emergencies well beyond national borders. It has also been sustained by economic interests and political arrangements in which multiple actors benefited from the regime’s permanence, even as institutions collapsed and accountability disappeared.
Focusing exclusively on the legality of a single act, while ignoring the accumulated damage that made such an act conceivable, risks repeating the same error that has defined international engagement with Venezuela for over a decade: reacting to moments of rupture while tolerating the slow dismantling that precedes them. If international law is to retain meaning, it cannot be invoked only at the point of intervention. It must also reckon with the long record of impunity, complicity, and selective concern that paved the way.
Laura Vidal is a digital rights researcher and civil society observer working across Latin America and international spaces. For nearly two decades, she has followed and documented Venezuela’s crisis from multiple vantage points, with a focus on authoritarianism, technology, and gender. She currently works with IFEX and Digital Action, and her research, analysis, and essays have been published by organisations such as Internews, The Engine Room, Mozilla, APC, EFF, and Global Voices, among others. Her work sits at the intersection of digital power, civic resilience, and the lived experiences of communities navigating repression and displacement.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are those of the individual author and do not reflect the views of The Foreign Policy Centre.
[1] Espacio Público, Detienen a cinco ciudadanos por celebrar detención de Maduro, Espacio Público, January 2026, . https://espaciopublico.ong/detienen-a-cinco-ciudadanos-por-celebrar-detencion-de-maduro/
[2]In interview with Efecto Cocuyo, Efecto Paz #11 – Presos políticos después del 3E, January 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhV_CpfoBpw&t=2821s
[3]Iria Puyosa, Delcy Rodríguez’s untenable balancing act, Atlantic Council, January 2026, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/delcy-rodriguezs-untenable-balancing-act/
[4] Angus Berwick, Imported repression: How Cuba taught Venezuela to quash military dissent, Reuters Investigates, August 2019, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/venezuela-cuba-military/; Armando.Info, La bitácora de los tanqueros fantasmas al servicio de la revolución, Armando.Info, April 2020, https://armando.info/la-bitacora-de-los-tanqueros-fantasmas-al-servicio-de-la-revolucion/
[5] Silja Thoms, Más allá de Rusia: la actividad del Grupo Wagner en Venezuela, Deutsche Welle, June 2023, https://www.dw.com/es/m%C3%A1s-all%C3%A1-de-rusia-la-actividad-de-grupo-wagner-en-venezuela/a-66048041
[6] Conexión Segura y Libre / VE sin Filtro, Censura y represión digital en las elecciones presidenciales en Venezuela, 2025, https://vesinfiltro.org/res/files/informe-presidenciales_2024-VEsinFiltro.pdf; Laura Bicker, Trump’s Venezuela raid has created chaos — and that is a risk for China, BBC News, January 2026, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly92dkxqvko
[7] Yurani Arciniegas, Fracasa en el Consejo de la OEA resolución que pedía transparencia al Gobierno de Venezuela, France 24, July 2024, https://www.france24.com/es/am%C3%A9rica-latina/20240731-%F0%9F%94%B4-en-directo-petro-afirma-que-hay-graves-dudas-sobre-los-comicios-en-venezuela-y-pide-transparencia
[8] Tiago Rogero, How Venezuela’s opposition proved its election win: ‘A brilliant political move’, The Guardian, August 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/10/gonzalez-proof-win-venezuela-election-vote-tally-maduro
[9] Centro de Justicia y Paz (CEPAZ), La comunidad internacional tiene una última gran oportunidad en Venezuela de mitigar la crisis que su propia ineficacia ocasionó, January 2026, https://cepaz.org/la-comunidad-internacional-tiene-una-ultima-gran-oportunidad-en-venezuela-de-mitigar-la-crisis-que-su-propia-ineficacia-ocasiono/
[10]Deutsche Welle, Muere bajo custodia un policía detenido en Venezuela, November 2026, https://www.dw.com/es/muere-bajo-custodia-un-polic%C3%ADa-detenido-en-venezuela/a-75463951
[11] BBC News, “I thought I was going to die”: Jailed Venezuelan activist details brutality of prison life, January 2026, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgz5l6l7k7o
[12] United Nations News, Venezuela’s National Guard linked to killings, torture and repression, UN probe finds, December 2025, https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/12/1166565
[13] Matt Ford, Colombia: Venezuelan activists attacked in targeted shooting, DW (Reuters/AP), October 2025, https://www.dw.com/en/colombia-venezuelan-activists-attacked-in-targeted-shooting/a-74341871
[14] Iria Puyosa, Andrés Azpúrua, Daniel Suárez Pérez, How Venezuela became a model for digital authoritarianism, Atlantic Council, July 2024, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/how-venezuela-became-a-model-for-digital-authoritarianism/
[15] FundaRedes, Boletín N.º 47: Grupos armados y Estado venezolano vulneran el derecho a la vida de los pueblos indígenas, FundaRedes, November 2023, https://www.fundaredes.org/2023/11/01/boletin47-grupo-armados-y-estado-venezolano-vulneran-el-derecho-a-la-vida-de-los-pueblos-indigenas/; Human Rights Watch, World Report 2025: Venezuela 2025, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/venezuela
[16] Nizar El Fakih, Aproximación al Régimen de Sanciones Internacionales y al caso de Venezuela, Discussion Document No. IDB-DP-840, Inter-American Development Bank, December 2020, https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://publications.iadb.org/en/node/29550&ved=2ahUKEwiWtLq81IiSAxWFVKQEHW0vBnUQFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3Ega3sYVRtvTyuCerIVUlw