The End of Chavismo - Part 6 - On the attack on January 3rd, Legitimacy and Crime

For a summarized timeline of events since 2024, refer to the previous posts in this series.

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Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

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On January 3rd, in the wee hours of the morning, a U.S. strike team carried out a series of bombings across Caracas and La Guaira, aimed at key military infrastructure, electrical sub-stations and anti-aircraft batteries. Their goal was to abduct Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, the de facto leaders of the chavista regime. They took them and left, leaving Venezuelans bewildered and with a mixture of feelings. After the attack, the regime unleashed its armed civilian groups to intimidate the population; checkpoints of them were set up in areas of the capital and in other cities, they stop people at random, check their phones ostensibly to search for any messages in support of the attack, and threaten residential neighborhoods with breaking into people's homes, entirely within their character.

Here's my personal position regarding this operation.

It was an abduction, there's no question about it. It was done in the middle of the night, involved the destruction of Venezuelan infrastructure, the death of Venezuelan and Cuban citizens and the kidnapping of two people. It was also not sanctioned by the U.S. Congress and not properly informed or described by U.S. officials.

Legally, however, it's a grey area. It can't be fully considered an act of war, nor has it been called out as such by any nation or institution, and it hasn't been formally censored by the U.N. Security Council. Nobody safe the chavista regime is officially treating it as a crime, although it most certainly is, and even they are powerless to act about it.

But here's a key issue: legitimacy.

The topic of whether the chavista regime and the PSUV (Venezuela's ruling party) are legitimate has also been a grey area for years. Chávez violated the Constitution in many ways during his time in office, postponing elections, removing authority from political opponents, banning political parties from running independently, running for a third term in office, and stacking the three branches of government and the entire institutional apparatus with loyalists, but he still commanded a tremendous public support until his death, so it was impossible to really make an argument that he was illegitimate. Nicolás Maduro's regime is very different.

^{Chávez, with Diosdado Cabello (right) and Nicolás Maduro (left), tells his followers to support Maduro before his death}

In 2013, after Chávez died, the regime finally called for elections that pitted Henrique Capriles (formerly thought to be an opposition leader but now known to have been an infiltrated chavista operative within opposition ranks) against Maduro, Chávez's appointed successor. Maduro "won" by a very slim margin of roughly 200k votes, and we're now aware that the whole election was a sham, although we couldn't prove it at the time. From a constitutional standpoint, the regime should've stopped being legitimate then, but they still held all the power and were recognized by all other governments, so once again, it's a grey area.

Between 2014 and 2024, the regime enacted several laws, issued decrees and court orders that caused further institutional decay and violated the Constitution to even greater lengths, thereby diminishing their legitimacy to the point in which they could no longer rally the population at all. Even grassroots chavistas deserted them. That's how, in 2024, they were forced to accept a new Presidential Election but still banned María Corina Machado, a politician with more than 20 years of anti-chavista work, from running. They were unwilling or unable to ban her replacement at the polls, career diplomat Edmundo González, most likely because of pressure from foreign agents, and he ended up winning by a landslide. The last shred of legitimacy that was still kind of available to the Maduro regime was lost, but they still clung to power and repression turned even more hardcore: any suggestion on social media that they lost, that the blackmarket dollar was soaring, that common crime was again back in the streets, could land anyone in jail to suffer torture and other sorts of abuse. I'm taking a risk with this very post, in fact.

^{2017 was a year of intense protests and even more intense repression. Publicly, almost 200 people were killed, and thousands were jailed. Many of those jailed remain in prison without trial, some may have died already}

The post-electoral protests died out and people returned to their normal lives, but then the U.S. government started an intense campaign against the regime. Chevron, one of the last foreign oil extraction companies still operating in Venezuela, had to leave the country when the Trump administration rescinded their license; the Tren de Aragua, a multinational criminal organization connected to the regime, was designated as a terrorist organization, therefore providing some grounds for the U.S. to intervene in Venezuela's affairs for "national security reasons". The Cartel de los Soles, the drug-trafficking arm of the regime reportedly headed by Diosdado Cabello and involving all of the top brass of the Armed Forces as well as many officials both military and civilian, was also targeted in statements and documents.

For the past few months, the Trump administration had been threatening the regime with military action, posting thousands of troops in the Caribbean, bombing four boats allegedly containing drugs and seizing oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela. The regime responded with outward bravado while privately attempting to negotiate a compromise without success. Then, this happened, and we learned that Trump was for real and not just talking. Another nuance here is that, while it may seem that the U.S. acted alone, there's a reason why Russia, China and Iran, chavismo's last and most powerful allies in the world, didn't get involved, and why other nations only issued statements but generally spoke little about the incident; this operation was carried out with the intelligence and covert help of many governments that see the Maduro regime as a serious problem but wouldn't or couldn't act openly like the U.S. can.

^{Venezuelans abroad celebrated Maduro's capture. Too soon, I think, but that's evidence of how strongly we want change}

Here's the other side of the situation: how we Venezuelans experience it now. I think any of my countrymen who claim not to have wished for something like what happened that Saturday morning is lying, to themselves first perhaps. We all wanted something to happen, but we were still shocked when it did. Many of us celebrated both openly abroad and secretly within the country, because we're really tired of this regime and we understand that they can only be removed this way, through violence; but this is still a crime committed against our nation and it sets a terrible precedent for future situations like these.

So you see, there's no easy way to approach this, especially if you're a foreigner with no experience concerning Venezuela, and particularly if you're an American, Trump supporter or not. Two things can be right at the same time, what Trump did wasn't ok, but it was the only way to put the regime in a critical situation, perhaps enough for them to fall on their own. Maduro was kidnapped but he's also a drug kingpin, a murderer and a torturer with zero legitimacy in the country. International law should regulate these issues and allow for ways to deal with regimes like this one more effectively, but it doesn't, and it won't for a long time. The system that permitted chavismo to exist and operate for so long that it became a threat not just to Venezuelans but to the world, is the same system that can't do anything to stop Trump or any other leader from doing what happened on January 3rd.

Another argument that I've seen a lot regarding Trump's motivations for doing this involves the ransacking of the country's resources, especially the oil, but here too there's a lot of nuance missing. Chavismo despoiled those resources first and, in the process, destroyed the oil industry, there's very little refining and production capability left after their onslaught. This also applies to other basic industries, meaning that, in order to extract the country's resources, the U.S. and other nations would require to make huge investments in a context where there's no Rule of Law or institutional stability. People repeat the "they want your oil" story as if it was as simple as a walk in the park, but it's very far from the truth.

^{Delcy Rodríguez is sworn in as acting president by her brother Jorge Rodríguez}

In the aftermath of the attack, chavista leaders have adopted a groveling attitude toward the U.S., except for Diosdado Cabello, who remains outwardly defiant. Delcy Rodríguez, playing the role of acting president of the country, and her brother Jorge Rodríguez, speaker of the National Assembly (both just as bad as Maduro and Cabello) have made public promises of correcting their ways, admitted the existence of political prisoners, which they had denied for ages, and released some of them, but far fewer than the original list. Many fear that Cabello may be blocking the process or worse, that many prisoners are already dead, severely ill or show visible signs of torture, which the regime would naturally hesitate to reveal to the world.

You may extract your own conclusions and feel about them as strongly or as meekly as you wish, but remember, if you're not Venezuelan or at least haven't lived in Venezuela for a considerable length of time, your opinion regarding the chavista regime and what they did to this country, and whether military actions against them were necessary or not, is severely limited and probably unwelcome by those of us who actually experienced Hugo Chávez's and Nicolás Maduro's governments, and who see no way that the cancer of chavismo can be ousted peacefully from power.