Two weeks after the US intervention in Venezuela, euphoria yields to anxiety. An analysis on the fragility of change, criminal micropowers, and the irrelevance of international law.
The persistence of the Chavista structure after Maduro’s capture suggests something worse than a miscalculation: it reveals a fundamental category error in Washington’s thinking.
In Americas Quarterly, Javier Corrales frames U.S. actions as a “Hostile Takeover and Abandonment”—a clever corporate analogy to decode Trump’s business-driven operating system. However, if we want to grasp the true nature of the tacit pact between Washington and Caracas, I suggest putting down The Wall Street Journal and picking up Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.
We are not witnessing a corporate collapse triggered by the removal of a CEO; we are watching an organized-crime ecosystem designed to survive decapitation. What is unfolding, to the dismay of the democratic opposition, is not a transition but a change of franchise: the brand shifts, the managers rotate, but the underlying machinery—coercion, rents, and territorial control—remains intact. Stability, in this model, is not institutional; it is transactional.
For two decades, the Venezuelan elite operated under a protection contract with Havana and Moscow, trading ideological alignment for intelligence and geopolitical shielding. But sanctions quietly eroded that pact by turning their wealth into dead capital, and the American armada in the Caribbean finally collapsed it. In this context, Trump’s arrival is read less as an invasion than as a hostile—yet enticing—tender offer. What Washington offers is not legitimacy, but liquidity. Loyalty shifts not because beliefs change, but because financial viability is restored.
The persistence of the Chavista structure after Maduro’s capture suggests something worse than a miscalculation: it reveals a fundamental category error in Washington’s thinking.
In Americas Quarterly, Javier Corrales frames U.S. actions as a “Hostile Takeover and Abandonment”—a clever corporate analogy to decode Trump’s business-driven operating system. However, if we want to grasp the true nature of the tacit pact between Washington and Caracas, I suggest putting down The Wall Street Journal and picking up Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.
We are not witnessing a corporate collapse triggered by the removal of a CEO; we are watching an organized-crime ecosystem designed to survive decapitation. What is unfolding, to the dismay of the democratic opposition, is not a transition but a change of franchise: the brand shifts, the managers rotate, but the underlying machinery—coercion, rents, and territorial control—remains intact. Stability, in this model, is not institutional; it is transactional.
For two decades, the Venezuelan elite operated under a protection contract with Havana and Moscow, trading ideological alignment for intelligence and geopolitical shielding. But sanctions quietly eroded that pact by turning their wealth into dead capital, and the American armada in the Caribbean finally collapsed it. In this context, Trump’s arrival is read less as an invasion than as a hostile—yet enticing—tender offer. What Washington offers is not legitimacy, but liquidity. Loyalty shifts not because beliefs change, but because financial viability is restored.