By Luis
Manuel Aguana
In these hours of anxious waiting for the final outcome of the situation created by the US, which is manifested in a massive military mobilization in Caribbean waters with the aim, according to that country, of fighting drug trafficking from Venezuela, we Venezuelans find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before has a Venezuelan leader been accused of being a criminal abroad, much less prosecuted as such by a foreign prosecutor, subject to capture by its police and/or military forces.
At the beginning of the last century, warships were sent to Venezuela with the aim of forcibly collecting debts from the Venezuelan leader at the time, Cipriano Castro. Paradoxically, it was the intervention and mediation of the United States that prevented that certain invasion of our territory.
Today we find ourselves in the worst of all worlds: a country without institutions, that is, without any legitimate institutions in place, and without the capacity to respond to the world in a situation over which we have no control.
Senior US officials, starting with President Donald Trump himself, have expressed their intention to take matters into their own hands and use force against those they consider responsible for exporting drugs from Venezuela to the US, currently viewing them as terrorists. Given this reality, there is little more to add. At this point, all that remains is to wait and see if these threats will be carried out, with Venezuelans having nothing more to say beyond speculating about the consequences that such action would have on our country.
At some point before this became a reality as a result of the approach taken to this problem by the Venezuelan political opposition, we at ANCO proposed that a channel of negotiation be opened that would bring together the four main actors in this tragedy: the US, the regime, the legitimate political opposition (not the MUD/PU and with new and irreproachable negotiators), and a qualified representation of Venezuelan civil society, The purpose would be to negotiate the convening of an Original National Constituent Assembly, electoral rules for the election, and an ad hoc Electoral Tribunal for that single election, with international oversight and monitoring by the four parties, in order to carry out the consultation and Constituent election so that this legitimate representation of popular sovereignty could resolve a political transition for Venezuela. Is it too late for that? At this point, I think it is very difficult, even though anything is possible in politics.
But faced with the clear wave of public opinion shouting “Let them go!” or “Take them away!”, which is evident everywhere (because let's not forget that Venezuelans want our solutions now, yesterday), all that remains for us to do is analyze what is not visible, what the political leadership does not like to talk about, namely, the consequences of the US threat becoming a reality. It is not that the US does not have the power to carry out its threats, but rather that it will do so and will not stay here to help us pick up the pieces of what has been broken, leaving us Venezuelans to deal with the mess.
I have reiterated in previous articles that the Displacement and Transition phases require effective military support to guarantee not only the stability of any future government, but also the security of maintaining public and social order in the country. No one in the opposition who has promoted the path of breaking with the prevailing political order has even mentioned in passing how this will be done. And assuming that this is a secret, the Americans themselves have stated that they do not know either, and they are the ones who have the tools of force to make the Displacement phase happen.
So what then? Will they be the ones to guarantee that in post-Maduro Venezuela? It would appear not. According to Juan González, former advisor for Latin America to former President Joe Biden, now in opposition to President Trump's administration, "Americans need to understand that replacing Maduro and restoring Edmundo González to Miraflores, who won the elections, let's be clear, last July (2024), will require the presence of American soldiers inside Venezuela. And that is the debate we have to have in this country, if we want to have another endless war over Venezuela..." (see in Spanish Patricia Janiot, Entrevista a Juan González, ex asesor para América Latina del expresidente Joe Biden, VENEZUELA ¿ES INMINENTE UNA OPERACIÓN MILITAR DE EE.UU.?, in https://youtu.be/MAYqoWtIlRg?t=452).
The US president does not own his country, even though he can make decisions that affect the lives of Americans. All international analysts point out that the US can carry out an operation and extract or eliminate “any terrorist” around the world whenever and however it wants; that is not up for debate. But what it cannot do on its own is start a war without the backing of Congress, putting military forces in our country.
So, does that mean they would come, remove the heads of the regime, move Edmundo González Urrutia and María Corina Machado to Miraflores, and leave the rest of us Venezuelans with the aftermath of getting rid of the regime's narco-criminal superstructure so that the opposition can retain power during a transition? That seems, to say the least, suicidal. If the Americans at least said that this is covered by local forces, without the opposition having to confirm or deny it, the matter would not seem so far-fetched. But the fact is that U.S. officials themselves, such as James Story, have publicly stated that there are no such sustainability plans on the part of the opposition (see statements by former Ambassador Story in Makink politic in Venezuela, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/p/making-politics-in-venezuela.html).
This is confirmed by the words of R. Evan Ellis (1) of the Strategic Studies Institute of The US Army War College, in a recent political report published:
“The biggest risk of a military operation in Venezuela which captures or eliminates Maduro and a portion of his cronies is the escalation of violence. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, and Maduro himself have arguably set up the country as a criminal franchise in which the military, Maduro’s cronies, and others have long been complicit. As a consequence, as noted previously, the disappearance of Maduro and those close to him is less likely to facilitate a transition to democracy than a scramble by the country’s numerous criminal actors to grab power for themselves and undermine any establishment of order by a democratic government that could hold them accountable for their crimes. These problematic dynamics would also be complicated by others such as Russia, Cuba, and China, each with a vested interest in denying the US a “victory” on Venezuela, and sowing chaos that distracts the US, consumes its resources, and taints it in the international court of public opinion, seeking to exploit the perceived US role in unleashing the chaos in Venezuela through its military actions.” (see R. Evan Ellis, in ¿Finally the Endgame in Venezuela? september 15, 2025, en https://legadoalasamericas.org/finally-the-endgame-in-venezuela/) (highlighted ours).
In other words, the struggle to seize power and prevent any establishment of order among the numerous criminal franchises that the regime has produced is more likely to facilitate a transition to democracy than the disappearance of “Maduro and his cronies.” How about that? All this without counting on the generous help of the regime's friends. Russia, Cuba, and China, which, without sending troops, will do whatever it takes to undermine the stability of any new government. Remember: how the Displacement is carried out will dictate the outcome of the Transition.
This puts a possible transition carried out on these terms in a serious dilemma. Either the demons are unleashed with the help of the US, or the entire path taken is completely reevaluated. This is a difficult position when it could be argued that the political survival of the opposition is at stake in this whole “no turning back” operation. But they cannot be placed above the safety of Venezuelan lives.
That said, and giving the benefit of the doubt that a transition could be stabilized after successfully completing a possible displacement phase (even without knowing how such a transition phase would be maintained), there will still be a need to legitimize the origin of that transition through a constituent order.
There is not a shred of legitimacy in any of Venezuela's public powers. This makes it imperative to convene the sovereign people in a National Constituent Assembly to legitimize not only a possible transitional government that would implement a government program (such as Tierra de Gracia), but also to build the institutions that will come and be sustained by a new constitutional structure. And that cannot be done without minimum political agreements on governance between the political factions. This has been done before in this country. Hopefully, there will be enough common sense not to try to reinvent the wheel...
Caracas, September 30, 2025
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
(1) Dr. R.
Evan Ellis is a research professor of Latin American studies at the Institute
for Strategic Studies at the U.S. Army War College, focusing on the region's
relations with China and other non-Western actors in the hemisphere, as well as
transnational organized crime and populism in the region.
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