By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Venezuela’s opposition pins its hopes on Trump

As Trump ramps up pressure on Maduro, massing U.S. forces and strikes against alleged drug boats, María Corina Machado’s opposition has embraced his approach.

As President Donald Trump sinks alleged drug boats of Venezuela and gathers U.S. forces in the region, raising the possibility of land strikes, the country’s opposition has come to see his approach, however risky, as its best and only path to topple the government of authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro.

Even with the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, set to join the troops and assets already massed in the Caribbean, Trump says no direct attack is planned. Venezuela is bracing for strikes nonetheless.

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For Venezuela’s opposition led by María Corina Machado, Trump’s second term presents a unique opportunity at a critical moment: a president in the White House eager to flex U.S. power abroad, at least up to a point, on the heels of last year’s contested Venezuelan election in which the opposition would have won in a fair count of the vote, according to a review of data from election receipts.

Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month, calls Trump’s Venezuela policy “clear and courageous.” She dedicated her win to the Venezuelan people and to Trump. While she has not endorsed an attack outright, she has cast Maduro, not Trump, as the instigator of whatever is to come. “Maduro started this war, and President Trump is ending that war,” she said in an address by video to a business conference in Miami on Wednesday.

“Finally, this is happening,” after years of begging the international community to take a harder line on Maduro, she said in an interview with Bloomberg last week, from hiding in Venezuela.

But it’s unclear what the administration’s endgame is

Trump has long disavowed regime-change wars. Even if he were to pursue strikes on limited targets, a through-line to Maduro’s potential toppling or ouster remains murky. If the pressure campaign fails to oust Maduro, the opposition could be left significantly weaker.

“They bet it all on black,” said John Feeley, a former senior State Department official and ambassador to Panama.

The opposition’s “genuine desire for change and an end to the nightmare in Venezuela is so great that they, like many people before them, come down to a calculation that the ends justify the means,” he said.

Unlike prominent opposition leaders before her who fled the country after high-profile clashes with Maduro, Machado has refused to go into exile. Edmundo González, the former diplomat who ran for president last year after Machado was barred, fled to Spain, where he received asylum. Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader whom the United States recognized as Venezuela’s president during Trump’s first term after an early, allegedly fraudulent election, now resides in Miami.

While the opposition is largely unified in the aftermath of last year’s election, there have been reports of divisions over Trump’s approach, and some analysts have warned that these divisions could deepen the longer the crisis persists.

In more than 11 years of socialist, strongman rule, Maduro has overseen economic collapse, widespread human rights abuses, political repression, and extrajudicial executions. More than 7 million people have fled the country under the governments of Maduro and Hugo Chavez before him.

“I support actions from our U.S. allies, which also includes diplomacy toward the dismantling of a criminal organization that is running my country,” said David Smolansky, a Venezuelan mayor turned opposition leader who has been in exile in Washington since 2017.

Smolansky said he believes the kind of pressure the Trump administration is placing on Maduro through the military buildup in the Caribbean could push him from power, although he did not say how. “We are very close,” he said, but refused to estimate a timeline or theorize next steps.

Former officials and experts caution that isolated airstrikes, of the sort Trump denies he is considering but for which analysts say U.S. forces appear to be preparing, would be unlikely to oust Maduro, who has already survived several coup attempts and years of international economic sanctions.

“This could be very messy,” said a U.S. official with years of experience on Venezuela who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing policy deliberations. While the opposition clearly has broad public support in Venezuela, Maduro has spent years steadily tightening his grip on power.

Venezuela’s security apparatus is built in layers, with a conventional, hierarchical military, guerrilla groups, and informal gangs all playing different roles under high surveillance, he said, a complex structure not easily unraveled, especially from the outside.

Trump’s Venezuela policy has shifted over the year: He began his second term with signals he was eager to engage, not attack, Maduro. Trump envoy Richard Grenell headed up engagement and traveled to Caracas, where the initial meetings went well, according to an individual briefed on the engagement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

Maduro “basically agreed to everything” the Trump administration asked for, from accepting deportation flights after an initial refusal to preferential treatment for American companies, he said. “Maduro was really kind of excited when Trump actually won the election.”

But over the summer, the White House abandoned engagement and in September began carrying out the strikes at sea, which have killed at least 70 people, including a strike Thursday that the Pentagon said left three people dead. The attacks have sparked legal questions and human rights objections: A top United Nations official said last week that they violate international law and amount to “extrajudicial killings.”

It’s unclear what triggered the abrupt policy change, or who is most influential in Trump’s thinking on the matter, but the individual briefed on engagement said Venezuela’s expatriate opposition and its allies, whom he called “the Florida crowd,” played a key role.

Venezuela’s opposition has long been aligned with Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state. He traces his political roots to the South Florida communities that champion anti-communist Latin America, which he represented in elected office, including as a senator.

Rubio described Machado as “the personification of resilience, tenacity, and patriotism” in a tribute he wrote to her in Time magazine this year. In media appearances, Machado links U.S.-Venezuela policy to larger, regional change.

“Once Maduro goes, the Cuban regime will follow, the Nicaraguan regime will follow, and for the first time in history, we will have the Americas free of communism and narco-dictatorships,” she said in an interview on NPR in October after her Nobel win.

While most of those killed in Trump’s strikes against alleged drug traffickers at sea were believed to be Venezuelan nationals, the opposition has largely avoided criticizing the attacks. Machado says targeting Latin American drug networks is necessary to “cut the inflow of criminal money” to the Maduro regime and weaken his hold on power.

“Everybody knows Maduro is the head of the biggest drug cartel, Cartel of the Suns, also the head of Tren de Aragua,” she told Fox & Friends in October. Trump has said Maduro directs Tren de Aragua, a Venezuela-based group, but a U.S. intelligence assessment has said that was not true, and experts have said that the group is not deeply involved in narcotics trafficking. The fight against drug gangs forms the underlying justification for Trump’s strikes and military buildup.

In her Miami video address this week, Machado struck a hopeful tone, predicting that the potential ouster of Maduro under Trump could draw Venezuelans who fled poverty and repression to return. “We want them back, and as soon as Maduro goes, you will see hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants coming back home,” she said.

 

 

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