Last Updated on December 28, 2025 by Chicago Policy Review Staff
Eight million people have fled a country that is not at war. Parents cross borders with nothing but a child’s backpack. Hospitals function without electricity. Political dissidents vanish into military prisons. These are not abstractions; they are the lived conditions of a nation dismantled by its own government.
Yet the discourse surrounding Venezuela remains filtered through a Trump-centric lens. Domestic viewers, pundits, politicians, and the media reframe the crisis as a referendum on the U.S. administration, a debate on imperialism, interventionism, or the Monroe Doctrine. What gets lost is the reality of the Venezuelan people, Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorial grip, and the subversion of the contract between the state and its citizens.
This distorted lens, focuses not on what is happening to Venezuelans, but on what is happening in the American political ether. In prominent opinion pieces, regime change is dismissed as “incomprehensible,” yet Maduro’s election theft, his security forces, and Venezuela’s humanitarian collapse barely appear at all. While some may disagree with the president on a number of issues, the inability to separate policy from politics in today’s polarized climate is intellectual cowardice and journalistic malpractice. It is time to resist the reflexes of partisanship that have reduced human suffering to political discussions.
The Maduro regime stole the 2024 election. The Venezuelan people categorically and democratically rejected the current government, 67% to 30%. The opposition collected voting tallies from approximately 80% of electronic voting machines, scanned and published them online for the world to verify. The UN noted that the regime’s refusal to publish disaggregated results has “no precedent in contemporary democratic elections.”
There is a widening international consensus that Maduro is the illegitimate leader of Venezuela. Many Western countries have already imposed sanctions and refused recognition, while the regime has cemented its rule through force rather than public consent.
Sanctions alone will not succeed. Neither will diplomatic non-recognition nor recognition of an alternative president. These tools failed not because they were misguided, but because the regime adapted: it replaced formal revenue streams with illicit ones, relied on Russia and China for backstopping, and maintained loyalty of the armed forces through patronage and surveillance.
The optimist sees the United States as a defender of the free world and a beacon of democracy. Thus, it has both a moral obligation and strategic interest to actively support regime change in Venezuela. This should be understood not as an act of imperialism or domination, but as a defense of self-determination for the Venezuelan people against a regime that has forfeited any claim to legitimacy.
Intervention carries risks, but these risks must be measured against the ongoing certainty of humanitarian deterioration, regional destabilization, and authoritarian entrenchment if Maduro remains in power. Intervention is a measured step to support the legitimate government, economically or militarily, in coordination with the regime-in-waiting. It must explicitly exclude nation-building or military occupation, both of which are unnecessary given the democratic infrastructure already present within Venezuela.
The longer the Maduro regime remains insulated from meaningful pressure, the more deeply repression, criminal networks, and foreign adversaries become structurally embedded.
Any external action should be limited in scope, conditional in duration, and explicitly tied to verifiable steps toward a democratic transition. The strategic objective must shift to degrade the repression infrastructure to fracture the loyalty of the armed forces, making continued allegiance to Maduro costlier than a transition in power.
More importantly, the Venezuelan opposition has explicitly requested external support. María Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, won the opposition primary in a landslide before being banned from holding office in a transparent political move. After her ally Edmundo González ran in her place and won decisively, she called on the United States to use military pressure as “the only way” to force Maduro from power. Machado has consistently supported America’s recent posture towards Maduro: “You need to raise the cost of staying in power and lower the cost of leaving power. Only when you do that, this regime will break down. And that’s where we’re moving toward right now.”
Machado has a mandate that Maduro does not. The Democratic Unitary Platform, a coalition of ten parties representing social democrats, liberals, centrists, and moderate conservatives, unanimously supports this call. This transforms the entire debate; responding to their request is not imperialism, but solidarity with a people exercising their right to self-determination.
This catastrophe was engineered. It began under Hugo Chávez, who concentrated power, politicized state institutions, and hollowed out economic governance, and continued under his immediate successor, Maduro, both of whom treated the state oil company, PDVSA, as a slush-fund for patronage. Following the 2003 strikes, Chávez fired over 18,000 skilled technicians and engineers, gutting the industry’s institutional knowledge overnight. He expropriated millions of acres of farmland and thousands of businesses, replacing productive private enterprise with corrupt state management. Maduro accelerated this destruction, responding to falling oil prices not with reform, but with hyperinflationary money printing and draconian price controls that emptied supermarket shelves.
Venezuela’s economic collapse is the direct legacy of economic chokeholds that dismantled market mechanisms and ironically concentrated wealth amongst regime elites. There is no credible path to poverty reduction, currency stabilization, shortage resolution, or international investment attraction under the current government. Economic recovery requires political transition as a precondition.
Under Chávez and especially under Maduro, over 25% of Venezuela’s population has fled; approximately 8 million people. This is the largest displacement crisis in Latin American history and the second largest worldwide, exceeded only by the Syrian refugee crisis spurred by its civil war. That is a staggering statistic, considering this exodus that occurred without a traditional war.
The Venezuelan people are not the only ones strained by this crisis. Countries across Latin America bear the burden of the largest refugee flow in hemispheric history. One in twenty residents of Colombia is now Venezuelan, totaling 2.8 million refugees. Peru hosts 1.66 million. Ecuador, Chile, and Brazil have absorbed hundreds of thousands more.
Beyond mismanagement, there is systematic repression. Following the July 2024 election, the regime killed 24 people in two days and arrested over 2,000 citizens. According to the human rights group Foro Penal, political prisoners now number nearly 2,000, a 745% increase compared to the previous years.
Meanwhile, illegal activities run through the state account for an estimated 20% of the economy, including fuel smuggling, gold trafficking, and narco-trafficking. Venezuela’s security services and senior officials are directly implicated; the United States has indicted multiple regime figures, and the Cartel de los Soles operates as a state-embedded criminal network.
Nowhere is this criminal expansion more visible than in the rise of the Tren de Aragua. Born in the Tocorón prison, this transnational syndicate has metastasized beyond Venezuela’s borders, establishing operations in Colombia, Chile, Peru, and now, the United States. U.S. authorities have linked the gang to human trafficking rings, sex work, and violent crimes in major American cities. The Treasury Department has designated them a transnational criminal organization, yet as long as their command-and-control structure remains protected by the Maduro regime in Caracas, domestic law enforcement is fighting a losing battle against a state-sponsored hydra. The birth of this type of transnational organization only occurs under a failed state, inflicts pain amongst all surrounding states, and has reverberating effects on the entire world.
Maduro has demonstrated that he will sacrifice Venezuela’s future to preserve his power. He has been willing to sell off national resources to stay in office, reportedly negotiating with foreign leaders for sanction relief in exchange for preferential oil access. This showcases how little regard he has for the Venezuelan people; their national patrimony is merely a bargaining chip for his survival.
Venezuela is an ally of Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba. Russia has provided over $17 billion in loans since 2006, deployed military advisors, and used PDVSA as a vehicle for sanctions evasion. China has provided over $60 billion in loans while Huawei has constructed surveillance and telecommunications infrastructure used by the regime to monitor dissidents. Iran collaborates with Venezuela on oil laundering and sanctions-evasion networks.
Military action need not put Americans at risk or result in mass civilian casualties. Options include precision strikes against intelligence and military infrastructure to degrade the regime’s capacity for control; maritime embargo operations to block illicit oil shipments; targeted sanctions against paramilitary groups; cyber operations against command-and-control systems; and inducements for military defection. All proposed actions target regime capability, not population centers. This preserves civilian life while weakening the coercive tools that sustain authoritarian rule.
The objective is a transitional governance framework led by the Democratic Unitary Platform, targeting free constitutional elections for parliament, judiciary, and executive within 12 to 18 months; full international monitoring by the OAS, EU, and Carter Center; the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners; and immediate stabilization measures. A security-sector reform plan must accompany the transition to prevent the reconstitution of the repressive state.
Critics warn of a power vacuum, but they ignore the reality that Venezuela is already a vacuum filled by foreign adversaries and cartels. A democratic, stable Venezuela could become the most valuable U.S. partner in the region, furthering American interests in the hemisphere while easing the humanitarian and economic stress of the migration crisis.
Economic and institutional reconstruction requires restoration of rule of law to pre-Chávez functionality; currency stabilization, potentially through dollarization; reopening of markets with appropriate regulation and profit-sharing with the Venezuelan people; oil sector transparency and international oversight; and creation of a sovereign wealth fund to prevent elites from siphoning wealth.
Behind policy abstractions are millions of Venezuelans denied political freedom, economic opportunity, and basic dignity. They have chosen their leaders. Those leaders are asking for help. The question is whether democracies will answer.
Continued Maduro rule means permanent humanitarian crisis, further regional destabilization, deeper entrenchment of adversary powers, and erosion of democratic norms across the hemisphere.
This is not about American politics. It is about whether the United States will stand with a people who have democratically rejected authoritarianism and explicitly asked for support. Venezuela’s future will be decided one way or another. The only question is whether the world will remain a spectator or act in defense of a nation fighting for its freedom.