It didn’t take long after the U.S. capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife for the rational follow-up question to raise its ugly head: what next? Who, exactly, is going to run Venezuela now that Maduro, a protege of the late Hugo Chávez and ruler of the country for the last 13 years, is on trial in New York on charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking?
There was an immediate assumption that the answer would be the anti-Maduro opposition. It was thought that the Americans would hand power to Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado and her surrogate, Edmundo González, a former Venezuelan diplomat who was forced into exile after the regime ignored the results of presidential elections last year.
It would have been clean and morally righteous—not only would Washington be reflecting the democratic will of the Venezuelan people, but Machado/González would be reliably pro-U.S. occupants of the Miraflores presidential palace. America could depend on the pair to kick out the Cubans and bring U.S. oil companies back into the fold.
Trump, however, had different ideas. Machado lacked sufficient “respect” among Venezuelans to rule, he said. Even harder for anti-regime Venezuelan exiles to stomach has been his willingness to work with Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, as the new head of state.
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