Q&A: What comes next in Venezuela? DU professor Francisco Rodriguez on the unprecedented attack
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DENVER — Early Saturday morning, U.S. forces conducted a "large-scale strike" against Venezuela, forcibly removing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home and transporting them to New York to face narco-terrorism charges.
Republican leaders in Congress rallied around President Donald Trump, but international law experts questioned the legality of the attack and Democratic leaders criticized the Trump administration for not notifying Congress.
“The Trump Administration repeatedly told Congress and the American people Venezuela wasn’t about regime change,” Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote on social media. “They lied.”
In a press conference after Saturday’s strike, President Donald Trump said the United States will “run” Venezuela, but his administration has since offered few details about how that will work. Maduro's Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, was sworn in to replace Maduro and has called for his immediate release. “The only president of Venezuela is President Nicolás Maduro,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is not backing Venezuela’s opposition party.
Opposition leader María Corina Machado, who received the Nobel Peace Prize last year for her outspoken criticism of Maduro, called for Edmundo González to be sworn in as Venezuela’s president. González is widely recognized as the true winner of 2024’s election in Venezuela. He replaced Machado on the ticket after Maduro’s government disqualified her from running.
Machado has aligned herself with Trump; she dedicated her Novel Peace Prize to Trump and supported his pressure campaign in Venezuela. But Trump, in his press conference, seemed doubtful that she could lead Venezuela.
"I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country,” Trump said.
Trump also made clear that a main goal of this operation was to take control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” Trump said.
On Sunday morning, Rocky Mountain PBS interviewed Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist and professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, about the attack in Venezuela. His research and writings primarily focus on Venezuela and he is the author of the 2025 book, “The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rocky Mountain PBS: What was your initial reaction upon seeing the news alert that U.S. forces had gone in and forcibly removed Maduro?
Francisco Rodriguez: I must say I was surprised, and I'll tell you why. This seemed, to me, to be a very high-risk operation. And I was skeptical that the Trump administration would try it. There’s really no precedent of such an operation, of extracting a head of state.
If you just think of it as an extraction operation, there was a huge risk of failure. Or at least that's how it seemed to me, before it happened. My mind went back to the failed extraction [in 1980] of the hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
So, now, what is it that made this work? Upon reflection, it's actually a very odd incident because Maduro was actually caught in his sleep. So you have to ask the question of, how do U.S. troops actually bombard a city and get to Maduro's bunker while he's still sleeping?
And that suggests to me — I can't say it as a fact — but it suggests to me that it's very likely that they had some type of internal cooperation. And now when I start seeing that the Trump administration is actually talking about working with the vice president [Delcy Rodríguez] — with Maduro's successor — that strengthens the thesis that there may have been, that this was not just a military operation itself, but probably that combined, with some type of palace coup.
RMPBS: You mentioned that there's really no precedent for actions like this, but a lot of the president's critics have invoked disastrous regime-change operations in places like Iraq when criticizing this decision. So I'm curious how you see this as differing from previous interventions in the Middle East or, obviously, there's also a long history of United States interventions in Central and South America.
FR: It's actually quite interesting because, when I said there was no precedent, I'm talking about the extraction of the head of state — actually going into a country and kidnapping the head of state. I mean, it's the type of thing that doesn't happen for some of the reasons that I laid out.
Now, the precedents that you're talking about are the ones that a lot of people were anticipating that the US might be considering [in Venezuela], but also which were seen as equally problematic in the sense that they would have required a full-fledged invasion. And with Panama, there was a full fledged invasion. There was a week of fighting. The same with Iraq, the same with a number of U.S. interventions.
But I think that you touched on a really important issue, which is that what happens when you have a full-fledged invasion, is that the U.S. fights against the army of that country, defeats it, and then the U.S. has to take over power and come up with a governance framework for that.
And sometimes that means handing over power to the opposition, which was what happened in Panama, with President Endara, or sometimes it might mean a transitional period of U.S. occupation and the U.S. actually running the country. And even though the term “running the country” is one that Trump actually used during his press conference, that's not what's happening.
There's absolutely no U.S. troops on the ground as far as we know. The people running the country right now are the Chavistas [supporters of Maduro]. And interestingly, just a few hours ago, Secretary Rubio had this interview on “Meet The Press” and when he was asked about this — how is it that you run the country? — he said, well, you know, now we're doing it through sanctions and through the naval blockade. So what he's basically saying is, “No, no. We're not running it. We're just creating the incentives so that the government will do what we tell them to do.”
So that actually means that it's very different.
RMPBS: On social media, you said the forcible removal of Maduro is more akin to a successful assassination. Can you elaborate on that for me?
FR: The actual physical extraction, I can't think of any precedent for it. But we do know of many cases in which heads of state have been killed. And what the literature tells you is that the most likely scenario is one where the group in power basically reorganizes itself under a new figure.
Assassinating the leader doesn't really lead to immediate change. But there we have the new element, which is this isn't just a one-off. The U.S. still has warships stationed, having shown that it can do this, having shown that if — and that's what President Trump threatened explicitly. He talked about the possibility of a second attack if the new government didn't acquiesce to [Trump’s] demands.
So I do think that what the U.S. seems to be trying to do is something that has its logic in the sense of, quite possibly, avoiding some of the problems that come out of the experiences that that you cite, which is that — at least right now — it doesn't seem like the US is saying, ‘We're going to go in and nation-build.’
It seems like they’re saying, “Chavismo’s going to run the place, but now that we've made this threat credible, they're going to do it under very specific conditions in which we're going to tell them what it is that they can or they cannot do.”
RMPBS: Do you think that's why the Trump administration seems hesitant to commit to installing Machado as the next leader?
FR: Oh, yes. Definitely. Definitely. And, you know… I'm a big critic of the Trump administration. And by the way, the fact that I'm actually saying that some of the things that they're proposing may make sense, I mean, it's still early in the game to really know what it is that they're going to do.
And we're just going by what Trump says and interpreting what Rubio says. But I mean, just to be clear, I think that what the U.S. did was a huge violation of international law. And I think that when you have world powers essentially being able to go into another country and just remove a head of state by force, that leads to a breakdown of some basic rules that govern the relations between countries. That is extremely, extremely dangerous.
But all of that said, I have also written a lot about the problems of the opposition. And I have, always, effectively said this is not viable. María Corina Machado does not pose a viable alternative to governing the country because you cannot just change a governing structure overnight. You can't just say, “oh, all of the Chavistas have to go,” and the opposition is going to waltz in and govern this country as if, you know, Chavismo just left the car with the keys dangling in the ignition, and you just have to turn it on. That's not how a country works.
So I think that what Trump and Rubio are now recognizing is that you are going to need some type of power-sharing in Venezuela, in which Chavismo continues to play a very important role, unless you want this country to completely fall apart. Back in 2024, I wrote a piece for The New York Times, just after Edmundo González’s election victory, essentially saying, don't insist on taking power immediately, even if you won the election. That's what, in principle, would happen in a democracy. But this is not a democracy. This is an authoritarian state that you need to carefully transition to a democracy. And the best way to do this is through a power-sharing agreement.
RMPBS: Do you think that Maduro's removal has moved Venezuela closer to a true democracy?
FR: Well, yes. But it's still very far from it. You know, let me let me go back briefly to the point that I made about the assassinations literature, because it actually kind of speaks to your question directly.
There's a very nice paper written by two economists, Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken, in 2009, about the impact of assassinations, where they estimate that a successful assassination of an authoritarian leader increased the chances of democratization by 13 percentage points. Now, 13% is not negligible. But it's not 100, and it's very far from it.
So if you ask me the question, not in terms of does this bring [Venezuela] closer to democracy, but what would be my most likely scenario going forward, it's actually one of the country remaining autocratic. The power structure has not changed in Venezuela today. I mean, you've just removed the person on top. But it's exactly the same governing party, exactly the same people, exactly the same cabinet, exactly the same army.
So you haven't done something fundamental to make the country more democratic and what Trump is proposing doesn't have anything to do with democracy.
While the U.S. I think, has the leverage to move this country towards democracy, we don't see any indication that it's doing it. Rather, we see an indication that the president of the U.S. remains obsessed with drugs and Venezuela's contribution to the drug trade, with migration, and with seizing Venezuela's oil reserves, which is not just absurd, illegal and unconstitutional, but also something that's likely to breed a huge degree of animosity among Venezuelans who rightly see the country's oil resources as belonging to their nation.
RMPBS: That was going to be my next question — previous American presidents have tried to sell regime changes as a means of spreading democracy or removing weapons of mass destruction, even if access to oil fields ended up being a central goal.
So are you surprised by how open Trump is about oil being a motivating factor here?
FR: Well, I don't find it surprising because he said it before. I mean, he said it about Venezuela, but he's also said it about other countries. Trump criticized Obama for helping overthrow Moammar Gadhafi and then not demanding that the oil, in his words, be handed over to the US.
I mean, if we see Trump's negotiations with Ukraine, they're also based on a minerals deal. So Trump has always been very blunt about this highly transactional view, which is part of his conception of “America First,” in which, if the US, intervenes in another country's problems, the U.S. has a right to demand, that that country's new government, repay it by handing over oil resources.
So we're kind of in this odd new reality in which, before, it used to be that the U.S. government said that they were intervening for democracy, and their critics said that they were really intervening because of oil. And now it's the other way around.
They're coming out and saying, “yes, it's all about the oil.” And, and the critics are saying, “well, but you should be saying that it's about democracy, right?”
Rocky Mountain PBS: In recent years, Denver has welcomed tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants, by some estimates. And, of course, there are more established Venezuelan communities in places like southern Florida. What has the response been like among the Venezuelan community in the United States to this news?
FR: I would say the people who have emigrated are, I think by a very, very large [percentage] are anti-Maduro, pro-opposition. In Venezuela, there are Maduro supporters, but you don’t see them among those who leave.
So the first reaction is joy combined with a bit of disbelief. I mean, this really happened very rapidly and a lot of people just didn't believe it.
In Venezuela, December 28th is what we call the Day of the Innocents. It's our equivalent of April Fool's Day. And, you know, it was relatively recent. So yesterday when we got the news, a lot of people reacted like, “hey, but it's not Innocents Day.”
I mean, it's a really complex relationship with Trump because they don't like Trump. They're afraid of him. Trump has stigmatized Venezuelans, he's taken away Temporary Protected Status. Some of them voted for him, but regret doing so. But on the other hand, some of them say, “well, what I really care about is recovering Venezuela. And if Trump is the one who's going to do it, then that's what's most important.”
And there are other people who are saying, “this is all bad for us. Chavistas are still in power and we're about to get deported.”
Type of story: Q&A
An interview to provide a single perspective, edited for clarity and obvious falsehoods. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.
An interview to provide a single perspective, edited for clarity and obvious falsehoods. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.