María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader and recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been calling for a foreign—read: US-led—military intervention in her country for years. Since at least 2019 she has insisted that using outside force to overthrow the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, was the only way to restore democracy to Venezuela. “The Western democracies have to understand,” she told the BBC at the time, that Maduro “will only give up power when faced with the credible, imminent, and severe use of force.” 

In the early morning dark on January 3, after strikes destroyed air defense installations, US forces swept into Caracas, whisked Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, out of the country by helicopter, and flew them on a military aircraft to New York to face federal drug trafficking charges. It was the first major US military action in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama and the capture of Manuel Noriega, also on drug-trafficking charges.

But while Machado got her intervention, she did not get it exactly as she wanted. She had called for the overthrow of the entire “criminal state”—meaning not just Maduro but also the other members of his Chavista power structure, most of whom have been in government with him since the era of his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. This would have cleared the way for her to occupy the Miraflores Palace in Caracas, presumably governing at least temporarily alongside Edmundo González, the overwhelming winner of the country’s July 2024 presidential election, which was stolen by Maduro. (Opposition activists collected more than 83 percent of voting machine tally sheets from across the country, which showed González receiving 7.3 million votes to Maduro’s 3.3 million.) Instead the gringos left Maduro’s inner circle in place, including the vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who was later sworn in as acting president; her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, the head of the National Assembly; Diosdado Cabello, the minister of the interior; and Vladimir Padrino López, the minister of defense.

Hours after a manacled Maduro had arrived on US soil, Trump held a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he upended just about everyone’s expectations for the future of Venezuela. “We’re going to run the country,” he said bluntly. It’s still not at all clear just what this means, but from the outset Trump made it abundantly clear what it did not mean. Machado, he said, would not be invited to the table. “I think it’d be very tough for her to be the leader,” he said. “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman but she doesn’t have the respect.”

In reality, Machado’s popularity at home remains high—even if it’s difficult to know how it may be affected by whatever follows Maduro’s ouster. She energized the opposition during the 2024 election campaign, showing great courage in crisscrossing the country despite government efforts to block and intimidate her and her supporters. And she crafted the campaign’s central message: the need to improve economic and political conditions so that the millions of refugees who have fled the country’s collapse can return home and families dispersed across the globe can be reunited. She inspired Venezuelans desperate for change by pledging to fight hasta el final—“to the finish.”

Machado’s political platform pledges to make Venezuela into “an international benchmark of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.” But in his Mar-a-Lago press conference Trump did not say the word “democracy” once. He said that the US would “run” Venezuela “until such time as a proper transition can take place,” but gave no timeline and no indication of what the country might transition into. By contrast, he said the word “oil” twenty times. The US, he announced, would take over the country’s oil sector and rebuild its infrastructure, bringing in American companies to invest billions in the effort. “We’re going to run the country right,” he said. “It’s gonna make a lot of money.”

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Machado has spent much of her political career as a disruptive force in the mainstream Venezuelan opposition. A hardliner with libertarian views on the economy and ties to the far right in the US and Latin America, she has been a strident voice for sweeping away all vestiges of Chavismo’s leftist policies and holding accountable those responsible for its excesses.

Yet she often appeared to spend as much energy criticizing other opposition leaders as she did the government. She stood firmly against several rounds of negotiations between the main opposition coalition and Maduro’s representatives, which sought to improve electoral conditions, win the release of political prisoners, and otherwise ease the nation’s impasse. And she was one of the loudest voices for boycotting elections, claiming—against evidence—that they were rigged.¹ The results were often damaging for the opposition, which was shut out of the legislature after a 2005 boycott and refused to offer voters a consensus candidate in the 2018 presidential election at a time when Maduro was politically vulnerable.

Machado had begun openly appealing for a foreign military intervention by early 2019, shortly after the first Trump administration declared Maduro illegitimate and recognized the head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as the nation’s rightful president. In an attempt to push Maduro from power, the White House effectively banned Venezuelan oil sales—a debilitating blow to a country where petroleum typically accounts for 95 percent of export earnings. Machado urged the international community to go further. “It is clear that they are not going to give up power unless faced with the real threat of force even greater than the one that they use to kill and destroy Venezuela,” she said of Maduro’s government.

To justify such an extreme measure Machado argued that in reality Venezuela was a country without a government. Instead, she said, a criminal organization had taken over the state and was exploiting it for its own profit. As a result, it was not possible to do politics in Venezuela: what could a democratic opposition hope to achieve against a violent, armed criminal foe?

The most glaring problem with this line of reasoning was that Maduro was indeed the head of what was recognizably a government. It was a highly corrupt government: officials at all levels engaged in bribery and drained profits from the state oil company, and high-level military officers colluded with drug traffickers. And it often governed badly and with catastrophic consequences. By choosing not to curb government spending when oil prices plummeted and the state’s income dried up, Maduro fueled hyperinflation; by imposing price controls on many goods, he brought about extreme shortages of basic items. And yet, at the same time, the state operated ports and airports, maintained roads, generated electricity (although with frequent interruptions), employed school teachers, and, however erratically, fulfilled other basic functions. It also, like other authoritarian states, operated a much-feared repressive apparatus: police, armed forces, security and intelligence agencies, prisons, torture cells.

Another drawback of Machado’s plea for intervention was that it—just like her calls for election boycotts—was, ultimately, an argument against the act of engaging in politics itself. Her thesis outsourced the problem and left the opposition with little to do but wait to be rescued. But when you ask others to come in and solve your problems, you may discover that they have an agenda of their own.

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Guaidó’s attempt to dislodge Maduro during the first Trump administration failed, leaving the opposition in disarray. As Venezuela’s crisis dragged on, the public gravitated to Machado’s defiant image. Despite her claim that electoral politics were futile in Venezuela, she won a primary election to be the opposition’s candidate in 2024, having decided to run after polling showed that she was the strong favorite. When the government banned her from running in the general election, she backed González, a former diplomat, as a surrogate candidate. But election authorities declared Maduro the winner, even though the ballot records showed that González had received about 70 percent of the vote. Protests erupted, and the security forces cracked down, arresting demonstrators and opposition leaders. González fled the country and Machado went underground, living for months in an undisclosed location.

But Machado was now a global figure. In the period after the stolen election she received five international human rights awards (two of them jointly with González), including the Sakharov Prize and the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize, culminating, last October, with the Nobel. In December she made a dramatic maritime escape from Venezuela and then flew to Oslo, although she arrived too late for the Nobel ceremony.

Through all this she continued to declare her support for Trump and to actively court his backing, unapologetically wielding her peace prize even as she encouraged his military build-up. Trump requires overt acts of submission, and often debasement, from those who would serve him or receive his favor, and Machado showed herself willing to play the game. Knowing that Trump had lobbied publicly to receive the Nobel, and that, according to reports, he was miffed at not being chosen, she quickly declared that she was dedicating her prize to him (although also to “the suffering people of Venezuela”). In October she told the BBC “how grateful the Venezuelan people are for what he’s doing, not only in the Americas, but around the world for peace, for freedom, for democracy.” In December she called Trump “a champion of freedom in the hemisphere” and voiced her absolute support for his Venezuela strategy.

She even validated Trump’s lie that the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was stolen, in part through the rigging of election software and machinery via a shadowy scheme linked to the Venezuelan government. Asked in a Bloomberg News interview in October about these debunked claims, Machado said, “I have no doubt that Nicolás Maduro, Jorge Rodríguez, and many others are the masterminds of a system that has rigged elections in many countries, including the US.” She repeated: “I have no doubt about that.”

She remained silent when Trump sent 252 Venezuelan immigrants to the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador. And she has refrained from criticizing the attacks on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, even as they killed at least forty-eight people, many of them Venezuelans. (Including strikes in the Pacific, the attacks have killed more than 120.) Pressed about the boat strikes in the Bloomberg interview, she refused to find fault with Trump, saying, “These deaths are the responsibility of Nicolás Maduro.”

But although Machado went through the motions, she never came across as a truly zealous votary at the Trumpian altar. There was a stiffness in her delivery, a reticence. Machado is from the alcurnia of Caracas, the nation’s wealthiest families. It’s not her custom to bow down. The difference between her offerings and those of a true acolyte like Javier Milei, the president of Argentina—who has made himself into fanboy número uno and been rewarded with a $20 billion line of credit from the US Treasury Department—were obvious.

After Trump dismissed Machado in his press conference on January 3, The Washington Post reported that, according to a person “close to the White House,” accepting the Nobel had been Machado’s “ultimate sin.” Her standing would be different today, the source averred, if she’d refused the prize on the grounds that it rightly belonged to Trump. Machado got the message. Two days after the Caracas raid she was asked by Sean Hannity on Fox News if it was true that she’d offered to give Trump the prize. She swallowed hard (you could see it on TV) and said, “It hasn’t happened yet but I certainly would love to be able to personally tell him that we believe—the Venezuelan people, because this is a prize of the Venezuelan people—certainly want to give it to him.” Trump later told The New York Times that he would meet with Machado and that “it would be a great honor” to accept the Nobel from her.

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Machado’s dilemma is rooted in the fact that her goals never meshed with those of her American sponsor. While Trump has offered few specifics about his plans for Venezuela, other than pumping oil and making money, he has praised Rodríguez, the acting president. And he has made it clear that he intends, at least for the time being, to keep her and the rest of the Chavista hierarchy—and its machine of repression—in place, prioritizing continuity and stability over democratization and human rights. On Wednesday he said he had spoken with Rodríguez on the phone. “She’s a terrific person,” he said. “We’re getting along very well with Venezuela.”

Trump obfuscated his intentions from the start, when in August he began a naval buildup in the Caribbean. He first claimed to be carrying out an anti-narcotics mission to defend national security and disrupt the flow of deadly fentanyl. But virtually no fentanyl goes through Venezuela (it mostly arrives by way of Mexico); and while Venezuela is a major pass-through country for cocaine, most of it is not bound for the US, heading instead across the Atlantic to Europe and other destinations. Asked by reporters in September if he was seeking “regime change” in Venezuela, Trump replied: “We’re not talking about that.”

But the deployment fulfilled other aims. As Jonathan Blitzer reported in The New Yorker, the crucial person behind the administration’s Caribbean strategy appears to be Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor: it was Miller, according to Blitzer, who seized on the enormous naval deployment and the attacks on small boats allegedly carrying drugs as an aggressive way of advancing the administration’s unprecedented expansion of presidential power. Numerous legal and military experts have deemed the boat strikes illegal—but the point of the attacks was, in part, to show that Trump would not be constrained by questions of legality. The attack on Caracas and the removal of Maduro were even bigger steps along the same path.

Venezuela has the planet’s largest estimated crude reserves, and we now know that Trump had his sights on the country’s oil all along. In December, even as US forces were rehearsing the Caracas raid in secret, Trump posted on his Truth Social account that Venezuela’s oil had been stolen from the US and must be returned. This appeared to be a reference to Venezuela’s 1976 nationalization of its oil industry and the 2007 restrictions placed by Chávez on the activities of foreign oil companies. But it was a baseless claim: under Venezuelan law the country’s oil has always belonged to the state; it was only the aboveground infrastructure and other assets that were affected by the nationalization and later legislation. Still, Trump continued to bang the oil drum at his Mar-a-Lago news conference. “They stole our oil,” he said. “We built that whole industry there and they just took it over like we were nothing. And we had a president that decided not to do anything about it. So, uh, we did something about it.”

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For now, Venezuela is in a strange limbo—“abnormal normality,” as more than one person there has told me. Maduro is gone but his government is still in place; on the ground, little else has changed. A state of emergency is in effect, apparently signed by Maduro even as the Americans were closing in, banning any show of support for the US intervention. While a large majority of Venezuelans longed to get rid of Maduro, as we know from the 2024 election results, there has been little or no public show of celebration following his capture. People are fearful, unwilling to speak out and careful to delete messages or images from their cellphones that might indicate opposition to the government if the devices are searched by police. They look at the seat of power and see the same leaders who have been behind years of economic devastation and escalating repression. Millions of poor Venezuelans still face the grim daily challenge of putting food on the table and obtaining essential medications in an environment of high inflation and unemployment.

Machado is nothing if not persistent. Having been counted out before, she nevertheless emerged as the undisputed leader of an opposition that had once largely disdained her. Much depends on her next moves—on whether she can repair her standing in Washington and whether she decides to return to Venezuela to pressure for a real transition. But for now the movement she led has stalled. The road to democracy is slick with oil, foggy with uncertainty, and chilled by a capricious wind blowing from the north.