Venezuela Removed Its President, But the Guns Never Changed Hands

Two weeks after U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, President Trump declared Washington would run Venezuela “until further notice.” On the ground, the dictatorship’s machinery never stopped, only changed hands, tightening its grip while promising cooperation.

Caracas without Maduro still feels like Maduro’s Caracas

The raid that removed Nicolás Maduro was supposed to be a rupture: the face of the regime gone, the pathway to a different Venezuela suddenly open. Within hours, President Trump told the public the United States would be running the country “until further notice,” as if a state could be managed like an airport after a storm. But in the neighborhoods and barracks, the reality described by people watching this unfold is simpler and colder: the regime, without Mr. Maduro, is still calling the shots.

That contradiction is where the story lives. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described a three-step strategy: stabilization, then recovery of economic and social institutions, then a transition to democracy. It’s the kind of sequence that reads clean on paper, especially from far away. But in Caracas, paper plans collide with the question that decides everything: who controls the guns, the files, the prisons, and the fear?

By the account here, buy-in now depends on Delcy Rodríguez, identified as Mr. Maduro’s replacement and the regime’s new dictator-in-chief. She is, in this telling, cooperating with the “gringos” in word but not in deed, saying what must be said to slow foreign pressure while protecting the internal architecture that keeps power in place. In Latin America, we recognize this choreography. Regimes don’t only survive by violence; they survive by mastering the performance of reasonableness while keeping the instruments of coercion within reach.

A Fragmented Military and One Man Rumored to Want It All

There is, the text suggests, one sliver of possibility: the military is fragmented. Fragmentation can mean paralysis, but it can also mean openings, officers, and soldiers who might defend a return to democracy precisely because no single command is fully trusted, no single loyalty fully secure. The idea is that enlisting and organizing those “patriots” could restore order and prevent an institutional collapse like Iraq after de-Baathification, where tearing out a governing structure created a vacuum filled by chaos.

But the same fragmentation also creates opportunities for predators. The “bad news,” as it’s laid out, is that the regime’s ruthless anti-American interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, still controls most of the guns, armed forces, national police, secret police, and paramilitary, and is rumored to be plotting to get the rest. The word “rumored” matters because it captures a familiar political weather: the kind you can’t quite prove until it’s already raining. And if Mr. Cabello consolidates control, the second phase of Mr. Rubio’s plan, rebuilding institutions, begins to look less like recovery and more like a managed continuity, a new label over an old system.

This is the trap foreign planners often underestimate. You can remove a leader, even dramatically. Still, if the coercive apparatus remains intact, if the prison keys stay in the same pockets, then the state’s daily power does not disappear. It simply updates the wall portrait.

A New Commander, An Old Résumé, And the Slow Drip Of Fear

Two days after Operation Absolute Resolve, Ms. Rodríguez promoted a veteran of the Chávez–Maduro apparatus to lead the Presidential Honor Guard: Gustavo Enrique González López. On paper, an “honor guard” sounds ceremonial, the kind of unit tourists might confuse with parade uniforms. Here it is described as something else entirely: an estimated two thousand members drawn from multiple branches, armed forces, national guard, national police, and secret police, a force “as big as a brigade,” and, more importantly, “the locus of the dictatorship’s power.”

The appointment matters not only because of the unit’s size, but also because Mr. González López also heads military counterintelligence, the DGCIM, which is described as responsible for repressing dissent inside the barracks, spying on soldiers and officers, and carting off those suspected of disloyalty to prison. The values of leadership, the text argues, will shape what Venezuela becomes next. And by naming Mr. González López, presented as a close confidant of Mr. Cabello, to control both the Presidential Honor Guard and the DGCIM, Ms. Rodríguez is not signaling a transition. She is signaling defiance, “giving the middle finger” to Mr. Trump.

The résumé presented is a timeline of consolidation. From 2014 to 2018, Mr. González López headed the secret police during a period of “intensified repression,” briefly serving as minister of the interior, justice, and peace, and attaining the rank of general-in-chief of the army. After advising Mr. Maduro, he returned in April 2019 to head the secret police again, holding the position until October 2024. From there, he moved to PdVSA, where he ran strategic affairs and production, then became president of the state-owned oil company in October 2025.

If this is the figure entrusted with the regime’s most sensitive levers, the implication is blunt: the current state of affairs is being defended, not dismantled. A man described here as central to “torture, tyranny and terrorism” is unlikely to guide the country toward the rule of law that economic development requires. And that fear bleeds into the details that ordinary Venezuelans would recognize more intimately than any cabinet title: the pace of prisoner releases, the pressure to stay silent, the sense that freedom can be revoked at any moment.

The numbers land like a ledger of intimidation. On January 3, the regime held more than eight hundred dissidents in jail, not including more than sixty whose whereabouts were unknown. By January 16, Foro Penal, the nonprofit that tracks arrests of nonviolent opposition figures, said only 100 political prisoners had been released. The text calls it “drip, drip,” and the phrase captures a strategy: release just enough to soften scrutiny, not enough to weaken the tool of imprisonment itself.

One reason offered is grotesquely practical: many prisoners may be in such bad shape that releasing them quickly would embarrass Ms. Rodríguez, who is described as cultivating “a persona of civility” while “dressing like Imelda Marcos.” But the larger reason is structural. If mass imprisonment is ruled out, Ms. Rodríguez and Mr. Cabello lose a necessary instrument of rule. Since Mr. Maduro was removed, Cabello enforcers, uniformed and civilian, have continued intimidating the population with threats of detention and physical harm. Even release, in this telling, is conditional: some freed prisoners are said to face open cases, meaning their freedom comes with an implied muzzle.

The portrait that emerges is of a regime trying to survive a historic shock by becoming more agile, not less cruel. Ms. Rodríguez is described as playing both sides, telling Mr. Trump, Mr. Rubio, and the CIA what they want to hear while keeping Mr. Cabello satisfied. But the oldest lesson of power in the Americas is that you can’t permanently balance fear on two knives. Eventually, “one side or the other has to go.”

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