A year ago it seemed unthinkable. Today it is beginning to be possible: Chavismo is exhausted and Nicolas Madurothe illegitimate, walks towards his exit.
The process will not be neat and tidy, but it is underway.
Maria Corina Machado She has been anticipating it in recent months, and she does not announce anything that she does not have well tied up. Their political movement, harassed and decimated by repression, is still standing. Furthermore, it grows.
And not because it has access to means or resources, but because it preserves the only thing that the regime cannot manufacture: legitimacy.
That legitimacy was born at the polls on July 28, when millions of Venezuelans, Despite fear and unspeakable obstacles, they cast their votethey guarded it and certified it. And then they became masters of their destiny.
Since then, every message from Machado, every gesture, every alliance inside and outside the country, pursues the same objective: to make the cracks in the regime stop being cracks and become gaps like chasms. In irreparable fractures.
US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, on September 16 in Israel.
Reuters
To understand what is happening you have to look back. Chavismo began as a populist project, mixing Bolivarian symbols with unbeatable oil power. He soon became a mafia gear at the service of Cuba.
After the death of ChavezMaduro held the presidency as a figurehead: obedient to Havana, managed by Diosdado Hair and the brothers Rodríguez. He was never a leader, but rather the face that gave continuity to a system of shared power between enriched military personnel, drug trafficking operators and a Cuban-style repression apparatus.
Today that scheme is breaking down. Maduro has assets seized halfway around the world and an international arrest warrant with no less than fifty million dollars in reward, although from outside he boasts of resistance.
Motions and appeals take place in Brussels and Madrid. With the socialists voting against, the European Parliament a few weeks ago approved declaring the Cartel of the Suns a “terrorist network”, whose leadership the US accuses of Maduro.
In Spain, the families of political prisoners with dual Spanish and Venezuelan nationality continue to demand action and information from the government of Pedro Sanchez.
But the center of gravity is in Washington.
Donald Trump has reactivated its war on drugs and, in just twenty days, Navy ships have sunk at least three vessels coming from Venezuela.
No one presents evidence that they carried cocaine. It doesn’t matter. The message is different: “We will not tolerate Venezuela functioning as a narco-state.”
Maduro has gotten the message: as he deploys troops on roads, orders starving elderly civilians to train with rifles, and shows videos of military loyalty, he knows that his personal survival depends on his diminished ability to negotiate. Trump did not want to acknowledge having received his letter asking to negotiate, surely to assess his advantage and take the next step. The image is the same as always: a dictator who shows muscle in public while begging for mercy in private.
His number two, Cabello, resorts to the only thing he has left: images of militiamen swearing to “defend the homeland” while wielding rusty weapons against an invisible enemy. The contrast with the surgical operation of the US Navy is brutal.
At the heart of this offensive is Marco Rubio. Today Secretary of State, Rubio has been obsessed with the fall of Chavismo and Castro’s Cuba for a decade. With Trump in the White House he has the ability to execute, not just denounce. And María Corina knows it.
For this reason, it has rearranged all the pieces: it maintains the vital link with Europe, yes. But he understands that the turning point is on the other side of the Atlantic.
August marked a milestone. María Corina Machado publicly thanked Trump for his decision to dismantle Maduro’s “criminal enterprise”. He did it with measured words, knowing that in international politics every gesture has weight.
And this September 20, it has gone up a step:
“It is already happening and you know what is going to happen. Visualize what we will do these days. The streets will be filled with Venezuelans reuniting with their children, with their families. You are part of this.”
It is not an empty speech. It is the continuation of the July 2024 strategy: organization, prayer and discipline. At that time it was election eve. Today is the eve of the transition. Machado speaks in the immediate future, and Venezuelans understand it as the present.
There is fear in Miraflores. YouTube has removed Maduro’s podcast and the program With the gavel giving de Cabello: two colossal blows to his propaganda and hate apparatus.
The desperate diplomatic movements, the leaks about letters sent to Washington, the growing repression against activists… everything responds to the same state of dread.
Because what is coming no longer depends on Maduro’s will or a complacent wink from Havana.
It depends on three pieces that have been aligned: the democratic legitimacy achieved on July 28; the leadership of María Corina Machado, who has survived everything; and the step forward of the United States, assuming the trophy as its own and advantageous.
One unknown remains: how.
Will there be military intervention? A negotiated exit process? A suffocating economic siege for an exhausted population? Nobody knows.
With Trump, rhetoric and action do not always coincide. But this time the game is played with different cards.
Venezuela is entering a point of no return. It will not be an instantaneous or risk-free outcome, but it will be irreversible.
No one can promise certainties, but there is evidence: millions of Venezuelans have shown that, even in the prison of hunger and repression, even from the desperate longing for exile, it is possible to sustain the seed of democracy.
And that seed is germinating. What is coming is no longer a matter of faith, but of time.