On the morning of January 3, I woke to excited shouts from the kitchen. My bleary eyes suddenly brightened as I heard the news: the U.S. had captured Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro Moros with no loss of troops or civilian casualties. My Instagram feed was flooded with “¡Venezuela libre!” and “Feliz Año” by Rawayana, and I couldn’t have been happier. Venezuela, I believe, will be free as long as the U.S. moves carefully in the leadership replacement process.
According to The Telegraph, Maduro rose to power by supporting Hugo Chávez, who gained Maduro’s admiration after leading a failed 1992 coup against a democratically elected administration. After Chávez’s death, a possibly falsified 2013 election crowned Maduro as the next president. Under Maduro, Venezuela’s economy crashed from a $300 billion GDP in 2013 to a $68 billion GDP today per Statista. As a London School of Economics Business Review article put it, he ran a “kleptocratic cronyism,” in which the state diverts wealth from the economy to enrich elites. According to CBS News, hundreds of billions have filled regime loyalists’ pockets with oil profits since the nationalization of the oil industry in 2007, when Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), a government-controlled oil company created in 1976, seized assets and platforms from American oil companies like Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips. These dissolutions of private property reflected illegal actions from Venezuela worth $20 to $30 billion as determined by the World Bank.
Nationalization of resources combined with inevitable corruption led to massive deficits for the vast majority of the nation’s citizens. Per The Telegraph, when the regime reserved the dwindling food supply for loyalist neighborhoods, everyone else went hungry: in February 2024, a United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur estimated that 53% of the population couldn’t afford a monthly basic food basket. Amnesty International has documented violent repression at anti-Maduro protests, extrajudicial executions, and prison torture of political opponents, protestors, and journalists—even children and women, some of whom were subjected to sexual violence as torture.
Maduro is not the president of Venezuela—he is an unelected dictator by force and falsehoods, something international law is quick to forget. In the July 2024 falsified election, opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, backed by famed leader of the opposition movement María Corina Machado, clearly won and even presented voting data to prove his victory, according to the Journal of Democracy. However, Maduro claimed to win 80 percent of the vote.
The U.S. government officially recognized González as the president, yet the UN did nothing more than simply express concern over election intransparency. The UN, supposedly the divine harbinger of international law, has always expressed mere concern over human rights abuses in Venezuela, noncommittally listing “coordinated repression” and “crimes against humanity” in its report without any real action.
Now, however, the overthrow of Maduro has incited anger over violations of “international law.” Makers of these claims use this argument to somehow oppose the capture of a heinous dictator whose actions are themselves internationally illegal. At its core, law aims to emulate an enforceable objective morality, and when a dictator like Maduro propagates unspeakable crimes, the only value in international law is to ensure the end of those abuses. When law becomes so-called “strong condemnations” made from the comfort of a conference room, it becomes an intellectualist performance that discusses morality without ever imposing it. This cheap talk will never improve the lives of people affected by Maduro’s crimes.
In an ideal world, one word from some transnational authority with moral high ground would send Maduro scrambling to free his political prisoners, but expecting dictators like him to partake in honest negotiations on respecting human rights is laughable. In fact, negotiations between the Trump Administration and the Venezuelan regime had continued for months prior to Maduro’s removal. As The New York Times reports, in October 2025, Maduro even proposed scrapping oil deals with China, Iran, and Russia, as well as allowing American companies to access Venezuelan oil and gold. Maduro’s regime, however, refused to accept anything related to improving the lives of Venezuelan citizens. Based on the U.S.’s rejection of that oil and gold deal, capturing Maduro—and an end to Venezuela’s poverty—seemed to be the main priorities of the negotiations. As Corina’s economic adviser Sara Levy remarked, Maduro’s deals would require freedom and democracy to come to stable fruition.
This uncanny relationship between freedom and economic success suggests that removing Maduro, partly for the U.S.’s acquisition of oil, improves the prospect of Venezuelan freedom. Levy’s prediction manifests even now, when U.S. oil companies hesitate to operate in Venezuela due to a lack of political stability.
Along with oil prospects’ dependency on Venezuelan peace and content democracy, the profits will revamp the previously oil-run economy and increase the wealth of the average Venezuelan. Despite Trump’s blunt comments like “We want [the oil] back,” the true ringleader of the operation is U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has laid out a reasonable plan to sell “between 30 and 50 million barrels of [Venezuelan] oil…in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people.” Rubio has long proposed action against the Venezuelan dictatorship, publishing a press statement on the anniversary of the 24 staged election, a statement which promised U.S. dedication to “Venezuela’s restoration of democratic order and justice.”
Although U.S. oil companies might benefit from Venezuelan oil, this change would bring democracy, improvements in respect for human rights, and an enriched economy for the people of Venezuela. Finally, the U.S.’s interventions in Latin American governments have been generally successful recently due to the heightened cultural and political presence of the U.S. Although many make comparisons to past Middle Eastern fiascoes, these connotations are vastly inapplicable because of Venezuela’s long history of democracy and current political unity. In fact, González’s “overwhelming majority of the [2024] votes,” as State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel put it, means that the unified country likely won’t dissolve into civil war like 2006 Iraq. Furthermore, the U.S. has experience in this domain: the latest interventions in Latin America have been wildly successful. Removals of the dictators of Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, and Haiti in 1994 have all resulted in democratic elections, political stability, and economic growth through U.S. motives. Recent history is, in fact, on the side of the Venezuelan people.
While it may look like Maduro’s regime is still in place as of Monday, January 12, with top officials still in power, it’s barely been a week since the capture, and avoiding sudden regime change supports stability. De facto vice president Delcy Rodríguez, a key perpetrator of human rights abuses along with Maduro, has sworn into power, so under the Venezuelan Constitution, elections must be held within 30 days, and as the Latin Times reports, Rubio has hinted at a “process” for non-corrupt elections. This “process” will be slow to avoid possible civil wars and political instability, as experienced briefly in Panama’s quick leadership replacement, but soon, elections and industry growth have huge potential to restore democracy, wealth, and human rights in El Bravo Pueblo. At the end of the day, Venezuela será libre.