BUENOS AIRES — Ongoing U.S. Navy strikes in the Caribbean and talk of an American invasion naturally have Venezuelans on edge, but many who spoke to The Washington Times this weekend said a populace battered by years of chaos and violence under the socialist Maduro regime is more worried about day-to-day survival than a conflict with the U.S.
President Trump again ratcheted up pressure Friday on the Nicolas Maduro government, which is seen as illegitimate by Washington and across much of the West. He told reporters that he had consulted with military advisers on the next step in the escalating conflict between Venezuela and the U.S.
For months, the U.S. Navy has been destroying boats off the South American country’s coast that the Trump administration says are carrying drugs.
“I sort of made up my mind,” Mr. Trump said. “I can’t tell you what it is, but we made a lot of progress with Venezuela in terms of stopping drugs from pouring in.”
U.S. warships have taken out at least 20 small vessels, killing an estimated 80 “narco-terrorists” in the process, the administration said.
The simmering conflict has a defiant Mr. Maduro engaging in fiery anti-American rhetoric, calling on friends in Moscow and elsewhere for help and mobilizing his troops in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and across the country in case Mr. Trump carries through on his threats.
Yet many Venezuelans tell The Times that the country’s populace is too busy scrambling to survive in an economy decimated by more than a decade under Mr. Maduro to pay heed to the strongman’s bellicose attempts to rally nationalist support for an armed showdown with the U.S.
“If you turn on state TV, you’d think we’re at war,” Milos Alcalay, the country’s ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, told The Times. “But life in Venezuela goes on with normalcy; overall, there is no wartime atmosphere.”
With runaway inflation and a virtually worthless national currency, many Venezuelans rely on U.S. dollars, primarily received through remittances, to buy grocery staples such as the flour used to make traditional arepas. For all but the country’s elites, pocketbook concerns have become all-consuming, said Yorelis Acosta de Oliveira, a Central University of Venezuela political scientist and psychologist.
Mr. Maduro’s incessant warnings of U.S. “imperialist” aggression don’t change that, she said.
“If you cry, ‘Wolf, wolf, wolf,’ it is no longer effective,” she said. “The economic situation is overwhelming; it cuts across everything. There’s crisis, devaluation, the loss of the bolivar’s purchasing power and the high cost of living. That’s the main worry, not what is happening in the Caribbean.”
Although the widespread nationalizations and an overreliance on oil revenue during Mr. Chavez’s 14-year rule may have paved the way for the country’s malaise, it was only after the firebrand socialist’s cancer death in 2013 and Mr. Maduro’s ensuing rise to power that Venezuela’s economy spiraled fully out of control.
The former bus driver has cycled through three currencies, shaving 11 zeros off the value of the bolivar.
Amid the ensuing hyperinflation, which reached a peak of more than 130,000% annually in 2018, according to official figures, and 1 million percent according to independent estimates.
Venezuelans faced widespread shortages of basic goods and medicines, and Mr. Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela sustained a crushing defeat in the 2015 parliamentary elections. Still, Mr. Maduro claimed to have won a second term in a vote marred by fraud in 2018. The United States instead recognized National Assembly Speaker Juan Guaido as the country’s legitimate leader.
That scenario repeated itself last year. The Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council said he had defeated Edmundo Gonzalez, a stand-in for opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whom the body had barred from running and who last month won the Nobel Peace Prize for her defense of democratic rights in what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called a “brutal, authoritarian state.”
“The Venezuelan opposition and the people of Venezuela have tried everything to achieve liberation and regime change,” former National assemblyman and Guaido adviser Sergio Vergara told The Times. “We’ve protested, we’ve voted, we’ve abstained from voting. We’ve expressed ourselves peacefully and with force.”
Unable to oust Mr. Maduro, who maintains a firm grip on Venezuela’s army, the omnipresent and privileged Bolivarian National Armed Forces, millions of Venezuelans vote with their feet. An estimated quarter of Venezuelans, around 8 million people, now live abroad, with the United States hosting about 770,000 in 2023, according to the latest recognized estimates.
The Trump administration has called Venezuela a failed “narco-state,” and Mr. Trump has said Venezuelan drug cartels and gangs that control the production of cocaine, fentanyl and other narcotics are literally attacking the people of the United States with illicit, addictive and oftentimes deadly drugs.
Mr. Maduro has used the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants in the United States in an attempt to ramp up anti-American and anti-Trump fervor among his countrymen.
“They persecute, suppress [and] beat [youngsters]; they put them in handcuffs, kidnap them, torture them, and then they kick them out of the United States,” he said Thursday. “And now they took away the so-called [temporary protected status] from 300,000 Venezuelans.”
Mr. Maduro made no mention of pending U.S. “narco-terrorism” and drug trafficking charges against him and his inner circle.
The U.S. State Department says the Venezuelan leader is the head of the “Cartel of the Suns” and is helping Colombian guerrillas ship tons of cocaine to the United States. The U.S. is serious about bringing Mr. Maduro to justice and has offered a $50 million reward for his arrest.
No one has been able to credibly claim the Venezuelan boats the U.S. Navy has destroyed since early September were anything other than vessels transporting drugs, said Mr. Vergara, who as a lawmaker helped lead the National Assembly’s security and defense commission.
“In Venezuela, we have a state that uses its power and institutions to help illicit drug trafficking activities,” Mr. Vergara said. “Maduro, [Interior Minister] Diosdado Cabello and [Defense Minister] Padrino Lopez are a principal element in the distribution chain. They allow drugs to be moved within Venezuelan territory and to be distributed from there to the rest of the world, primarily the U.S. and Europe.”
Mr. Maduro’s attempt to paint as an affront to Venezuela’s sovereignty the U.S. attacks on suspected drug boats and the buildup of U.S. naval forces in the region, limited thus far to international waters, contrasts with the lack of outrage voiced by Venezuela’s Latin American neighbors, Mr. Alcalay noted.
“Venezuela is part of the Caribbean, but the Caribbean is not ‘mare nostrum,’” the diplomat said. “Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao — they evidently don’t hold this position of an ‘American invasion.’”
Although Mr. Maduro and his propaganda machine may milk the phantom invasion for all it’s worth, he also likely suspects that his regime would not be able to withstand a direct confrontation.
“It’s absurd to believe that a Venezuelan move against the world’s most powerful military would have any possibilities of success,” Mr. Alcalay said. “Hopefully, it will not come to that.”
Even though Russia’s foreign-policy-heavy Izvestia newspaper ditched the condition Thursday to predict the mayhem a U.S. invasion “will” cause, Mr. Maduro would be wise not to count on his longtime allies in Moscow and Beijing to prop up his rule.
Russia “is preoccupied with Ukraine, with the Middle East. I don’t see a Russian military presence in the Caribbean,” Mr. Alcalay said. “Even less so for China, because China … [rather than] backing a [particular] regime, seeks economic participation with governments of the center, left and right.”
If the Trump administration, amid a purportedly low-resistance scenario, does consider a broader regime change operation, the Venezuelan opposition could not outright welcome that step, said Mr. Vergara, treading a fine line.
“It’s a logical outcome, an inevitable outcome. It’s not up to us; it’s in the hands of the president of the United States,” he said. “No one wants bloodshed. No one wants damage to infrastructure, physical damage, collateral damage [to] an innocent population. But sadly, with the level of conflict Maduro has brought this to, it’s very likely there are no alternatives.”
Mr. Guaido was known to worry that talk of foreign meddling might lead Venezuelans to rally around the flag and inadvertently strengthen the Maduro regime. After reports that Mr. Vergara had met with Jordan Goudreau, a Florida contractor who had allegedly been planning an armed operation to capture Mr. Maduro, Mr. Guaido accepted his adviser’s resignation in 2020.
Given Mr. Chavez’s and Mr. Maduro’s combined quarter-century in power, with a regime entrenched in Venezuela’s civic and military institutions, simply getting rid of the ruling clique around Messrs. Maduro, Cabello and Padrino Lopez would achieve little, human rights advocate Feliciano Reyna warned.
“Change here can only happen in the long run,” Mr. Reyna said. “The idea to remove those in power in one sweep is a fallacy; that’s not possible.”
Any attempt to bring down the regime’s cupola by force would lead to increased confrontation, with the regime doubling down on its repressive measures, he said.
“This is not a group of three or four people; it’s an entire structure,” Mr. Reyna said. “We have to conceive this as a long-term process. Unless internal damages don’t matter, we won’t see changes even in the medium term.”
For millions of Venezuelans similarly resigned to the status quo, their primary focus will remain on economic, social and, often, literal survival.
“If you’re hungry day in and day out, that takes priority over everything else,” said Ms. Acosta de Oliveira, the psychologist. “Politics — and Venezuela’s confrontation with the United States — is just one more among the many worries we have.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.