Nobody Knows What Comes Next

I spoke today with a well-known Venezuelan source and a dear friend, someone with deep personal ties to the country and a real understanding of how power actually functions there, both politically and on the ground. For obvious reasons, they’re remaining anonymous.

What they said was simple and heart breaking. No drama, no theatrics. No victory speech, just a reality check for the world.

“This isn’t freedom,” they told me. “It’s a first step toward freedom. And after that… we’ll see. The reality is nobody knows.”

That’s the most honest assessment I’ve heard all day.

From inside Venezuela, today doesn’t feel like liberation. It feels like the moment right before things either stabilize — or turn very dangerous. People are relieved Maduro is gone. That part is real. Families cried. People felt something lift, a sense of relief. For many, this is deeply deeply personal.

“It’s a good day that he’s gone,” my source said. “For my family. For people who were imprisoned. For people who had their country destroyed.”

But that relief hasn’t turned into celebration.

“And where this goes,” they added, “nobody really knows.” That uncertainty isn’t theoretical. It’s lived and felt by those in the country and those who have since left.

One thing my source was very clear about: without Chávez, Venezuela wouldn’t have this mess. Chávez was the glue. When he died, he personally chose Maduro, and that decision is what kept the regime barely unified.

Now both of the people actually running things are gone.

“There is no successor,” my source said. “There’s a power vacuum in government because the two people in charge are gone.”

And then this — quietly, almost offhand “A lot of people said she was the brains in many ways and in many ways she was far more cruel, far more evil, like barking evil.”

That matters more than most people understand. She wasn’t ornamental. She was deeply involved in enforcement and repression. With both of them gone, there is no center holding the system together.

That’s why people are being careful right now. There are people on the streets but not as many as the mainstream media is telling you, and not for long. This isn’t a country erupting fully into celebration. It’s a country moving cautiously, watching, waiting, measuring risk because they have felt this before.

People aren’t staying home because they don’t care. They’re being careful because they understand exactly what moment they’re in.

What they’re worried about isn’t abstract. They’re worried about the colectivos

The “colectivos” are armed pro-regime militias. They’ve been around for years. Everyone in Venezuela knows what they are capable of. When protests formed in the past, they showed up on motorcycles and in cars and opened fire on civilians. Openly. With impunity.

Those men didn’t disappear with Maduro. So while some people have cautiously stepped outside, many are choosing restraint over celebration. Silence over noise. Right now, quiet isn’t necessarily a bad thing or a form of weakness. It’s survival.

This is what power vacuums actually look like. They don’t fill themselves with democracy. They fill themselves with whoever still has guns, money, and control over food. My source put it plainly: “this is a very dangerous time for Venezuelan people.”

That danger isn’t just internal.

For years, Venezuela functioned as a puppet state. It supplied oil to Cuba. Cuba supplied security, intelligence, and military know-how. Venezuelan oil kept Cuba afloat. Cuban advisors helped keep Venezuelans subjugated. That pipeline is now broken.

And Cuba doesn’t suddenly become less desperate because Maduro is gone. If anything, it becomes more unstable. Any Cuban-linked security or intelligence networks still operating inside Venezuela won’t disappear quietly. They’ll resist, adapt, or try to sabotage whatever comes next.

From the outside, people want a clean story. Dictator gone. Country and it’s people free but from the inside, that’s not how it works.

“The structure is still there,” my source told me. “The people who enforced it didn’t just disappear.”

No one knows how long the U.S. will stay. No one knows what “running Venezuela” actually means. No one knows if the military will unify or fracture. No one knows if the militias will disarm or turn criminal. Anyone pretending they know is lying. The next 48 to 72 hours matter more than anything that’s happened in the last twenty years. That’s when things either settle or spin.

If militias aren’t disarmed, they turn into criminal gangs. If the military fractures, violence follows. If foreign security influence remains embedded, the transition rots from the inside.

That’s why people are being careful. That’s why restraint is everywhere. “It’s a good day that he’s gone,” my source said again.
“And where this goes — nobody really knows.”

That’s not pessimism. That’s reality for anyone who fully understands Venezuela.

Maduro and his cruel wife are are officially gone. That matters most. That’s a first step. But freedom doesn’t just arrive with a helicopter extraction. For Venezuelans, today isn’t the end of the nightmare. It’s the moment where they hold their breath and wait to see what replaces it.

These are very dangerous times for the Venezuelan people.

Pretending otherwise helps no one.

KELSI SHEREN

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Marco Navarro-Génie

Everything His Defenders Want You to Forget

On Saturday, January 3, Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolas Maduro, was apprehended and removed.

Maduro’s weekend was ruined rather decisively. Brazil’s Lula, Nicaragua’s Ortega, Cuba’s Díaz-Canel, and Mexico’s Sheinbaum have also had their weekends spoiled, though not as severely as Maduro. The collapse of Venezuela’s Bolivarian model implicates the entire Latin American left that defended it.

These leftist leaders, their allies, defenders, apologists and enablers will claim legitimacy: the same for those in Canada. I expect folks like former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, current leadership hopeful Avi Lewis, and leftist Liberal Lloyd Axworthy to salute Maduro’s martyrdom. They will insist Maduro was Venezuela’s rightful president, removed by imperial intervention. I will confess to being skeptical of all the cartel and drug allegations because I have not seen the evidence, and I will suspend judgment on those. But perhaps a brief reminder of what legitimacy meant under Maduro’s rule would help clarify matters for his apologists.

Hugo Chávez won genuine elections in 1998. Whatever one thinks of his socialist policies, he commanded popular support. But Chávez systematically dismantled the institutions that made those victories meaningful. He packed the Supreme Court in 2004, neutered the National Assembly, and turned the National Electoral Council into an appendage of his government. He also began the systematic destruction of Venezuela’s once-thriving economy and silenced the free press through a campaign of intimidation, license revocations, and outright seizures. When he died in 2013, he bequeathed Maduro a constitutional facade concealing authoritarian machinery and an economy already in decline.

Maduro inherited power through a special election that international observers questioned from the start. The margin was suspicious, less than two percent in a country where Chávez had won by double digits. From that ambiguous beginning, Maduro’s “legitimacy” rested increasingly on force rather than consent.

The 2015 legislative elections revealed the charade. The opposition won two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly in a landslide. Maduro’s response demonstrated his understanding of legitimacy: the Supreme Court stripped the Assembly’s powers, declared it in contempt, and transferred legislative authority to a newly invented Constituent Assembly in 2017, an entirely undemocratic body stacked with regime loyalists that nobody outside Caracas requested.

Venezuela hasn’t conducted a remotely credible election since. The 2018 presidential election was so farcical that even sympathetic governments refused to recognize it. Major opposition parties were banned. Leading candidates sat in prison or exile. The Electoral Council moved the date to disadvantage opponents. Turnout figures defied basic arithmetic. International observers stayed home rather than legitimize the spectacle.

The pattern repeated in 2024. Maduro declared victory despite exit polls showing opposition candidate Edmundo González winning by over thirty points. When the opposition published detailed precinct-level results demonstrating Maduro’s defeat, the regime responded with mass arrests, disappeared activists, and unleashed paramilitary groups against protestors. Over 24 people died in the crackdown. The regime arrested over 2,000 people, including children as young as fourteen, charged with terrorism.

Behind the electoral theatre lies comprehensive repression. The regime imprisoned opposition leader Leopoldo López for organizing peaceful protests. María Corina Machado, who won the opposition primary with ninety-three percent, was barred from holding office. Edmundo González fled to Spain to avoid arrest. Countless others vanished into Venezuela’s archipelago of unofficial detention centers.

Independent journalism has been systematically destroyed. Chavismo drove critical media outlets into bankruptcy through arbitrary currency controls and discriminatory advertising restrictions. The regime refused newsprint to opposition newspapers, seized television stations, and forced radio broadcasters off the air. Journalists face arrest on fabricated terrorism charges for reporting unflattering facts. Those who persist work in exile or risk disappearance. What remains is state propaganda and silence.

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Maduro’s thuggish behaviour extended beyond Venezuela’s borders. He launched a populist irredentist claim on two-thirds of neighbouring Guyana, the Essequibo region, threatening a free country with territorial annexation to distract from domestic failures. The move combined nineteenth-century imperialism with twenty-first-century demagoguery. Lest Canadian leftists be tempted to dismiss Maduro’s imperial claim to a neighbour’s territory as trivial, remember how Canadian progressives lost their heads and tore their garments at Trump’s mere suggestion that Canada should become an American state. Maduro printed and distributed official state maps of Venezuela that included most of Guyana as part of Venezuela. He held a sham referendum claiming overwhelming support for annexation, then began military buildups along their border. This wasn’t rhetorical provocation. It was preparation for conquest (see my post on the subject from December 2023).

The economic destruction represents perhaps the most damning indictment of Chavismo’s legitimacy. Venezuela was once Latin America’s most prosperous country, built on the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Chavismo reduced it to a catastrophe through systematic mismanagement, corruption, and plain ideological stupidity. The regime nationalized productive industries and handed them to incompetent cronies. It imposed price controls that guaranteed shortages. It printed money to finance spending until the currency became worthless. Oil production, the economy’s foundation, collapsed under corrupt management and chronic underinvestment. A country that should have rivalled wealthy Gulf states instead produced mass starvation and the flight of millions of its citizens.

While Venezuelans starved, Maduro stole billions from his own people to prop up the equally murderous and illegitimate Sandinista regime of Nicaragua for twenty years. Venezuelan oil subsidies kept Daniel Ortega in power even as shortages at home grew desperate. The regime exported revolution while its citizens couldn’t find toiletries and medicine. This wasn’t solidarity. It was theft dressed as internationalism, just like Claudia Sheinbaum is doing today with Mexican oil to support the Cuban régime.

The humanitarian catastrophe speaks to the absence of legitimacy. Over 7.7 million Venezuelans, more than a quarter of the population, have fled the country. This exodus dwarfs Syria’s refugee crisis on a per capita basis. People don’t ever flee legitimate governments in such numbers.

Those remaining behind face conditions incompatible with the legitimacy of government. Inflation reached 1.7 million percent at its peak. The average Venezuelan lost twenty-four pounds between 2017 and 2018, not from dieting. Hospitals lack basic medicines. Electricity fails regularly. Violence turned Caracas into one of the world’s most dangerous cities. Oil production collapsed to levels last seen in the 1940s despite Venezuela holding the world’s largest proven reserves.

Despite Venezuela’s imperialist claims on Guyana and Maduro’s involvement in several countries in the region pushing “Socialism for the Twenty-First Century,” the regime’s defenders invoke non-interference and anti-imperialism. They ignore that legitimacy requires more than avoiding foreign intervention. A government that tortures opponents, rigs elections, and starves its population forfeits legitimacy regardless of Washington’s position.

Maduro himself abandoned the pretense. When asked about recognizing his defeat in 2024, he responded: “Whoever messes with me, dries up. Whoever messes with Maduro, dries up.” Leaving aside that psychologists have written volumes about people who refer to themselves in the third person, this is the language of gangsterism, not democratic governance.

The contrast with genuine democracy illuminates the distinction. Democratic governments lose elections and transfer power. They don’t imprison opponents for organizing protests (even if Justin Trudeau didn’t get the memo for this one). They don’t ban political parties for winning too decisively. They don’t require citizens to show proof of loyalty to the government to access food. They don’t produce refugee crises rivaling war zones. They don’t threaten neighbours with territorial conquest. They don’t silence journalists for reporting inconvenient truths.

Venezuela under Maduro represents democratic forms emptied of democratic content, what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism. Elections happen, but the regime controls enough of the process to guarantee outcomes. Opposition exists, but within strict boundaries that the government determines. The result is the corpse of legitimacy dressed in democratic clothing.

Those defending Maduro’s legitimacy should specify what the word means. If it means controlling the military and police, then every dictator qualifies. If it means following constitutional procedures, then the procedures themselves must be legitimate, not the hollow rituals of a rigged system. If it means representing the people’s will, then Venezuela’s refugee exodus and repeated opposition victories render the claim absurd.

Legitimate governments don’t need to disappear teenagers for protesting. They don’t need to falsify vote counts (by thirty points). They don’t generate the largest refugee crisis in Western Hemisphere history. They don’t reduce their people to starvation while sitting on vast oil wealth. Whatever Maduro represents, legitimacy isn’t it.

Thomas Paine understood tyranny’s inevitable arc: “It is from a strange mixture of tyranny and cowardice that exclusions have been set up and continued. The boldness to do wrong at first, changes afterwards into cowardly craft, and at last into fear.” Maduro’s political career traced this trajectory precisely (He was a bus driver before becoming a trusted Chávezista). The boldness of rigging elections descended into the cowardly craft of disappearing children and silencing journalists, before collapsing finally into pure fear. In his final weeks as dictator, Maduro watched US naval forces mass off Venezuela’s coast, the warships a daily reminder that his regime’s end approached. The man who threatened to invade Guyana cowered as real military power gathered on his shores. The disappeared activists, the imprisoned children, the exiled opposition leaders, the silenced journalists, the paramilitary thugs, all had served one purpose: maintaining his power through fear. But when Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly against him despite the risks, and when American ships appeared on his horizon, fear consumed the fearmonger himself. What remained was precisely what Paine identified: order without consent, government by fear alone, is power without legitimacy that ends as it inevitably must, in the coward’s capture.

As Xavier Milei, Argentina’s legitimate president, likes tosay: “Que viva la libertad, carajo!”