‘A more convenient dictatorship’: fear and uncertainty in Venezuela after fall of Maduro

Original article by Tom Phillips in Cúcuta and Patricia Torres in Caracas

Freddy Guevara will never forget the 34 excruciating days he spent inside Venezuela’s most notorious political prison after being snatched by masked men from Nicolás Maduro’s intelligence agency.

The black hood, the interrogations, the stress positions, the salsa music his captors blasted at him in an attempt to make him crack.

“It was horrible … You don’t know what is going to happen,” recalled the 39-year-old opposition leader who was forced into exile after eventually being released.

“It was the Covid era and they told me that if I didn’t give them the passwords [to my phone] they’d go to my grandma’s house and give her Covid and she would die,” Guevara said.

Nearly five years after winning back his freedom, Guevara had hoped the approximately 1,000 political prisoners still languishing behind bars in Venezuela – some in overcrowded, rat-infested cells – might also be released after Maduro’s dramatic capture by US troops last weekend.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump hinted that El Helicoide – the spectacular brutalist shopping mall turned jailhouse where Guevara was held – was entering its final days. “They have a torture chamber in the middle of Caracas that they are closing up,” the US president claimed as Maduro found himself behind bars after being abducted from a military base.

Two days later, Venezuelan authorities announced the release of a “significant number” of Venezuelan and foreign prisoners and several prominent figures emerged from El Helicoide, including the Spanish-Venezuelan activist Rocío San Miguel and the former presidential candidate, Enrique Márquez. “This is a very important and smart gesture,” Trump said.

But a week after the US’s audacious – and, to many experts, illegal night-time raid – there were few other signs of a major political thaw.

Instead, many detected an even more draconian atmosphere as the South American country’s “new” regime – led by Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez – sought to assert its authority and deter unrest after the operation, which Venezuela’s interior minister said left 100 people dead.

Kalashnikov-carrying masked civilians roamed the disconcertingly quiet streets of Venezuela’s capital on motorbikes. Security forces set up checkpoints and scoured citizens’ phones for compromising, anti-regime material. Journalists were detained, deported and barred from entering Venezuela to witness the latest moment of upheaval for a country reeling from years of hyperinflation, hunger, political instability and a refugee crisis that has driven eight million people to flee abroad.

In 23 de Enero, a working-class area in Caracas long considered a bastion of regime support, members of paramilitary groups called colectivos imposed an informal curfew. “After 6pm you don’t see anyone in the streets,” said one local describing how those groups were recruiting and arming homeless people and drug addicts to join their patrols. “People are afraid something else might happen and their kids might be out on the street,” the woman added.

The fear stretched right across Venezuela, from Caracas near the Caribbean to the western border with Colombia, in the foothills of the Andes. There, a 57-year-old entrepreneur implored the Guardian not to broadcast an audio recording of his voice lest it lead to his identification and arrest.

“We’re happy about the news [of Maduro’s capture] but we can’t show it because it’s dangerous … You can’t even publish anything [on social media],” the man confided as he crossed from the Venezuelan border town of San Antonio del Táchira into Cúcuta in Colombia on foot.

The man complained that while US special forces had decapitated the monster by seizing Maduro, its body remained in the form of Venezuela’s new rulers. “Our hope is that they come back for the rest of the body,” he added, although he was unsure that would happen.

When news of Maduro’s capture broke early last Saturday, government opponents were euphoric, believing Venezuela was finally entering the “new era” of democracy and reconstruction promised by the opposition leader María Corina Machado, the Nobel laureate they expected to lead that change. But those hopes were soon dashed as Trump announced he would recognise Rodríguez, one of Maduro’s closest allies, and work with the remnants of his regime to “stabilise” the country. Machado, whose movement is widely believed to have won the 2024 presidential election, was sidelined.

“It’s the same regime – [this was] just a leadership change. But instead of being a palace coup, it was an external coup,” said Tom Shannon, a veteran US diplomat who has worked with Venezuela since the 90s and was ambassador to Brazil. “We removed a leader and then chose the next one – but it’s the same gang.”

Andrés Izarra, a minister under Maduro’s late mentor, Hugo Chávez, who now lives in exile, agreed. “Trump rewrote regime change. Now it’s regime capture,” he said, describing how the White House had simply delegated control of Venezuela to Maduro’s main allies, led by Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, the powerful president of the national assembly.

The US emphasised its hostile takeover of Venezuela’s government this week, with the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, telling reporters: “Their decisions are going to continue to be dictated by the United States of America.”

“Trump conquered an oil hacienda … and hired the Rodríguez siblings to run it for him,” Izarra said, pointing to Trump’s admission that he sought “total access” to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest. “This has nothing to do with democracy or a transition to democracy,” Izarra added. “That’s all bullshit. This is all about power and enrichment.”

On Wednesday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, outlined a three-phase strategy for Venezuela’s future under Washington’s tutelage: stabilisation​, recovery and reconciliation, and political transition. “We feel like we are moving forward here in a very positive way,” Rubio said.

But observers see a treacherous road ahead as Maduro’s successors jockey for power and struggle to understand who betrayed their leader. CIA agents had infiltrated Maduro’s regime to such a degree that the US was reportedly able to pinpoint “how he moved, where he lived, where he travelled, what he ate, what he wore [and] what were his pets”.

“My guess is that the Cubans are hard at work on that,” Shannon said of the counterintelligence hunt for culprits.

Izarra suspected Maduro’s capture had plunged his former government colleagues into a maelstrom of distrust. “If they were paranoid and untrusting of each other before, I can’t imagine how it is now … These guys [must be] sitting around a table with their daggers behind their backs.”

The disorientation was underlined on Monday night when gunfire rang out near the presidential palace, leading many to speculate that a secondary coup to remove Rodríguez was afoot. Later, it emerged that police and paramilitaries had exchanged fire after being spooked by the presence of government drones.

Moisés Naím, a former minister from the early 90s who lives in exile, said predicting how long Rodríguez’s reign would last was impossible. “She can be out as we speak or she can stay for 10 years,” he said, lamenting how Trump had “essentially thrown María Corina Machado under the bus” to embrace members of the old regime.

“At the beginning, I was exhilarated, overjoyed [at the possibility of being] able to go back to my country,” said Naím, who has not returned for 15 years. But almost immediately, as the focus turned to the US’s thirst for oil rather than democracy, Naím realised it had merely been “a hiccup of happiness”.

“The situation today is almost indistinguishable [from before]. You really have to use a magnifying glass to try to find differences,” said Benjamin Gedan, the director of the Latin America Program at Washington’s Stimson Center and the national security council’s former South America chief. “This is just a more convenient dictatorship … It was an unfriendly dictatorship and now it’s a friendly one … It would be like picking a different crown prince in Saudi Arabia.”

This week’s prisoner release provided some encouragement to Venezuelans yearning for genuine change, although by Friday lunchtime, only a tiny fraction of those incarcerated had been freed.

As he crossed into Cúcuta from Venezuela, passing three armoured personnel carriers guarding against unrest, Ricardo Alcalá voiced optimism over his country’s new direction. “We’re into the last season of the series,” predicted the 42-year-old journalist who had driven for two days across the country from the city of Barcelona to collect a relative returning home from Chile.

How would the series end? “We don’t know,” Alcalá replied. “The truth is, nobody knows anything.”