In the dead of the night on 3rd January 2026, US forces captured or kidnapped (depending on one’s point of view) President Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela and his wife from their residence in Caracas and flew them to New York - where, in the theatre of performative power and humiliation that we have witnessed in human traffic in the opposite direction namely the deportation of supposedly illegal Latino immigrants and falsely branded criminals to El Salvador’s notorious supermax - to face charges of narcotics supply to the US.
The overthrow of uncompliant governments in Latin America at the instigation of US agencies is, of course, hardly a rare event in a region where America has always presumed the right to do as it likes to uphold its strategic interests. But this was no half-baked attempt to overthrow a regime using native proxies like the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961; no coup with a ready mean moustachioed military dictator like Pinochet; no long drawn out insurgency such as the Contra guerrilla campaign against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in the 1980s; no transformative blueprint for the reordering of an entire region by democratisation and free markets such as the Project for a New American Century which provided the intellectual ballast for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. No, it was the decapitation of the figure head while the regime continues its repression of the Venezuela population. In an inversion of the language of anti-war movements of the West, “it was all about oil” as Trump made abundantly clear while it was most certainly not about “democracy” which was the message delivered by Trump’s disavowal of any role in any future dispensation for Maria Corina Machado, the leading light of the democratic opposition and winner of the Noble Laureate which Trump so craves while he indicates his desire to cut a deal with the technocratic Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez to ensure US control of Venezuelan oil reserves. No colour revolutions on Trump’s watch.
And there will be no colour revolutions, televised or otherwise, because despite the apparent ideological chasm between Trump and the Chavismo regime that Maduro represented, both belong to the loose but interconnected conglomerate of authoritarian leaders that Anne Applebaum describes as Autocracy Inc. Unlike military regimes and ideological alliances from the past and contemporary hybrid or “illiberal” democracies like Hungary, Turkey or India, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, cemented not by ideology but instead by a ruthless, single-minded determination to keep their personal privilege and wealth.[1]
Applebaum lists the strongmen leaders of the following countries (at the time of writing): Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan and maybe three dozen others who share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to repel any attempts at transparency or accountability, and to strike out at anyone, at home or abroad, who has the courage to challenge them. The leaders of Autocracy Inc also share a brutally pragmatic approach to wealth. They often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures. Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are moulded not through ideals but through deals – deals designed to ameliorate the effects of sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.[2] Although the name of the country that he leads is not listed in the above rogues gallery of autocracies, the modus operandi of their mutual collaboration also belong to the toolkit of President Donald Trump. His transactional view of the world, of personal and international relations and his brazen and signal approach towards self-enrichment puts the United States into that club.
Not a few of those autocracies on that list were initially birthed through popular revolutionary or national liberation struggles such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola and, most pertinently for this article, Venezuela. For as much as the events of January 3, 2026, are so emblematic of raw American power, they can also be seen as the long-term culmination of a revolution betrayed.
President Hugo Chavez arrived in office in 1998 after a strident campaign for change in the Republic of Venezuela which had been established forty years earlier. Formerly a wealthy, stable democracy, Venezuela had, as is the typical developmental pattern in many oil states, become nepotistic and corrupt with bribery of politicians and kickbacks being given to their friends. With the fall in oil prices in the 1990s, the resultant anger created the conditions for the revolutionary ferment that brought Chavez, a lieutenant-colonel in the Venezuelan army who had led an abortive coup d’etat in 1992, to power in a democratic election in 1998 on a promise to create a more honest Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. A year later, the new Venezuelan president held a meeting with an old comrade in struggle Jesus Urdenta, his chief of internal police. Urdenta brought to Chavez evidence of corrupt practices in the new, supposedly revolutionary government. He informed him that several top officials in the new government were padding invoices for government contracts, including the printing contract for Chavez’s new constitution. Urdenta urged Chavez to bring an end to such behaviour. After an initial silence, Chavez asked for Urdenta’s resignation and Venuezela’s Supreme Court quashed any investigation into corruption.[3]
So, Chavez made a choice, one which would prove in the long term to be fatal for the legitimacy of the revolution and the Bolivarian Republic. Had he sided with his old comrade and established an expectation of probity in the public sector, then it would have provided a solid ethical and democratic foundations for the undoubtedly popular social programmes that he did institute. But, in an attempt to keep himself in power in perpetuity, he made the calculation that corrupt officials would prove more malleable than clean ones and he was proved right to the long-term detriment of his revolution and his country.[4]
For in the years that followed, cronies of Chavez would support the president’s drive to eliminate any mode of accountability and transparency, both because doing so maintained their stay in power and protected them from scrutiny. Like other budding autocrats like Putin, Orban and Erdogan, Chavez gradually but steadily denuded democratic institutions in Venezuela of autonomy – the press, the courts, the civil service, various regulators, and ombudspersons – even while proclaiming his belief in democracy. His supporters went along with that too and, over time, the state began to act like a criminal enterprise.[5]
And what a gravy train grew for the officials who partook in the skimming off of the Bolivarian Republic’s resources. During the fourteen years Chavez held power, Venezuela took in nearly $800 billion in oil-export revenues, much of which did indeed finance the state welfare programmes which made Chavez such a poster boy for Western leftists like Jeremy Corbyn, erstwhile leader of the British Labour Party. But hundreds of billions of dollars from PDVSA, the state oil company, as well as other Venezuelan state companies, ended up in bank accounts around the world. In 2017. Investigators found that PDVSA officials had been hiding millions of stolen dollars at the Portuguese bank, Banco Espirito Santo. A 2021 investigation revealed that Swiss banks were hiding $10 billion on behalf of officials at Venezuelan state banks, electrical utilities, and other entities. In that same year, journalists uncovered a $2 billion Venezuelan oil company that had been processed through banks in the principality of Andorra.[6]
But graft pervaded the totality of Chavismo society with one of its most important agents being the industry of currency exchange manipulation, created by the state’s byzantine system of multiple currency prices. The beneficiaries of this “democratisation of kleptocracy” included students who gamed the allowance for cheap dollars meant for overseas studies either to profit from the artificial exchange rates abroad or by paying unscrupulous schools to produce paperwork suggesting that they had studied abroad which meant that cheap dollars could be swapped on the black market for many more Venezuelan bolivars than it had cost to buy them, creating for the student “a nice little earner” of a few thousands of dollars in profit. But there were far greater and more egregious players in on this scamocracy who exploited their connections to work out how to claim tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to import spare parts, medical supplies, telecoms equipment, chemicals, computers. If Venezuela needed to import anything, then someone would be generating the false paper trails and making discreet payoffs, just to unlock access to cheap currency. [7]
Behind the allure and bluster of Chavismo propaganda lay an economy and society so weakened by corruption and gross incompetence that it was peculiarly exposed to the effects of turbulence, internally and externally. The cash behemoth that was the oil industry was the first to suffer the shocks that undid the Bolivarian revolution. In 2002-3, Chavez detonated chaos in the industry by sacking 19,000 oil workers for going on strike and replaced experts with regime loyalists. Later, the decline of commodity prices and the imposition of sanctions on the PDVSA by the first Trump administration accelerated the collapse. Almost simultaneously, Venezuela began to experience critical scarcities of everything due to the currency exchange scams. Billions (or maybe tens of billions) of state funds had disappeared into the proverbial black hole, the country’s foreign currency had been siphoned into private offshore accounts, hyperinflation accelerated, and imported goods disappeared.[8]
People without dollars faced hunger and malnutrition if not outright starvation. The Catholic Charity Caritas estimated in 2019 that 78 percent of Venezuelans ate less than they used to, and 41 percent went whole days without eating. Doctors in Venezuelan hospitals faced pressure not to list malnutrition as either a cause of illness or death.[9] Even the most basic commodities disappeared from shelves including, most excruciatingly embarrassing (if such emotions could be held by such uber-kleptocrats) toilet paper.
The death knell for the Bolivarian revolution turned kleptocracy with a faux left tinge should have been sounded by the death of Chavez in 2013 and his replacement by the uncharismatic party functionary Nicholas Maduro. Venezuelans knew the truth of the hollowed-out revolution and the regime it brought to power; corruption seeped from its pores. The accession of Maduro to power ushered in a series of popular, Arab Spring demonstrations across the country and it seemed that the days of the regime were well and truly numbered. However, as Anne Applebaum describes, this was the moment that the regime called in favours from Autocracy Inc.
As well as the common ur garden means of revenue raising by rogue regimes such as drug trafficking, illegal mining, kidnapping, extortion and gasoline smuggling, the Maduro regime was able to find friends and trading partners among other sanctioned states and companies happy to engage in corruption. Russian companies such as Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil and TNK-BP (a joint Russian-British venture, at their own behest or at the request of the state, filled the gaps left by departing European, North American and South American firms frightened by the instability and risk, to put money into Venezuelan oil, agriculture and even manufacturing. In addition to subsidised grain exports replacing those previously from Canada and the US and gasoline (the only gasoline available in Venezuela), Moscow supplied Caracas with some $4 billion of arms and armaments, including 100,000 Kalashnikovs, 24 fighter jets, and 50 helicopters to be used in the recurring bouts of repression that characterised the Maduro regime. Complementing such lethal cargo, China has sold surveillance technology, crowd-control equipment, and riot gear to the Maduro government, along with water cannons, tear-gas guns and enormous moveable walls that could block people from joining crowds – all tools that helped prevent the opposition from winning power. China had also been a generous benefactor in the way in which it replaced international institutions wary of lending to Venezuela by providing $30 billion in loans before it cottoned onto the reality that these loans would never be paid back and that an incredibly expensive, Chinese-backed high-speed railway meant to cross Venezuela’s lightly populated southern plains would never be completed due to Venezuelan contractors absconding with the money.[10]
A shared anti-American worldview links Cuba and Venezuela and in return for subsidised Venezuelan oil, Cuba provided soldiers, police officers, security and intelligence experts as sell as sports coaches, doctors, and nurses. A shared feeling of ‘disrespect’ from the democratic world lies behind the personal links between Maduro and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Venezuela exports gold to Turkey and receives food in exchange. But the biggest Autocracy Inc relationship that Venezuela has cultivated and developed is with Iran. They relate to each other on the basis of shared anti-American grievance and interest in clandestine petroleum sales. Iranians bought Venezuelan gold and sent food and gasoline in return. Iranians are believed to be advising Venezuela on repressive tactic against dissidents. They helped Venezuela build a drone factory with mixed success and have helped with the repair of Venezuelan oil refineries. In return, the Venezuelans may have helped launder money for the Iranian proxy militia and are believed to have provided passports for Hezbollah and Iranian officials as well.[11]
By tapping into this axis of convenience/corruption/illiberalism (add any suitable adjective) conceptualised by Applebaum as Autocracy Inc, the Maduro regime was able to shamelessly steal elections, bloodily suppress street protests and imprison thousands of political opponents and presumably continue to feather the nests of its entourage of placemen and apparatchiks.
And there will be no colour revolutions, televised or otherwise, because despite the apparent ideological chasm between Trump and the Chavismo regime that Maduro represented, both belong to the loose but interconnected conglomerate of authoritarian leaders that Anne Applebaum describes as Autocracy Inc. Unlike military regimes and ideological alliances from the past and contemporary hybrid or “illiberal” democracies like Hungary, Turkey or India, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, cemented not by ideology but instead by a ruthless, single-minded determination to keep their personal privilege and wealth.[1]
Applebaum lists the strongmen leaders of the following countries (at the time of writing): Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan and maybe three dozen others who share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to repel any attempts at transparency or accountability, and to strike out at anyone, at home or abroad, who has the courage to challenge them. The leaders of Autocracy Inc also share a brutally pragmatic approach to wealth. They often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures. Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are moulded not through ideals but through deals – deals designed to ameliorate the effects of sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.[2] Although the name of the country that he leads is not listed in the above rogues gallery of autocracies, the modus operandi of their mutual collaboration also belong to the toolkit of President Donald Trump. His transactional view of the world, of personal and international relations and his brazen and signal approach towards self-enrichment puts the United States into that club.
Not a few of those autocracies on that list were initially birthed through popular revolutionary or national liberation struggles such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola and, most pertinently for this article, Venezuela. For as much as the events of January 3, 2026, are so emblematic of raw American power, they can also be seen as the long-term culmination of a revolution betrayed.
President Hugo Chavez arrived in office in 1998 after a strident campaign for change in the Republic of Venezuela which had been established forty years earlier. Formerly a wealthy, stable democracy, Venezuela had, as is the typical developmental pattern in many oil states, become nepotistic and corrupt with bribery of politicians and kickbacks being given to their friends. With the fall in oil prices in the 1990s, the resultant anger created the conditions for the revolutionary ferment that brought Chavez, a lieutenant-colonel in the Venezuelan army who had led an abortive coup d’etat in 1992, to power in a democratic election in 1998 on a promise to create a more honest Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. A year later, the new Venezuelan president held a meeting with an old comrade in struggle Jesus Urdenta, his chief of internal police. Urdenta brought to Chavez evidence of corrupt practices in the new, supposedly revolutionary government. He informed him that several top officials in the new government were padding invoices for government contracts, including the printing contract for Chavez’s new constitution. Urdenta urged Chavez to bring an end to such behaviour. After an initial silence, Chavez asked for Urdenta’s resignation and Venuezela’s Supreme Court quashed any investigation into corruption.[3]
So, Chavez made a choice, one which would prove in the long term to be fatal for the legitimacy of the revolution and the Bolivarian Republic. Had he sided with his old comrade and established an expectation of probity in the public sector, then it would have provided a solid ethical and democratic foundations for the undoubtedly popular social programmes that he did institute. But, in an attempt to keep himself in power in perpetuity, he made the calculation that corrupt officials would prove more malleable than clean ones and he was proved right to the long-term detriment of his revolution and his country.[4]
For in the years that followed, cronies of Chavez would support the president’s drive to eliminate any mode of accountability and transparency, both because doing so maintained their stay in power and protected them from scrutiny. Like other budding autocrats like Putin, Orban and Erdogan, Chavez gradually but steadily denuded democratic institutions in Venezuela of autonomy – the press, the courts, the civil service, various regulators, and ombudspersons – even while proclaiming his belief in democracy. His supporters went along with that too and, over time, the state began to act like a criminal enterprise.[5]
And what a gravy train grew for the officials who partook in the skimming off of the Bolivarian Republic’s resources. During the fourteen years Chavez held power, Venezuela took in nearly $800 billion in oil-export revenues, much of which did indeed finance the state welfare programmes which made Chavez such a poster boy for Western leftists like Jeremy Corbyn, erstwhile leader of the British Labour Party. But hundreds of billions of dollars from PDVSA, the state oil company, as well as other Venezuelan state companies, ended up in bank accounts around the world. In 2017. Investigators found that PDVSA officials had been hiding millions of stolen dollars at the Portuguese bank, Banco Espirito Santo. A 2021 investigation revealed that Swiss banks were hiding $10 billion on behalf of officials at Venezuelan state banks, electrical utilities, and other entities. In that same year, journalists uncovered a $2 billion Venezuelan oil company that had been processed through banks in the principality of Andorra.[6]
But graft pervaded the totality of Chavismo society with one of its most important agents being the industry of currency exchange manipulation, created by the state’s byzantine system of multiple currency prices. The beneficiaries of this “democratisation of kleptocracy” included students who gamed the allowance for cheap dollars meant for overseas studies either to profit from the artificial exchange rates abroad or by paying unscrupulous schools to produce paperwork suggesting that they had studied abroad which meant that cheap dollars could be swapped on the black market for many more Venezuelan bolivars than it had cost to buy them, creating for the student “a nice little earner” of a few thousands of dollars in profit. But there were far greater and more egregious players in on this scamocracy who exploited their connections to work out how to claim tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to import spare parts, medical supplies, telecoms equipment, chemicals, computers. If Venezuela needed to import anything, then someone would be generating the false paper trails and making discreet payoffs, just to unlock access to cheap currency. [7]
Behind the allure and bluster of Chavismo propaganda lay an economy and society so weakened by corruption and gross incompetence that it was peculiarly exposed to the effects of turbulence, internally and externally. The cash behemoth that was the oil industry was the first to suffer the shocks that undid the Bolivarian revolution. In 2002-3, Chavez detonated chaos in the industry by sacking 19,000 oil workers for going on strike and replaced experts with regime loyalists. Later, the decline of commodity prices and the imposition of sanctions on the PDVSA by the first Trump administration accelerated the collapse. Almost simultaneously, Venezuela began to experience critical scarcities of everything due to the currency exchange scams. Billions (or maybe tens of billions) of state funds had disappeared into the proverbial black hole, the country’s foreign currency had been siphoned into private offshore accounts, hyperinflation accelerated, and imported goods disappeared.[8]
People without dollars faced hunger and malnutrition if not outright starvation. The Catholic Charity Caritas estimated in 2019 that 78 percent of Venezuelans ate less than they used to, and 41 percent went whole days without eating. Doctors in Venezuelan hospitals faced pressure not to list malnutrition as either a cause of illness or death.[9] Even the most basic commodities disappeared from shelves including, most excruciatingly embarrassing (if such emotions could be held by such uber-kleptocrats) toilet paper.
The death knell for the Bolivarian revolution turned kleptocracy with a faux left tinge should have been sounded by the death of Chavez in 2013 and his replacement by the uncharismatic party functionary Nicholas Maduro. Venezuelans knew the truth of the hollowed-out revolution and the regime it brought to power; corruption seeped from its pores. The accession of Maduro to power ushered in a series of popular, Arab Spring demonstrations across the country and it seemed that the days of the regime were well and truly numbered. However, as Anne Applebaum describes, this was the moment that the regime called in favours from Autocracy Inc.
As well as the common ur garden means of revenue raising by rogue regimes such as drug trafficking, illegal mining, kidnapping, extortion and gasoline smuggling, the Maduro regime was able to find friends and trading partners among other sanctioned states and companies happy to engage in corruption. Russian companies such as Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil and TNK-BP (a joint Russian-British venture, at their own behest or at the request of the state, filled the gaps left by departing European, North American and South American firms frightened by the instability and risk, to put money into Venezuelan oil, agriculture and even manufacturing. In addition to subsidised grain exports replacing those previously from Canada and the US and gasoline (the only gasoline available in Venezuela), Moscow supplied Caracas with some $4 billion of arms and armaments, including 100,000 Kalashnikovs, 24 fighter jets, and 50 helicopters to be used in the recurring bouts of repression that characterised the Maduro regime. Complementing such lethal cargo, China has sold surveillance technology, crowd-control equipment, and riot gear to the Maduro government, along with water cannons, tear-gas guns and enormous moveable walls that could block people from joining crowds – all tools that helped prevent the opposition from winning power. China had also been a generous benefactor in the way in which it replaced international institutions wary of lending to Venezuela by providing $30 billion in loans before it cottoned onto the reality that these loans would never be paid back and that an incredibly expensive, Chinese-backed high-speed railway meant to cross Venezuela’s lightly populated southern plains would never be completed due to Venezuelan contractors absconding with the money.[10]
A shared anti-American worldview links Cuba and Venezuela and in return for subsidised Venezuelan oil, Cuba provided soldiers, police officers, security and intelligence experts as sell as sports coaches, doctors, and nurses. A shared feeling of ‘disrespect’ from the democratic world lies behind the personal links between Maduro and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Venezuela exports gold to Turkey and receives food in exchange. But the biggest Autocracy Inc relationship that Venezuela has cultivated and developed is with Iran. They relate to each other on the basis of shared anti-American grievance and interest in clandestine petroleum sales. Iranians bought Venezuelan gold and sent food and gasoline in return. Iranians are believed to be advising Venezuela on repressive tactic against dissidents. They helped Venezuela build a drone factory with mixed success and have helped with the repair of Venezuelan oil refineries. In return, the Venezuelans may have helped launder money for the Iranian proxy militia and are believed to have provided passports for Hezbollah and Iranian officials as well.[11]
By tapping into this axis of convenience/corruption/illiberalism (add any suitable adjective) conceptualised by Applebaum as Autocracy Inc, the Maduro regime was able to shamelessly steal elections, bloodily suppress street protests and imprison thousands of political opponents and presumably continue to feather the nests of its entourage of placemen and apparatchiks.
The ending of Maduro’s term in office by a much more powerful kleptocrat and authoritarian populist who, like Maduro’s predecessor, can speak to his constituency in familiar language, will most likely change nothing on the ground. In many ways, it was an easy win for Trump as his European allies, especially the UK, feels hamstrung in its response due to their perceived need to keep him on board in the defence of Ukraine. Despite all his bluster, it is almost impossible to see him repeating his “success” with, for example, the despotism of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
References
References
[1] Anne Applebaum (2024), Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run The World. London: Allen Lane p.2
[2] Ibid, p.3
[3] Ibid, pp.43-44
[2] Ibid, p.3
[3] Ibid, pp.43-44
[8] Ibid, pp.48-49
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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