A Venezuelan Expat Makes A Case for Justice That Can Bring About Real Democratic Change
Editor’s Note: Venezuelan expat Ernesto Rodriguez reflects on the U.S. military’s Jan. 3, 2026 capture of Nicolás Maduro, recounts the authoritarian leader’s grip on power from 2013-2026, makes a case against the years of torture and political corruption, and calls for justice. Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are facing U.S. federal charges in New York for narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and weapons offenses.
Let’s picture the scene. I’m sleeping back home in Madrid, and I get woken up by a call from Caracas, where the time is around 3 o’clock in the morning. As anyone knows, calls at those hours are usually some form of bad—or at the very least urgent—news. This wasn’t an exception.
I probably won’t forget my dad’s words, precisely for how bizarre they were: “Hey, we are all at home and fine, so keep calm, but Caracas is getting bombed.”
After making sure my parents and brothers were fine, the next few hours were a frantic process of calling friends and family back in Venezuela to make sure they were okay. But after that came a weird realization: My city getting bombed was not good news, of course, but the feeling of hope was unavoidable. At least something was happening. Chavismo’s decision to steal the election in 2024 finally had consequences, even if reality rarely works how we want it to move.
Of course, reactions have come from everywhere. It seems everyone has an opinion on the U.S. capture of Maduro. As a Venezuelan who escaped the repressive regime, listening to the opinions tests my patience. I’ve heard from friends and colleagues opinions on what’s happening and how we should feel today. Some people try to explain to me why it is bad news that the Trump administration is taking such brazen actions. Defenders of the regime express sadness that one of the last openly “socialist” countries got its president captured.
For many Venezuelan exiles like me, the weeks after Nicolás Maduro’s capture in what many consider to be an illegal military intervention have been complex, confusing, and hopeful all at once. But the weirdest part has not necessarily been seeing the trial or even how the political movements and different players look to benefit from the moment, but how many people, once again, completely ignore the long history of human rights violations of his regime. I understand that for those opposing Donald Trump in the United States, it is important to protect American democracy, but many of the arguments relating to Venezuela seem supportive of a cruel dictator that hurts your case for democracy in the long term. It consolidates the support that this administration still has in the U.S.-based Cuban and Venezuelan communities.
The ‘Madurismo’ Grip on Power
Maduro, who got to the presidency in 2013 after being appointed by Hugo Chávez as his successor, started his grip on power with immediate controversy and protest. The first election he won in April of that year, against the now-forgotten Henrique Capriles Radonski, was considered a fraud by his rival. At that time, Chavismo was hiding behind the “actas”—more on those later—to not open the ballot boxes when his opponent called for a recount, and with the opposition not being able to provide them after the pressure on their poll watchers, it made it impossible to get them at that point.
His reign came to be known as “Madurismo.” The next 13 years of “Madurismo” were a succession of political and economic crises that left people struggling to cover their basic needs. While many defenders of Chavismo around the world will say that the economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela comes from international sanctions, the truth is a lot more complex. While, yes, the sanctions eventually came from the United States, they only appeared after the students’ protests asking for better living conditions that took place every few years inside the country. The first one of those was in 2014.
“La Salida,” as the movement spearheaded by María Corina Machado and Leopoldo López was called, came with what was the modus operandi from the government to deal with dissent: shooting at the protesters—first with gas, then with rubber bullets, and eventually just bullets—and jailing as many protesters as possible to cause fear. It wasn’t just jail, though; according to the latest report from the United Nations fact-finding mission to Venezuela, protesters in 2014, 2017, 2019, and beyond were subject to physical, psychological, and even sexual torture, sometimes for years in places like “El Helicoide” or “La Tumba.”
YEARS AND YEARS OF TORTURE
It’s hard to put words to the testimonies of torture inflicted by Nicolás Maduro’s regime is hard, because many of us know someone who went through it, and even now, we worry about our inside that’s still dealing with the Delcy Rodríguez regime, which is proving day by day to be more of the same. According to the UN report, they managed to confirm at least 28 cases of forced disappearance and 10 cases of torture. While many will say it sounds small, these only take into account the findings of the independent investigative commission but are not the only testimonies.
According to Foro Penal, an NGO working for the freedom of political prisoners in Venezuela, there have been over 19,087 detentions motivated by politics, with 475 political prisoners still in the country, two of them missing. Many of the jailed in those years have died in prison, or disappeared, and even with the amnesty law letting some of them out, there are videos and stories of freed prisoners incapable of recognizing family and friends after years of torture.
KILLING OF PROTESTERS
That’s not the only number that boggles the mind. During this time, the armed forces and the police were under the direct command of former Minister of Defense Padrino López and Diosdado Cabello. According to data from Provea, taking into account the deaths from the protests in 2014, 2017, 2019, and 2024, government forces killed 291 unarmed protesters. This is not counting the numbers killed or injured by the “colectivos,” the unofficial militias formed by Chavismo.
THE ECONOMIC CRISIS
It sounds kind of absurd, but the torture, capture, and the murder of peaceful protesters might not even be the main reason for Venezuelans to be angry at Maduro. His government also presided over the worst economic and humanitarian crisis in Latin America in the 21st century; the food shortages from 2016 all the way to 2020, at least, adding to the water and electricity cutoffs, made living conditions for many Venezuelans the worst they had ever been, and caused the biggest migration wave of the continent, with more than 8 million people leaving the country.
The situation went to extremes. Since the left-wing political movement known as Chavismo came to power back in 1998, Venezuela became a country of migrants. It went from being a nation of the middle and upper classes to a free-for-all, where people felt that any other country had better conditions of living.
TWO CHANCES TO LEAVE PEACEFULLY
Part of the problem is that Maduro decided to stay in power by all means possible, even when he had at least two chances for a peaceful transition of power. Back in 2015, the opposition won, comfortably, the National Assembly—the equivalent of both Houses of Congress and Senate in the United States—with a supermajority that could’ve permitted them to make the needed structural and economic changes to fix the problem. But Chavismo ran to change the judges of the Supreme Court to take out two members, avoid the supermajority, and take away the power of the legislature to… well, legislate. This ended up causing a constitutional crisis that ended with the failed movement to make Juan Guaidó president back in 2019.
But he had another chance. Maduro is widely considered to have lost the presidential election of 2024. Vente Venezuela, María Corina Machado‘s party, even managed to get enough “actas” to prove that Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate, won with over 70 percent of the vote. But instead, the National Electoral Committee announced a result that nobody has audited or trusted, without showing how the vote was split by state.
Chavismo didn’t accept the same proof they used to discredit the fraud allegations in 2013. And they stayed in power, by any means necessary, again. That’s why you see Venezuelans celebrating Maduro’s capture, as illegal as it was, or sending letters to him in prison making fun of him. It is also why we are ready to accept the help of people like Trump, even when they clearly don’t care what happens to us.
It’s not just that we think he’s also guilty of drug trafficking—the main charge against him in American court—but also that for many of us, it’s not enough. It kind of feels like Al Capone getting caught for tax evasion. It is not that drug trafficking is not a crime. It is that it doesn’t feel close to being the most significant crime Maduro committed—crimes against his own people.
¿CAN MADURO STAND ANOTHER TRIAL?
To be fair, there’s a real chance that now that he’s captured, Maduro gets to stand a real trial for his human rights violations. Argentina, for example, has asked for extradition of the former president so he can be judged the same way an Argentine civilian court tried their own dictator, Jorge Rafael Videla, back in 1985. That is not the only open case.
Back in 2021, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor opened a formal investigation into alleged crimes against humanity (including torture, sexual violence, and arbitrary detentions) committed by Venezuelan authorities since 2017. That investigation is open, and the ICC can take its time. Under the Rome Statute heads of state do not exempt a person from its jurisdiction, and national authorities in Venezuela are not interested in making the right investigations.
For so many of us it feels like real justice is needed for change. It’s yet to be seen how the Maduro trial in New York goes on and if any of the other indictments can make a dictator stand trial. Justice, not vengeance, is needed for a real change, not to keep the Delcy regime, but to have real democracy and real freedom and, for some of us, to go back home.
