The Trump administration abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last weekend to stand trial in New York. It is the latest in a long string of U.S. interventions in Latin America, but one foreign policy expert says the big difference this time is how America did it.
Nick Cullather, professor of history and international studies at Indiana University, said past American meddling with neighbors was usually covert. Now, it has openly violated international law.
“It wants to be able to deny that it's interfering even militarily in Latin American countries, largely because of the repercussions of that for other parts of the world,” Cullather said. “There are a lot of aggressors in other parts of the world that might want to do similar things.”
The Trump administration has been explicit that it intends control the country’s government and open its oil resources to private enterprise.
But the viability of those plans is also in question. Maduro remains unpopular in Venezuela, but the opposition may not be significant enough to replace the Chavista regime.
That’s according to Leandro Aristeguieta, a history doctoral student at IU.
“They can't very well put Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, who won the 2024 elections, or Maria Corina Machado, in the middle of Caracas and say they're the leaders now. That wouldn't last a day,” Aristeguieta said. “You have to work with the people that are there.”
That means the entrenched Chavista government, which has held power since the late 1990s. Venezuela Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in Monday as acting president.
Aristeguieta was born in Venezuela and studies its relationship with the United States. His family still lives there, and he said there’s little love lost for Maduro. One friend of the family was arrested and disappeared for speaking against the regime.
“I think you can't blame people for putting their hopes on Trump, because it's been many years of disappointments in Venezuela and tragedy,” he said.
But he doesn’t approve of the U.S. attack and said that, as a historian, he doesn’t expect the ruling party – or its record on human rights – to improve.
If the Chavistas were removed from power, Cullather warns consequences could be even more disastrous.
“This is liable to be a very messy process, and the Trump administration is anxious to claim that they're avoiding the mistakes of Iraq, when in fact they are exactly repeating those mistakes,” he said.
Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party systematically looted banks, museums and oil companies soon after Americans reached Baghdad in 2003; it also pre-positioned caches of arms.
“The Chavistas might well be pre-positioning bombs at polling places, at oil refineries, at airports, wherever they could disrupt an American transition,” Cullather said.
He is also skeptical of Trump’s plan to open Venezuela to foreign oil companies. While the South American country sits on the world’s largest petroleum reserves, its thick, low-grade bitumen is expensive to extract.
“The claims that Trump has been making about the eagerness of American oil companies to dive into Venezuela and to begin extracting their oil are exaggerated,” Cullather said. “I would imagine that American oil companies are going to be very wary.”
Ultimately, Aristeguieta is pessimistic.
“I don't see anything much changing within the near future.”
