A year ago Nicolás Maduro stole Venezuela’s election and entrenched his power by jailing and killing those who opposed him. But the world’s democracies don’t need to sit on the sidelines. Here is how they can raise the costs for Maduro.
July 2025
On 28 July 2024, Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly to elect opposition candidate Edmundo González as their next president. After years of economic failure, spiking crime, and political oppression that caused a quarter of the population to flee, exhausted voters turned out in droves to reject the brutal dictator Nicolás Maduro, despite his crude efforts to intimidate them and discredit the opposition. The result wasn’t even close: González received twice as many votes as Maduro according to more than 80 percent of the printed tally sheets — or actas — collected, posted online, and manually tabulated by the opposition. Their strategic verification efforts exposed the true magnitude of González’s win and put paid to regime claims of popular legitimacy. But Maduro’s government actively tried to suppress the results, hiding actas and releasing its own improbable totals that claimed Maduro had won with 51.2 percent of the vote. Within hours, the regime declared victory and vowed to reinaugurate Maduro for a third presidential term.
González has since fled the country, opposition leader María Corina Machado is in hiding, and numerous other opposition figures and supporters have been exiled, jailed, or killed. Maduro remains firmly entrenched, sustained by his regime’s stranglehold on state-security forces and Venezuela’s vast oil and mineral wealth, plus an illegal drug trade. The regime — still desiring a veneer of electoral legitimacy and confident in its own longevity — held state and local elections in May. The opposition boycotted these contests, rightly concerned that participating would have conferred legitimacy on a regime that rejects the results of elections it loses.
Venezuela is a true international conundrum. The country was once a stable democracy situated at the heart of the Western Hemisphere. But over the last quarter-century, its leaders — Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) followed by his successor, Nicolás Maduro — purposefully steered Venezuela toward authoritarianism. It is now a fully consolidated “electoral dictatorship.” The country, which sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves and other natural resources, was once the wealthiest in Latin America. But today, having lost more than 75 percent of its GDP, Venezuela is home to the worst man-made economic disaster in the region’s modern history. The tragedy stems from a combination of vapid Chavismo ideology, Cuban imperialism, great-power competition, and the unbridled greed and political ambition of its rulers and their cronies, who have looted the national patrimony and replaced vibrant, if imperfect, democracy with grinding dictatorship. Recovery, if it happens, could take generations and will require massive capital outlays.
Elections have long been considered the best way to reverse the excesses of Chavismo, even as the regime shrank democratic spaces, muzzled the free press, used state resources to promote government candidates, and deployed an impressive array of tactics to choke opposition parties and their supporters. Despite the obvious risks, the opposition threw itself into contesting the July 2024 election and addressing systemic issues that had weakened past opposition efforts. The Democratic Unitary Platform, a coalition of opposition parties led by Machado, delivered a united, organized, and clear alternative to Maduro. The coalition’s masterstroke was to develop a strategy to obtain and quickly publicize the vote tallies by stationing volunteers at voting booths across the country. The opposition publicized the genuine results and outmaneuvered the regime, whose subsequent efforts to cover up the fraud were quickly seen as illegitimate.
Maduro’s immediate rejection of the results and claim of victory seem to have caught the United States and broader international community by surprise. Washington had challenged Maduro to hold elections in the first place, no matter how unfree or unfair, in return for sanctions relief, but failed to prepare a “day after” strategy should the regime refuse to honor the outcome. Senior U.S. government officials, preoccupied with their own country’s electoral cycle, paid insufficient attention, and Maduro proceeded to steal the 2024 election with impunity. The Biden administration did call for the release of the actas to verify the results, but Maduro’s government predictably refused to comply and instead instituted its own “days after” strategy to suppress dissent and intimidate citizens into accepting its preferred outcome.
Russia and China immediately leapt to Maduro’s defense, as did key ally Cuba, while neighboring Colombia’s leftist president was noncommittal. The strongest attempt to resolve the electoral crisis came from Brazilian presidential advisor Celso Amorim, who remained in Caracas for days after the election trying to broker a negotiated solution — even pitching an election do-over. He returned to Brasilia when it became clear that Maduro had no intention of relinquishing power.
The Way Forward
There is a path to change, if the international community understands that Maduro has but one goal: to stay in power, which he will do until and unless the costs outweigh the benefits. And the benefits for regime insiders and cronies have been very high. If we are ever to see Maduro leave office, the costs of remaining must dramatically increase.
First, the United States and other countries should no longer trade for the return of citizens kidnapped by the Maduro regime. As repeated hostage negotiations and repatriations have shown, meeting Maduro at the negotiating table only emboldens repeat offenses; hostages are a renewable resource. Likewise, Venezuela’s ballooning population of political prisoners must be released from custody, including from the notorious Helicoide torture center.
Second, the United States must speak with one voice and one voice only on Venezuela, and work closely with president-elect González and his representatives, namely, Machado. Conflicting strategies toward Venezuela have made U.S. policy unclear, even incoherent, and direct contacts with the regime disempower Venezuela’s democratic forces.
Third, the Venezuelan cause must not be allowed to fade from international attention. The United States should vocally support a Nobel Peace Prize for Machado, the driver behind the opposition’s mass mobilization who had been the popularly elected presidential candidate until she was arbitrarily and unscrupulously banned by the regime. Machado continues to receive worldwide recognition for her courage — including being awarded the Sakharov Prize, Václav Havel Human Rights Prize, and Magnitsky Award for Outstanding Political Opposition Figure in 2024 — even as she remains in hiding in Venezuela with her life increasingly at risk.
Finally, the United States should amplify its efforts to isolate the Venezuelan regime. Threatening secondary sanctions on countries that deal commercially with Venezuela sends a strong signal; tracking and sanctioning the Russian fleet of sanctions-busting “ghost ships” should be a priority. The United States must develop new ways to stop outflows of illegal or stolen products that enrich Maduro’s regime and its supporters. Freezing and seizing financial and real assets held abroad by regime cronies and their families would be a powerful move. Other actions could include cutting off Venezuelan officials’ access to U.S.-based social media, denying third-country landing rights for Venezuelan aircraft, and coordinating regional efforts to counter Maduro’s aggressive cyber actions such as electronic monitoring of members of the opposition and their supporters, enabled by Chinese technology.
In the meantime, countries must continue their efforts on the legal front until Maduro leaves Venezuela. Circumstances will not change meaningfully until he does. These legal moves include indictments of regime officials, especially at the International Court of Justice for crimes against humanity, and monetary rewards offered by the U.S. Department of Justice to hold officials to account for narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and corruption.
For maximum effectiveness, Washington cannot act alone. It is one thing to call on the Organization of American States to “do more” about Venezuela or else lose U.S. funding, but without greater regional support it will be difficult for the OAS to act. Lacking international coordination, it will also be impossible to hunt down and sanction transshipments of illegal products or to freeze and seize illicit assets. Without the collaboration, or at least acquiescence, of neighbors such as Brazil, Colombia, and Guyana, any U.S. actions toward Venezuela will be much less effective. Current U.S. foreign and economic policies, however, may make such regional cooperation and coordination more difficult.
Some observers have raised the possibility of military actions — including regime-decapitating drone strikes, targeted assassinations, mercenary actions, and outright invasion to overthrow Maduro. But these would be impractical, politically unpopular, largely ineffective in achieving long-term peace and stability, and contrary to the values and interests of a democratically governed country, at least without a clear international mandate from the UN Security Council (where China and Russia would certainly exercise their veto power). This calculus could change if Maduro himself establishes a casus belli by, for example, foolishly invading neighboring Guyana to enforce claims on the Essequibo region, as he has periodically threatened. But Maduro knows the red lines; such self-defeating actions are unlikely.
Still, continued efforts to peel away the support of the regime’s military and security forces on the basis of their constitutional duties and self-interest is appropriate and remains an essential aspect of creating conditions that will contribute to a restoration of Venezuela’s democratic path.
The Reality and the Hope
Venezuelans were repeatedly told to change their situation through the electoral process, to unite their divided opposition, and to take to the streets and demand accountability when all else failed. This is precisely what they did. Opposition leaders gambled by competing on a dramatically tilted playing field. They and their voters risked their lives for this vote, and they won. But Maduro cracked down hard and remains in power today, while the international community has largely moved on.
But Venezuela is a country worth fighting for, where democracy once stood and can stand again. The stolen election of 2024 must not be the last word for Venezuelan democracy. The question now is whether the world will do what’s necessary to help push sustainable, positive change.
Eric Farnsworth is a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a Director of the Venezuelan American Association of the United States. He previously served in the White House and State Department and led the Washington office of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images
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