Next week, Venezuelans will mark 100 days since U.S. forces launched a raid in Caracas, capturing President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and taking them to the U.S. to face trial on drug-trafficking and other charges.
The operation sparked a debate about whether Maduro’s removal from power constituted another U.S. attempt at “regime change”—a politically loaded term after the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan—this time aiming to restore democracy in Venezuela. Indeed, some Venezuelans both at home and among the diaspora thought they would see a quick break with Caracas’ 27-year history of increasingly illiberal and deeply anti-American policies, first launched by Hugo Chavez after he was elected president in 1998.
Those policies were continued by Maduro, Chavez’s hand-picked successor who took over after he died in 2013. Since then, Maduro accelerated the dismantling of Venezuela’s democracy, tightening the increasingly dictatorial regime’s apparatus of repression while also driving the economy into a ditch.