Maduro is gone, but his regime is intact. What happened behind the scenes?

Maduro is gone, but his regime is intact. What happened behind the scenes?
Alejandro Velasco

In the early fray of foreign interventions, evidence is largely circumstantial. But here the circumstances tell a powerful story


(Guardian UK) As late as Saturday afternoon, fires continued to smolder in parts of Caracas. Residents throughout the city, stunned and anxious, filled grocery stores and gas stations, stocking up before a future unknown. Everywhere the question hung in the air like the smoke still clouding Venezuela’s capital: what next?

After months of military buildup, deadly strikes at sea and a looming ground war, the United States made good on its threats to attack Venezuela in a dramatic overnight raid that ended with Nicolás Maduro in a New York City jail cell. Yet 48 hours later, little else appeared different in Caracas: Maduro’s inner circle remained in place; state institutions remained in their control; streets were calm, if tense, while authorities called on people to return to their daily lives. In other words: move along, nothing to see here.

If this is regime change, it seems a strange sort, one that leaves the regime otherwise intact, and which raises a more pressing question than what comes next: what happened? Of course, much remains speculative. But at this point, information available suggests that after over a decade of tight cohesion around Maduro, his inner circle calculated they were better off without him and struck a deal with the Trump administration: Maduro in exchange for staying in power.

In the early fray of foreign interventions, evidence is largely circumstantial. But here the circumstances tell a powerful story. First the raid itself. To be sure, US forces – covert and conventional – have formidable superiority over Venezuela’s military apparatus, whose primary plan to combat US intervention has long been asymmetric rather than head-to-head war. Still, the absence of even minimal organized resistance to a raid that involved multiple low-flying, slow-moving aircraft traversing densely populated and otherwise heavily defended Venezuelan airspace for more than two hours invites speculation not only about prior knowledge of the attack by Venezuela’s military, but about stand-down orders for the bulk of the country’s armed forces. .................(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/08/maduro-gone-regime-intact-behind-the-scenes