Venezuela Lost Its Democracy: A Comprehensive Analysis
- At first I thought it was an earthquake, but as the second, fourth, and fifth hollow explosions followed, I knew it was the Americans.
- Around the world, Venezuelans were seen celebrating what many believed was the end of Nicolás Maduro's rule.
- Those reactions make sense only if you understand how democracy died in Venezuela: not suddenly, but slowly, quietly, and through institutions that once claimed to protect it.
On Jan. 3, I was at home in Caracas when I heard explosions. My room’s windows shook and the walls trembled. At first I thought it was an earthquake, but as the second, fourth, and fifth hollow explosions followed, I knew it was the Americans. A military buildup in the caribbean that started in Aug. 2025 hung loosely inside millions of Venezuelan’s minds. As I heard the sounds of aircraft echo above me, uncertainty sank in.
Around the world, Venezuelans were seen celebrating what many believed was the end of Nicolás Maduro‘s rule. The scenes puzzled observers abroad. How could people celebrate while worrying about foreign intervention? How could relief coexist with fear?
Those reactions make sense only if you understand how democracy died in Venezuela: not suddenly, but slowly, quietly, and through institutions that once claimed to protect it.
Democracy rarely disappears overnight. More often, it erodes-procedure by procedure-until people must risk their lives to prove that their votes ever mattered.Venezuela is not a warning about ideology.It is a warning about complacency.
Context matters. Over the past decade, roughly a quarter of Venezuela’s population-one in every four people-has left my country. (For comparison, imagine if the population of California, Texas, and a couple of smaller states left the U.S.) People do not abandon their families, their homes, and their futures without reason.
Part of the answer is bad governance a“`html
I first reported on Venezuela’s descent into authoritarianism in 2014, covering the protests that erupted after Nicolás Maduro’s election. I revisited the story in 2014 and again in 2017. I covered those protests as a journalist for national and international agencies. I hid behind kiosks as people inside government buildings shot bullets from above. I learned to use milk or toothpaste to quench tear gas’s sting on sweaty skin. I carried a dying protester as her eyes turned purple-security forces had shot a gas canister at her head.
Repression intensified.At least 200 people were killed during those protests, and more than 5,400 were detained. Torture became an increasingly common political weapon: 33 documented cases in 2014, and at least 88 in 2017.
The government also deepened its control over territory and labor. Maduro decreed that 12% of Venezuela’s land-much of it Amazon rainforest-woudl be opened to mining. The Communist Party, long an ally of Chávez, was persecuted and forcibly intervened. Dozens of union leaders and labor-rights advocates were jailed on charges of “conspiracy” or ”treason.”
By 2024, Venezuela was no longer a functioning democracy, but elections still mattered, as they revealed the regime’s illegitimacy.
The tallies were transported-sometimes by canoe through Amazon rivers, other times by vehicle-to secret locations where they were digitized and uploaded via Starlink to a secure database.
That night, the National electoral Council announced results that were mathematically impractical, according to analyses later conducted by Columbia University mathematicians. Machado and her candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, challenged the official count. The next day, their team published digitized tallies from 85% of voting machines nationwide. The data showed a two-to-one opposition victory-even though the quarter of Venezuelans who live abroad, and overwhelmingly oppose Maduro, were left out of the voting registry.
Gonzalez urrutia won in all states.He also won in many military and police polling stations, including the government armed forces university and Libertador airbase, among Venezuela’s largest. Venezuelans were united in their democratic will for change.
To this day, neither Maduro’s party nor the electoral authorities have published their own tallies or disaggregated results.
Nonetheless of what anyone feels towards Machado’s politics, she led one of the most consequential democratic challenges to an authoritarian regime in contemporary history. That unprecedented effort is what ultimately earned her the Nobel peace Prize.
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Venezuela’s oil production has plummeted to its lowest level in nearly 80 years, falling to just 716,000 barrels per day in November, a 55% decline.
According to energy experts, this is the fastest collapse of a national oil industry outside of war. Mismanagement, corruption, lack of maintenance, and the prioritization of political loyalty over expertise hollowed out the industry. Analysts estimate it would take an investment of at least $100 billion over a decade to restore production to 1998 levels.
even today, much of Venezuela’s oil does not generate usable revenue. Less than half of exports involve cash payments; the rest service debts to Russia, China, and other creditors. PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company, owes around $55 billion to partners, service companies, and financial lenders. Between 2020 and 2023, the company could confirm receipt of just $4.08 billion out of $25.27 billion in oil exports.
The rest, once again, slipped through the cracks.
Many worry about the precedent that intervention sets. They are right to worry. But it was also risky to ignore Venezuelans for years as we documented torture,