What Will It Take to Rebuild the Government in Post-Maduro Venezuela?

Editor’s Note: The Trump administration’s sudden capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro raises the obvious—and unanswered—question of what is next for Venezuela and the United States. The George Washington University’s Omar García-Ponce argues that any new system and leadership the United States tries to install will face a bloated and fractured military, entrenched criminal gangs, and an oil sector that is a curse as well as a blessing.

Daniel Byman

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Nicolás Maduro is now in U.S. custody, facing criminal charges in a federal courtroom. The reality on the ground in Venezuela is far more uncertain. President Trump has said the United States will “run” Venezuela during a transition period, and administration officials have begun to sketch what that might mean—from steering policy and tightening control over oil flows to channeling key revenues through U.S.-supervised accounts. Yet the scope, duration, and institutional mechanisms of any such stewardship remain undefined.

What does it mean to “run” Venezuela? Any interim arrangement must confront three fundamental governance challenges. First, Venezuela’s security apparatus has been deliberately fragmented to prevent unified command, a process begun by the Chávez government to protect itself but that now hinders its operation. Second, the country’s territorial order is characterized by criminal and non-state armed actors performing core governance functions, often in collusion with the state. And third, the oil sector that has received so much of Trump’s attention will be technically slow to recover, but the bigger risk will be its vulnerability to capture by those non-state actors, which can use it to reinforce their power at the expense of the government. Any authority in Caracas—whether a transitional government, a U.S.-backed administration, or a democratically elected successor—will have to face these realities.

A Fragmented Security Apparatus

The most immediate governance test is whether a post-Maduro authority can reconstitute a credible monopoly on violence. Following a process initiated under Hugo Chávez, Maduro consolidated a regime that did not merely tolerate corruption but used selective access to rents, immunity, and patronage to manage a security apparatus deliberately designed to resist coordinated action against the executive. Central to this effort was a deliberate strategy of “coup-proofing”—fragmenting the command structures of the armed forces to prevent unified opposition.

This fragmentation was institutionalized through parallel security bodies with overlapping jurisdictions: the Fuerzas de Acciones Especiales (FAES, or Special Action Forces), Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional (SEBIN, the intelligence agency), Dirección General de Contrainteligencia Militar (DGCIM, military counterintelligence), and the National Guard, among others. It was reinforced by the multiplication of senior ranks. Venezuela’s armed forces now include around 2,000 admirals and generals, roughly 10 times the number when Chávez became president and twice as many as the U.S. military. This was not mere bureaucratic bloat. It was an instrument for multiplying stakeholders, distributing privilege, and eroding the conditions for collective action.

The loyalty of high-ranking officers was secured not through ideological commitment but through selective access to rents. The military was granted control over lucrative sectors of the economy, including food distribution, ports, and mining. This created a loyalty trap in which officers remained tied to the regime not because they believed in Chavismo, but because their material survival and immunity from prosecution depended on its continuity.

Removing Maduro disrupts this equilibrium but does not replace it. It also creates an acute principal-agent problem for any new authority. Local commanders who fear prosecution or the loss of rent streams have strong incentives to defect from the center and entrench themselves as autonomous power brokers—or, more dangerously, as local warlords. A transition strategy that relies on a top-down chain of command will likely fail because the chain itself has been broken for years.

Criminal Governance and Territorial Order

The second challenge is that the Venezuelan state has long ceded effective sovereignty over large parts of its territory to non-state armed groups. In the absence of effective state institutions, criminal organizations—ranging from the pranes (prison gang leaders) to the sindicatos in the mining belt, and remnants of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional/Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (ELN/FARC) dissidents—have evolved to perform core governance functions.

Research on non-state armed governance distinguishes between armed groups that substitute for the state and those that operate in a complementary relationship with it. In Venezuela, we see both. In many urban neighborhoods, organized criminal groups function as “microstates,” enforcing contracts, policing streets, and taxing local economies, effectively replacing a police force widely viewed as predatory. In the borderlands and the Orinoco Mining Arc, armed groups often operate in tacit or explicit collusion with state authorities, sharing profits from illicit gold and drug trafficking in exchange for territorial dominance.

This leaves any post-Maduro authority facing a dilemma that force alone cannot solve. A rapid push to dismantle armed intermediaries—without simultaneously building credible substitutes and legitimate mechanisms of dispute resolution—risks producing more insecurity and undermining political trust. But tolerating criminal governance reinforces the idea that authority lies with coercive brokers rather than lawful institutions. 

The prison system illustrates this dilemma. Prison gangs exert meaningful governance behind bars: They regulate violence, manage internal economies, and adjudicate disputes in ways that compensate for administrative incapacity. Efforts to restore formal authority through force can trigger organized resistance and spirals of violence—a phenomenon familiar across prison systems in Latin America. However, accommodating criminal governance inside prisons sustains the organizational bases of groups that project power outside them. The post-Maduro state will inherit a territorial order in which governance is uneven and contested, and where many rules are enforced by actors who are not accountable to the public.

Oil as Political Risk

Oil is often invoked as the remedy—or at least part of the solution—to Venezuela’s problems: restore output, restore revenue, finance reconstruction, stabilize politics. This view is dangerously naive. In practice, Venezuela’s oil is not only technically constrained but also a central political risk.

The technical obstacles are severe. Production has collapsed from 3.2 million barrels per day in 2000 to roughly 900,000 today. Infrastructure decay, underinvestment, and the exodus of skilled personnel cannot be reversed quickly. Even with sanctions relief and foreign capital, production recovery will be slow. Rystad Energy estimates that returning output to 3 million barrels per day would require $8-9 billion annually through 2040.

The deeper governance issue is that, in a fragile state with a fragmented local order, oil revenue creates incentives for capture and predatory extraction. Whoever controls contracting offices, export infrastructure, security perimeters, and logistics can extract rents, shape allocation, and finance coercive capacity. This creates two pathologies that are easy to underestimate in the optimism of a “post-Maduro” moment. The first is rapacity under the banner of emergency: opaque deals, discretionary contracting, and off-budget revenue management justified as necessary to stabilize quickly. The second is predation through territorial fragmentation: extortion, theft, sabotage-for-leverage, and coercive taxation of oil operations by armed actors seeking revenue and power.

The risk is not just corruption; it is that the oil sector becomes the financing mechanism for perpetuating Venezuela’s fragmented political order. If regional commanders or non-state armed groups can extort operations in the oil belt—with or without the cooperation of a new central government—the country risks a renewed cycle of predatory rentierism. Venezuela’s “resource curse” is not that oil crowds out other industries; it is that oil revenues can finance the autonomy of actors with coercive capacity and little stake in building a rule-of-law state.

U.S.-Backed Democratic Renewal?

The United States has attempted to restore order or build democracy abroad many times before. Whether Washington will pursue democratic institution-building in Venezuela or settle for stability under a compliant government remains an open question. So too does the political future of María Corina Machado, the apparent winner of the last presidential election, which the Maduro government refused to recognize. The release of at least 80 political prisoners by the administration of acting-President Delcy Rodríguez, while symbolically significant, suggests that human rights will continue to function as diplomatic bargaining chips rather than as a commitment to institutional reform. Recent events underscore how tenuous respect for basic political liberties remains: Juan Pablo Guanipa, a prominent opposition politician and close Machado ally, was freed from prison in early February only to be seized by armed men in Caracas hours later, a move his family and party have described as a kidnapping even as authorities sought to justify it on procedural grounds.

However, the challenges posed by Venezuela’s military, limited sovereign control, and vulnerable oil sector should not be read as fatalism. They are boundary conditions that define what a plausible transition strategy must accomplish and what it must avoid.

First, security-sector reform that threatens the inflated officer corps with sweeping prosecution can backfire on two fronts. It can resolve the officers’ collective-action problem by handing otherwise fractured factions a shared survival interest, enabling them to coalesce into a spoiler coalition that blocks reform altogether. It can also drive defections that further fragment the state’s coercive apparatus: As distrust rises and patronage networks erode, some commanders may conclude that the center can no longer protect them and instead entrench locally, cutting protection-for-profit arrangements with the non-state armed groups already present in urban barrios, border corridors, and mining zones.

Second, oil revenues—often treated as the fiscal engine of reconstruction—are not only technically constrained but also politically volatile without hard institutional guardrails. Without transparent revenue management, independent auditing, and binding allocation rules that steer rents toward public goods rather than discretionary spending, oil can quickly recreate the same rentier incentives that under Chavismo sustained patronage, bought loyalties, and hollowed out state capacity.

Finally, criminal governance enclaves cannot be dismantled by force alone, as the failure of mano dura crackdowns across Latin America has repeatedly shown. Purely punitive approaches may suppress violence temporarily, but they seldom endure because they leave the underlying governance vacuum intact. Where non-state armed groups regulate disputes, provide protection, and control access to livelihoods, repression without institutional replacement tends to reorganize and entrench criminal governance regimes rather than eliminate them.

These boundary conditions persist regardless of who occupies Miraflores. The fundamental challenge is not simply to oversee a transfer of power, but to construct a functioning state where one essentially no longer exists.