Opinion | This Is What Venezuelans Really Want

President Nicolás Maduro is finally gone from Venezuela. He was captured by U.S. forces and flown out of the country early in the morning on Saturday. President Trump has said that the United States will run the country for the foreseeable future.

For Venezuelans, our situation will not be fixed by Mr. Maduro’s departure, let alone by a foreign occupying force. We are not a nation held together by a government or a social contract, but a collection of individuals trapped in a struggle for survival. Replacing the man at the top will not dismantle the web of bosses, private loyalties, corrupt practices and institutional ruins that have replaced public life here.

In the fall I had a conversation with a student of mine at Simón Bolívar University, the school in Caracas where I’ve taught political science for nearly three decades. Like many students there, he was usually locked in a weary, defensive silence. But in a flash of openness, he told me a little about his life two hours outside the capital, where his mother runs a fast food stand and his father, a retired policeman, rents out a few motorcycles to delivery drivers. His silence quickly returned when he mentioned his older brother, a member of the Venezuelan national guard. “He doesn’t like to talk about his work,” he said.

The brother, who was in a position to provide a few small perks reserved for guard members and other armed forces, is probably his family’s last thread of connection to a state that has utterly failed the people of Venezuela. For most Venezuelans, life has become an exercise in struggle in an economy of scraps and favors, making do with a patchwork of informal jobs and relationships that can never quite fill the void left by the corruption and inefficiency of the government. For years, this is what our authoritarianism has looked like: not autocratic socialism, but the worst kind of primitive capitalism.

In Venezuela, we have long faced a brutal paradox: an absent yet omnipotent state. It is everywhere and nowhere. It has failed to provide the essential services that once, under President Hugo Chávez, justified its monstrous growth and revolutionary ambitions — water, electricity, health care, education. Our society has been orphaned, ground down to its most basic capacities. The government has been reduced to a mere apparatus for securing its own continuity. The old promises of Chavismo have vanished, and the well of grand stories the government used to tell has run dry.

Mr. Chávez came to power with revolutionary promises: to refund the republic, to erase the distinction between the haves and the have-nots, to give the marginalized a seat at the table of power. His movement rested on two pillars: Mr. Chávez’s victory in democratic elections and the redistribution of oil wealth. It was through this combination that he managed to sustain his anti-establishment narrative, his hegemonic exercise of power and the country’s revolutionary fervor.

Perhaps Venezuelans still remember the splendor of the oil boom and the near-constant elections that confirmed Mr. Chávez’s political invulnerability. But it is unlikely that we will ever forget the damage caused by the crumbling of those two pillars after Mr. Maduro took power in 2013. When the oil market crashed in 2014 and the government doubled down on ruinous currency controls, among other measures, the cost of the resulting economic catastrophe was brutally shifted onto the population. Public spending shrank, except to strengthen the police and military apparatus, leaving our civic institutions hollow. Millions of people fled the country. The Venezuelans who remained had to learn how to survive on their own.

Of course Venezuelans want change. We said as much in the 2024 elections, in which tallies gathered by thousands of volunteers showed an overwhelming opposition victory. For many, the demand for change is not ideological, or limited to new leadership. Venezuelans want change in their quality of life; they want to regain more control over their futures and not be beholden to corrupt networks of power. They want a state with the capacity to honor its obligations, whose power is balanced and limited.

The Venezuelan government no longer reliably provides basic services, but that doesn’t mean it has gotten weaker. It’s just changed shape. The regime’s power has trickled down across Venezuela. Thousands of “comunas,” state outposts scattered across the country, now often conduct political surveillance under the guise of community management projects. Millions of people — whether bought, coerced or true believers — still voted for Mr. Maduro in 2024. It would be a mistake to assume that he does not maintain an organized political base.

Even without Mr. Maduro, the state remains a maze, comprising a sprawling web of overlapping intelligence services, paramilitary groups known as “colectivos” and regional bosses who compete for kickbacks. This fragmentation has been the ultimate insurance policy: It helped ensure that no single general or minister held enough unified power to lead a coup, while keeping every official tethered to the center through the shared need for protection and profit.

Mr. Trump has not said how the United States will begin to run Venezuela or when it will stop, except to say it will do so until “we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” Whatever is to come, the system that Mr. Maduro has overseen can’t be dismantled overnight. His followers, longstanding Chavistas or armed opportunists, could very well mount a prolonged insurgency — the type of war in which the population is held hostage, regardless of political preferences. It is very easy to create chaos and make a country ungovernable when the formal institutions are already broken. No matter who is in power, the path to healing the anxiety, distrust and isolation that have flourished over the past decade is not clear.

Venezuelans awaken each day with many different fears: that we or our family members will disappear, that hyperinflation will wreck our savings once again, that our migrant loved ones are not safe in the places where they sought refuge.

That student spent the last few months in my class learning about the rise and fall of Venezuelan democracy over the past century. But he, like the rest of us, is trapped in an eternal present, and I don’t know if he can imagine a different future. All we can do is take it one day at a time.

Colette Capriles is a Venezuelan social psychologist and teaches political science at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas.

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