Venezuela - Choosing between Chaos or Dictatorship

Is Maduro’s consolidated dictatorship so bad that chaos is better? What if those are the two most likely options and you must choose?

You’ll find something to disagree with in today’s newsletter. Even I’m not sure I fully agree with it. I aimed for a thought exercise that provided a different perspective than what I’ve read elsewhere, and this is the 1,300 word essay that dropped out of my head yesterday afternoon. The goal is not to plant a flag in a firm position, but to provide something different to spur thought and conversation.

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Imagine four scenarios for Venezuela’s future. Think about their likelihood and impact.

Scenario A: Maduro is removed in the next three months. A transition government led by Edmundo Gonzalez and Maria Corina Machado takes over. They reform Venezuela into a prosperous democracy.

Scenario B: Maduro is removed in the next three months. It leads to a chaotic and violent power struggle that lasts at least five years. The instability increases the humanitarian crisis in the country and grants a continued foothold to various organized crime groups that fight each other.

Scenario C: The Chavistas remain in power for 24 more months, and negotiations lead to a gradual transition back to democracy and a powersharing agreement in which the democratic opposition gains greater control by 2028.

Scenario D: Maduro and/or other Chavistas retain their consolidated and criminal dictatorship well past 2030. Life sucks.

Here’s an AI-generated graphic of these scenarios that may be helpful.

There are two genres of competing commentary columns about Venezuela right now, where Scenario A argues against Scenario C. I genuinely believe the people on both sides of this debate want to see Maduro gone and Venezuela improved. Those supporting Scenario C argue that Scenario A is unrealistic, saying the miracle transition is unlikely to occur. Instead, they say the first group is underestimating the odds of Scenario B, stating that a swift removal of Maduro will instead lead to chaos, and that is bad. We should be careful not to tip the cart over.

The people who argue for Scenario A will tell you that Scenario C is also unrealistic and is likely to revert to Scenario D. Maduro has spent over a decade using negotiations to stall a transition, and he’ll do it again.

I think the criticisms of both scenarios A and C are correct. Neither is particularly realistic. Unfortunately, in the current debate, the defenders of Scenarios A and C are arguing past each other because both are trying to avoid admitting that the most likely outcomes are the two worse ones to their own preferences.

The realistic/pessimistic view means we should be arguing about Scenarios B vs D. Chaos vs consolidated dictatorship. That’s something few want to do. Both are bad. But which is worse?

There are still a few extreme regime apologists who defend Maduro and argue in favor of Scenario D as if it’s a good outcome. They’re terrible. “Stability” under a dictatorship is not neutral; it is the continuation of state criminality, torture, corruption, and mass repression.

Thought experiment: You have the magic power to snap your fingers and teleport Maduro to a maximum security prison in the US. While you absolutely should worry about “how” in a real world planning scenario, for the sake of this thought experiment, it’s just nice, clean magic with no cost. What happens next?

The answer is that the de facto presidency transitions to Delcy Rodriguez and the dictatorship moves on. Perhaps over the following months, it leads to instability or makes a negotiated transition more likely, but the immediate result is almost certainly that the current regime continues along as before without Super Bigote as its figurehead. So, not much changes.

Fine. That’s boring. New thought experiment: You snap your fingers and instantly imprison the top ten Chavistas of your choosing. Now what happens? And should you use that magic?

This is a far more interesting question. The result here is chaos. No, not as bad as Libya or Afghanistan, but it’s bad. There is an immediate fight for power, one that is likely violent. The people who have guns are more likely to succeed than the people who don’t, which is one of the key challenges for an opposition-led transition. Citizens can protest, but will be repressed. Illegal armed groups take over territory outside of urban areas and will be difficult to push out. There are probably multiple regime changes over the coming years. Even if the current opposition led by Gonzalez and Machado manages to take over in this process, without a strong security force backing them, they would be at risk of being pushed out amid mass instability. One lesson to take away from the Honduras coup in 2009 is that there would likely be an increase in competing organized crime groups in the country, at least temporarily, due to a weaker central government allowing criminal groups to more widely fight over territory and business.

Yet, despite the above and the “how” question, there is something positive about removing the top Chavista leaders from the scene and letting the power struggle happen. Because it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in contrast to the long, painful, continued dictatorship that would otherwise remain in place.

Ultimately, one deciding factor is how long you think the Chavistas will remain in power if they aren’t pushed out. If it’s just five years, maybe. If it’s another five decades of dictatorship, a few years of power struggle seems a whole lot better.

Nobody wants to publicly argue in favor of Scenario B. It sounds callous/immoral to advocate for chaos that will lead to violence and instability that pundits don’t have to live under. Arguing for chaos isn’t particularly compelling to convince foreign leaders to go along with your regime change plan. Nobody controls chaos once it happens, meaning outcomes can turn against you. And there are plenty of business interests that would do better under any option other than Scenario B. Those pushing regime change only point to the best possible outcomes. Those arguing against regime change use chaos as a worst-case scenario to be avoided.

Yet, even if Scenario B is not anyone’s preferred outcome in Venezuela, right this moment, some version of it seems to be more likely than Scenarios A or C. The Trump administration is running right towards Scenario B at full speed, trying to push out Maduro without a transition plan or military support for a democratically elected leadership to come in once the top Chavistas are removed.

While it’s not publicly discussed much, many Venezuelan friends have pointed out to me in private that even if it’s not a smooth and peaceful transition back to democracy, chaos may be preferable to the current situation of a consolidated and criminal dictatorship. They understand that democratic transitions don’t happen easily, but are eager to roll the dice for whatever comes next, believing it will create an eventual path to a better outcome than the current situation, which will stagnate. The current situation, with political violence, prisoners, corruption, and dictatorship, is awful enough that taking a chance at any change to get unstuck is tempting.

Unfortunately, magic doesn’t exist, and the “how” matters greatly. Ultimately, if some external actor pushes Venezuela into chaos, that actor owns the consequences. That external actor also requires constitutional and legal justifications that they may not have. Mistakes and unexpected outcomes happen in military operations. And if an external actor does a poor job of the effort, bad becomes worse quite quickly. There are variations of chaos that are more prolonged and painful than others.

Even if there is a hypothetical case for Scenario B over Scenario D in Venezuela, there are good reasons to second-guess it when moving from the hypothetical discussion to the actual implementation. There are ways to do it better and ways to screw it up even worse.

In conclusion, five points:

• The debate between the less realistic scenarios (A vs C) is too idealistic on both sides and sometimes distracts from a real policy choice (B vs D). That isn’t to argue that we shouldn’t try to work towards solutions that look better (we should!), but a realistic assessment means you can’t assume a good outcome will occur if that is the direction you push for.

• Chaos for a few years might be preferable to a long-term dictatorship, even if nobody will say that aloud and no external actor wants to own the results of it.

• Whether they want it or not, the Trump administration is potentially rushing into the chaotic Scenario B without the discipline or plan to manage the fallout. They are assuming positive outcomes.

• If I had the magic power, I’d snap my fingers to remove Maduro and his cronies tomorrow. Thought exercises are useful for planning. But without magic and with legal and moral obligations, we should be very careful about how we proceed and brutally honest about the costs of both action and inaction.

• Plan for, hope for, and fear Scenario B. Whether it happens now or at some future point in the years to come, chaos is a likely outcome once the Chavistas fall. That chaos is likely to occur is not just an argument against regime change, but a consequence of decades of dictatorship.

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Thanks for reading!