Election to a second term of Nicolás Maduro

Convinced that the election—scheduled for April but ultimately delayed until May—would be anything but free and fair, opposition leaders called on supporters to boycott the voting. Nevertheless, Henri Falcón, onetime governor and former member of the PUV, launched an active campaign, as did evangelical minister Javier Bertucci. Voters stayed away from the polls in droves. According to the National Electoral Council, only 46 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot (opposition sources put the turnout much lower), and many who voted seemed to do so in order to ensure that they would continue to receive government-provided food baskets. As a result, Maduro captured some 5.8 million votes, about 68 percent of the ballots cast. Falcón, who finished second with about 1.8 million votes, denounced the process as fraudulent and refused to recognize the results. Still, Maduro trumpeted the outcome—which gave him a second term that would keep him in office until 2025—saying that he and Venezuela’s “revolutionary people” had been underestimated. Ultimately, the election was condemned as illegitimate by a number of countries and international organizations, including the United States, most of the so-called Lima Group (12 of 13 Latin American member countries and Canada), and the European Union.

On August 4, while addressing National Guard troops who had participated in a commemorative parade in Caracas, Maduro was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt undertaken by two drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) laden with explosives, which were detonated near the president but did not harm him. Responsibility for the attack—believed to have been the first attempt with drones against a head of state—was unclear. Officials announced that six “terrorists and hired killers” had been taken into custody. Maduro cast blame for the attack on right-wing Venezuelans and his prominent opponent Juan Manuel Santos, the outgoing president of Colombia. Following the incident, the rogue military and police element allegedly responsible for the attack on the Supreme Court in 2017 made a strong anti-government statement online without directly claiming credit for the August 4 attack. On the other hand, a lesser-known group, the “National Movement of Soldiers in T-shirts,” used social media to claim that it had launched the attack. Some observers speculated that the assault had been staged by the government to justify the imposition of new, more-repressive measures.

On January 10, 2019, Maduro was sworn in for his second term as president. Although representatives from the countries who refused to recognize the election were not in attendance, the presidents of Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador were there, along with emissaries from Mexico, Turkey, and China. Earlier in the month, the opposition appeared to find new life with the election of largely unknown 35-year-old Juan Guaidó, a hard-line opponent of the Maduro regime, as the head of the National Assembly. Guaidó called on Venezuelans to take to the streets in protest on January 23, and on that day in Caracas he declared himself the country’s acting president, claiming that the constitution empowered him to do so because Maduro had not been elected legally and therefore Venezuela was without a president. In short order, the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, and the Organization of American States officially recognized Guaidó as the leader of Venezuela. An outraged Maduro declared himself “the only president of Venezuela,” branded Guaidó’s action as a conspiratorial coup engineered by the United States, and gave U.S. diplomats 72 hours to leave the country. Maduro received strong statements of support from Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Turkey, and Russia, the last of which had ties to the Venezuelan military and oil industry and characterized Guaidó’s action as an attempt to “usurp power.”

By February, supplies of medicine and food from the United States and elsewhere had been transported to Venezuela’s borders with Colombia and Brazil, but Maduro closed border crossings and then blocked them with large trucks and containers to prevent entry of the relief aid, which he painted as a smoke screen for a U.S.-orchestrated coup attempt. Defying a government travel ban against him, Guaidó went to Colombia, where on February 23 at Cúcuta, across the border from Venezuela, he led an attempt by supporters and human rights activists to break the Maduro government’s blockade by providing human shields for aid-bearing trucks as they sought to cross a bridge into Venezuela. Although dozens of Venezuelan national guardsmen deserted to the opposition, security forces loyal to Maduro turned back the relief convoy and demonstrators with rubber bullets and tear gas. That same day, an unsuccessful attempt to breach the blockade on the Brazil-Venezuela border brought deadly results. Once again, the overwhelming bulk of the Venezuelan military had remained true to Maduro. Furious at Colombian Pres. Iván Duque’s support of the relief effort, Maduro broke off diplomatic relations with Colombia.

The failed April 2019 insurrection and its aftermath

On April 30 the opposition upped the ante by attempting to stage a full-fledged coup. That move began with the release of a video in which Guaidó, flanked by supportive soldiers and accompanied by López (who had left house arrest), announced that the “final phase” of the operation to oust Maduro had begun. Guaidó claimed that important contingents of the country’s security forces had joined the insurrection. In truth, the head of Venezuela’s intelligence apparatus had switched sides, but few other security officials or military officers had followed his lead. Notwithstanding the Trump administration’s claim that Maduro had been on a plane ready to flee to Cuba, the insurrection never gathered steam, and by the next day Guaidó was publicly explaining its failure. As before, the military and the security forces had remained loyal to Maduro.

Some observers attributed that continued loyalty to Maduro’s insistence on meeting the needs of the enchufada (well-connected government cronies), the military, and the security forces even as most Venezuelans experienced extreme deprivation. At a time when the hyperinflated Venezuelan currency was effectively worthless, it was argued that a criminalized faction of the military and security forces were thriving in the “dollarized” economy through illegal activities such as drug trafficking. In May 2019 Norway brokered talks between the Maduro government and Guaidó, but by August the talks had broken down. In the wake of the failed insurrection, many in the opposition began to lose faith in Guaidó, and his popularity waned significantly. As the humanitarian crisis deepened, rank-and-file opponents of the regime seemed more concerned with survival than with seemingly futile attempts to topple Maduro.

Most of the opposition parties boycotted the December 2020 elections for the National Assembly. In their absence, and as a result of a turnout of only some 31 percent of eligible voters, the PSUV dominated the elections, capturing about 68 percent of the vote, which would gain it an overwhelming majority of seats in the new Assembly. Almost immediately, international organizations and observers pronounced the elections a charade. With control of the National Assembly in chavista hands, the last major systemic obstacle to Maduro’s authoritarian rule would be gone. Nevertheless, Guaidó persisted in his campaign for Maduro’s removal, and the roughly five dozen countries that recognized Guaidó as Venezuela’s leader continued to employ measures to undermine Maduro’s survival. All of this unfolded as the crippled Venezuelan health care system flailed in its effort to stave off the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic; the virus had first been reported in China in late 2019 and had begun sweeping the globe in early 2020. In June 2021, with the country still in the throes of the pandemic, Maduro surprised many by responding positively to Guaidó’s call to restart bilateral talks.

Emigration, agreement on a freer presidential election in 2024, and the Essequibo referendum

As the pandemic waned, the Venezuelan economy experienced a brief period of increasing stability in late 2021 and early 2022, but the lasting effect of this turnaround was an improvement of conditions for only a select few. The vast majority of Venezuelans still faced an uphill struggle just to survive, burdened by the escalating cost of living, high unemployment, low wages, and the lingering economic effects of the pandemic, which combined to further impoverish many of them. Emigration skyrocketed. By 2023 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 7.7 million Venezuelans had left the country.

Meanwhile, talks between Maduro’s government and the opposition—engineered by Norway and conducted in Barbados—were proceeding but making little noticeable progress. Then, in October 2023, came the surprising announcement that an agreement had been reached on procedures for a freer presidential election to be held in the latter half of 2024. While that accord did not promise to lift the ban that had been imposed on the candidacies of many key opposition figures, it did pledge to “recognize and respect the right of each political actor to select” its presidential candidate freely, and later (in late November, under pressure from the United States), the government granted banned candidates the right to appeal their prohibition before the Supreme Court. Responding to the October agreement, the United States announced that it would lift the majority of the restrictions it had imposed on the energy, financial, and gold sectors of the Venezuelan economy.

Against the backdrop of the signing of the agreement, later in October, the opposition conducted a primary election in an attempt to arrive at a unity candidate for the presidential election. It was estimated that some 2.4 million Venezuelans participated in the primary election. The favorite going into the vote, María Corina Machado, a former member of the National Assembly, won in a landslide.

With the looming prospect of an election that might actually unseat him, Maduro appeared to attempt to distract Venezuelans from their hardships and stoke nationalist solidarity by dramatically increasing the urgency of Venezuela’s long-standing territorial claims on the oil-rich Essequibo region of neighboring Guyana. That area, which constitutes some two-thirds of Guyana, had been part of Venezuela during the Spanish colonial era and was claimed by Venezuela when it declared its independence from Spain in 1811, but in 1899 international arbitrators from Britain, Russia, and the United States awarded the contested region to what was then the U.K. colony of British Guiana. An agreement in 1966 between Britain, Venezuela, and independent Guyana established a commission to reconsider the border dispute. Venezuela’s ongoing claims to the region intensified after oil was discovered in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean off Essequibo in 2015.

Couching the attainment of control of the region as a patriotic imperative, in early December 2023 Maduro held a national referendum on whether Venezuela should establish a state in Essequibo, grant residents citizenship, and reject the U.N. International Court of Justice’s jurisdiction in the dispute. Although voter turnout appeared to be low—despite claims by the National Electoral Council that more than half of the electorate had participated—the majority of those who did vote endorsed Venezuela’s claim to sovereignty over Essequibo.

Venezuelans went to the polls on July 28, 2024, and both Maduro and the opposition claimed victory. The following day, the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner with 51.2 percent of the vote. Regional and international leaders immediately called the results into question, noting serious irregularities in the electoral process.