After Maduro’s Capture, Venezuela Faces Old US Shadows and Uncertain Future

This story was reported for K Onda KQED, a monthly newsletter focused on the Bay Area’s Latinx community. Click here to subscribe.

When Stanford professor Alberto Díaz-Cayeros heard about the Jan. 3 capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, he knew it would strike a deep chord in the Latin American psyche.

That chord, he said, is rooted in recognition of the United States’ long history of intervening in Latin America, often destabilizing the governments and economies and leaving millions impoverished, exploited and desperate.

I spoke with Díaz-Cayeros, a political scientist and former director of Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies, on Jan. 7 after he moderated a panel titled, “Venezuela After Maduro: Democracy, Authoritarian Rebalancing, or Chaos.”

“What really struck me, at least about what happened on the night of [the Maduro raid], is less that something radical changed in Venezuela. It’s not obvious what will happen,” Díaz-Cayeros said. “But it’s more that the U.S. displayed this force and was able to say, ‘I can make things go one way or another if I so wish.’”

I heard the news about Maduro’s capture on KQED when I was driving to the gym. My first thought was: Have the Venezuelan people not suffered enough?

Then I thought about bananas — specifically those imported by the United Fruit Company, the storied American corporation that, over the course of several decades and across multiple countries, extracted resources, oppressed workers and helped remove democratically elected leaders from office. As many scholars have documented, the result has been a pattern in which U.S. interests in Latin America have prioritized profits over people.

Díaz-Cayeros said it may seem like a stretch to compare current to those of a century ago, but it’s not. President Donald Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine, an early 19th-century foreign policy, to justify U.S. actions in Venezuela.

“U.S. exploits in the Western Hemisphere have routinely caused devastating economic displacement, and that has, in turn, led to the northward migration of mostly poor, often Indigenous or mestizo (racially mixed) people from Latin America.,” wrote Laura E. Gomez, a legal scholar and author of Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism, in a LinkedIn post. “In other words, we are here because the U.S. was there.”

For a deeper history of the United Fruit and similar interventions, check out Gomez’s book, as well as Harvest of Empire by Juan Gonzalez.

Gomez lays bare a dynamic U.S. officials often avoid acknowledging: When the United States asserts dominance in Latin America, the consequences reverberate at home. Yet instead of reckoning with that reality, we have built an immigration enforcement apparatus that dehumanizes migrants and routinely violates basic rights — including those of people who defend them.

What is notably different now is that in the past, U.S. companies and investors often led the push into Latin America and then lobbied Washington to intervene. Under the Trump administration, those roles appear reversed. The administration is using military force to secure American interests, said Miguel Tinker Salas, professor emeritus of Latin American History at Pomona College and author of Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know and The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture and Society in Venezuela.

Rebuilding Venezuela’s oil infrastructure could take years, even a decade. The United States now produces more oil than it consumes and is a net exporter.

“This is about power, this is about regime change, this is about access to oil, this about reestablishing U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean and Central America,” Tinker Salas told me.

It can be easy to dismiss what is happening in Latin America as something happening in a distant place with little personal relevance, especially for Americans without family ties there. But the connections are real — and consequential.

The question is not whether the U.S. will see an influx of Venezuelan migrants. Roughly one in four Venezuelans — about 8 million people — have left the country over the past decade, most settling in other Latin American countries, primarily Colombia.

About 770,000 Venezuelan immigrants lived in the United States in 2023, making up less than 2% of the nation’s 47.8 million immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute. An estimated 3% of Venezuelan immigrants lived in California. Trump had called for deporting 600,000 Venezuelans who lived in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status.

The larger question is whether U.S. involvement will help create conditions that allow Venezuelans to return home to stability, prosperity and economic growth — or whether the country’s vast wealth will primarily benefit American corporations.

Venezuela’s economy has been so severely damaged that even modest foreign investment could generate growth, making it attractive to investors, Díaz-Cayeros said.

“It’s not just about the oil. It’s about all the business opportunities that open up,” he said.

During the Stanford panel, Hector Fuentes, a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, said that Venezuela is not profiting off its oil reserves, raising the question of what the country stands to lose if the United States takes its oil, as Trump has promised.

So far, the Trump administration has framed its actions as benefiting the U.S., with little emphasis on ensuring Venezuela becomes a stable, prosperous democracy. The outcome appears more like a hoped-for byproduct than a central goal.

“People are celebrating because there’s a sense of relief. They think the page has been turned, but the page has not been turned,” Tinker Salas said. “I’m Venezuelan-American. I don’t see huge numbers of Venezuelans returning to Venezuela in the short run.”

Many hope Maduro’s exit marks a turning point that bucks history. It’s possible, but we won’t know for years or decades.

In the meantime, I suggest reading up on U.S. political and economic interventions in Latin America. It’s a history that has shaped many of our lives and one that all Americans should understand.