# Venezuela > [!info] Gateway page > Orientation on Venezuela is here. Operations directed at the United States are at [[Venezuelan Influence]]; the full historical cluster is at [[Venezuelan History Hub]]. **Venezuela** is the vault's clearest test case for a proposition the American right has asserted for a generation: that removing a hostile leader changes the regime. In January 2026 the United States removed one, and the answer arrived almost immediately. **What happened.** U.S. forces took [[Nicolás Maduro]] from his Caracas residence on **3 January 2026** and flew him to New York, where he faces narcoterrorism, cocaine-importation and weapons charges and has pleaded not guilty. Two days later, on **5 January 2026**, vice president [[Delcy Rodríguez]] was sworn in as acting president. She is a longtime Maduro ally and an adherent of the same movement. **The finding is the continuity.** The government did not fall. Its institutions, security services and governing party survived the removal of the man at the top by a margin of forty-eight hours. *This is the strongest available case against decapitation as a theory of regime change*, and it is worth holding precisely because the intervention succeeded on its own narrow terms — the target was captured, is in custody, and is being tried. The operation worked and the objective did not follow from it. **The opposition was sidelined by the country that claimed to back it.** [[María Corina Machado]], the [[Nobel Peace Prize]] laureate who won the opposition primary, was passed over as Washington chose to work with a figure from the governing party instead. She announced in May 2026 that she intends to run again and to return from exile before the end of the year. The gap between the democracy-promotion rationale and the working arrangement that followed is the part of this story the vault treats as most instructive. **Oil is the reason the file is thick.** Venezuela holds among the world's largest proven reserves, and American policy toward it has oscillated between sanctions and carve-outs depending on the price of crude — which is the same tension visible in the Russia and Iran files. Sanctions relief tends to arrive when gasoline is expensive. On **22 September 2026** [[Donald Trump]] put the arrangement to the [[UN General Assembly]] in terms that removed any remaining ambiguity about the rationale: the intervention was "perhaps the biggest deal ever made," and "[t]o the victor belong the spoils." The same passage announced a general hemispheric entitlement — the United States "will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere" — which makes Venezuela the stated template rather than an exception. See [[Spheres of Influence]] and [[UN General Assembly]]; [[Cuba]] is where the template is being applied next. **The domestic American thread runs through immigration.** Venezuelan migration produced the population against which [[Temporary Protected Status]] revocations and [[Alien Enemies Act]] removals were directed, making Venezuela unusual: a foreign-policy subject that became a domestic enforcement subject, with the same people on both sides of the ledger. ## Where to go from here | Destination | What's there | |---|---| | [[Venezuelan Influence]] | Operations and lobbying directed at the United States | | [[Venezuelan History Hub]] | The historical arc, Chávez to the present | | [[Nicolás Maduro]] | Captured January 2026; awaiting trial | | [[Delcy Rodríguez]] | The acting president who succeeded him | | [[María Corina Machado]] | The opposition leader Washington set aside | | [[Alien Enemies Act]] | The removal authority aimed at Venezuelan migrants | ## See also [[Hugo Chávez]] · [[Bolivarianism]] · [[PDVSA]] · [[Temporary Protected Status]] · [[World History Hub]]