MADURO’S FALL AND THE GLOOMY FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY IN VENEZUELA

 

The detention of Nicolás Maduro during the United States' invasion of Caracas on January 3, 2026, should not be analyzed solely as a traumatic act of international justice or as a legal anomaly in the global order. It is a paradigmatic episode of the contemporary mutation of power, where democracy, international law, and sovereignty are subordinated to a logic of permanent exception, inaugurated after September 11, 2001, and now fully normalized.

Unlike readings that repeat—with reason, but without novelty—the thesis of the decline of the liberal order in the era of globalization, the Maduro case forces us to pose a more unsettling question: what kind of democracy can survive when hegemony is exercised through the selective suspension of international law? Princeton University scholar Robert Keohane warned early on that stable international orders depend on predictable rules and the self-restraint of the dominant hegemonic actor. However, in 2026, we are no longer facing a "decline" of the liberal order, but rather its authoritarian reconfiguration. The United States has not abandoned the multilateral system; it instrumentalizes it.

Maduro’s capture—without a Security Council mandate—illustrates a more recent pattern: a) selective multilateral neutralization, where legality is replaced by ad hoc coalitions; b) extraterritorial judicialization of the enemy, using charges of drug trafficking or terrorism as a substitute for absent international legitimacy; c) fragmentation of global reactions, where China and Russia denounce the illegality, Brazil and Mexico waver strategically, and the UN is reduced to a series of statements without coercive capacity. This scenario does not fit Keohane’s predictions. We are facing a U.S. hegemony that does not seek consensus, but rather chaos management, accepting normative erosion as a calculated cost.

A key advance over previous analyses is to take seriously the U.S. counterargument—not to validate it, but to dismantle it with precision. Washington argues that Maduro is not a legitimate head of state, but a criminal actor, and therefore full sovereign protection does not apply. This reasoning is dangerous for three reasons: first, it creates an informal hierarchy of sovereignties, where democratic legitimacy is defined unilaterally; second, it blurs the boundary between criminal justice and war, indefinitely expanding the concept of "enemy"; and third, it establishes replicable precedents, not only for the United States, but for any power with coercive capacity.

If electoral legitimacy becomes a condition for sovereign recognition, then no weak democracy in the Global South is safe. Here emerges a new core for analysis: the problem is not Maduro’s fall, but the “day after.” Comparative experience is devastating when looking at Iraq: rapid overthrow, state collapse, sectarian-religious violence, and formal democracy without real sovereignty. Libya: elimination of dictator Gaddafi, destruction of the state, militias, and permanent civil war. In both cases, intervention is justified in the name of democracy, but produces an institutional vacuum that makes a “new democratic order” impossible.

Venezuela presents similar conditions, with a state penetrated by illicit networks, politicized Armed Forces, and a fragmented opposition dependent on external support. In this context, post-Maduro democratization risks becoming a fiction of elections administered from the U.S., without real governability.

The 1989 invasion of Panama is often cited as a successful counterexample. However, it was an unrepeatable historical exception with a small and highly institutionalized state. The objective was limited (Noriega’s capture), not regional reengineering. Even so, the violence was greater than acknowledged, and sovereignty was profoundly conditioned. Pretending that Venezuela will repeat the Panama case is a strategic illusion.

The most likely outcome is not liberal democracy, but what we might call tutelary democracy, characterized by elections without economic sovereignty; permanent dependence on external actors; chronic state weakness; and the normalization of political violence. Maduro’s capture could confirm the most pessimistic diagnosis about the future of global democracy: it is no longer a universal project, but a rhetorical resource used selectively to legitimize military interventions.

The detention of dictator Maduro does not inaugurate a new era of international justice, but deepens a world where law is subordinated to force and democracy to invasive exception. If Libya and Iraq taught us anything, it is that overthrowing a regime does not equate to building a viable political community. The true drama in Venezuela is not Maduro, but the future that opens after his fall. A future where democracy, once again, could be the first disastrous collateral victim.