How Trump took control of Venezuela’s democratic transition

 

How Trump took control of Venezuela’s democratic transition

 

The U.S. has sidelined opposition leader María Corina Machado and bet on a “serious” but little-known regime critic as it tries to restore democracy in Venezuela.

 

By Eva Hartog and Eric Bazail-Eimil

08/29/2026 12:00 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/29/venezuela-democracy-transition-machado-figuera-01053625

 

CARACAS, Venezuela — Over the nearly eight months since U.S. special forces captured Venezuela’s dictator in a middle-of-the-night raid, a Marriott hotel in central Caracas has become the epicenter of U.S. activity in the country.

 

It housed dozens of U.S. diplomats, agents and officials ahead of the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in March. Many still live at the hotel, alongside Marines and a coterie of private security contractors. The hotel’s breakfast chef knows their omelet orders and the staff greets them by name. U.S. energy company representatives broker deals in the lobby.

 

Now the hotel has become the staging area for the final phase of the U.S. plan to show its capture of Venezuela’s dictator was worth it — the transition to democracy.

 

In early August, the Marriott received a new group of guests: a group of Venezuelan opposition politicians. For years, they had lived in exile, some in Spain and some in the United States, in fear of being arrested if they returned. This time, at the invitation of the State Department, they walked openly through the city they’d been forced to flee.

 

Since January, Washington has governed Venezuela in all but name. Now it is exerting equally tight control over how Venezuela pursues a new democratic government, along with who gets to take part in the process.

 

Chairing the talks on behalf of the Venezuelan government is Jorge Rodríguez. He’s the brother of Delcy Rodríguez, the former vice president and oil minister whom the White House installed in January as interim president after removing longtime leader Nicolás Maduro.

 

The opposition is being represented by Dinorah Figuera, a politician plucked by the Trump administration out of obscurity because she had been tapped as the leader of Venezuela’s exiled 2015 National Assembly, the last democratically elected legislature recognized by the United States. Despite holding that role, Figuera has not been a prominent figure in the active Venezuelan opposition.

 

“No one in the Venezuelan opposition, no one, would have selected her as the opposition representative,” said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. envoy for Venezuela during President Donald Trump’s first term who supports the idea of an armed intervention in Venezuela, but has been a vocal critic of the current Trump administration.

 

Figuera’s selection came at the expense of María Corina Machado, the extremely popular leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for fair elections in Venezuela and who had long been seen as the most likely figure to lead any future democratic government in the country.

 

POLITICO’s account of the political maneuvering surrounding the transition process is based on interviews with a dozen current and former U.S. and Venezuelan political insiders, opposition figures, diplomats and others familiar with the negotiations, many of whom were granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks and the U.S. role in them.

 

The stakes are high for both critics of the process and its supporters. Many were wary of divulging anything that could alienate Washington and derail what they see as Venezuela’s one shot at liberating itself of oppressive rule — even if that means letting the U.S. dictate the terms.

 

Machado, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has not openly criticized the White House or opposed the talks. A week before they were due to begin, she issued a carefully worded statement saying she would “not pose an obstacle” to “tangible progress,” while making clear she would not be responsible for the outcome.

 

Figuera wrote in a message on WhatsApp in July regarding her selection for the job: “It’s been difficult, but I’m calm.” On the eve of the talks, however, she went silent and canceled a scheduled interview in Caracas.

 

For the White House, the talks are a demonstration of its commitment to democracy even as it pursues its economic ambitions. On Friday, Trump announced that Venezuela had agreed to give the U.S. majority-control of about a third of its proven oil reserves, which he described on social media as a “partnership with private business.”

 

Earlier this year, the Trump administration promised a three-part plan for the country: stabilization and recovery, followed by elections. But it has remained vague about the details of its role in the democratic transition. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the U.S. will “facilitate it, not dictate it.”

 

A spokesperson for the State Department, Tommy Pigott, declined to provide details as to what that facilitation includes. Instead he said in a statement, “As we continue to advance the three-phase plan, the United States continues to closely monitor the Venezuelan-led process of in-person talks with the interim authorities.”

 

The White House added in its own statement that “relations between Venezuela and the United States have been extraordinary for us and for the Venezuelan people,” praising cooperation with Rodríguez and the windfalls of oil production in the country. It added that the U.S. welcomes the talks and “remains committed to supporting this Venezuelan-led process.”

 

An unexpected opposition leader

Before Maduro’s capture, Machado appeared to be in pole position to lead Venezuela if it ever succeeded in shaking off almost three decades of increasingly authoritarian rule, first by left-wing revolutionary Hugo Chávez and then by Maduro.

 

A former lawmaker and longtime critic of the government, Machado became the dominant anti-government figure after winning the opposition’s 2023 primary in a landslide. She continued as the top voice of the opposition even after the Maduro regime barred her from running in the 2024 presidential election and jailed many of her key allies, forcing her into hiding.

 

Though Maduro’s crackdown was effective in preventing her from challenging his rule on the streets, a majority of Venezuelans considered her, and the candidate she’d backed in the 2024 vote to run in her stead, as Venezuela’s legitimate leaders.

 

Washington, however, had other ideas. A day after U.S. forces seized Maduro, Trump dismissed Machado as “a very nice woman” who lacked the “respect” to lead Venezuela, and then backed Rodríguez as interim president.

 

Many in the opposition had hoped that the Rodríguez appointment was a short-term fix to pave the way for Machado’s return.

 

But Trump continued to play down Machado’s importance to the country, even after she handed over her Nobel Peace Prize to him in January.

 

Then, on April 22, the official X account of Michael Kozak, at that time the State Department’s top official for the Western Hemisphere, posted a picture of him with Figuera, a little-known Venezuelan politician in exile. The two, he wrote, had discussed “pathways toward a stable, orderly and lasting democratic transition.”

 

It was the first public signal of a move the Trump administration had been planning for some time — tapping Figuera, over Machado, to lead the transition.

 

A person close to the Trump administration said that officials began discussing the potential role of the opposition-led National Assembly in a process of “political reconciliation” even before backing Rodríguez as the leader of Venezuela. They made that a condition for recognizing Rodríguez.

 

Rodríguez and her brother Jorge agreed to the terms.

 

The U.S. had treated Venezuela’s National Assembly in exile as the legitimate Venezuelan government since 2019, even though it was stripped of its powers in 2017 and members have fled the country over the past decade. (A separate, loyalist National Assembly within the country now serves as its official legislative body.)

 

For the Trump administration, that made Figuera the obvious candidate.

 

“She is serious, sober and the institutional leader — whom we recognized until February,” said the person close to the Trump administration. “Also, she doesn’t have presidential ambitions. So can seriously negotiate institutional transition without personal ego and ambition getting in the way.”

 

Two people with knowledge of the process also said that a White House-connected intermediary conducted exploratory talks earlier this year in Madrid that included two well-known Venezuelan exiled politicians belonging to the only two parties that now form part of the opposition’s delegation for transition talks in Caracas.

 

Asked about the meetings, the State Department’s Pigott said that “as a general matter, the department does not comment on department actions with respect to private diplomatic conversations.”

 

Figuera has described the U.S. involvement as merely to encourage “collaboration and coordination” — even as her team and the State Department regularly cross-post social media messages.

 

In June, Figuera landed at Simón Bolívar International Airport, near Caracas, on an American Airlines flight from Miami, setting foot on Venezuelan soil for the first time in eight years at, she said, the “invitation of the U.S. State Department.” She had returned, she told journalists, to help lay the foundation for free and fair elections, to the benefit of “all candidates” who might want to participate.

 

In Caracas, her first stop was the U.S. Embassy, where she met with chargé d’affaires John Barrett. She then went on to the golden-domed Legislative Palace, where she sat down with Jorge Rodríguez, who apart from being Delcy’s brother is also the head of the loyalist National Assembly. The next day, she flew back to Miami where, she told the French news agency AFP, she had “many meetings,” without providing additional details.

 

In a statement at the time, the State Department hailed Figuera’s meeting with Rodriguez as a “first step in what will be a thoughtful process to secure a free and open Venezuelan society.”

 

The statement added that “the cornerstone of any democratic transition is inclusive dialogue.”

 

Meanwhile, the person close to the Trump administration accused Machado of “creating a civil war in [the] opposition” because of early talks she held with other opposition leaders to set up a structure to work with the U.S. on a transition.

 

“Machado has created more problems than the chavistas,” the person continued, saying she had a “messianic complex.”

 

In a response, David Smolansky, a senior adviser to Machado, wrote: “Machado will never create more problems than the communists-chavistas who have always been aligned with US adversaries.”

 

“She has been leading a democratic process with 92 percent of support after she was elected in the opposition primary,” Smolansky continued. “Results that everyone within the opposition recognized.”

 

After two earthquakes devastated parts of Venezuela in late June, Machado promised her supporters she would return imminently to help with the aftermath, but according to several mediareports, Washington interfered by communicating to those helping Machado, whose lack of a valid Venezuelan passport complicates her return, that it did not support the plan.

 

The White House did not directly respond when asked if the administration intervened to block her return to Venezuela, but did say in a statement that it “is up to the Venezuelan people to decide” whether Machado should play a role in the transition process.

 

Whatever the Trump administration’s frustration with Machado, her popularity in Venezuela hasn’t diminished. In a poll by AtlasIntel for Bloomberg in July, 72 percent of Venezuelans said they held a positive view of her, compared with just 19 percent who approved of Delcy Rodríguez.

 

At a rally organized by Machado’s Vente Venezuela party in Caracas in late July, a festival-like atmosphere was laced with anxiety over her continued absence.

 

After years of shunning public demonstrations for fear of arrest, Machado’s supporters embraced each other, posed for photographs and held aloft banners, many of them bearing Machado’s image. Vendors weaved through the crowd selling flags and vuvuzelas, the long plastic horns associated with soccer matches.

 

“Machado has to come back. The people are waiting for you!” shouted a man dressed in all white, adding: “Come back already!”

 

Secrecy and division

Figuera’s elevation as the de facto leader of the opposition in the talks blew open a rift within Venezuela’s democratic movement.

 

Less than a month before Figuera’s trip to Caracas, Machado had convened the Unitary Platform, a coalition of opposition parties, in Panama City. The meeting had resulted in a document titled the Panama Manifesto, whose signatories agreed to pursue a “serious, resolute and responsible negotiation” with the interim government under U.S. facilitation — with Machado as the opposition’s main voice.

 

Figuera’s sudden appearance in Caracas suggested Washington was not on board. Machado, the country’s most prominent opposition leader, seemed to have been passed over for a figure many in the country had never heard of.

 

“The idea that this represents the will of the Venezuelan people is kind of absurd,” said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for the International Crisis Group who is in regular touch with both opposition factions and government officials. “It’s a nice letterhead, so that they can say that this is genuinely representative, which it’s not.”

 

Brian Naranjo, who served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela from 2014 to 2018, said he remembered “almost falling out of my seat” when he heard of Figuera’s appointment. “Dinorah was never an A- or even a B-list politician.”

 

Figuera had spent the previous eight years in exile in the Spanish city of Valencia. A member of Venezuela’s National Assembly for the center-right party Primero Justicia, she had fled in 2018 fearing arrest by the country’s secret police.

 

In Spain, Figuera was just one of hundreds of thousands of other struggling Venezuelan immigrants. A single mother and a surgeon by training, she worked as a caretaker for an elderly diabetic patient, ironing clothes and doing other chores, relying on charity for food and clothing.

 

But in 2023, five years after she had left Venezuela, fellow lawmakers chose Figuera to lead the remnants of Venezuela’s parallel National Assembly in exile.

 

The body had no power inside Venezuela. And among opposition-minded Venezuelans, its relevance had been obscured by Machado’s rising star. But its recognition abroad gave Figuera something that would become valuable: institutional standing.

 

As National Assembly president, Figuera had a communication channel with U.S. officials, lobbying to protect Venezuelan state assets such as the Houston-based oil refiner Citgo. Yet at the time of Maduro’s capture, Figuera wasn’t a household name in Washington.

 

“I’m unaware that she had any particular juice in Washington. She wasn’t a Washington figure, she didn’t know a lot of people,” said James Story, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela.

 

Figuera’s supporters argue that it is precisely her relative obscurity that makes her an ideal figure to help lead the transition. Machado, they argue, is a polarizing figure whose selection would antagonize the chavistas because of her stubborn personality and right-wing, free market ideals.

 

A number of critics of the talks, some of whom have known Figuera for decades, vouched for her personally and said they did not question her integrity.

 

But they did argue that the arrangement lacks democratic legitimacy because it excludes both Machado’s party and those who were also part of the 2015 National Assembly.

 

Figuera’s allies claim Machado was brought into the plan in late April but rejected the format. Machado’s camp, in turn, accuses Figuera of failing to be transparent about her dealings with the U.S. State Department. Several people close to Machado denied she was informed or consulted about Figuera’s role.

 

Rep. Mario Díaz Balart (R-Fla.), the powerful House appropriator who represents a large Venezuelan community in South Florida, said he’s keeping an open mind about Figuera.

 

“My only goal is to have elections, real elections. Otherwise nothing good happens,” Díaz Balart said.

 

‘How can we believe them?’

The U.S. involvement in the six days of talks in August was clear on the ground in Caracas.

 

Before and after each negotiation session, U.S. diplomats sat with the delegation to talk through potential sticking points, according to a person close to the talks. U.S. diplomatic vehicles and security were also used by the opposition delegation throughout their stay.

 

As the first round of talks wrapped up on Aug. 12, the two delegations presented a joint statement to a room full of journalists. Figuera outlined sweeping Supreme Court reforms, while Rodríguez announced an agreement to work toward unfreezing $4 billion in Venezuelan gold held at the Bank of England.

 

Both of these steps have been seen as necessary for laying the groundwork toward strengthening democracy and helping Venezuelans recover from the earthquakes, two of the goals agreed on by both delegations.

 

Talks are expected to resume in mid-September.

 

For critics of the interim government, one of the strongest indicators that it is not committed to democratic change is that, despite passing a new amnesty law, it has kept hundreds of political opponents behind bars.

 

A person close to the negotiations said political prisoners were deliberately kept off the negotiation agenda to prevent the interim government from using them as leverage.

 

Two days after the August talks concluded, in an apparent gesture of goodwill, the Rodríguez government announced the release of 131 political prisoners, though without naming them.

 

Foro Penal, a rights group, has confirmed only around 80 releases. Many of those freed remain subject to restrictions, including travel bans and a duty to report regularly to the authorities.

 

Although welcoming the move, opposition leaders and rights activists caution the lack of transparency should be seen as a warning sign that, even as the talks proceed, the regime is more interested in the optics than in true reform.

 

“It’s not true that we’re free,” said Henry Alviarez, one of Machado’s top aides, who was released in February after two years in Caracas’ notorious El Helicoide prison, under the condition he report to the authorities every month.

 

Like many others, Alviarez cited more than a dozen rounds of previous negotiations with the chavista government in the past decade as a reason to be skeptical.

 

He recalled how, within months of the last round of talks between the government and opposition in Barbados in late 2023, Machado was forced into hiding, and he and several members of her team were detained.

 

“How can we believe them?” he questioned, referring to Venezuela’s current leadership.

 

Another such sign, rights groups have argued, has been the treatment of journalists wanting to cover the negotiations, who, throughout the six-day process were largely kept in the dark and not given an opportunity to ask the delegations any questions.

 

On the first day of the talks, Aug. 6, as the two sides met at La Carlota, a military airbase, a journalist was stopped by armed men on motorcycles who seized her phone and proceeded to delete photographs she’d taken of the venue, according to Venezuela’s National Union of Press Workers.

 

The men briefly discussed over radio whether to take her to military counterintelligence before letting her go, the union said.

 

According to Venezuelan opposition media, Jorge Rodriguez told the delegations he’d chosen the airbase for the first meeting between the two sides because it was “almost a bunker” that would help “keep out both the media and other factors that might seek to undermine the talks.”

 

Waiting for democracy

The talks in Caracas were only the first step in what is looking to be a long process.

 

So far, Figuera has not given a firm timetable for a vote, even as she has said Venezuela should have a new electoral council and Supreme Court, two bodies that would help ensure a fair electoral result, by the end of the year.

 

“The way the [U.S.] administration is doing it is saying: ‘Well, we have to create the conditions first,’” said Abrams, the former U.S. envoy. “‘And then when all the conditions are created, we can set a date for an election.’” He called that a “very bad idea” because it gives the regime an incentive to ensure those conditions are never fully met.

 

But even many critics of the talks hold out hope that Washington’s involvement and the threat of military action will keep the regime on its toes.

 

“The American presence has to ensure that what happened in past negotiation processes in Venezuela, in which the regime’s only objective was to buy time and stay in power, doesn’t happen again,” said Juan Pablo Guanipa, a prominent opposition politician, speaking over videocall from his home in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-biggest city.

 

On the streets of Caracas, however, many are despondent and say they feel little momentum toward the promised democratic transition.

 

“It’s like a divorce that just goes on and on,” said Rosa, a middle-aged shop vendor with shoulder-length dark hair who worked in a largely empty shopping mall in Chacao, Caracas’ once wealthy business district. She was granted anonymity in order to speak freely on political matters.

 

“One figurine [Maduro] has been removed,” she said, “but his place has just been taken over by others who are just like him.”

 

 

A prolonged transition could work to Rodríguez’s advantage, further extending her time in power while deepening her relationship with Washington and keeping her political opponents divided.

 

Critics also fear Rodríguez could use the negotiations to hand Trump a symbolic foreign policy victory ahead of the U.S. midterms, such as by agreeing to regional elections rather than presidential ones, making a symbolic democratic concession without actually running the risk of being voted out of office.

 

An extended negotiation process could also benefit Washington, prolonging its working relationship with a regime that Trump has openly praised for its subservience.

 

Pigott, the State Department spokesperson, declined to comment on the timeline for the transition, saying only that the U.S. “remains committed to advancing the three-phase plan for Venezuela’s stabilization, economic recovery, reconciliation, and democratic transition.”

 

In Venezuela, the question is how far the U.S. is willing to go to make that transition politically meaningful — and not simply symbolic.

 

“It’s clear that we’re now part of the U.S. playbook,” said one senior Venezuelan military officer. “It’s just not clear what that playbook is.”

 

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