10
Loading video...
By Jesus Mesa
Reporter
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
Henrique Capriles has run for the Venezuelan presidency twice and come closer than almost anyone to beating Chavismo at the ballot box. Six months into a United States-engineered transition of power in Caracas, he says he has come to read Washington differently than most.
Even as U.S. President Donald Trump's public tone toward interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez has swung from threats of ruin to open praise, Capriles, one of Venezuela's leading opposition leaders and now a National Assembly member, says he has learned to separate what Trump says about the caretaker government from what his administration is actually doing.
"I'm not one of those who gets carried away by President Trump's statements," Capriles said in an interview with Newsweek. "I don't take them as some kind of definitive sentence, because we've seen many statements from President Trump, and three days later it's something else."
Read More on Politics
Hours after the January 3 operation that resulted in the capture of President Nicolas Maduro, Trump warned that Rodríguez would "pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro" if she failed to cooperate. Months later, however, his tone had changed, full of praise for Rodríguez and the interim government, and even extended to Washington intervening on her behalf in federal court.
"Delcy is doing a fantastic job," Trump said Thursday during an event at the Environmental Protection Agency. He pointed to the volume of Venezuelan crude reaching American refineries as evidence of the relationship's payoff.
But rather than reading Trump's comments as evidence of a broader policy shift, Capriles said he has grown accustomed to the president's unpredictable messaging, pointing to the weeks before the January raid, when Trump and Maduro spoke by phone despite the escalating tensions.
"Venezuelans give President Trump credit for taking out Maduro. The truth is, with elections we couldn't get rid of Maduro," Capriles said, pointing to the second anniversary of the July 28, 2024, election, in which Maduro claimed a widely disputed victory that independent observers, including the Carter Center, said he actually lost to opposition candidate Edmundo González.
"Flowers, sanctions, none of that got rid of Maduro either. The game was completely locked. And then Trump came in and did what he did," he added.
...
A Gamble That Paid Off
The January 3 raid, carried out under the name Operation Absolute Resolve, saw U.S. Special Forces seize Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from a secured compound in Caracas after months of military pressure that the Trump administration framed as an anti-narcotics campaign. Venezuelan officials said 83 people were killed and more than 112 injured in the operation.
Maduro was flown to New York, where he and Flores pleaded not guilty to narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine-importation conspiracy and weapons charges. A federal judge set his trial to begin June 1, 2027, though prosecutors and defense attorneys have said the schedule could shift.
Capriles said the operation might never have happened at all had Maduro accepted defeat in 2024.
"If Maduro had respected the results, and Edmundo González had assumed the presidency, January 3 would not have happened, in my opinion," Capriles said. "It would have changed the relationship with the international community, but especially with the United States."
Looking back, Capriles said he did not believe, even as tensions escalated through 2025, that Washington would actually go through with a military operation to remove Maduro.
"I never imagined it was going to happen the way it happened. And it happened," Capriles said. "That's why I say Trump gambled. He gambled. And he won."
Trump said at the time that the United States would "run" Venezuela until a safe transition could take place. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro's vice president, was sworn in as interim president two days later, becoming the first woman to hold presidential power in Venezuelan history, under what U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described as a three-phase plan moving from stabilization to economic recovery to political transition.
"You have to give Trump credit—he took out Maduro," Capriles said. "I believe the political process happening in Venezuela, beyond whatever President Trump says, is a process being driven day to day by the Secretary of State Marco Rubio."
...
The Sovereignty Question
The scale of U.S. involvement in Venezuela's transition has drawn criticism well beyond Chavista holdouts. When the January 3 operation was first announced, Colombian President Gustavo Petro called it an assault on the sovereignty of Latin America and warned it would trigger a humanitarian crisis.
A New York Times investigation published earlier this month, reported by Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev, later described Rubio as Venezuela's de facto "viceroy." The Times reported that Rubio has weighed in on Venezuelan personnel decisions, pushed Rodríguez to purge officials tied to Maduro, and pressured her government to soften a public statement critical of U.S. airstrikes on Iran.
Capriles rejected the framing that Venezuela has surrendered its sovereignty, arguing that the country's history of invoking sovereignty rhetoric has typically served whoever held power in Caracas, not the Venezuelan people.
"If Maduro had still been in Miraflores during the earthquakes, you would have seen Russian helicopters, Chinese, Iranian, Cuban," Capriles said. "The sovereignty argument in Venezuela has always been used out of convenience. A false nationalism."
He said he does not view the current arrangement as a permanent loss of Venezuelan self-determination, but as a phase Venezuelans need to move through carefully.
"I don't believe this is some kind of viceroyalty, that we're going to become the 51st state. I think that's rhetoric," Capriles said. "I believe our relationship with the United States, going forward, is going to be a relationship between country and country."
That arrangement has drawn its own scrutiny. A Financial Times investigation published last week estimated the United States has collected more than $13 billion in revenue from Venezuelan oil sales since assuming control of the country's exports in January, while only $300 million has been publicly documented as reaching Venezuela, according to a government website set up to track the funds.
Asked about the figure aboard Air Force One as he traveled to Michigan to tour a General Motors facility, Trump did not dispute it. "Thirteen billion from Venezuela? I think even more than that," he told reporters.
Capriles acknowledged the economic dimension of the arrangement but argued that judging the transition on revenue figures alone misses what he sees as the harder, generational work still ahead.
"It's true that the United States has economic interests. But I believe there is, or should be, awareness in Washington that democracy is very important in Venezuela, that voting is part of democracy," Capriles said. "I would bet on the success of what Secretary Rubio has laid out."
...
The Three-Phase Plan
Rubio announced in July that Venezuela's government and a segment of the opposition would formally begin transition talks on August 1. The talks fall under a three-phase plan Rubio first laid out in January: stabilization, recovery and transition. Washington has cast the August 1 talks as the formal start of that third and final phase.
The process has already exposed rifts within the opposition. Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, who together represent the ticket Maduro is accused of defeating through fraud in 2024, have said they will not join a mechanism they argue was designed without their input.
Capriles has had his own history of friction with Machado's camp over strategy, most notably during the 2018 and 2024 election cycles, when he argued for participation over abstention. Even so, he said Machado's voice needs to be part of any credible transition, despite her staying out of the August 1 process.
"Any process of negotiation or transition in Venezuela, the voice of María Corina has to be present, has to be heard," Capriles said. "She has said she is not going to be an obstacle to the process moving forward. That seems positive to me."
Related Story
Judge Excludes Speedy Trial Clock as Maduro’s Case Pushes to 2027
That calculation, more than loyalty to Washington, is what Capriles said explains why so much of Venezuela's political class has avoided open confrontation with the United States since January 3, even as criticism of Rubio's role has mounted. It is not agreement with every decision coming out of Washington, he said, but a recognition of what the alternative still represents.
"Nobody wants to fall into contradiction with this process. Nobody," Capriles said. "Because everyone immediately remembers Maduro, going back to Maduro, never having again what existed before January 3. Nobody wants that."
Capriles, who won a seat in Venezuela's National Assembly last year despite widespread calls within the opposition to abstain from participating, was careful to distinguish Rodríguez's caretaker administration from any form of legitimate government.
"Delcy Rodríguez is a 'meanwhile,'" Capriles said, using a term that implies a placeholder rather than an elected leader. "She was not there by popular election. Delcy Rodríguez was there by selection, designation, decree of Maduro."
He said he has observed growing friction inside the ruling apparatus itself, particularly between officials closer to the late Hugo Chávez and those, like the Rodríguez family, more closely tied to Maduro.
"The Rodríguez family are not the heirs of Chávez. The Rodríguez family are closer to Maduro than to Chávez," Capriles said.
...
An Earthquake Complicates Recovery
The transition has been tested in ways few anticipated. Twin earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude struck Venezuela's coastal La Guaira region on June 24, killing more than 5,000 people and leaving thousands homeless, according to figures from Venezuela's information ministry. The disaster hit just as the country's interim government was working to stabilize the economy and attract renewed investment following Maduro's removal.
Capriles described the timing as a cruel setback to a country that had just begun to see signs of economic hope.
"There was a great economic expectation, and then came this disaster, these two earthquakes," Capriles said. "This obviously brings back uncertainty, a great uncertainty about when the recovery, the reconstruction will happen, and when the economic and social improvements will come."
Rodríguez's government has said it secured $346 million in emergency financing from the International Monetary Fund for humanitarian needs, though the United Nations has said international donations remain far below the roughly $931 million needed for the year. Reconstruction costs are expected to run into the tens of billions of dollars in a country whose economy has contracted more than any other in peacetime in modern history, according to figures cited by foreign policy analysts.
Yet, Capriles said the earthquake, for all its devastation, revealed something about ordinary Venezuelans that the country's politics had obscured.
"In the earthquake, it didn't matter if you were Chavista or not," Capriles said. "The neighbor sees you, comes out, and there's no deep wound there. I think that stage of extreme polarization, of divided families, people who wouldn't speak to each other over politics, I think that's over."
Asked how a country as politically divided as Venezuela might eventually reconcile, Capriles said accountability and durable institutions, not retribution, would determine whether the country avoids repeating its past.
"Justice is not revenge," Capriles said. "If Venezuela has a strong and independent judicial system, then whoever thinks the plan is simply to change the color of the shirt and do the same thing Chavismo did will run into that justice, will run into strong institutions."
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Sam Wilson.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines