Maduro’s Capture Wasn’t a Raid. It Was a Hand‑Off
As Cuban bodyguards died and Venezuelan forces stood down, Delcy Rodríguez and the Caracas elite quietly turned a U.S. operation into their chance to cut loose a leader they no longer trusted.
Venezuela’s political class treated the U.S. raid that removed Nicolás Maduro less as an invasion than as an opportunity. Delcy Rodríguez’s rise and abrupt tone shift make it hard to ignore the possibility of an internal calculation, or at least quiet acquiescence, even if no one has produced a smoking gun. The near absence of Venezuelan military resistance, the fact that the clearly identified dead are Cuban officers guarding Maduro, and the speed with which institutions rallied behind Rodríguez all feed a plausible narrative. Either Maduro was betrayed by his own inner circle, or he helped manage his own exit from an increasingly untenable position.
The outsourced presidency
For years, Maduro tried to protect himself from betrayal inside the Venezuelan state by deepening his reliance on Cuban officers in his security detail and intelligence network. In practice he outsourced pieces of Venezuela’s sovereignty to Havana. Critics inside and outside the country had already described this Cuban layer as a parallel state within the state. It monitored officers, filtered information, and shaped Maduro’s perception of who was loyal and who was a threat.
The U.S. operation did not wipe out the entire system. It removed the man at its center and the foreign guardians closest to him, while leaving most of the Venezuelan power structure physically intact. Cuban officers died in significant numbers. Venezuelan power brokers survived and quickly stabilized around Rodríguez. That imbalance already suggests that the real break was not simply Washington against Caracas, but Caracas trying to loosen Havana’s grip.
A system that chose not to fight
The strangest feature of the raid is not its boldness but its cleanliness. A complex operation in the heart of Caracas reportedly faced little resistance and produced no U.S. deaths. It is difficult to accept that at face value. To pull off something like that, someone on the inside either opened doors or agreed not to close them. Former officials, military commentators, and Venezuelans posting online converged on a similar intuition: this looked less like a surprise ambush and more like a controlled implosion.
The armed forces reinforced that impression. The defense minister went on television and condemned the United States. At the same time, the military high command endorsed Rodríguez as acting president and presented the situation as institutional continuity. In a region where even clumsy coups usually trigger days of standoffs, that fast return to routine feels rehearsed. It looks less like paralysis and more like a Plan B finally activated.
Delcy Rodríguez and the national interest
Rodríguez entered this crisis as a core regime operator, not a placeholder. She had already been supervising parts of the economy and managing sanctions damage control. She was the person tasked with keeping the system from outright collapse. Within days of the raid, she moved from denouncing a kidnapping to talking about a balanced and respectful relationship with Washington and inviting cooperation. That shift does not sound like the voice of a camp that believes it is under open imperial attack. It sounds like a technocrat testing how far she can reopen channels to the global system without losing her base.
Viewed through a critical lens, this begins to look like a national interest coup without tanks. The goal was not democracy. The goal was to bring decision making back to Caracas and away from Havana. Maduro’s survival strategy had turned Cuban intelligence into the main arbiter of internal loyalty. The easiest way for insiders to reclaim autonomy was to remove the president who embodied that dependence and let outsiders take the blame for the violence. By letting the United States shoulder the visible force, Rodríguez and the generals avoided the stigma of directly deposing Maduro, while inheriting a state no longer shielded by his Cuban circle or burdened by his personal legal exposure abroad.
In that sense, Maduro was not only overthrown. He was exported. He became a legal problem parked in a courtroom in New York instead of a live risk sitting in Miraflores.
Betrayal inside an anti betrayal strategy
The darkest irony is that Maduro’s attempt to prevent betrayal probably made betrayal easier to justify. His answer to internal plotting was to surround himself with Cubans. That may have convinced many Venezuelan insiders that getting rid of him was synonymous with defending Venezuelan sovereignty. Even members of his own family have leaned into the language of betrayal, promising that history will reveal the traitors. That is as close as you get to an admission that people close to the center allowed this to happen.
For years, critical voices in and around Chavismo asked whether Maduro was defending the nation or subcontracting it. To them the Bolivarian project under Maduro looked less like a sovereign experiment and more like a joint venture between Havana and Caracas. Once the costs of that arrangement became unbearable, once sanctions bit deeper and the ruling elite started to feel personally exposed, the calculation shifted. The easiest way to recentre the regime on Venezuelan interests was not to break with Cuba in public. It was to watch, in silence, as a foreign power stripped away the Cuban focused president and his foreign guards in one night.
The result is a grim inversion of the old anti imperialist script. Official rhetoric still brands the United States as the aggressor. Yet the real winners from the raid are the Venezuelan insiders who no longer live under a leader whose legal troubles and foreign loyalties threatened them, and a new president who can claim revolutionary continuity at home while offering pragmatism abroad.
Judas goat or sacrificial pawn
On the edges of the conversation, more speculative narratives are circulating. Some frame Maduro as a Judas goat, a leader who unwittingly led his own foreign protectors to slaughter. Others push the idea that he accepted capture as the least bad exit, trading the risk of an internal purge for the relative predictability of a U.S. court and the status of a political prisoner. None of that is provable. What matters is why so many people find those theories more believable than the official story.
The visible facts line up with a darker logic. A president protected by foreigners is taken in a way that disproportionately kills those foreigners. The domestic elite that had most reason to fear his judgment remains largely intact around his vice president. The new leadership immediately tries to play a double game, talking sovereignty and resistance to its base while testing the waters of cooperation with Washington.
Under that light, the most unsettling part of the Maduro capture is no longer the lack of resistance. It is the possibility that, for the people who now rule Venezuela, resisting was never really on the table.