The Venezuelan regime is governing on an expired mandate

Diosdado Cabello has a $25 million American bounty on his head and is under federal indictment in New York for narco-terrorism, weapons trafficking, and conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States. Last week, cameras caught him personally turning away an American rescue worker trying to reach earthquake victims in La Guaira, a Venezuelan state long associated with drug and money-laundering networks.

Rescue teams from Germany, Spain, and Chile reported similar treatment. One rescuer stated his team found roughly 20 safe-deposit boxes in the basement of a collapsed building, a neighbor called it cartel money. The confirmed death toll has climbed toward 3,000, with tens of thousands still unaccounted for.

This is the man helping to oversee Venezuela’s stabilization six months after the U.S. removed Nicolás Maduro and celebrated the start of a democratic transition, a transition now being run on legal authority that has expired.

The Trump administration presented Maduro’s capture as a strategic success: a dictator flown to New York on drug charges, sanctions eased, and Chevron back in Venezuelan oil fields. Yet the government now consists largely of the officials who sustained Maduro’s rule. Interim leader Delcy Rodriguez, her brother Jorge, and Cabello formed his inner circle.

Maduro disappeared. They did not.

Venezuelan Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello (L) and Executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez (R). (Washington Examiner illustration; Andalou/Getty Images)

" data-large-file="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Venezuela_leadership_InFocus_44-e1783612699438.jpg?w=696" src="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Venezuela_leadership_InFocus_44.jpg?w=696" alt="Venezuelan Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello (L) and Executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez (R)." class="wp-image-4642311" style="width:781px;height:auto">Venezuelan Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello (L) and Executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez (R). (Washington Examiner illustration; Andalou/Getty Images)

That continuity looks less like an accident than the practical foundation of the transition itself. Rodriguez was in contact with U.S. officials for months before Maduro’s removal and had signaled her willingness to cooperate once he was gone. That does not prove a bargain existed, nor does it need to. The security services, the courts, and the governing party all remained intact. Washington removed the regime’s most internationally toxic figure, and the regime survived.

The earthquakes two weeks ago exposed what that decision had preserved. Thousands of buildings collapsed, and international rescue teams from several countries encountered delays, restrictions, and arbitrary access decisions that slowed lifesaving assistance. Rather than restoring order, residents accused police and military personnel of looting homes and even bodies, and the justice ministry confirmed the arrest of four officers caught stealing from the rubble, even as ordinary Venezuelans searched for survivors with their bare hands.

Maria Corina Machado tried to return home to help organize relief through the volunteer network she has spent years building. Her aircraft was turned back over North Carolina after U.S. officials intervened, and a second attempt through Panama failed when a commercial carrier declined to carry her, reportedly fearing regime retaliation. State officials publicly backed democratic transition while separate White House channels urged her to stay away. The effect was unmistakable: the opposition figure best positioned to mobilize Venezuelan civil society stayed sidelined while Maduro’s lieutenants consolidated power.

That failure now has a name: an expired mandate. Venezuela’s high court ruled that Maduro’s “forced absence” triggered a provision letting Rodriguez, then vice president, serve as acting president for up to 90 days, extendable once by the National Assembly for another 90, the maximum allowed. That 180-day limit lapsed on July 3, more than a week into the earthquake response, with no public vote and no comment from either Rodriguez’s government or the Assembly.

The only lawful path forward is a snap election. Rodriguez would likely lose it, given a track record that includes the disputed 2024 vote, when the government declared Maduro the winner, a result the U.S. and much of the international community refused to recognize. A vote held now, under earthquake devastation and an already expired mandate, would invite that same kind of controversy regardless of the outcome, adding to the instability Washington has spent six months trying to avoid.

Public opinion has registered the disappointment precisely. A Bloomberg-commissioned survey put Rodriguez’s disapproval at 63.3%, with 52.4% calling her earthquake response very poor. Machado, still barred from returning, remained the country’s most trusted political figure at 53% favorable.

The fracture is no longer confined to Caracas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called the earthquakes a “setback” to the transition plan. Florida Republicans, including Sen. Rick Scott and Reps. Carlos Gimenez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart, have broken with the White House to demand that Rodriguez’s government be cut off from American aid and Cabello be extradited. Washington’s Venezuela policy is now contested at home almost as openly as in Caracas.

Many Venezuelans describe the same arc: hope raised by Maduro’s removal, then withdrawn as the same institutions and leaders remained in control.

There is a realpolitik defense of this approach. After 25 years of Chavista rule, Venezuela’s military, bureaucracy, and patronage networks are deeply intertwined with the regime, and a sudden dismantling risked the kind of collapse seen in Iraq or Libya. Working with insiders capable of keeping the state functioning was a defensible instinct.

The problem is not that Washington chose continuity over chaos. The problem is that it presented continuity as democratic transition while preventing the one political movement with genuine national legitimacy from exercising the influence it had earned.

That failure to back the opposition was not an isolated misstep. American policy never settled on what it was actually for, driven at different moments by regime change, stability, migration, or oil, sometimes all at once, with no strategy built around the one constituency that could have made any of those goals durable: the Venezuelan people themselves.

Washington had an asset it never fully employed: millions of Venezuelans abroad, an opposition movement that survived years of repression, and volunteer networks capable of delivering aid and rebuilding local legitimacy. Rather than treating those networks as the principal instrument of change, Washington managed them as complications around an arrangement with surviving regime insiders.

A different strategy would have invested directly in that opposition infrastructure, building a competing source of legitimacy Venezuelans could trust. Instead, Washington pursued the faster, more visible success: Maduro in custody, sanctions relief, renewed oil production, declarations of transition. It got the dictator without getting rid of the dictatorship.

The lesson extends beyond Venezuela. Removing a ruler is often the easiest phase of political change, but transforming the institutions that sustained his rule is harder since stable authoritarian systems rarely depend on one individual. They depend on networks, bureaucracies, and elites built to survive leadership transitions. And unless those structures are addressed, removing the leader just creates space for the next manager.

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Removing Maduro was worthwhile. Leaving intact the machinery that empowered him was a separate, costly decision. Six months later, the U.S. is celebrating a dictator’s fall while working with the officials who built his regime, officials whose own legal mandate to govern has quietly expired without comment from either capital.

Washington removed Maduro; it has not replaced Maduroism.