Opinion: In Venezuela, Washington is legitimizing power, not the vote

María Corina Machado walked into a church in Lara state on the morning of October 25 and posted two words on X: "Aquí estoy. Con ustedes" — I am here, with you. It was her first appearance inside Venezuela in nearly ten months, since she went into hiding and then exile after the disputed election of July 2024, and it set off scenes NPR described as a jubilant congregation surrounding her, followed by hundreds of supporters swarming her car when she reached Caracas.

It should have been the week's clearest vindication of the Trump administration's Venezuela policy: the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, home at last, nine months after U.S. special forces seized Nicolás Maduro in a January 3 raid and flew him to New York to face narco-terrorism charges. Instead, the return exposed exactly who that policy has and has not been built around. Secretary of State Marco Rubio credited her homecoming to "the US supported reconciliation talks" — talks that, by her own account and by the account of outside analysts, she has not been part of. President Trump, asked about it, said he knew little of the trip, called her "a very nice woman" who had given him her Nobel Prize, and moved on. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez, the Maduro loyalist Washington has spent the year rehabilitating, said nothing public at all.

That asymmetry is the story. Nine months into a transition Washington designed, built and continues to fund with sanctions relief, the Venezuelan with the strongest claim to an actual electoral mandate is a bystander to it, while a career Chavista with an expired legal mandate is its centerpiece.

A caretaker president who outlasted her own clock

After Maduro's capture, Venezuela's Supreme Tribunal installed Rodríguez, his vice president, as acting head of state under a constitutional provision that caps a temporary absence at 90 days, extendable once by the Rodríguez-aligned National Assembly. That clock ran out on April 3 with no public extension vote — Rodríguez simply stayed in office, as the Associated Press reported at the time, with an analyst quoted predicting the government would eventually produce a tribunal ruling to paper over the gap, "and it would be no surprise if they did so again." The same court order, notably, still lists Maduro as Venezuela's legally sitting president, describing his absence as a "kidnapping" rather than a removal — a legal fiction that lets the same apparatus govern indefinitely while never quite admitting the office is vacant.

Washington's response to that ambiguity was not to press for clarity. It was to reward it. On April 1, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control deleted Delcy Rodríguez's two entries from the Specially Designated Nationals list — the sanctions that had frozen her out of the U.S. financial system since Trump's first term — within days of her term limit quietly expiring. Reporting at the time noted the administration had already begun referring to her as Venezuela's "sole Head of State" in U.S. court filings. No comparable gesture has been made toward setting an election date. Nine months on, none exists.

Oil licenses, not ballots

The clearest measure of what Washington actually prioritized in Caracas is the sanctions relief it issued fastest. On January 29 — less than four weeks after Maduro's capture — OFAC published General License 46, authorizing "established U.S. entities" to resume lifting, refining, importing and trading Venezuelan-origin oil through PDVSA and the Rodríguez government. The license was amended twice more within six weeks; the consolidated Federal Register filing covering all three versions shows the authorization extends to chartering vessels, marine insurance, and port operations conducted with Venezuela's state port authorities — the ordinary machinery of a functioning oil trade, waved back into motion for a government that had just watched its own president extracted by American commandos.

There is a defensible case for that sequencing: Venezuela's economy is in ruins, its oil sector is the only plausible source of near-term recovery, and squeezing it further punishes ordinary Venezuelans more than it punishes Chavista elites. But the administration cannot have it both ways. It cannot treat the oil sector's needs as urgent enough to resolve in weeks while treating Machado's exclusion from the actual political negotiations, and the absence of any election timetable, as a matter requiring no comparable urgency nine months later.

The talks that didn't need her

The "reconciliation talks" Rubio credits with Machado's safe return began in August between Jorge Rodríguez — Delcy's brother and the government's chief negotiator — and Dinorah Figuera, who leads the opposition-controlled National Assembly elected in 2015. Machado and her party, Vente Venezuela, were left out from the start, because, as the framework Washington endorsed defines it, she holds no seat in that 2015 body — the institutional vehicle chosen for the dialogue. It is a technically defensible criterion and a politically absurd one: Machado is not a member of an eleven-year-old legislature because she is the woman whose coalition's candidate, Edmundo González, by independent tallies and the assessment of multiple governments that withheld recognition of Maduro's claimed 2024 win, actually won the presidency Rodríguez's government now occupies on a caretaker basis.

The sequence of the past ten months reads less like a negotiated transition than a series of unilateral US and Venezuelan government decisions that Machado has had to react to from outside the room:

• January 3, 2026 — U.S. forces capture Maduro in Caracas; he is indicted in the Southern District of New York and flown to Manhattan.
• Late January–February 2026 — OFAC issues General Licenses 46, 46A and 46B reopening Venezuela's oil sector to U.S. firms.
• March 2026 — Washington and the Rodríguez government agree to restore diplomatic relations.
• April 1, 2026 — OFAC removes Delcy Rodríguez from its sanctions list, days after her constitutional 90-day term limit lapsed unextended.
• August 2026 — "Reconciliation talks" open in Caracas between the government and the 2015 National Assembly opposition, without Machado or González.
• October 15, 2026 — Machado tells reporters the U.S. has excluded her from the negotiations over her own country's future; the State Department disputes her framing.
• October 25, 2026 — Machado returns to Venezuela unannounced after nearly a year in exile; Rubio credits the talks she was not part of.

Machado has not rejected the process outright — she has said she will judge it by whether it produces freed political prisoners and real elections, and Edmundo González, still in exile in Spain, called her return "a very important day for Venezuelans" and said he would join her soon. But her consent is not a precondition the administration has treated as necessary. It has instead built a parallel legitimacy for Rodríguez's government through diplomatic recognition and sanctions relief, and then presented Machado's reappearance as evidence the strategy is working — crediting the talks for an outcome the talks did not produce and Machado did not control.

What legitimacy should actually cost

None of this means the administration was wrong to remove Maduro, whose government spent a quarter-century entangled with cocaine-trafficking networks according to the indictment prosecutors unsealed in January, or wrong to try reviving an economy that has driven roughly a quarter of Venezuela's population abroad since 2014. A functioning oil sector and a stabilized caretaker government are not inherently at odds with a democratic outcome. But they are not the same thing as one, and treating sanctions relief and diplomatic recognition as sufficient rewards for Rodríguez's government — while treating Machado's return as a bonus outcome of a process that sidelined her — gets the incentives backward. It tells Caracas that stability and oil access can be banked before democracy is delivered, not after.

If Washington wants its Venezuela policy to be remembered as something other than a change of which faction controls the oil taps, the test is straightforward and still unmet: a published election date, Machado and González free to campaign for it, and sanctions relief calibrated to that outcome rather than to a caretaker government's survival past its own legal deadline. Nine months after Maduro's capture, none of the three exists. Machado came home anyway, on her own initiative, to a country whose interim government never scheduled a vote and whose foreign patron is still unsure, in the president's own words, what she was doing there.