Seventy-two hours in, the shape of this is already familiar if you’ve spent any real time inside Venezuela. The Rodríguez network controls the Executive, the Legislative, and what remains of the economic circuitry, a form of power exercised through decrees, courts, contracts, and international interlocutors, and that is the narrow platform from which Delcy Rodríguez is attempting to govern. The problem she faces is not the opposition, which is largely neutralized for now, but the country itself, where authority has never flowed neatly from institutions and where governability is decided far from the Official Gazette.
That is the terrain Diosdado Cabello understands instinctively. His power has never depended on formal control of the state, but on control of the instruments that make the state work or fail. Henchmen, paramilitary structures, colectivos, the informal coercive layer that operates without legal cover and without apologies. When colectivos reappear in Caracas and intelligence actors begin moving outside visible chains of command, that is not spontaneous disorder or revolutionary enthusiasm, it is a deliberate strategy to deny governability. Diosdado does not need to overthrow Delcy to defeat her. He only needs to make it impossible for her to rule, because his leverage has always been the ability to veto outcomes rather than propose them.
That dynamic leaves one hinge, and it has always been the same one: Vladimir Padrino López. Padrino has never been loyal to personalities or factions, and anyone who still frames his role that way is misreading him. His loyalty is to arrangements that preserve the Armed Forces as the last functioning national structure and preserve his position as their arbiter. He tolerates civilian power as long as it does not hollow out the military by replacing it with militias, and he tolerates instability only until it begins to bypass him.
None of this is new if you read Venezuelan history without romanticism. After Marcos Pérez Jiménez fell in 1958, democracy did not arrive as a clean moral break. There was almost a year of provisional rule under Wolfgang Larrazábal, a figure drawn from the old order, precisely to absorb the shock and give the system time to recompose. Only after that buffer did Rómulo Betancourt take office, and even then his government operated under permanent threat and instability.
The through line is uncomfortable but consistent. Transitions are not moral moments but exercises in power management. Venezuela’s last successful one survived because it accepted ambiguity and continuity long enough to stabilize the system. Anyone expecting clean breaks, instant legitimacy, or orderly handovers in this country is not being hopeful. They are refusing to look at how it has actually worked before, in Venezuela and many other countries. Chile and Spain were an exception to the rule.
That is the terrain Diosdado Cabello understands instinctively. His power has never depended on formal control of the state, but on control of the instruments that make the state work or fail. Henchmen, paramilitary structures, colectivos, the informal coercive layer that operates without legal cover and without apologies. When colectivos reappear in Caracas and intelligence actors begin moving outside visible chains of command, that is not spontaneous disorder or revolutionary enthusiasm, it is a deliberate strategy to deny governability. Diosdado does not need to overthrow Delcy to defeat her. He only needs to make it impossible for her to rule, because his leverage has always been the ability to veto outcomes rather than propose them.
That dynamic leaves one hinge, and it has always been the same one: Vladimir Padrino López. Padrino has never been loyal to personalities or factions, and anyone who still frames his role that way is misreading him. His loyalty is to arrangements that preserve the Armed Forces as the last functioning national structure and preserve his position as their arbiter. He tolerates civilian power as long as it does not hollow out the military by replacing it with militias, and he tolerates instability only until it begins to bypass him.
None of this is new if you read Venezuelan history without romanticism. After Marcos Pérez Jiménez fell in 1958, democracy did not arrive as a clean moral break. There was almost a year of provisional rule under Wolfgang Larrazábal, a figure drawn from the old order, precisely to absorb the shock and give the system time to recompose. Only after that buffer did Rómulo Betancourt take office, and even then his government operated under permanent threat and instability.
The through line is uncomfortable but consistent. Transitions are not moral moments but exercises in power management. Venezuela’s last successful one survived because it accepted ambiguity and continuity long enough to stabilize the system. Anyone expecting clean breaks, instant legitimacy, or orderly handovers in this country is not being hopeful. They are refusing to look at how it has actually worked before, in Venezuela and many other countries. Chile and Spain were an exception to the rule.
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