Until the US spirited Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro away to a jail cell in New York, the strongman’s image and voice dominated the airwaves.
The former bus driver, like his predecessor Hugo Chávez, made rambling and folksy speeches that were carried in full by state broadcasters, sometimes for hours. Even if there was little to announce, each of the two men would fill airtime by dancing, singing — and singling out suspected dissidents. Buildings and billboards featured their faces across the country.
Since acting president Delcy Rodríguez took over in January, Venezuelans said the atmosphere has been very different. While Rodríguez, formerly Maduro’s deputy, has pledged loyalty to him, she has also brought about an abrupt shift from abrasive populism to a more technocratic style. Her television appearances tend to be brief and focused.
“There’s just less hate and fewer accusations flying around now,” said Yenyfer Díaz, a pensioner in Caracas. “Maduro isn’t on television all the time attacking people, and that alone is major change.”
Rodríguez has spent decades operating within Venezuela’s authoritarian socialist system. But under heavy US pressure, a tentative political opening has begun since she took power. And Venezuelans say the changes are not purely cosmetic.
Small, student-led pro-democracy protests have been tolerated; hundreds of political prisoners have been released; and opposition leaders are appearing on state media. All were unthinkable on the eve of Maduro’s capture.
Rodríguez has also pledged to close El Helicoide, an unfinished shopping mall that was repurposed into a feared prison. Since January 3, the day of Maduro’s capture, some 350 prisoners have been released nationwide, according to rights groups. Foro Penal, a watchdog, said Venezuela had 687 political prisoners on February 2.
“The country we had last year and the country we’ve had since January 3 are worlds apart,” said Rosa Cucunuba, a student leader at the Central University of Venezuela, who organised a pro-democracy rally outside the university that would have been crushed by authorities during Maduro’s tenure. “A door of opportunity has opened that we cannot afford to waste.”
Lawmakers on Thursday advanced an “amnesty law” that, if approved, will result in pardons for political crimes committed during 26 years of revolutionary rule.
Taken together, the measures represent the first signs of an unwinding of the central tenets of Chavismo, the political movement launched by Chávez, a leftist populist who ruled from 1999 until his death from cancer in 2013.
But many Venezuelans are cautious that the early advances could be reversed should the US pressure ease up.
“The US has to keep Venezuela in its focus because if it doesn’t, democracy won’t advance,” said Marilin Ojeda, a protester at the pro-democracy event in Caracas.
Also central to Chavismo was opposition to US influence, with Chávez famously comparing then-president George W Bush to the devil during an appearance at the UN General Assembly in 2006.
During the “maximum pressure” campaign of US President Donald Trump’s first administration, Washington imposed sweeping sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry, some of which are now being unwound. Last week, the US embassy in Caracas welcomed Laura Dogu as the first American chargé d’affaires to serve in Venezuela since 2019.
With Trump focused on business benefits for US companies, Rodríguez has signed a new hydrocarbons law that effectively ends the state’s control over the oil sector, allowing private companies to operate in Venezuela with a lower tax burden.
“They’re trying to do economic opening but not political opening,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank in Washington, of Venezuela’s government.
“The former is going very quickly while the latter is slower than we all want it to be, and some of these actions can be reversed,” Berg added.
“That said, we’ve come a long way in a month and none of this would have happened without the US pushing.”
Rodríguez must also manage the hardliners in her cabinet, including defence minister Vladimir Padrino and interior minister Diosdado Cabello, who together control the armed forces, police and paramilitaries. Cabello’s daughter, an influencer and socialite, was elevated to tourism minister this month in an apparent concession to her strongman father.
A major question is whether Rodríguez’s government will open up space for the political opposition. One private broadcaster, Venevisión, on January 29 aired comments from opposition leader María Corina Machado, who had been largely absent from the airwaves during the later years of Maduro’s tenure.
Machado — who won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize and is in Washington lobbying the White House and diplomats to push for elections in Venezuela — last week said elections could be organised this year.
“We believe that a real transparent process with manual voting . . . throughout the process could be done in nine to 10 months,” Machado, who has been outside Venezuela since December, told Politico. “But, well, that depends when you start.”
Machado was barred from running in 2024’s presidential election, but she spearheaded an independently verified parallel vote count that showed her stand-in, Edmundo González, winning by a margin of two-to-one. Still, Maduro was declared the victor. Rodriguez and her politician brother Jorge were in senior positions during the poll, which the US and several allies said was fraudulent.
While Joe Biden’s administration recognised González’s victory, Trump has sidelined Machado. In his press conference in the hours following Maduro’s arrest, he said the opposition leader “doesn’t have the support . . . or the respect within the country” to lead Venezuela.
Ricardo Ríos, who heads local pollster Poder & Estrategia, said reforms were taking place “with unusual speed” and that polling carried out this week suggests a public that is warming to the moderation in Miraflores, the presidential palace.
“There is a lot of expectation over economic improvement, which is of course thanks to oil companies and Trump, but it also plays in Delcy’s favour,” Ríos said.
Maduro was deeply unpopular, having overseen a severe economic contraction in which GDP shrank by about three-quarters, while nearly a third of the population migrated abroad.
Ahead of Maduro’s capture, more than 45 per cent of poll respondents said sadness was their main emotion in response to the situation in Venezuela, said Ríos. This week the number was closer to 20 per cent. Only 11 per cent said they were intending to leave the country, down from about 20 per cent last year.
Chavistas rarely dare to second-guess the decisions of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, either out of fear or because of party discipline, but some wondered whether the oil sector reforms meant Chávez’s legacy was being erased.
“We are trampling on Chávez’s legacy; he nationalised our industry, and now we’re handing everything over to foreign capital,” said a demonstrator at a march convened in Caracas in support of Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, who was also captured by US forces.
Rodríguez’s government has held other activities to commemorate Maduro and Flores, including installing a letterbox in Caracas’s central Plaza Bolívar, so that well-wishers can write to their ousted leader. Few have deposited correspondence.
“I wrote to thank him for his efforts to sustain us despite the blockade, sanctions and economic measures that have held us back,” said Julio Millán, who works at the Caracas city council.
Mirna Carrasco, a student, was hopeful. “We don’t know how things are going to play out,” she said, “but without Maduro, at least the economy will improve.”