By Justin Kirangacha| The Common Pulse/latest news /US/ Kenya/Abroad/Africa / OCTOBER2025.
For years, the dream of regime change in Venezuela has rested on one faint hope, that the military, the very institution that sustains Nicolás Maduro’s rule, would one day turn its guns around and sweep him from power. Opposition leaders have prayed for it, Washington has banked on it, and countless Venezuelans have whispered about it in dark corners, believing that only the army could end their misery. But as a menacing U.S. naval buildup looms just offshore and diplomatic pressure intensifies, one stubborn truth remains, Maduro is virtually coup-proof. His regime, through years of paranoia, patronage, and purges, has perfected the art of internal control, transforming the military from a potential threat into a pillar of loyalty.
The Anatomy of a Dictatorship
To understand Maduro’s hold, you have to understand the machinery Hugo Chávez built before him. When Chávez, himself a former army officer, rose to power in 1999, he understood that Venezuela’s military was both a sword and a shield. He restructured it not as a neutral institution of the republic, but as a political arm of his “Bolivarian Revolution.” Ideological indoctrination replaced professionalism, loyalty to the revolution supplanted loyalty to the constitution, and military leaders were gradually bound to the state through access to wealth, smuggling routes, and patronage networks.
When Maduro inherited the system after Chávez’s death in 2013, he inherited a double-edged sword, a military already politicized but also corrupted. Rather than reforming it, he tightened the screws further. Generals were promoted not for competence but for loyalty. Entire branches of the armed forces were placed under the control of men who owed their wealth and freedom to the regime. By weaving military elites into a web of privilege, Maduro ensured that betrayal would come at too high a personal cost.
The Wealth That Binds
The Venezuelan military today is less a fighting force than an economic empire. It controls oil distribution, mining, food imports, and even black-market fuel smuggling. Many of its senior officers live like oligarchs while ordinary soldiers endure the same deprivation as the people they are supposed to protect. This economic entanglement has made the armed forces not just complicit but dependent.
Maduro’s government allows generals to control lucrative state-owned companies, issue contracts, and profit from the very sanctions meant to weaken the regime. The infamous “Cartel of the Suns,” a network of military and political figures implicated in drug trafficking, epitomizes this marriage of corruption and loyalty. When your survival depends on the continuity of the regime, ideology becomes irrelevant, and coups become unthinkable.
Fear as a Political Strategy
But loyalty in Venezuela is never voluntary, it’s enforced. Maduro has institutionalized paranoia, using intelligence agencies like SEBIN and DGCIM to spy on officers, arrest potential dissenters, and crush conspiracies before they form. Dozens of mid-level officers have been jailed, tortured, or disappeared on suspicion of plotting against the government. The message is clear, dissent equals death or exile.
This climate of fear has paralyzed any coordinated military movement. Even those who despise Maduro understand that rebellion without total unity would be suicide. The army’s fragmented hierarchy ensures that no single faction can act independently. Meanwhile, Cuban intelligence operatives embedded in Venezuelan security structures help detect and neutralize threats. It’s a surveillance state woven directly into the military’s bloodstream.
U.S. Pressure, Empty Threats, and Misread Realities
Every few years, the United States rediscovers Venezuela as a symbol of tyranny in its own backyard. The current naval buildup in the Caribbean, officially aimed at curbing drug trafficking and enforcing sanctions, has fueled speculation about regime change. But Maduro has learned to weaponize external pressure to his advantage.
American threats, whether from Donald Trump’s bluster about “all options on the table” or Joe Biden’s diplomatic maneuvers, have consistently strengthened Maduro’s narrative. He paints the opposition as pawns of imperialism and himself as a nationalist defender of sovereignty. Even among disillusioned Venezuelans, anti-U.S. sentiment runs deep enough that overt American hostility often backfires. Each U.S. destroyer offshore reinforces Maduro’s justification for internal repression, rallying what remains of his base and intimidating wavering elites into renewed obedience.
The Opposition’s Eternal Dilemma
Venezuela’s opposition, fractured and exhausted, continues to misread the military question. Juan Guaidó’s brief flirtation with power in 2019, when he stood atop a Caracas overpass urging soldiers to defect, symbolized both the courage and naivety of the anti-Maduro movement. Only a handful of troops joined him, and the uprising collapsed within hours.
Since then, opposition figures have oscillated between dialogue and desperation, hoping that economic collapse or international isolation might push the generals to reconsider. But the reality is harsher. As long as the military’s upper echelons remain economically entangled with the regime, and as long as the intelligence apparatus keeps everyone terrified of each other, the hope of a spontaneous coup is fantasy.
The Myth of the Hero General
Many Venezuelans cling to the romantic idea of a hero general, a modern Simón Bolívar rising from within the ranks to liberate the nation. But the truth is that the kind of officer capable of such defiance no longer exists in the upper command. Those with the courage or moral conviction to challenge Maduro have long been purged, exiled, or silenced.
What remains is a generation of officers raised in a culture of corruption and political indoctrination, their ambition tied not to ideals of liberty but to material survival. A coup would require not only courage but a network capable of sustaining power afterward. And that network, after two decades of systematic dismantling, simply doesn’t exist.
The People’s Fatigue
Outside the barracks, the Venezuelan people have endured one of the worst humanitarian collapses in the modern Western Hemisphere. Hyperinflation, hunger, mass emigration, and the collapse of public services have become the national norm. Yet despite the misery, there’s a weary acceptance that no miracle is coming from the military.
The hope that soldiers might once again align with the people, as they briefly did during the failed 2002 coup against Chávez, has faded into cynicism. Ordinary Venezuelans now seek survival, not revolution. Millions have fled to Colombia, Brazil, and beyond, leaving behind a hollowed-out civil society incapable of sustaining prolonged resistance.
The Illusion of External Salvation
Regional leaders and Washington hawks continue to flirt with the fantasy that a foreign intervention could tip the scales. The U.S. naval presence in the Caribbean, joint military exercises with Colombia, and intelligence leaks about “contingency plans” all feed speculation. But direct intervention would ignite chaos, drawing in regional actors and likely plunging Venezuela into a prolonged civil conflict.
Maduro knows this, and he plays the long game. He offers just enough dialogue to split the international consensus, just enough concessions to ease pressure, while steadily consolidating control at home. For all the rhetoric, the world has learned to live with him. Oil still flows through back channels, Russian and Iranian advisors maintain his defense systems, and China continues to trade, albeit quietly.
Why the Coup Will Never Come
The key to understanding Maduro’s coup-proof design lies in how he has redefined power. It’s no longer centered in the presidency alone but distributed among overlapping circles of loyalty, fear, and greed. The military, intelligence agencies, party apparatus, and criminal networks all depend on each other’s survival. There is no single head to cut off.
By dividing power across institutions and ensuring mutual corruption, Maduro has created a system in which betrayal threatens everyone equally. The generals know that even if they succeeded in overthrowing him, they would inherit a poisoned chalice, economic collapse, sanctions, and likely prosecution. Stability under dictatorship, for them, is preferable to uncertainty under democracy.
A Nation Trapped in Stasis
Venezuela has become a textbook case of authoritarian endurance in the twenty-first century. It’s a nation that should have collapsed long ago but hasn’t, sustained by repression, oil trickles, and the moral exhaustion of its people. The opposition fights on in name, but the real contest is over time. Maduro is betting that fatigue, not force, will win the day. And so far, he’s right.
The U.S. naval buildup may rattle sabers and raise hopes among exiled Venezuelans, but within the country, it barely registers anymore. The people have seen too many false dawns, too many empty threats. Maduro remains in power not because he’s strong, but because he’s made everyone else weaker.
The Quiet Future
In the end, Venezuela’s tragedy is not that its military refuses to act, it’s that it no longer can. The institution that once prided itself on national sovereignty has been transformed into a cartel of survival. Its loyalty isn’t ideological but transactional.
For change to come, it won’t be through a coup or a foreign intervention, but through the slow erosion of that transactional loyalty, the gradual realization among those who serve the regime that the system can no longer sustain them. Until then, Maduro’s fortress holds, not through popularity, but through the oldest tools of tyranny, fear, privilege, and paralysis.
Venezuela remains a country frozen in time, watching the horizon for ships that will never come ashore, waiting for soldiers who will never march, and hoping against reason that the weight of its own suffering will one day be enough to tip the scales of history.
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