How the ‘Power Game’ Is Reshaping Venezuela

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2:15Phil Gunson:Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. Hi, David. Hey, Sarah. Nice to see you in the studio. And it's good to be here with you. And we're never here at the same time. We're never here at the same time. We're like ships in the night and so rarely are. But OK, but now we're not ships in the night anymore. No. We've made it into the studio together. Yes. So, David, ever since the U.S. launched a major military operation in Venezuela in January, and even before that, we've been talking a lot about it on the show. Yeah, I am fascinated by this story in part because I used to live in South America.

2:46Phil Gunson:I lived in Bolivia when that country was going through a political transition. I'm very eager to see sort of what will come of this effort the U.S. made to shake things up, change the circumstances of Venezuela. And today we're going to hear a brand new conversation you had this week about the state of play in Venezuela. And it's also airing on this new show that you're about to launch at Bloomberg. Yes. So that new show is called Bloomberg This Weekend, and it's going to debut on Bloomberg TV and Bloomberg Radio on Saturday. You can also stream it online. I'm going to host it with Christina Ruffini and Lisa Matteo.

3:17Phil Gunson:David Gurra, you're doing a show during the week and during the weekend. When do you sleep? I'm trying to figure this out, but rest assured, I'm not going anywhere. I will be here on The Big Tag. Well, your first get was a great get. Tell us about this guest who's coming on the show. Yeah, I sat down with Phil Gunson, who is a bit of a rarity. He's covered Latin America for the better part of four decades, and he's focused on one country in particular.

3:41David Gura:What it says on my business card is that I'm Crisis Group's senior analyst for the Andes region. But in practice, that means that I focus on Venezuela. Venezuela keeps me busy. I've lived in Caracas for nearly 27 years now.

3:54Phil Gunson:Phil moved there in 1999. So he was there when Hugo Chavez came to power. He was there when Hugo Chavez died. He was there when Nicolas Maduro became the president of Venezuela. Was he there when the U.S. went in and captured Nicolas Maduro? He was there. And he told me his house is pretty close to the military base where Maduro was taken by U.S. forces.

4:10David Gura:This is the point where I embarrassingly have to admit that I slept all the way through. You did. I mean, the attack in Venezuelan time, the bombs and rockets started falling about two in the morning. I was fast asleep. Wow.

4:23Phil Gunson:Yeah, that chaos didn't wake him up, but his phone eventually did. And since then, Phil has been really focused on how the U.S. is engaging with Venezuela today. He and I talked a lot about that, and we dug into really how uncertain the country's future is.

4:37David Gura:As we like to say, in Crisis Group, a transition is a process, not an event.

4:41Phil Gunson:Well, I'm really excited to hear more. So here's my co-host, David Gurra, with Phil Gunson. Don't forget to catch this and more on Bloomberg this weekend from 7 to 10 a.m. Eastern Time every Saturday and Sunday. I'll be setting my alarm.

5:01Phil Gunson:I'm David Gurra, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, my conversation with International Crisis Group senior analyst Phil Gunson. We discuss how Venezuela has changed and how it hasn't since the U.S. captured Nicolas Maduro and what could come next.

5:21Phil Gunson:Let's spend some time talking about the events of January the 3rd with the U.S.'s Operation Absolute Resolve. Remind us what the run-up to that was like, what the weeks and months leading up to that date were like and felt like in Venezuela.

5:34David Gura:You know, it was very startling, I suppose, because when Trump came back to power in January of last year, we and I think a lot of other analysts had concluded that Trump's approach to Venezuela was going to be rather less effective. I mean, it was going to be a pragmatic approach, not regime change, not maximum pressure, as we saw under Trump one. And that was the way it started out. And then August of last year, we began to see this immense military buildup, which was framed as a counter-narcotics operation. And to be honest, I think, you know, in crisis group and elsewhere, it was largely interpreted as a bluff.

6:17David Gura:On the one hand, it's saber rattling in order to persuade Maduro to leave because the consequences of not doing so would be severe on the assumption that that would be enough, that there wouldn't be any need to put, as they say, boots on the ground, because clearly Trump was not willing to do that. And so I think we, and I think President Maduro himself, concluded, well, this is not going to really come to anything. But the buildup went on and on and on, and you had the aircraft carrier, you know, the General L. Ford deployed to the Caribbean, this massive, massive military buildup, to the point where we began to say, well, you know, they just can't just sail away.

6:52David Gura:And Maduro showed no signs of leaving. It became very hard to understand how this was going to end. When it did conclude with January the 3rd, it wasn't any of the scenarios that we had really anticipated.

7:05Phil Gunson:Could you describe the uncertainty of those hours that followed for you and for others who live in Venezuela just wondering what would happen next? And did it feel like a vacuum was opening up?

7:17David Gura:It was all really very quick, actually. I mean, it almost was too quick for us to properly work out what we were feeling about it. I mean, the first sensation is, well, okay, it's obviously a US attack. It's not a complete surprise because Trump had been threatening this repeatedly. Pretty much every weekend for weeks before that, we'd been expecting some kind of attack. So in that sense, it wasn't totally shocking. What was really shocking was suddenly to realize Maduro was snatched along with his wife. What did that mean? But by the time we got around to trying to work out what that might mean, you know, there was already a press conference in Washington with Trump saying, you know, announcing the operation.

8:04David Gura:And that was, in a way, the biggest surprise of the whole morning, which was Trump saying, well, Maria Corina Machado is a great lady, but unfortunately she doesn't have the support in Venezuela to be installed as the government. So we're going to be dealing with Dulce Rodriguez, who's Maduro's vice president. That was probably the most surprising thing in those few hours.

8:25Phil Gunson:What is the state of political power in Venezuela today? So Maduro is gone. He's in a jail cell in Brooklyn. Dulce Rodriguez is in power on an interim basis. Maria Karina Machado is somewhere. We don't know exactly where. Who is in control and how would you assess the longevity of the kind of political moment that we're in?

8:43David Gura:I think that's probably the key issue. Obviously, we heard from President Trump very soon after January the 3rd. I can't remember if it was on the same day, but within a couple of days at least, he was saying, you know, the US is going to be running Venezuela. We're looking around and going, where are they? You know, because there's nobody here on the ground. There's not been an embassy. There is now. I mean, they've reopened the embassy and they're starting to establish a US diplomatic presence in Caracas. But since 2019, there were no US diplomats in Venezuela. There certainly weren't boots on the ground.

9:16David Gura:There's no military occupation in Venezuela. So in what sense is the US running Venezuela? And my immediate thought was, seems to me the Venezuelan government is running Venezuela. But of course, then it becomes more complicated. Then you have to work out, well, okay, the US says that they're going to be running Venezuela because if the Delci government doesn't do what they say, then there will be consequences. And therefore, this is kind of a neo-colonial sort of operation. But to try to run, especially a country the size of Venezuela, a country twice the size of California, twice the size of Iraq, nearly 30 million people, topographically very difficult, politically very difficult, full of guns among the security forces and outside.

10:02David Gura:How are you going to do that? How are you going to run Venezuela? So we're still working it out is the honest answer to that question, I think.

10:09Phil Gunson:How do you think about the role that Delce Rodriguez is playing? The apparent closeness she has with the Trump administration, the closeness that she had with Nicolas Maduro, the political power that she's amassed as a result of her career in Venezuelan politics. How she is navigating those two things?

10:26David Gura:Delce Rodriguez and her brother Jorge, who's the guy who runs the National Assembly and is a key figure in all of this. He was Maduro's key negotiator for a very long time with the opposition and with the US. These two, the Rodriguez siblings, are smart people. They're very adaptable. They're very pragmatic. They're also very ideological. I mean, ideologically, they come from the same segment, if you like, of the ideological spectrum as President Maduro himself. They come from the far left, but they are adaptable. And I think that's the key to what Del C is able to do right now because she turned on a dime.

11:06David Gura:I mean, you know, and of course she has maintained the discourse, the narrative for internal purposes about this being a socialist revolution, anti-imperialist and all the rest of it, whilst doing her best to comply with what Trump needs. That's not an easy thing to do. I think if anybody can do it, she can, and she's demonstrated that so far. This is a power game. It's about staying in power. And in particular, I think what divides so-called moderates from so-called hardliners is whether or not they perceive a future for themselves under some form of political transition. I think the Rodriguez siblings can imagine, I don't think they want it, but I think they can imagine surviving a transition.

11:48but a lot of the people with guns cannot imagine that and for them it's an existential issue

11:54David Gura:and so it's it's a case of day by day figuring out where the boundaries are but then of course apart from that the opposition is divided and that I think is one of the key obstacles that might lie in the path of some form of political settlement some form of transition.

12:16Phil Gunson:so what could u.s involvement in venezuela tell us about trump's approach to other countries and is the president's end game really just about oil that's after the break

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14:52Phil Gunson:After the U.S. captured Nicolas Maduro, President Trump said the U.S. would run Venezuela, which raised a bunch of questions. I asked Phil Gunson of the International Crisis Group what Maduro's expatriation has meant in real terms. I'd hoped you and I could talk about political transition. And I guess what's sort of peculiar about this moment is you have Maduro being removed from power, yet it seems like there hasn't been much of a political transition yet. I imagine the key to that is elections at some point. Are they being talked about? What would they need to look like to remove what I imagine is a huge hurdle here for there being any kind of viable political change?

15:30David Gura:Well, as we like to say in crisis group, a transition is a process, not an event. And one of the things I think that is problematic about the way some people in the opposition regard the term transition and the idea, the concept of transition, is that they don't distinguish between transition and regime change. In other words, transition for them is, you leave power, we take power. That's a transition. A transition for us is a process whereby the government that is still in power concedes certain things over a period of time. The opposition also concedes certain things, and they come to an agreement about where this process is going, what the end result should be.

16:11David Gura:Elections, at least a presidential election, to my mind, should be closer towards the end of that process than the beginning.

16:19Phil Gunson:What is the US getting from this leadership change? I suppose it's somebody who will return their phone calls. But what makes Delce Rodriguez more palatable to the US than, and I should say, US leadership, the Trump administration, than the Nicolas Maduro was?

16:33David Gura:if you ask some people, they would say, oh, it's oil, right? I mean, Trump wants the oil. Dulce is giving in the oil and therefore, you know, that's the beginning and the end of the story. I think it's a lot more complicated. And I don't actually think that oil in the purely material sense is necessarily even most of what it's about. I think the US wants a stable, friendly Venezuela, open to U.S. capital that excludes forces seen by the U.S. as hostile to U.S. interests.