The United States has seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who is currently detained in New York, and everything about the country’s political future is in question. The decisive variable is Venezuela’s armed forces. Whoever winds up in charge of post-Chávez Venezuela, the military will almost certainly remain politically active.
The danger is that if civilian leaders are appointed, the military will either topple or manipulate them. For this reason, the transformation of Venezuelan civil-military relations in both form and substance is critical to long-term democratic stability. It will require moving away from the party-controlled military of the present—but also from the civil-military relations of the pre-Chavista era that preceded it.
Aside from reporting of a CIA mole within Maduro’s security detail, the poor performance of Venezuela’s military forces throughout the Jan. 3 operation is striking.
What we know is that the president’s immediate security detail—a job officially assigned to the Presidential Honor Guard unit—included numerous Cuban personnel, 32 of whom were killed during the U.S. raid. This perhaps indicated that Maduro and other senior leaders did not trust their own soldiers. Moreover, the Venezuelan air force and army could not prevent the incursion of U.S. helicopters carrying special operations forces or the destruction of their Russian-supplied air defense systems—also revealing weaknesses in preparedness and equipment.
Yet, although the military has proved unable to defend the nation, it is nonetheless a key political actor, as revealed by three data points. First, consider Maduro-appointed Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López’s declaration of support to Vice President Delcy Rodríguez on Jan. 4—before she became acting president on Jan. 5.
Second, upon assuming the presidency, Rodríguez installed Maj. Gen. Gustavo González López as the head of the Presidential Honor Guard. González López is the equivalent of a four-star general of the army, ex-chief of the national intelligence agency, and ex-commander of the pro-regime Milicia Bolivariana paramilitary force. Third, recall that the interior ministry is headed by Maduro appointee Diosdado Cabello, known for his close ties to the military and who also remains loyal to the regime.
This fusion of the party and army originates not with Maduro but rather in the pre-Chávez era—in the Puntofijo system of democracy, which was disrupted by a series of coups starting in the late 1980s. Venezuela’s first, little-known coup, in October 1988, the tanquetazo, revealed deeply embedded institutional problems in the military. The famous second coup was led by Lt. Col. Hugo Chávez of the Venezuelan army in February 1992. Although the February coup failed and its leaders were imprisoned, another unsuccessful one, led by elements of the Venezuelan air force, followed in November 1992. The coup leaders fled to Peru, but both sets of 1992 coup plotters were subsequently granted amnesty, and Chavez joined civilian politics.
These coups occurred because civilian supremacy in Venezuela’s pre-Chávez democracy was only an illusion. The 1958 Puntofijo Pact, a power-sharing agreement between three elite-dominated parties, allowed the military to retain dominance over national security issues, avoid scrutiny, and reinforce personal ties between senior officers and politicians.
This arrangement meant that even as civilian rulers attempted to create a professional military, accompanied by strict spheres of separate expertise, professionalization never entirely supplanted the praetorian tendencies within the Venezuelan military. Civilian oversight was abdicated, as was budgetary control; meanwhile, as scholar Harold Trinkunas explains, the general staff were replaced with a joint staff to thwart centralized command and interservice collaboration. Among the ranks of the Venezuelan military, as scholars Hernán Castillo and Leonardo Ledezma suggest, loyalty to the constitution did not “necessarily imply the effective existence of a civilian control over them and their real subordination to civilian power.”
This contradiction between the appearance and reality of civilian supremacy was obscured for two decades or so by oil wealth that ensured popular legitimacy, as well as high salaries and benefits in the military. In the late 1980s, due to rising popular unrest in the wake of austerity measures that included cuts to the military’s benefits and massive corruption scandals, even that superficial civilian supremacy crumbled. Military interference in politics ticked up and culminated in the coups that brought Chávez to power.
Two institutional aspects of the coups between 1988 and 1992 reveal the pernicious dynamics of the civil-military relationship at the time. First, the rising dissent against civilian politicians by the coup plotters was known by military leaders, but they neither reported it to civilian leaders nor was preventive action taken by the military or civilian leadership. Meanwhile, civilian leaders in the Puntofijo system had abdicated oversight over the military in exchange for its loyalty. For instance, the defense minister was a serving general, and the military budget lacked civilian oversight—even though the constitution specified that a civilian be in charge and provided for civilian oversight.
Second, the coup attempts in 1988 and 1992 were led by mid-ranking officers—majors and colonels, rather than generals. And despite civilian and especially military casualties in both the 1992 coup attempts, their perpetrators were freed and asked to join politics under interim Presidents Ramón José Velásquez and Rafael Caldera. A system where training and promotions up to mid-ranking officers were professionalized, while senior officers enjoyed clientelist links with politicians who intervened in promotions was frustrating to ambitious junior and mid-ranking officers.
These weaknesses, coupled with growing popular opposition to the Puntofijo regime, culminated in popular protests, riots, and looting in Caracas against austerity measures, specifically increases in gas prices, in 1989. The uprising was crushed by the police and the military, but it left an indelible effect on Chávez.
The prevailing institutional arrangements created by him and expanded by Maduro have entrenched one-party control over the military. Their strategy since the failed anti-Chávez coup of 2002, the last of the Cold War coups, included a combination of monitoring by intelligence services, promotion based on political loyalty rather than merit, changing of promotion structures of noncommissioned officers, opportunities for corruption via smuggling of drugs and other goods, and creation of counterbalancing forces such as the National Guard and the Colectivo militias.
The process of buying loyalty through promotions and corruption has led to ridiculous outcomes, such as the nearly 2,000 generals and admirals in a combined military and National Guard of 150,000, with tiny commands and a navy with few seaworthy ships. To put these numbers into perspective, Brazil—with the largest military in South America of 366,500 troops—has about 403 such officers.
The party-army fusion guaranteed loyalty to the leadership for a long while. Now things are changing again. But whether we are currently witnessing regime change in Venezuela or something else, there is a chance of the army shattering on partisan lines—increasing the possibility of insurgencies and civil war.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, whom U.S. President Donald Trump has seemingly dismissed as a replacement for Maduro, previously presented her plans for a post-Maduro future. She said the new government should reform the military and the police “so that their mission, sacred purpose, and constitutional duty is to defend all people of Venezuela as well as our national territory.” However, doing so would require moving away from not only the party-controlled military of the Chávez-Maduro regime but also the civil-military relations of the Puntofijo era. That latter aspect has been ignored by Machado.
If political parties become unpopular, a return to the Puntofijo system’s civil-military relations could destabilize Venezuela. State capacity needed for both oversight and delivery of public goods has been further eroded from years of politicization, corruption, and economic decline—a problem ignored by opposition politicians such as Juan Guaidó, who sought to reinvolve former military officers currently in exile in various countries.
In line with civil-military scholar Peter D. Feaver’s policy prescriptions, Venezuela’s new leaders should reestablish substantive civilian oversight and budgetary control as well as create civilian expertise via education and think tanks. A civilian defense minister should be installed and the number of senior officers reduced.
On the other hand, future civil-military relations in Venezuela should be bound by the concept of discretion: First, create the legal bounds within which choices can be made by officers; second, provide the “left and right” limits in military parlance of where an officer has this power. Doing so requires both formal institutions and informal norms, as proposed by civil-military scholar Sam Sarkesian. In terms of formal institutions, this means restricting the military officers’ roles in defense and foreign policy-related issues, as well as arrogating to civilians the right to decide what issues would qualify as such. It also means inculcating values regarding interactions with citizens, such as probity and respect for human rights, and a willingness to work with subnational civilian political authorities to buttress state capacity.
The United States can help Venezuela in this endeavor via personnel and institutional means and without becoming unduly entangled in domestic politics. It can send scholars and practitioners to design new civil-military institutions, such as laws and regulations, and educate civilians on military-related matters. To assist the Venezuelan military, it can fund an accelerated renewal of the National Guard’s State Partnership Program. That program was established in the early 1990s to help develop democratic civil-military relations in post-Soviet countries. It has since evolved to train partner nations’ militaries in aiding civilians in tasks as varied as counternarcotics operations and recovery efforts from natural disasters—all activities that increase state capacity.
The process of establishing truly democratic civil-military relations—and not a mere facade of them, as Venezuela once had—will require buy-in from both civilian and military leaders. It will also take years of patient work, but it remains the only path to stability.