With Trump, polarization among Venezuelans reaches new heights
First published at NACLA.
Trump’s belligerence toward Venezuela — military actions off its coast, demonization of Venezuelan immigrants and their mass deportation, and the stiffening of sanctions — has deepened polarization in an unexpected quarter: the Venezuelan opposition. Until the July 2024 presidential election, the opposition’s leading parties had rallied behind María Corina Machado and her chosen candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia. Today, that unity has fractured, and much of the division can be traced to Trump’s Venezuela policy.
The situation mirrors the Trump-provoked polarization in the United States, which is not just left versus right but pits Democrats and Republicans against one another with unprecedented fervor. In Venezuela, one bloc of the opposition consists of leaders who, from the outset, have been vehemently anti-Hugo Chávez and anti-Nicolás Maduro, but are now distancing themselves from Washington. They find themselves at odds with the pro-Washington bloc, aligned with Trump on everything from immigration to regime change by any means possible.
Machado’s recent Nobel Peace Prize win sharpens the rift. The intensity of the opposition’s division starkly contradicts the Nobel Committee’s claim that Machado is a “key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided.”
Polarization in Miami
This paradox is nowhere more striking than in Miami, where an anti-Chavista consensus has always prevailed. Nearly half of all Venezuelans in the United States reside in Florida, most in Miami and its surroundings. Many live in the Doral municipality, where Trump beat Kamala Harris by 23 percentage points. Less than a year after the elections, the Wall Street Journal reported that due to fear of deportation, “one by one, Venezuelans and other immigrants are starting to disappear from Doral.”
Many Venezuelan immigrants who were among Trump’s most ardent supporters now have serious doubts about the president’s performance. Their mood has been described as “confused,” in disagreement with Trump, “in disbelief,” “disillusioned,” and “enraged.” Anchorman journalist Jorge Ramos suggests that the word “betrayed” may be applicable. At a Venezuelan arepa shop in Doral, one man summed up the bitterness with biting humor: “We’re all members of the Tren de Aragua.” This being the name of a Venezuelan gang Trump labels as “foreign terrorists” involved in drug trafficking.
Only 15 percent of Venezuelans living in the U.S. — those who have been there the longest — have citizenship status, while the rest are subject to arbitrary detention. The first wave of Venezuelan immigrants consisted of members of the upper crust who left their country in reaction to former president Chávez’s preference for the poor, while a second wave tended to be middle-class professionals. With Obama’s executive order in 2015 declaring Venezuela a security threat, after which U.S. companies abandoned the country and the economy went into a tailspin, immigration began to encompass a wider range of social classes. At the same time, class and race prejudices, long ingrained in Venezuelan society, got reproduced on U.S. soil.
The Venezuelan polarization in Miami thus has a definite social dimension. Venezuelans who have acquired U.S. citizenship — unlike the other 85 percent — do not face the threat of deportation, a factor that helps explain their steadfast support for Trump. Oxford University doctoral student Erick Moreno Superlano, whose dissertation focuses on Venezuelan immigrants in the United States, argues that unconditional backing of Trump’s policies by the well-to-do serves “as a way to claim whiteness, modernity, and legitimacy,” while distancing themselves from poorer newcomers. Members of the Venezuelan elite justify the Trump administration’s hardline stance by asserting that “these Venezuelans have abused the system, committed crimes, and shown their lack of moral principles.” Moreno adds that, according to this narrative, such behavior is typical of “Chávez’s supporters who have grown accustomed to the state subsidizing their lives.”
The political dimension of the polarization in Miami has also become increasingly evident. Anti-Maduro Venezuelans in South Florida placed high hopes on Trump’s election. They enthusiastically backed the campaign, amplified by local media, to revoke the licenses granted under Joe Biden to Chevron and other companies operating in Venezuela’s oil sector, believing such measures would soon take effect. The expectation was that the resulting economic collapse would pave the way for regime change.
Trump’s Venezuela strategy, however, took a different turn. He twice authorized the renewal of Chevron’s licenses, while the military buildup in the Caribbean appears to signal military action on Venezuelan territory. Leopoldo López, Juan Guaidó, and Machado — each at one time Washington’s preferred figure in Caracas — support U.S. intervention along these lines.
Yet many anti-Maduro Venezuelans in the United States have expressed fear that U.S. intervention aimed at regime change could plunge the country into political and social turmoil. Those familiar with U.S. politics know that the Republicans — and Trump in particular — have long inveighed against “nation building,” favoring instead swift, decisive military action followed by complete withdrawal.
Henrique Capriles, a leading member of the anti-Machado faction of the Venezuelan opposition, referred to this logic in an interview with The New York Times: “ Name one successful case in the last few years of a successful U.S. military intervention?” He further points out that “the majority of those [Venezuelans] who favor… a U.S. invasion don’t live in Venezuela.” Indeed, many of them — Juan Guaidó among them — live in Miami.
Machado, for her part, has sought to allay these fears, vehemently denying that Maduro’s overthrow “would provoke chaos or violence.” To back her claim, her advisors have drawn up a plan for “the first 100 hours” following Maduro’s ouster — an initiative that would involve the participation of international allies, “especially the United States.”
Trump and polarization in Venezuela
The main bloc of the Venezuelan opposition under the Chavista governments has always been subject to some internal tension. During the abortive April 2002 coup headed by Pedro Carmona, several opposition leaders expressed unease over the dissolution of the National Assembly, as NACLA reported at the time. Subsequently, Capriles and other leaders opposed the opposition’s boycott of the 2005 legislative elections, though the differences were held in check. Capriles criticized other opposition strategies, such as the four-month street protests of 2014 and 2017 and Guaidó’s self-proclamation as interim president in 2019 — but only in hindsight.
Now, however, the confrontation among leaders who previously belonged to the main opposition bloc is head-on. Capriles is accused of “collaborating” with Maduro — or worse, of being a “scorpion” (alacrán), meaning on the government’s payroll. Much of this polarization is rooted in the dilemma over how to respond to Trump’s policies.
The new reality set in shortly after the July 28, 2024, presidential elections in Venezuela and the two days of explosive protests that followed. As José Guerra, a prominent opposition figure aligned with Capriles, told me, “people are tired of being told that Maduro’s days are numbered and then nothing happens.”
Indeed, Machado’s renewed push to oust Maduro echoes past regime-change attempts that lacked any fallback plan. Luis Vicente León, Venezuela’s leading pollster and president of Datanálisis, notes that Machado’s support “face[s] significant and inevitable decline” and that her hardline positions on measures to achieve regime change are deeply unpopular. According to León, only 12.6 percent of Venezuelans support international sanctions against Venezuela, and even less — only 3 percent — favor military intervention.
In response, Capriles and former presidential candidate Manuel Rosales of the Un Nuevo Tiempo (UNT) party have called for a reevaluation of the opposition’s strategy. The two formed an alliance that fielded candidates in the May 2025 National Assembly elections and endorsed participation in municipal elections in July. Both contests were boycotted by Machado and her allies.
Capriles is confident that when his term as elected deputy to the National Assembly begins this January, he can unite opposition sectors that reject Machado’s hardline approach. He hopes to draw in many of those who broke with the main opposition bloc in 2020 and formed parallel parties that quickly gained government recognition. At the time, opposition hardliners called these politicians “scorpions” for being soft on Maduro, similar to the accusations now lodged against Capriles.
One of the leading members of this original “scorpion” group, Bernabé Gutiérrez, president of a faction of Acción Democrática, has even encouraged Venezuelans to enlist in the militia activated by Maduro in preparation for a possible U.S. invasion. Guerra describes Gutiérrez as “submissive to Maduro,” an opinion undoubtedly shared by Capriles and Rosales.
Following the July municipal elections, Maduro — in an obvious reference to Capriles, Rosales, and their allies, who only a year earlier had been aligned with Machado — offered to “extend his hand to this New Opposition in the name of dialogue… to turn the page on so many terrible chapters — of coups d’état, calls for blockades, sanctions, assassinations, foreign military intervention.” In effect, Maduro sought to forge a new polarization that would pit Machado against his government, with nothing much in between. The rationale was the pressing need for “national unity” in the face of an external threat.
Capriles has met Maduro halfway. He condemns Trump’s threats and deportations and has challenged U.S accusations of drug trafficking against the Venezuelan president. While Capriles previously accused Maduro of involvement in trafficking, he now insists that Washington “present the evidence” of the existence of the so-called “Cartel de los Soles,” allegedly headed by Maduro.
Like Rosales, Capriles insists that negotiation with the government is the only way out of Venezuela’s crisis. But the Chavista leadership has made clear that dialogue comes with a condition: support for “national unity,” framed as falling in line with the more accommodating stance of Gutiérrez. Capriles, however, has a different agenda, which includes the release of opposition prisoners and electoral reform. To advance national dialogue with no strings attached, he is counting on pressure from Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, though he previously complained that both leaders had “thrown in the towel” on Venezuela.
The Venezuelan opposition has become polarized over two key issues: whether to participate in electoral politics and how to respond to Trump’s policies and rhetoric. Machado and her closest allies are clearly at one end, having decided to avoid criticism of Trump, including the delicate issue of immigration. As Guerra revealed: “One of Machado’s closest confidants told me they cannot risk losing Trump’s backing; they’ve decided to support all his actions even though there are some differences.”
Machado’s declining support in 2025 is telling. In 2024, she gained considerable popularity in spite of her embrace of extreme neoliberalism, but this year her alignment with Trump’s policies has eroded that support. Her recent Nobel Peace Prize is unlikely to reverse that trend. One takeaway is clear: the campaign by right-wing figures like Steve Bannon to create their own International is at odds — at least in Latin America — with Trump’s America First agenda on immigration, tariffs, and his embrace of the Monroe Doctrine, all of which clash with nationalist sentiment.
Steve Ellner is a retired professor at the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela where he lived for over 40 years. He is currently an Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives. His latest book is the co-edited collection Latin American Social Movements and Progressive Governments: Creative Tensions Between Resistance and Convergence.