Trump’s betrayal of Maria Corina Machado won’t end well

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The abrupt mid-air termination of Maria Corina Machado’s flight back to Venezuela early this month marks a stark contradiction between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visionary rhetoric  and the cruelty of Donald Trump’s realpolitik.

Machado, Venezuela’s most revered opposition leader, had intended to bring urgently needed comfort and leadership to her earthquake-stricken homeland. Though her inner circle believed her journey carried approval from the Trump administration, the operation was neutralized when U.S. officials ordered her private jet to turn around in mid-flight over North Carolina.

In a shocking betrayal, the Trump administration left Machado blindsided, exposing a contradiction in the U.S.-led Venezuela transition between the opposition’s urgent timeline and Washington’s embrace of the status quo.

This pivot mirrors the darkest chapters of the Iraq occupation, where soaring promises of democracy-building quickly dissolved into a race for petroleum resources. In both cases, the U.S. instrumentalized the agony of a battered population to justify intervention, only to abandon its moral obligations once economic interests took precedence.

At least in U.S.-occupied Iraq, elections were set and the underpinnings of democratic institutions formed. But while many within the U.S.-Venezuela transition team shared a sincere vision for a new democratically led Venezuela, it’s starting to look like rebuilding Venezuela’s democratic institutions was never part of Trump’s plan.

Following the Jan. 3 abduction of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuelans — including Machado, who gifted her Nobel Peace Prize medal to Trump — hitched their hopes for freedom from 25 years of Chavismo on the perceived support of the U.S.

In neighboring Colombia, where I spend much of the year, people were expectant, joyful that the epicenter of regional narco-politics would finally be annihilated by the U.S., often perceived there as a beacon of democratic liberation.

A January poll conducted by the Venezuelan firm Meganalisis found an estimated 90 percent of Venezuelans were in favor of the ouster, but 94 percent didn’t believe the U.S. should lead Venezuela’s post-Maduro transition to democracy, NPR reported.

They were right. Rubio’s three-phase plan for stabilization, recovery and transition and the idea that the U.S. was including Machado in the negotiations turns out to have been empty rhetoric. The U.S. has squandered a singular, time-sensitive and rare opportunity.

Instead of using its leverage to demand the release of political prisoners, rebuild institutions, support the opposition’s carefully crafted transition plans and overhaul electoral and judicial institutions, the only thing the U.S. appears to have achieved with its outsized power is seizing control over and revamping Venezuela’s oil industry.

To be sure, that has meagerly improved the Venezuelan economy. But according to former U.S. diplomat Brian Naranjo, out of $8 billion moved to U.S. control, a mere $300 million was pledged for earthquake relief.

Naranjo’s brief noted that an observer called the U.S.-Venezuela relationship that of a “client-state” where “Washington controls the oil revenue that is the government’s budget.” It also quoted Phil Gunson of the International Crisis Group, who called the U.S. response “anything from totally non-existent to, at best, completely inadequate.”

The Venezuelan regime’s ineffective and repressive response to the earthquake exposed its fundamentally authoritarian nature.

The interim government of Delcy Rodriguez — a longtime Chavist insider with no legal right to the presidency and a history of human rights violations — blocked at least 65 news sites and turned back international rescue teams. Thousands of Venezuelans remain missing, but so far, only a fraction of the death toll has been reported by the government. Left abandoned by the state, grieving families were forced to take their own initiative, digging through the wreckage to find the remains of their loved ones.

Though Trump declared in March that Rodriguez was “doing a great job,” in reality, she and her remaining Chavist colleagues are happy to play the role of compliant sycophants to outlast Trump’s presidency. As former Ambassador to Venezuela James Story put it: “What you have is a removal of the top of the regime where you cut the head off one part of the head of a hydra and you have the rest of the regime in power.”

Eric Farnsworth, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me that while the ouster of Maduro was a positive development, Rodriguez has no legitimacy.

“It’s critically important that stunning tactical success not be overtaken by the strategic defeat of leaving the regime and its criminal networks in place,” he said, adding that Rodriguez “enjoys no greater legitimacy than Maduro and is widely reviled. … Through elections that Maduro himself ran, Edmundo Gonzalez and Maria Corina Machado have earned the right to become Venezuela’s next leaders. They must be given that chance.”

Trump’s betrayal of Venezuela is a dark moment for U.S. foreign policy. The international community must demand that the U.S. allow Venezuela’s democratic political parties to elect their own leaders, replacing those illegally appointed by the Maduro regime.

At stake is not only the future of U.S. relations with the existing democratic elements within Latin America, but the risk of committing an unfathomable cruelty that history will judge harshly.

Kristina Foltz is a foreign affairs writer focusing on Latin America.

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