By: Ricardo Abud
Recent history is unequivocal: US military interventions in nations with complex political structures and divided societies do not produce orderly transitions to democracy. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria are testaments to how the collapse of the state, however authoritarian, triggers power vacuums that no external force can effectively fill.
Venezuela, with its particular socio-political characteristics, would not be the exception to this rule, but possibly its most extreme manifestation in the western hemisphere.
Unlike other intervention scenarios, Venezuela presents a unique and decisive variable: a fragmented political opposition with little popular credibility among broad sectors of the population. Decades of disconnection from its grassroots base, a perception of elitism, and association with previous coup attempts have eroded its political capital.
This reality implies that any government installed after a military intervention would lack internal legitimacy from its first day. We would not be talking about a "liberation" perceived by the majority, but rather an external imposition supported by minority sectors of Venezuelan society.
The immediate institutional collapse and disintegration of the state apparatus.
The first effect would be the total collapse of Venezuelan institutions. Unlike previous invasions where some salvageable bureaucracy existed, in Venezuela the state has been completely fused with the Chavista political project for over two decades. The fall of the government would mean the immediate dissolution of the security forces, with thousands of soldiers and police officers, fearing reprisals, abandoning their posts or splintering into armed factions. The already precarious electrical system would cease to function across much of the country, while officials with operational knowledge of the state would flee or go into hiding. The breakdown of order would unleash the massive looting of what little remains of the commercial and industrial infrastructure.
No occupying force, however large, can govern a country of thirty million inhabitants with such a complex geography. The Venezuelan opposition lacks administrative personnel with recent experience in public administration, an effective territorial presence in working-class neighborhoods, rural areas, and outlying states, the capacity for positive popular mobilization beyond government rejection, and internal consensus on the economic and political model to be implemented. This administrative vacuum would be immediate and devastating.
The Multifaceted Insurgency
Venezuela would not produce a monolithic insurgency, but rather several simultaneous conflicts that would overlap and feed off each other. Organized Chavista resistance would emerge from sectors with military training and deep roots in neighborhoods, waging a protracted guerrilla war with extensive knowledge of the terrain and established community networks. Simultaneously, the armed groups that currently control collective territories, gangs, and criminal organizations would become local warlords, filling authority vacuums and establishing proto-states within the failed state.
Governors or local leaders would form their own militias to "protect" their territories, deepening the Balkanization of the country. Beyond these organized structures, entire communities, lacking a clear ideology but rejecting foreign occupation, would resist in a decentralized and spontaneous manner, making it impossible to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
The Amplified Iraqi Syndrome
The Iraqi experience would be a smaller-scale model of what would happen in Venezuela. The occupying forces and the installed government would face daily attacks with improvised explosive devices, ambushes, and bombings. Vast areas of the country would fall outside the government's effective control, especially border regions, rural areas, and some working-class urban sectors. The division would not be religious as in Iraq, but rather socioeconomic and political, with constant clashes between "Chavista" and "opposition" zones, turning entire neighborhoods into battlefields.
If the current humanitarian situation is dire, the post-intervention scenario would be apocalyptic. Between five and eight million people would flee combat zones for relatively safe areas or neighboring countries, creating internal refugee camps without basic infrastructure, an unprecedented regional humanitarian crisis, and the complete collapse of services in receiving cities unable to absorb these massive influxes.
The destruction of already fragile food distribution networks and the disruption of imports would cause widespread famine. Severe malnutrition would affect 40 to 60 percent of the child population, while death from starvation would become commonplace in isolated areas. Diseases associated with malnutrition would spread unchecked.
The healthcare system would collapse completely. Eradicated diseases like measles, diphtheria, and potentially polio would reappear. Treating chronic illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, or HIV would be impossible. Epidemics of cholera, dengue fever, and other tropical diseases would spiral out of control, while the hospital system would become entirely inoperable. An entire generation of children would grow up traumatized by violence, amidst the disintegration of the social fabric and the normalization of extreme violence.
Economic balkanization and the transformation of the state into fragmented territories: Venezuela would not be a coherent economic unit for decades. Each region would develop its own subsistence economy, disconnected from the rest. Zulia would turn toward Colombia, potentially seeking autonomy or annexation after years of informal integration. The states bordering Brazil would develop parallel economies in Brazilian reais, while the oil-producing areas would be violently contested by multiple factions. The central states would develop informal barter and dollarization economies, operating outside any central authority.
Far from being a solution, oil would become a source of funding for armed groups, a target for constant looting and sabotage, and a cause of permanent interterritorial conflicts. The already deteriorated oil infrastructure would be impossible to exploit efficiently under conditions of fragmented civil war. Each armed group would seek to control wells or refineries, not to operate them productively, but to extract rents through smuggling or extortion.
The professional exodus would accelerate exponentially. Doctors, engineers, teachers, and technicians would flee en masse, creating an unprecedented brain drain on the continent. The inability to rebuild technical capabilities would extend for generations, making recovery an increasingly distant dream.
The Libyan Model: Permanent Fragmentation
Following the post-Gaddafi Libyan pattern, Venezuela could fragment into multiple political entities vying for legitimacy and territory. A "legitimate government" installed in Caracas would be internationally recognized but would effectively control only a few urban areas, entirely dependent on foreign military support for its day-to-day survival.
Simultaneously, reorganized Chavista structures would establish a "People's Government" controlling specific territories, particularly urban working-class areas and some rural zones. They would have popular legitimacy in their areas but lack international recognition, perpetuating a conflict without a viable diplomatic solution.
Military commanders, criminal leaders, or local strongmen would control entire regions like warlords. Zulia would fall under the control of pro-Colombian factions, the Amazonian states under the influence of Brazilian groups or illegal miners, the oil-producing areas would be contested by multiple factions in conflicts that would constantly shift alliances, and the Andean states would fragment into small, practically medieval fiefdoms.
Foreign enclaves would also emerge: US military bases functioning as islands of "stability" amid the chaos, militarized Chinese mining concessions operating as autonomous territories, and oil areas under the management of international corporations with their own private armies.
The Permanent War Economy
As in Syria or Somalia, a permanent "war economy" would take hold, where violence itself would become the economic engine. Venezuela would become a black market for weapons, where groups from across the continent would buy arms. Without a functioning state, the country would become a massive drug corridor, surpassing even the worst moments of Colombian drug trafficking. Illegal mining would spread without any environmental controls, devastating entire ecosystems in the search for gold and coltan.
Human trafficking would reach unprecedented levels of modern slavery, while kidnapping would become the main industry in vast areas. Entire communities would survive through extortion, smuggling, and criminal activities, which would be the only functional economy available.
The Destabilization of South America
Venezuela would not be an isolated problem but an epicenter of continental destabilization. Colombia would face an additional three to five million refugees, Venezuelan armed groups operating freely within its territory, the reactivation of its internal conflict due to Venezuelan spillover, and possibly the de facto annexation of Zulia after years of informal Colombian control of that region.
Brazil would suffer an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in its northern states, particularly Roraima and Amazonas. The infiltration of Venezuelan criminal groups into Brazilian cities would reshape the map of organized crime in the country, while military pressure to intervene in border areas would grow until it became irresistible, dragging Brazil into a conflict it neither wants nor can win.
Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago would see their capacity to absorb refugees collapse, facing internal political crises that would destabilize their fragile democracies. The Caribbean would face waves of refugees arriving by sea, with thousands drowning in the attempt, recreating the Cuban "rafter" crisis tenfold and generating political tensions on every island that received these desperate flows.
Regional Militarization
The crisis would force an unprecedented militarization across the subcontinent. Defense budgets would skyrocket in all neighboring countries, diverting desperately needed resources from social development. Tensions between countries over crisis management would generate constant diplomatic friction, with potential armed clashes over control of disputed border areas. Regional institutions such as UNASUR, CELAC, and others would be weakened to the point of irrelevance, unable to respond to a crisis of this magnitude.
The Crucial Factor: No Viable Reconstruction Plan
The proponents of intervention would assume a popular "liberation" with massive support, rapid stabilization with oil revenues financing reconstruction, an opposition capable of governing effectively, and an international community generously funding the process. This fantasy would crash against reality within weeks.
The reality would be massive resistance from broad sectors of the population who would see the intervention as a foreign invasion, not a liberation. Oil would be impossible to extract under conditions of civil war, with infrastructure constantly sabotaged and workers fleeing or joining armed groups. The opposition, fragmented and administratively incompetent, would be unable to provide basic services or maintain order. And after the multi-billion-dollar failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere, Western countries would have neither the stomach nor the resources for another failed, decades-long reconstruction project.
The Cost in Blood and Treasure
A conservative projection would estimate between 200,000 and 500,000 deaths from direct violence in the first ten years, with another 500,000 to 1 million deaths from indirect causes such as hunger and disease. Between 10 and 15 million people would be displaced or become refugees, creating the worst humanitarian crisis in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere.
The cost of military occupation would reach fifty to one hundred billion dollars in the first five years alone, not including thirty to fifty billion in humanitarian costs. Venezuela would lose between seventy and ninety percent of its GDP, destroying decades of capital accumulation. The regional impact would add another one hundred to two hundred billion dollars in indirect costs, making the intervention the most costly economic disaster in Latin American history.
The Abyss After the "Liberation"
Military intervention in Venezuela would not produce a democratic transition, but rather the collapse of a nation. The combination of unique factors—an opposition lacking popular legitimacy, a state completely enmeshed in a decades-long political project, a deeply polarized society, complex geography, and an abundance of weapons—would create conditions for a humanitarian and political disaster unprecedented in the modern Western Hemisphere.
The examples of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria are not exaggerated warnings, but rather conservative models of what could happen. Venezuela, with its population size, social complexity, and geographic location, could become the worst case of a post-intervention failed state in recent history, surpassing even the horrors we have witnessed in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The fundamental lesson is that there is no military solution to complex political crises. The human cost of "solving" Venezuela by force would be orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the current crisis, however terrible it may be. And the end result would not be a stable and prosperous democracy, but decades of violence, territorial fragmentation, and massive suffering that would scar several generations.
The question is not whether Venezuela needs change—it clearly needs it urgently. The question is whether a military intervention would produce that change or simply replace a complex political crisis with a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions, making the country synonymous with a failed state for generations. The accumulated evidence from the last two decades of military interventions overwhelmingly and irrefutably suggests the latter. The proposed remedy would not only be worse than the disease, but it would kill the patient while attempting to cure it.
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EXCLUSIONARY THAN BEING POOR
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