By: Ricardo Abud
There are events that occur in broad daylight and yet remain shrouded in a convenient fog. Not because they are incomprehensible, but because understanding them requires unsettling too many vested interests, breaking too many comfortable silences.
What happened on January 3rd in Venezuela is one of those events.Calling it a coup d'état seems excessive or premature to many. But if the facts are examined objectively, setting aside ideological sympathies and official narratives, the conclusion is hard to avoid: Venezuela experienced a forced change of power. And what is truly disturbing is not that it happened, but how it happened, who carried it out, and, above all, who ultimately benefited from it.
Popular imagination associates coups with very specific images: tanks in front of government buildings, radio broadcasts interrupted by uniformed officers, the clang of power changing hands. But the 21st century has refined the art of overthrowing. Contemporary coups don't always require such theatricality. Sometimes they are surgical, planned with top-notch military intelligence, executed with a precision that leaves few visible traces and many questions without official answers.
What happened in Caracas fits that pattern. The operation was swift. Resistance was minimal. And that minimal resistance didn't come from those who, in theory, had the institutional obligation to defend Venezuelan constitutional order. It came, according to testimonies that have been circulating, from a small group of men who weren't even Venezuelan. Men who had crossed the sea to carry out a mission from which, it seems, they wouldn't return.
That a foreign power has precise information about the movements of a head of state is not, in itself, extraordinary. Modern intelligence services are capable of remarkable feats. What is extraordinary, however, is the quality of that information, its level of detail, its timeliness. This kind of precision is not obtained from satellites or microphones installed in embassies. It is obtained from within. From someone who eats at the same table, who knows the routines, who has access to the plans.
This raises a question that, when voiced aloud, deeply unsettles those who have spent years constructing a narrative of anti-imperialist resistance: was this a coup orchestrated from the outside, or was it a coup facilitated from within, with external support? The difference is significant. In the first case, Venezuela is the victim of aggression. In the second, Venezuela was betrayed by its own ruling class.
Subsequent events suggest that the second hypothesis deserves, at least, to be taken seriously.
Just hours after the capture of the Venezuelan president, a sequence of events began that defies all conventional logic. The figure who assumed interim power was not an outsider, not a long-persecuted dissident, not a representative of the opposition that had been demanding the government for years. He was someone from the regime's own hard core. Someone who, until the day before, had been an indistinguishable part of that very government that had supposedly just been overthrown.
And then something even more difficult to explain began. The very institutions that for years had been the political backbone of the Chavista project, including the National Assembly, supported the new measures without much resistance. The brother of the new interim president was, in fact, presiding over that Assembly. The apparatus, it seemed, simply changed drivers without leaving the vehicle.
Meanwhile, in the streets, demonstrations were organized that served an ambiguous purpose: were they a genuine expression of popular support, or were they a mechanism to give visual legitimacy to a transition that had already been negotiated in private? The question doesn't have an easy answer. But the question exists.
What truly made this scenario unusual was the procession of visitors that began arriving in Caracas in the following days. These weren't second-tier diplomats or discreet emissaries. Instead, they were the most visible figures in the country's security and energy apparatus, the very same country that had just carried out the operation. The head of foreign intelligence. The head of the energy sector. The regional military command chief. The highest-ranking official in the domestic security sector.
They were all received. All with handshakes. All with the proper protocol for official welcome visits.
There is an image that sums up the paradox well: if someone enters your house by force, breaks down the door, subdues a family member and takes them away, and two days later you receive them in the living room with coffee and courtesy, the outside observer has the right to wonder if the door was actually open before.
The formal re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, announced with all the institutional pomp, only confirmed that what was being witnessed was not the defeat of a government by its historical enemy, but the consummation of an agreement between parties who, at some point in the process, ceased to be enemies.
Politics has its cold logic. States negotiate, betray, and reorganize. People, over time, digest the changes and normalize them. Venezuela has a long and tortuous history of power ruptures and reconstitutions, and it is likely that its people will, sooner or later, find their own path.
But there's something about all this that can't be so easily normalized. Something that doesn't fit into any geopolitical equation and doesn't appear in any official statement.
Thirty-two men died in Caracas during that operation. They weren't Venezuelans. They were Cubans. They had crossed the Caribbean carrying out a mission known to their own commanders, authorized by their own governments, part of a web of loyalties that had been years in the making. They died far from their homeland, far from their families, far from everything they knew.
And they died alone. Because if the hypothesis of an inside job has any basis—and the facts suggest it does—then those men weren't simply victims of an enemy military operation. They were victims of something much darker: calculated abandonment. Of the decision, made in some office by someone with enough power to make it, not to warn them, not to withdraw them, to leave them there to play their part in a script that had already been written without their input.
They died because someone let them die. That doesn't have a politically correct name. But it has a plain name: betrayal.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this entire episode is not the events themselves, but the silence surrounding them. In Cuba, where the families of those thirty-two men mourn their dead, no one in a position of authority has offered a clear explanation. There has been no accountability. There has been no public acknowledgment of what happened. There hasn't even been the slightest gesture of an honest explanation to those left behind.
The official silence in the face of the death of their own is, in itself, a way of confessing that something in this story cannot withstand the light of day.
History judges. Not always quickly. Not always fairly. But it judges. And when it does, it is usually merciless with those who sacrificed their own for political expediency and then looked the other way.
Those thirty-two men deserve, at the very least, to have their names acknowledged. Someone should say aloud that they were there, that they fulfilled their mission to the very end, and that they were abandoned by those who should have protected them.
That, at the very least, is what they are owed.
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EXCLUSIONARY THAN BEING POOR
Note: Many have commented to me about Russia's betrayal and inaction regarding the events of January 3rd; I dedicate this paragraph to them:
The erosion of Bolivarian socialist principles by President Nicolás Maduro's inner circle poses a fundamental strategic dilemma for Russia regarding the viability of continuing to invest resources in systems that have lost their internal cohesion. While Venezuelan leadership is precipitously losing ground, the focus should not be on alleged Russian disloyalty, but rather on revealing internal security failures and political concessions to Washington that appear more like a personal betrayal of the president than an exercise in pragmatism. This lack of investigation into the rifts within Maduro's circle suggests that the system is not being undermined from the outside, but is collapsing under the weight of its own fragmentation and loyalty crisis.
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