There are stories that, when first published, seem too strange, too dark, or too close to the inner workings of power to be fully understood at the time—not necessarily because they are false, but because pieces are still missing that would allow us to grasp the true dimensions of what is being told. Time, which is often a terrible ally to those who believe they can hide their relationships forever, eventually places names, events, and documents exactly where there were once only questions, forcing us to return to old investigations and discover that some of those apparently isolated pieces were part of a much larger reality.

Ángel Monagas published one of those stories.

A lawyer, journalist, and meticulous investigator, for years he cultivated relationships with figures connected to politics, the security services, the military world, and major Venezuelan business interests, building a network of sources that gave him access to spaces very few people could reach. As often happens with those who spend decades cultivating sources inside closed structures, he frequently knew of facts that could not yet be publicly demonstrated by simply placing a document on a table, but which time would later illuminate through events, testimony, and documents produced by independent investigations.

One of those investigations revolved around a nickname that, according to Monagas, circulated inside Venezuela’s Directorate General of Military Counterintelligence, the DGCIM.

El Calígula

That was the name used for Jorge Rodríguez, the current president of Venezuela’s National Assembly and the brother of Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s fraudulent interim president.

It was hardly a tribute to the Roman Empire. According to the investigation published by Ángel Monagas, some DGCIM officials began using the nickname because of conduct they attributed directly to Jorge Rodríguez: asking to be connected by video call while certain detainees were being tortured. Monagas was even more specific. Jorge, he explained, did not want recordings sent to him afterward. He wanted to watch those sessions live, as they happened.

The story may be difficult to digest, but that is precisely why it is important to explain how Ángel reached it and who provided the elements that allowed the person known inside that structure as El Calígula to be identified.

The Venezuelans who took El Calígula to the International Criminal Court

Ángel Monagas recounted the case of two Venezuelans living in Chile who had decided to report to the International Criminal Court the torture they had suffered in Venezuela. The woman had been subjected to degrading abuse for five days, while the young man had been beaten and subjected to electric shocks to his genitals while hanging upside down by his feet. But those two victims also had access to particularly relevant testimony, because a former DGCIM official, also living in Chile, knew the procedures used against detainees from the inside and could describe who participated, how the torture was carried out, and what relationships existed within that structure.

According to Monagas, that former official explained something especially perverse: on certain occasions, those carrying out the torture knew perfectly well that the people being subjected to those torments had no useful information to provide, yet the procedures continued anyway. It was that same former official who recalled an episode during the torture of the young Venezuelan, when a call came in, and one of the sergeants present exclaimed: It’ss El Calígula.”

From that point on, the story took on another dimension. According to the testimony collected by Ángel, there was a figure within the upper political structure who maintained direct contact with certain officials and had made a very particular request: he wanted to be connected by video call. At the same time, some of the victims were being tortured so that he could personally watch what was happening. He did not want a recording afterward. He wanted to witness the procedure as it occurred.

The former official explained that it was only later, when the scandal surrounding the death of Captain Rafael Acosta Arévalo erupted, that he finally understood who the person known within that structure as “El Calígula” was.

According to Ángel Monagas’s investigation, it was Jorge Rodríguez.

Those Venezuelans took their story to the International Criminal Court, and this deserves to be placed within a much broader context because, during those years, something was unfolding that those in power in Venezuela had every reason to fear. The ICC had formally opened its investigation into the Venezuela I situation, and when the government attempted to halt it by arguing that its own institutions were capable of adequately investigating the facts, a procedure was opened so that victims could directly express their views and concerns. The participation was enormous: 1,875 submissions represented approximately 8,900 victims, 630 families, and two organizations.

This was not, therefore, a handful of people telling stories from abroad. It was an enormous universe of Venezuelans beginning to place before international institutions names, events, locations, security agencies, officials, and chains of responsibility. Against that backdrop, it is extraordinary that Ángel made public the story of those Venezuelan torture victims living in Chile, the existence of a former DGCIM official capable of identifying practices and participants, and, most importantly, the identification of Jorge Rodríguez as the person known within that structure as El Calígula.

Then reports began circulating that people belonging to that universe of Venezuelans were being sought in Chile, and the name appearing around that search was particularly disturbing: Tren de Aragua.

Who were they looking for in Chile?

As far as we know, there is no public document that allows us to take an inventory of victims who approached the International Criminal Court or provided information to United Nations mechanisms and compare it, name by name, with those who may subsequently have been sought by Venezuelan criminal structures in Chile. But it is extraordinary that a Venezuelan criminal organization was looking for Venezuelans in that country and that some of those people could very well have belonged precisely to the universe of victims, former military officers, former officials, witnesses, or complainants who were providing information about Venezuela’s repressive apparatus to international institutions.

Then something happened that forces us to take that possibility much more seriously. On February 21, 2024, several men dressed as police officers arrived before dawn at the Santiago, Chile, home of retired Venezuelan lieutenant Ronald Ojeda Moreno, dragged him away almost naked in front of his family, and disappeared with him. Days later, his body was found inside a suitcase buried beneath concrete. The Chilean investigation eventually established the involvement of members of Tren de Aragua. At the same time, prosecutors progressively discarded the hypothesis of an ordinary financially motivated kidnapping and concluded that the killing was politically motivated and had been commissioned from Venezuela.

Ronald Ojeda is not the former DGCIM official mentioned by the two Venezuelans whose complaint Ángel Monagas reported. That former official was another person, also residing in Chile, who had known the torture procedures from the inside and provided the testimony through which Jorge Rodríguez was identified as the figure known within that structure as El Calígula.

Nor is there public evidence allowing us to state that Ojeda’s murder was specifically intended to silence that complaint. The relevant conclusion is different, and sufficiently serious on its own: after thousands of Venezuelans began providing information about torture, persecution, and repressive structures to international bodies, a Venezuelan criminal organization had the operational capacity to locate, kidnap, and murder Venezuelans on Chilean soil. And in the case of Ronald Ojeda, a Venezuelan military officer opposed to the regime, Chilean prosecutors ultimately established a political motive and an order originating in Venezuela.

That raises a question that still has no sufficient answer: who else were they looking for? If among those individuals there were former military officers, defecting officials, torture victims, citizens who had filed complaints before the International Criminal Court, or witnesses capable of identifying responsibility within the security services, then we would be facing a transnational dimension of persecution that deserves far deeper investigation.

After the murder of Ronald Ojeda, no one can seriously maintain that it was inconceivable for a Venezuelan criminal structure to reach a Venezuelan political target thousands of miles from Caracas. The capability existed, the apparatus was operating, and in at least one case it ended with the death of a Venezuelan military officer on Chilean soil.

And it is precisely here that we must return to Ángel Monagas, because one of the names that appeared in his investigation into El Calígula was Alexander Enrique Granko Arteaga.

Alexander Granko Arteaga

Monagas reported that Jorge Rodríguez had maintained a direct relationship with Granko for years, and that Granko became one of the most powerful men within the DGCIM’s operational structure. Over time, Granko’s name ceased to belong exclusively to journalistic investigations and began appearing repeatedly in international investigations into torture and grave human rights violations committed inside Venezuela’s intelligence services.

The United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela extensively documented the role of the DGCIM’s Special Affairs structure and the responsibility attributed to Granko within it. But there is one case in which all of these lines intersect again, and in which the relationship described by Ángel becomes extraordinarily important: the killing of retired Navy Captain Rafael Acosta Arévalo.

It is worth stopping here, because the Acosta Arévalo case allows us to understand with particular clarity how that structure operated.

Rafael Acosta Arévalo: seven days

I reconstructed the killing of Rafael Acosta Arévalo extensively in 2022 in Evilness Cahoot, because I have always regarded that case as an especially clear illustration of how state violence operated in Venezuela: not only through torture itself, but also through the subsequent construction of an administrative and media narrative designed to conceal what had really happened.

Rafael Acosta Arévalo disappeared on June 21, 2019. His wife publicly stated that she did not know where he was, and during the following days there was no officially acknowledged detention, no access to lawyers, and no effective judicial oversight. Yet on June 26, after Acosta had already been missing for five days, Jorge Rodríguez appeared before the media to announce that the authorities had dismantled a conspiracy against Nicolás Maduro and included the retired captain among the alleged participants.

The sequence is particularly revealing because the Public Prosecutor’s Office formally announced the investigation the following day, while DGCIM records eventually stated that Acosta Arévalo had been arrested precisely on June 26, the same day Jorge Rodríguez publicly presented the alleged conspiracy, even though Acosta’s disappearance had begun five days earlier.

Five days had been administratively erased.

It is precisely within that period that Ángel Monagas places the relationship between Jorge Rodríguez and Alexander Granko. According to Ángel’s investigation, Jorge had contacted Granko to order Acosta Arévalo’s detention and had asked that the operation remain within a restricted circuit between the two of them. He later allegedly intervened through video calls to guide the preparation of the supposed confessions and then began asking to be connected while the torture was taking place.

Monagas maintained that Jorge could remain connected for one or two hours watching those procedures and that he did not want recordings sent afterward because he wanted to see them directly while they were happening. According to Ángel, it was around those episodes that certain DGCIM officials began referring to him as El Calígula.

On June 28, Acosta Arévalo resurfaced to be brought before a military court. He was retired from the armed forces, yet he was nevertheless subjected to military jurisdiction. When his lawyer was finally able to see him briefly, he was in a wheelchair, barefoot, visibly injured, virtually unable to move his hands or legs, and barely strong enough to say that he had been tortured. He died shortly thereafter.

Amnesty International later reconstructed the case with a phrase that brutally captures what happened: Rafael Acosta Arévalo died before a judge.

What the United Nations corroborated

The importance of this case to Ángel Monagas’s investigation lies not only in the atrocity of Acosta Arévalo’s death, but also in what was later independently corroborated.

The United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Rafael Acosta Arévalo died as a result of torture suffered while in DGCIM custody. It also confirmed the discrepancy between the real date of his disappearance and the date later entered into the official records, establishing that Acosta had spent several days outside judicial supervision.

But the key figure in this story is Alexander Granko Arteaga. In the United Nations investigation, one witness detained at Boleíta said he had heard Acosta Arévalo’s screams during interrogation and recognized Granko’s voice among those present. Another former DGCIM member stated that the order to torture the captain had come directly from Granko.

This means that an independent international investigation ultimately placed Alexander Granko squarely inside the apparatus connected to the torture that caused Rafael Acosta Arévalo’s death—the same man Ángel Monagas had operationally linked to Jorge Rodríguez.

There is another circumstance that cannot be overlooked. While Acosta Arévalo remained disappeared, Jorge Rodríguez was not some peripheral observer who merely received information after the procedure was over. He was the man who appeared before Venezuela on June 26 to announce a conspiracy that included a person who had already been missing from his family for five days and whose official detention, curiously, began on paper that very same day.

That is why Ángel’s investigation carries such extraordinary significance. Monagas did not simply claim that Jorge knew about the case. He maintained that Jorge had been involved from the beginning, that he maintained a direct relationship with Granko, that he requested the detention, that he participated in constructing the supposed confessions, and that he later watched the torture through video calls.

That is what Ángel published.

And the United Nations ultimately corroborated a fundamental piece of that story: Granko was indeed inside the structure that tortured Rafael Acosta Arévalo until it caused his death.

We are not talking, then, about a nickname invented to add color to an accusation, but about an investigation that identified a concrete relationship among Jorge Rodríguez, Alexander Granko, and the Acosta Arévalo case, and which later found highly significant independent corroboration in international reports.

One final piece was still missing: where would Granko appear once Nicolás Maduro was no longer in power?

Granko reappears alongside the Rodríguez siblings

On January 3, 2026, Nicolás Maduro was extracted from Venezuela, triggering a profound reorganization around the presidency, the security services, and the real centers of power. Under circumstances like these, the position of operators linked to the previous structure becomes especially revealing, because those who depended exclusively on Maduro could be displaced. At the same time, those who were part of deeper relationships of trust would find a place inside the new center of power.

And that is precisely where Alexander Granko reappears.

Months after Maduro’s removal, during an event attended by Delcy Rodríguez in Puerto La Cruz, cameras recorded the arrival of the convoy accompanying the interim president. From one of the vehicles immediately beside her stepped Alexander Granko Arteaga, dressed in civilian clothes and moving with complete familiarity inside that security arrangement.

That episode takes on particular significance when placed alongside what Ángel Monagas had investigated years earlier. Granko does not appear merely as an official who managed to preserve a position after Maduro’s fall. He appears physically integrated into the environment surrounding Delcy Rodríguez, sister of the same Jorge Rodríguez whom Monagas had directly linked to him since the Acosta Arévalo case.

The inference is obvious: the relationship of trust between Alexander Granko and the Rodríguez siblings was not circumstantial, nor did it depend exclusively on Nicolás Maduro. Ángel had placed Granko inside Jorge Rodríguez’s circle years earlier, and after Maduro’s removal, the same operator reappears integrated into the apparatus surrounding Delcy. The continuity is not merely bureaucratic; it is political, operational, and personal.

This substantially reinforces the connection described by Ángel. The man whom Monagas placed within JorgeRodríguez’ss direct circle in the Acosta Arévalo case eventually appears, with Maduro no longer at the center of power, beside the other member of the Rodríguez nucleus occupying Miraflores. Granko’s continued presence within that structure is visible evidence that the relationship described by Ángel was not episodic or confined to a single case, but part of a much deeper relationship of trust.

And this is where we must return once again to Ángel Monagas, because three years earlier he had published another story that seemed, on its face, to be about polls, elections, and presidential succession, but which in reality described something much deeper: a future in which Nicolás Maduro would no longer be in power and the Rodríguez siblings would be prepared to administer it.

Easter Sunday

It was April 9, 2023, Easter Sunday, when, according to Ángel Monagas, Jorge Rodríguez, his sister Delcy, the Abou Nassif brothers, an assimilated active-duty Army colonel, the colonel’s wife, and a Catalan communications strategist met together. According to that account, the setting did not look much like a war room. There were canapés, caviar, Dom Pérignon Vintage Luminous 2008 champagne, and Pata Negra ham from Jabugo. But on the table were two polls containing a problem far more serious than any of the gastronomic excesses surrounding them.

That problem was named María Corina Machado, and it is essential to pause over the date in order to understand the significance of what Ángel was reporting. It was April 2023, and María Corina had not yet won the opposition primary. More than six months remained before October 22, when she would sweep her competitors and become the principal political reference point of that opposition majority. At the time, there were still numerous contenders, Henrique Capriles retained a national political organization, Benjamín Rausseo was trying to build a candidacy, and it was not even clear who would ultimately dominate the primary.

Yet the polls being analyzed by the Rodríguez siblings were already showing something else. In one of the flat scenarios, which simultaneously included Nicolás Maduro, María Corina Machado, Benjamín Rausseo, Henrique Capriles, and Juan Guaidó, María Corina led with 25%, followed by Maduro at 21%, Rausseo at 9%, Capriles at 8%, and Guaidó at just 3%.

There were also indicators that were particularly troubling for the government. Seven out of ten Capriles supporters said they would like to see him support María Corina, while 17% of NicolásMaduro’ss own sympathizers said that, if they were to vote for someone else, they would vote for her. This was not simply about voting intention, but about María Corina’s growing ability to absorb voters from other political spaces.

But another scenario was even worse for Nicolás Maduro: when the field was reduced to a more defined presidential contest, María Corina reached 42% against just 25% for Maduro.

And I return to the date because it is fundamental: April 9, 2023. María Corina had not yet won a primary, had not yet traveled the country as the unified opposition candidate, and the extraordinary political mobilization that would follow had not yet taken place. Yet one of the polls they were examining already placed her seventeen points ahead of Nicolás Maduro.

This allows us to understand much more clearly the conversation Ángel attributed to that meeting. They were not merely watching an opposition leader beginning to grow. They were already contemplating the possibility of a presidential defeat, which is why Benjamín Rausseo occupied an important place in the discussion.

According to Monagas, the Catalan strategist was quite blunt in his assessment. With only 9% in one of the scenarios and only a portion of those sympathizers actually willing to participate in the primaries, he could not see a way to turn Rausseo into a sufficiently strong candidate. Yussef Abou Nassif reportedly replied that his campaign would begin the following week and that, if necessary, more money would have to be injected into it.

Delcy then raised the truly important question: how could they turn “Er Conde” into a kind of Venezuelan Rodolfo Hernández, capable of altering the electoral geometry and ultimately facilitating a Maduro victory? But the polls themselves showed that this might not be enough, because the problem was no longer merely dividing the opposition vote. María Corina could win by a wide margin.

It was then, according to Monagas’s investigation, that Jorge Rodríguez outlined a different strategy. He had ordered legal opinions to be prepared, and the idea was not to definitively resolve María Corina’s disqualification, but to let her advance, allow her to reach the election, and then, using the words Ángel attributed to that conversation, “catch her on the way down.”

If she won, she would be declared ineligible, the election would not be repeated, and there would be no repeat of Barinas. A presidential vacuum would then arise, and Jorge Rodríguez, as president of the National Assembly, would assume an interim presidency. At the same time, they prepared a new electoral process under conditions more favorable to them.

One of the Abou Nassif brothers asked how much money such an operation would require. According to Monagas, Delcy replied that there was no reason to worry because they already had “open bar at PDVSA” and the money would not run out.

But the truly extraordinary moment came when the military officer present asked the question anyone would have considered obvious: what, then, would happen to Nicolás Maduro?

His wife replied:

“You’re not understanding. What do you mean the man no va pa'l baile?”

There is a Venezuelan expression behind that sentence: “no va pa'l baile,” the colloquial contraction of no va para el baile, translated here as “isn’t going to the ball.” It does not simply mean that someone will not attend a dance. It means that he is out of what comes next—that he will not be part of the game when the decisive moment arrives.

In April 2023, the phrase might have sounded extravagant, but one part of that conversation was already supported by the numbers in front of them: María Corina could defeat Nicolás Maduro by 42% to 25% before she had even won the opposition primary. Three years later, the other meaning contained in that phrase would become impossible to ignore.

Maduro, in fact, didn’t make it to the ball.

María Corina’s endorsement of Edmundo

The strategy did not unfold exactly as it had apparently been discussed in that meeting, because María Corina Machado overwhelmingly won the opposition primary in October 2023. Still, the government succeeded in preventing her from appearing on the presidential ballot through her disqualification. Corina Yoris was then also prevented from registering, and ultimately a figure emerged whom surely none of those present in that earlier conversation had originally included in their calculations: Edmundo González Urrutia.

On July 28, 2024, Venezuelans voted. The National Electoral Council declared Nicolás Maduro the winner, but never published the polling-station-level results necessary to verifiably support that proclamation. The opposition collected approximately 80% of the tally sheets, and the Carter Center later concluded that those records reflected roughly 67% for Edmundo González versus 30% for Nicolás Maduro and that the process had failed to meet international standards of electoral integrity.

Nicolás Maduro lost the election, but decided to remain in power by using the institutional and coercive control he still held over the state. That is where the path Ángel had described changed: María Corina did not make it onto the ballot, Edmundo did, and the regime could not execute exactly the maneuver conceived around a possible post-election disqualification of Machado because the political dynamic had altered the actors and circumstances.

Maduro remained in Miraflores for another year and a half, until he was captured by U.S. forces and extracted from Venezuela on January 3, 2026. Two days later, Delcy Rodríguez assumed the interim presidency, and the person who swore her in was none other than her brother Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly. The image of Venezuelan power ended up looking disturbingly similar to the conversation Ángel had published almost three years earlier: Maduro was out, Delcy occupied Miraflores, and Jorge still controlled the National Assembly. At the same time, the Rodríguez siblings jointly administered the core of Venezuelan power.

The route had changed, but the fundamental outcome of that conversation had been fulfilled: Maduro didn’t make it to the ball.

Open bar at PDVSA

Here another phrase from that Easter Sunday conversation deserves to be read again: “We already have open bar at PDVSA. The money won’t run out.”

Today Delcy Rodríguez is attempting to build her political survival around precisely the asset that has historically financed the Venezuelan state and allowed it to bargain with the outside world: oil. But now she needs something more, because she understands perfectly well that controlling Miraflores will not be enough if Washington determines that her transitional role is over and that Venezuela must move toward a government born from elections.

That is why she has built a pragmatic relationship with the United States government based on oil, investment, security, and stability. The United States gains access to resources and opportunities within Venezuela’s oil industry, while Delcy gains revenue, international interlocution, political breathing room and, above all, time. The operation has a transparent purpose: to convert the immediate utility of her government to Washington into a sufficient guarantee of permanence to reorganize power internally.

Delcy is not simply preparing the administrative conditions necessary for clean elections. Delcy Rodríguez is using Venezuelan oil to build the political conditions that will allow her to remain in power and prepare an election she intends to steal. The formula does not have to reproduce the 2024 fraud exactly, because an election can be conditioned long before voters reach the polling stations, and to carry out that operation there is one indispensable element that the Rodríguez siblings have already begun to obtain: time.

The first trap is time

Curiously, time also appeared in the conversation recounted by Ángel. Jorge Rodríguez reportedly explained that, once installed in an interim government, they could use as much time as necessary to prepare the next elections and, according to Monagas, even referred to a period of approximately “two or three years.” There is no need to claim that someone preserved a folder written in 2023 and later began executing its pages literally, because the important connection is much more obvious: the political logic remains the same, and the first trap—the trap of time—has already been set.

When Nicolás Maduro was captured and taken to the United States on January 3, 2026, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice decided to preserve the artificial fiction of a temporary absence and place Delcy Rodríguez at the head of the executive branch. But it did not simply resolve an immediate contingency. It created a mechanism through which Delcy can remain indefinitely in the presidency for as long as Nicolás Maduro remains imprisoned in the United States, in violation of the limits established by the Venezuelan Constitution.

A temporary absence may last ninety days and may be extended only once for another ninety. The first ninety days passed, then the full 180, and Delcy continues to exercise the presidency. The Supreme Tribunal tied her permanence to Maduro’s personal circumstances, continuing to treat his absence as temporary for as long as he remains detained in the United States, even though the constitutional period has already been exceeded.

The comparison with the conversation reported by Ángel Monagas is unavoidable. Against a limit of ninety days, extendable to 180, Jorge Rodríguez spoke of having “two or three years” to prepare a new election. The first trap of time consists precisely in turning a limited temporary substitution into the political space necessary to approach that horizon.

The situation is even more serious because the institution called upon to intervene in the face of that prolonged absence is the National Assembly, presided over by Jorge Rodríguez, the brother of the person who directly benefits from that constitutional determination never being made.

The first condition the Rodríguez siblings needed to prepare their own continuity has therefore already been satisfied: they have obtained the time they were asking for in the meeting described by Ángel.

An immediate election after Maduro’s removal would force them to compete after Chavismo lost the 2024 presidential election, with María Corina Machado established as the principal opposition leader and the memory of July 28 still intact. Under those conditions, an election poses a direct threat to the continuity of the Rodríguez nucleus, which is why they need to use the time they have already secured to reorganize the CNE, rebuild economic resources, establish a functional relationship with the United States, market stability, try to generate some economic recovery through oil, divide the opposition, wear down María Corina, and construct the conditions under which an election no longer represents an existential threat.

That is why they will try to steal those elections, even if the mechanism does not necessarily take the crude form used in 2024. The next trap can be built by deciding when the election takes place, who may run, which CNE organizes it, which parties receive ballot access, which political organizations survive administratively, which international observers are admitted, how state resources are deployed and, above all, what happens if the opposition once again wins a majority that those controlling the government are unwilling to accept.

The first maneuver, therefore, is no longer a matter of speculation about what they might do in the future. They have already done it: they extended Delcy’s political time beyond constitutional limits and tied it to an event of uncertain duration—Nicolás Maduro’s continued imprisonment in the United States.

An election can be stolen before a single ballot box is opened.

An irreversible defeat

Denouncing repression, documenting abuses, and exposing the mechanisms used by the regime to remain in power were always indispensable, but for years I have maintained that this was not enough. Venezuelan democracy could not be recovered merely by demonstrating the authoritarian and criminal nature of the system built around Nicolás Maduro; it was essential to design a coherent strategy capable of transforming the enormous social rejection of the regime into an organized political force, electorally risective and ultimately capable of governing.

That reflection gave rise to my book National Conciliation: The Path to Democratic Emancipation in Venezuela. There I established that democratic recovery required overcoming a fragmented opposition and turning unity into something much deeper than a circumstantial agreement among political leaders: a civic, political, and territorial articulation accompanied by leadership, mass participation, and an electoral strategy capable of defeating the regime even under the institutional conditions it had designed to prevent precisely that outcome.

July 28, 2024 demonstrated that the strategy worked. María Corina had been excluded from the ballot, Corina Yoris had also been prevented from registering, and virtually the entire institutional apparatus worked in favor of Nicolás Maduro’s continuation in power. Yet Venezuelan society managed to organize around Edmundo González Urrutia, protect a decisive portion of the tally sheets, and demonstrate that an organized majority could electorally defeat a regime even when that regime controlled the state.

From there came When the People Rise: The Democratic Insurgency Behind Nicolás Maduro’s Electoral Defeat in Venezuela. If Evilness Cahoot explained the architecture of violence, persecution, and control used to sustain the dictatorship, and National Conciliation established the practical mechanism for defeating it democratically, When the People rise examines the moment when that strategy ceased to be a proposal and became fact: the Venezuelan people electorally defeated Nicolás Maduro.

This is decisive for understanding what comes next, because the same fraud on which Maduro materially sustained his permanence after July 28 is what now sustains Delcy Rodríguez’s interim presidency. Maduro refused to recognize the will expressed by Venezuelans at the ballot box and used control of the state to remain in power; Delcy now occupies an interim presidency fraudulently extended through a Supreme Tribunal decision that destroyed the Constitution’s temporal limits in order to prevent the country from quickly reaching a new electoral decision.

The mechanism changed, but the essence is the same: use institutions controlled by those in power to prevent democratic will from producing its consequences. The answer remains the same as well.

Venezuelans have already demonstrated that they can defeat that architecture through an organized, disciplined majority capable of politically defending its decision. Nicolás Maduro entered July 28 with every advantage accumulated through more than a decade of institutional control and still lost. The Rodríguez siblings now inherit an apparatus that has already been electorally defeated, bear the accumulated wear of the same system, and are trying to manufacture a new legitimacy through the same mechanisms that produced that defeat.

They can buy time, reorganize the CNE, deploy PDVSA’s resources, negotiate stability with Washington, try once again to divide the opposition, and again prevent María Corina from appearing on a ballot. None of that changes the reality demonstrated on July 28. When the Venezuelan majority organizes itself around a common purpose, the apparatus may temporarily retain power, but it cannot manufacture a majority it does not possess.

In National Conciliation, we established a strategy to defeat Maduro democratically, and Maduro was defeated. We are already working on the new strategy to complete Venezuela’s emancipation.

The Rodríguez siblings will be defeated by the same mechanism: democratic, electoral, and massive. Recent RedAnálisis Consultores polls show support of barely 9% for Delcy Rodríguez, and significantly less for any other surviving figure of Madurismo.

Their problem is still called María Corina

Here lies the mistake the Rodríguez siblings have been making since well before the 2024 elections: they believe their problem is María Corina Machado and that, by eliminating her electorally, they also eliminate the threat she represents. They already tried that formula, and the result was exactly the opposite. Now they are trying to persuade the United States government to exclude her from any democratic process in Venezuela, using the oil business as leverage. Economic blackmail is, after all, one of Delcy Rodríguez’s specialties, and she holds the ledger of the political bribes of the Chávez-Maduro era.

In April 2023, before María Corina had even won the primary, the polls Ángel Monagas attributed to that meeting already showed that she could defeat Maduro by 42% to 25%. The reaction was to try to construct an alternative capable of fragmenting the vote, keep her disqualification in force, and prepare legal mechanisms to neutralize her if she eventually won. They later disqualified her, prevented Corina Yoris from registering as well, and surely believed they had solved the problem.

Then Edmundo González appeared.

That episode should have taught them something elementary: María Corina is not merely a candidate who can be erased through an administrative ruling, because behind her an electoral majority has been organized whose existence no longer depends on whether her name appears on a ballot. Venezuelans demonstrated in 2024 that they could massively transfer their political decision to another candidate and turn a diplomat virtually unknown only months earlier into the electoral instrument of a collective will.

That is why the Rodríguez siblings’ obsession with María Corina will ultimately defeat them. Every disqualification, every act of persecution, every attempt to prevent her participation, and every maneuver aimed at manufacturing an election without her only confirms the argument that mobilized millions of Venezuelans in 2024: they are not confronting a system willing to compete, but a structure determined to decide in advance who is entitled to defeat it.

The Rodríguez siblings can control the National Assembly, use the Supreme Tribunal, reorganize the CNE, command PDVSA, negotiate with Washington and even pressure it to exclude María Corina from any process of democratic emancipation in Venezuela, while keeping around their structure generals, police officers, dossiers, intelligence agencies, and men such as Alexander Granko. But we already know that there is a boundary where all that power encounters a limit: when millions of Venezuelans convert a common will into votes and manage to sufficiently protect the evidence of what they have done.

Maduro discovered that limit on July 28. The Rodríguez siblings will discover it too.

But the percentage obtained by Edmundo González is going to look small.

Incitatus

Caligula had a horse named Incitatus, around whom historians still debate whether the emperor truly intended to appoint him consul or whether the story was later exaggerated. Some believe Caligula’s real purpose was to humiliate the Senate, to demonstrate that he could place even a horse in one of Rome’s highest offices and remind the senators that institutions were worth only what the emperor was willing to allow them to be worth.

Perhaps that is precisely why the story survived for two thousand years, because Incitatus ceased to be merely a horse and became the perfect metaphor for power that comes to believe it can dispose of absolutely everything, turn institutions into personal instruments, change the rules, and then call the result institutional order.

Ángel Monagas used Incitatus after reporting that Jorge Rodríguez was called El Calígula. Still, perhaps the metaphor was not yet complete, because for years these people have tried to treat Venezuela as Caligula would have treated Incitatus: a creature on which they can place the reins, decide where it walks, and even use it to humiliate the institutions that are supposed to constrain their power.

They have decided who may compete, when elections should be held, which results they will recognize, what a court ruling is worth, how long a temporary absence lasts and now how long an interim president may remain in office without submitting power once again to the decision of Venezuelans. Delcy uses oil, Jorge uses the National Assembly, and both are trying to buy enough time to prepare an election in which they believe they will finally be able to control every variable.

But they are making the same mistake Nicolás Maduro made: confusing control of the reins with control of the animal.

Venezuela has already disobeyed them once. On July 28, 2024, after years of persecution, disqualifications, institutional manipulation, and control of the state apparatus, millions of Venezuelans did precisely what the regime had built an entire system to prevent: they voted massively to remove it from power.

Fraud succeeded in postponing the consequences of that decision, but it did not erase it.

Now the Rodríguez siblings want to use another fraud, this time built upon an indefinitely prolonged interim presidency, Venezuelan oil, institutional control, and a new electoral operation designed with enough time to extend the dictatorship.

They will fail again.

Because when they try once more to mount Venezuela, they will discover something that El Calígula, Jorge Rodríguez, should also have remembered before playing with his horse:

Incitatus isn’t going to the ball.

And when they go looking for him to put the reins on him again, Incitatus will kick them out of power.

Posthumus note

An essential part of this article comes from the investigations conducted by Venezuelan lawyer and journalist Ángel Monagas, who died in 2025 and devoted much of his professional life to investigating power relationships in Venezuela, cultivating sources inside political, military, business, and security circles accessible to very few journalists.

This article is a posthumous acknowledgment of his work and his memory.

Ángel Monagas. May his investigations not be lost, and may his questions not be forgotten.