Introduction
On 3 January 2026, US forces sent by President Donald Trump captured Venezuela’s long-ruling dictator Nicolás Maduro in Caracas and transferred him to a jail in New York, where he awaits trial for grave human-rights violations and involvement in drug trafficking. This daring commando raid suddenly terminated the autocrat’s reign, which had unexpectedly dragged on for almost 13 years, despite various acute and severe crises and stark domestic and external challenges. Until then, the uncharismatic successor to left-wing populist Hugo Chávez had maintained a tight grip on power, against all odds; strikingly, it took an external military intervention by the most powerful nation in the world finally to oust him.
The lengthy duration of Maduro’s harsh, corrupt dictatorship poses a real puzzle, given the regime’s record of multifaceted governance failure. Lacking the magnetic personality of Chávez, who pushed Venezuela into competitive authoritarianism from 1999 until his death in 2013, wooden Maduro felt compelled to intensify political repression and impose blatant dictatorship.Footnote 1 Moreover, Chávez’s ideological radicalism and Maduro’s economic mismanagement led to a contraction of approximately 70–75 per cent in GDP and pushed up to 90 per cent of the population into poverty.Footnote 2 Political decay and economic deterioration turned Venezuela into the second most corrupt country in the world, surpassing even North Korea and South Sudan.Footnote 3 This devastation drove over a quarter of Venezuelans into exile.Footnote 4 As Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff concludes, ‘It’s really hard to think of a human tragedy of this scale outside civil war.’Footnote 5
Due to this abysmal record, Maduro confronted a number of serious political challenges – but always prevailed. During his seemingly interminable rule, he survived large-scale protests by mostly middle-class people in 2014 and 2017; outmanoeuvred an opposition-controlled legislature from 2015 to 2020; outlived a parallel opposition-led government recognised by over 50 nations after 2019; and evaded economic sanctions from the US, ignoring the superpower’s political pressures and military threats as well.
The dictator finally seemed to face his reckoning when, in the presidential elections of mid-2024, the democratic opposition managed to overcome serious limitations resulting from multi-faceted government manipulation and to secure an overwhelming majority of 67 per cent of the vote, compared to the incumbent’s 30 per cent.Footnote 6 Yet despite this unprecedented electoral triumph, the pro-democratic forces failed to achieve their main goal: to end the authoritarian regime. Instead, Maduro insisted on the utterly implausible claim that he had won the contest.Footnote 7 In response to this blatant disregard of the popular will, scattered protests erupted. But the regime suppressed them quickly with targeted repression and then proceeded with Maduro’s inauguration for a third consecutive term (2025–31). Thus, despite the well-documented rejection by an electoral super-majority, which reflected Maduro’s deplorable performance, the autocrat maintained a firm hold on power.Footnote 8 Only a US military intervention finally managed to terminate his reign.
What gave the autocracy such stubborn resilience, despite the magnitude of Venezuela’s government-induced collapse? Its persistence for more than a dozen years is especially puzzling because it was run by a personalistic clique and lacked firm institutionalisation, a common foundation of regime solidity.Footnote 9 Moreover, although, like all dictators, Maduro relied on fear to deter threats, political repression mostly remained targeted and selective. Compared to the more than 3,000 killings witnessed in early 2026 in Iran, for instance, in Venezuela’s post-electoral protests of mid-2024, about 25 people lost their lives. Operación Tun Tun – coordinated by Maduro’s ‘enforcer’, Diosdado Cabello – raided the homes of local leaders and prominent oppositionists, rather than unleashing indiscriminate mass repression.Footnote 10 More basically, Maduro’s very capacity for reliably marshalling coercion depended on an underlying factor that needs explanation, namely elite unity: why did military, police and paramilitary commanders dip their hands in blood and oversee violence in order to sustain the dictator? Accounting for this internal cohesion and autocratic solidarity constitutes a central goal of our analysis.
To explain how Maduro – surprisingly – maintained power for so long, this Commentary advances a novel explanation. Contrary to conventional views of crisis-driven regime fragility, we argue that the very deterioration overseen by Maduro paradoxically reinforced his rule. Against all odds, the regime effectively transformed adversity into opportunities for consolidation. Drawing on Albert Hirschman’s seminal framework of ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’,Footnote 11 we identify four mechanisms through which the dictatorship converted regime-threatening crises into sources of resilience: (1) mass exit, (2) forged mass loyalty, (3) engineered elite loyalty, and (4) fear-driven elite loyalty.
Through these mechanisms, Maduro managed to address the two main problems of regime survival emphasised in Milan Svolik’s foundational theory of authoritarian rule:Footnote 12 he succeeded in averting spiralling mass unrest that could defy his rule from the bottom up; and he precluded serious divisions among regime insiders that could split his regime from the top down. As a result, the protracted economic, social and political crisis failed to precipitate a regime breakdown or political transition. On the contrary, Venezuela’s autocrat exploited and manipulated the crisis to sustain his rule for more than a decade.
While existing scholarship has explored various factors that help explain the stubborn endurance of Maduro’s reign despite lamentable performance and significant challenges,Footnote 13 our approach differs in two important ways.
First, we offer a systematic account through a comprehensive application of Hirschman’s categories of ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’ that considers both of Svolik’s two threats to authoritarian stability. Prior usage of Hirschman’s insightful concepts has focused almost exclusively on challenges from the masses. Indeed, it mostly stresses the importance of citizen ‘exit’ via large-scale out-migrationFootnote 14 and does not highlight how the regime manufactured a sufficient base of support to sustain its long duration.
We complement these analyses by explaining how the regime engineered ‘loyalty’, at the mass level and especially among the ruling elite. After all, reliable backing from the top cadres who control the main power capabilities and coercive resources constitutes an indispensable requirement for authoritarian consolidation, as Svolik stresses: numerous autocrats stumble over internal divisions and conflicts, and fall to military coups.Footnote 15
To explain how Maduro averted insider challenges for 13 years, we highlight two sources of elite loyalty. By politically conditioning access to juicy rents, which often arose from illicit activities such as corruption, contraband and drug trafficking, the dictator ensured the obedience and support of his top lieutenants. Furthermore, trying to sanction the regime’s illicit rent-seeking and human-rights violations, the international community threatened Maduro and his top aides with prosecution. Yet in an unintended twist, this external push for accountability did not provoke splits among Venezuela’s autocratic elite, but instead induced it to hang together in order not to ‘hang’ separately. Fear-driven loyalty led the top cadres to keep supporting Maduro and collectively cling to power at all costs.
With these novel arguments, we integrate Hirschman’s categories with Svolik’s theory of the ‘twin problems’ of authoritarian survival. ‘Exit’ and various strands of ‘loyalty’, at the mass and the elite level, came together to help the autocracy avoid not only bottom-up challenges, but also to bolster cohesion at the top. By converting the very repercussions of crises into instruments of regime sustenance, Maduro managed to enlist mechanisms elucidated by Hirschman to fortify his control and protect the ill-performing autocracy against destabilising pro-democratic ‘voice’. Thus, our combination of Hirschman’s and Svolik’s frameworks explains the surprising durability of Maduro’s reign.
Second, our counter-intuitive account of crises providing instruments for regime stabilisation is distinctly less sanguine than prevailing interpretations about Venezuela’s democratic prospects – even in the immediate aftermath of Maduro’s ouster. The multiple crises that battered Venezuela suggested to observers that the regime was suffering from important vulnerabilities.Footnote 16 By contrast, this Commentary highlights that the autocracy’s bad performance had several repercussions that paradoxically strengthened its persistence. Besides benefiting from the mass ‘exit’ of predominantly discontented sectors, the dictator skilfully exploited severe problems (which he exacerbated) to enforce ‘loyalty’, both among the broader population and inside the ruling elite. By turning adversity into strength, the governing grouping for 13 years marginalised pro-democratic voice; indeed, in the immediate aftermath of Maduro’s capture, it seems to continue maintaining its autocratic control.
Moreover, whereas some scholars suggested that international pressure, particularly efforts to hold the autocracy accountable for its wrongdoing, would fracture the regime,Footnote 17 we contend that, on the contrary, such threats reinforced internal coordination and elite cohesion. Regime insiders felt compelled to cling to power in order to ensure their impunity. That even after Maduro’s capture the authoritarian power structure appears to persist (for now), and that President Trump’s plan for US tutelage rests on this persistence (which maintains stability in the near term and thus avoids deeper US intervention with all its risks), supports our argument about the autocracy’s firm entrenchment.
Exit, Voice and Loyalty, and the Pillars of Dictatorial Stability
To understand the puzzle of Maduro’s long-lasting reign despite abysmal performance and serious crises, one must start from the basic tasks that dictators face. As Svolik’s much-cited theory clarifies, ‘the survival of [authoritarian] leaders and regimes [is] shaped by the twin problems’ of ‘authoritarian control [of the masses]’ and ‘authoritarian power-sharing [among the elites]’.Footnote 18 To stay in power, despots must avert bottom-up challenges from the broader citizenry as well as top-level takeovers by regime insiders, especially military coups.Footnote 19
Autocrats have little difficulty satisfying these requirements during economic booms. Accordingly, Maduro’s predecessor, Chávez, did not need to enlist the blatant fraud that Maduro committed after the mid-2024 elections because he benefited from the bonanza gifted by the global commodities boom. In oil-exporting Venezuela, these windfall rents sustained Chávez’s march into competitive authoritarianism: generous social programmes guaranteed the acquiescence of common people, while the perks of office, including ample opportunities to engage in corruption, pacified the political elite and the military.Footnote 20
But with the economic collapse that Venezuela suffered under Maduro’s misgovernment, resources became scarce while unfulfilled needs grew by leaps and bounds. How, then, did the autocracy ensure compliance and obedience under such dire conditions, both from the mass citizenry and from regime elites? To explain the paradox of Maduro’s persistent survival amid calamitous governance, we draw on Hirschman’s categories of ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’ to elucidate the mechanisms through which Maduro turned regime-threatening crises into regime-fortifying opportunities and thus averted both of the challenges emphasised by Svolik.Footnote 21 Through episodes of mass protest and occasional electoral victories, especially the triumph of 2024, the Venezuelan opposition tried to use its voice to push for a democratic transition. But there were four mechanisms of exit and forms of loyalty that effectively neutralised regime-threatening voice by strengthening the dictatorship and ensuring that even electoral defeats and – it seems so far – the US intervention did not translate into a regime breakdown.
Regarding the regime’s control of the masses, two of Hirschman’s categories prove relevant. First, authoritarian rulers can benefit from mass exit, which weakens threatening ‘voice’. ‘Exit’ means that discontented people leave the state responsible for their suffering: They emigrate and seek refuge in countries where living conditions promise to be better. For an illegitimate ruler like Maduro, the mass emigration of approximately eight million Venezuelans provided a net political advantage: he managed to ‘export’ potential critics and dissidents, including opposition leaders.Footnote 22 With this goal in mind, the regime pushed 2024 election winner Edmundo González Urrutia and other political adversaries out of the country.Footnote 23 Thus, the unprecedented exodus that Venezuela experienced under Maduro’s ill-performing reign helped the questioned autocrat stay in power.Footnote 24
What about the Venezuelans who could not ‘exit’, but had to stay in their crisis-stricken country? Here, ‘loyalty’ came into play, though mainly with a coercive twist. In what we call forged mass loyalty, Maduro’s autocracy weaponised the very crisis it aggravated to forge ‘loyalty’ among large segments of the population. Conventional arguments would suggest that the depressed economy jeopardised the regime by creating the risk of a sociopolitical explosion.Footnote 25 However, severe deprivation paradoxically benefited Maduro. As Venezuelans turned to ‘survival strategies’ to meet basic needs, they became increasingly dependent on government handouts, particularly food aid.Footnote 26 The Maduro regime exploited this dependence by establishing a nationwide surveillance system and thus conditioned essential handouts on political loyalty:Footnote 27 citizens had to remain submissive and refrain from publicly challenging the failing incumbent to receive the assistance they so urgently needed.
This enforced mass loyalty deterred visible political behaviour that could jeopardise autocratic rule through contentious collective action, the most dangerous type of political ‘voice’. Only in the fleeting secrecy of the voting booth did the masses have an opportunity to express their true preferences and reject the dictator, as they massively did in mid-2024. Yet while protests surged spontaneously after the government refused to recognise its defeat, even in the poorer neighbourhoods where most needy, aid-dependent citizens live, they remained sporadic and faltered quickly.Footnote 28 The kind of mass uprising that dislodged authoritarian regimes in other countries, such as Bolivia’s ‘citizen revolt’ of 2019,Footnote 29 did not occur. After all, Venezuela’s popular sectors remain ‘heavily dependent on cash transfers, food parcels and other social programmes’ to survive.Footnote 30 This controlled dependence systematically forestalled sustained bottom-up challenges against the openly undemocratic regime.
Extending Hirschman’s framework to explain the Maduro regime’s capacity to address Svolik’s problem of authoritarian power-sharing as well, we also elucidate two mechanisms for guaranteeing elite ‘loyalty’. Indeed, a critical reason why protests faced relatively targeted repression and why the regime survived even when momentary trouble erupted lay in Maduro’s ability to forge engineered elite loyalty by giving his top cronies politically conditioned access to ample material benefits. Interestingly, the regime’s deficient performance actually reinforced this rent-based cohesion among the top echelon. For sure, Venezuela’s economic collapse greatly reduced the resource flows that regime insiders could tap into. But, contrary to conventional wisdom to the effect that crises prompt dangerous divisions,Footnote 31 this very scarcity made political allegiance a requirement for elites’ continued access to the still-available profit opportunities. Given the drastic economic contraction, only those loyal to the dictator could benefit from the remaining (yet scarce) oil proceeds, as well as from new opportunities created by discretionary economic liberalisation measures and the resulting illicit business dealings.Footnote 32 Political obedience was a precondition for these ill-gotten gains. By contrast, whoever displayed signs of political disloyalty be expelled from the ruling circles and face the risk of prosecution for their prior misdeeds.
However, despite the regime’s extensive control mechanisms, Maduro’s most fervent opponents occasionally took the risk of protesting, as in mid-2024. To these challenges, the dictatorship always responded with determined repression. Over the years, hundreds were killed, and thousands suffered imprisonment and torture.Footnote 33 In response, the international community repeatedly condemned these human-rights violations and threatened legal consequences.Footnote 34 However, while transnational activists and Western governments hoped that the threat of prosecution would provoke divisions inside the regime and thus prompt a democratic transition, this push for accountability tragically backfired in Venezuela. Because Maduro and his aides had already committed extensive misdeeds, the risk of prosecution gave them strong incentives to cling to power – at all costs. The looming prospect of prosecution raised the costs of defection, making loyalty a safer option.Footnote 35 After all, opposition offers of post-transition amnesties lacked credibility because a new democratic government could easily use its newly won political power and institutional authority to renege on such earlier promises. Thus, the unintended consequences of the international human-rights regime gave Maduro a powerful weapon for cementing the autocracy’s internal unity.Footnote 36 This fear-driven elite loyalty solidified unity among Venezuela’s top elite, further entrenching the dictator’s hold on power.
In sum, accounts that treated Venezuela’s economic and political catastrophe as a source of regime instability had difficulty elucidating the surprising duration of Maduro’s dictatorship. This Commentary, inspired by Hirschman’s brilliant classic, offers a more convincing explanation: in four important ways, the very crisis that the Venezuelan autocrat oversaw and exacerbated paradoxically helped the dictator cope with the twin problem of authoritarian survival à la Svolik. For more than a decade, he succeeded in controlling the masses and in maintaining elite cohesion. Through a combination of ‘exit’ and enforced ‘loyalty’, Maduro effectively stifled dangerous ‘voice’ – both spiralling mass protests and challenges by regime insiders. The following sections flesh out these four mechanisms that allowed the autocracy to survive for so long – and, at least for now, to persist even after the recent US intervention.
How Exit and Loyalty Bolstered Maduro’s Dictatorship
Mass Exit
During Maduro’s long-lasting reign, ‘exit’ swelled to massive proportions. Since 2014, the regime-made crisis has driven almost eight million Venezuelans out of the country – roughly a quarter of the population.Footnote 37 In this way, huge numbers of discontented people who could, in principle, cause political risks for the government by protesting or turning out to vote for the opposition, have simply left. ‘Exit’ has not just been a direct consequence of bad policies, but a near-intentional strategy employed by the regime to survive despite economic crisis and political illegitimacy.
With a 75 per cent plunge in per capita income, a bout of three-to-four-digit hyperinflation in the late 2010s, and the decimation of an oil sector responsible for 90 per cent of the nation’s revenues,Footnote 38 Maduro’s regime deprived the population of material benefits and pushed many to seek basic wellbeing elsewhere. These deep structural and conjunctural problems, compounded by the regime’s repression of protests (as in 2014 and 2017) and the whole apparatus of systematic, state-sponsored intimidation and persecution, made many Venezuelans despair of prospects for improvement.Footnote 39 Consequently, the dire economic and political conditions triggered an unprecedented mass exodus which – as Hirschman’s reflections on ‘exit’ suggestFootnote 40 – ended up bolstering Venezuela’s dictatorship.
Indeed, the socioeconomic characteristics of those who ‘exited’ indicate that they were predominantly Maduro critics. A third of the people who emigrated since 2017 came from the best-off income quintile.Footnote 41 These more moneyed and educated sectors have long sided disproportionately with the political opposition; by contrast, the Chavista regime found its (relatively) firmest backing among less educated and more destitute groupings – the group that emigrated the least.Footnote 42 Thus, the regime exported critical opponents at particularly high rates. This mass emigration drained predominantly anti-regime citizens, who gave up hope of effecting change by voting or protesting against the dictator. In this way, the exodus inadvertently helped to stabilise the autocracy.
The repercussions of Maduro’s electoral fraud in 2024 confirmed that bad conditions fuelled this regime-sustaining mechanism. In the aftermath, some 40 per cent of remaining Venezuelans – roughly 8 million – expressed their intent to emigrate as well.Footnote 43 Such an additional exodus would have further depleted the opposition and bolstered Maduro’s rule. In this perverse way, the expectation of expelling even more discontent reinforced the autocrat’s determination not to make any concessions.Footnote 44 The more opposition supporters ‘exited’, the more pro-democracy ‘voice’ weakened.
By pushing out over a quarter of Venezuelans and providing strong incentives for millions more to leave, the economic catastrophe and political degradation that Maduro oversaw did not produce a social explosion, but paradoxically opened up a big safety valve in the pressure cooker. The mass export of discontent helped to forestall outbursts of protest that could have detonated the inept autocracy. Indeed: unsuccessful ‘voice’ – as in the stolen election of 2024 – prompted further ‘exit’, enabling the dictator to limit challenges. Venezuela’s predicament thus corroborated that ‘emigration can leave autocracies with a more loyal and quiescent population’.Footnote 45 The Maduro regime appeared intent on fuelling this exodus, hoping that only regime supporters and impoverished citizens, whom he kept dependent and controlled, would remain in the country.
Forged Mass Loyalty
For those Venezuelans who could not afford to leave and who had to grapple with economic and social collapse, the dictatorship found a way of leveraging this very deprivation to enforce political loyalty. Between 2018 and 2024, the regime-induced crisis pushed around 80 per cent of the population into income poverty.Footnote 46 Their destitution allowed Maduro to make citizens dependent on targeted government handouts and tighten his grip through systematic surveillance.Footnote 47 As monthly wages ranged from $2 to $70 for the bottom half of income-earners amid skyrocketing inflation, millions of poor Venezuelans could not make ends meet and had to rely on the government to provide basic necessities, like food, cash transfers and subsidised fuel, which became strikingly scarce in this oil-rich nation.Footnote 48
However, there was an extortionary twist: to receive the in-kind benefits, people were required to obtain government-sponsored ID, the ‘Carnet de la Patria’ (‘Fatherland Card’), which enabled regime officials to monitor people’s activities, induced them to remain obedient, and strongly discouraged dangerous protests.Footnote 49 This expansive control mechanism covered over 80 per cent of Venezuelans still residing in the country.Footnote 50 The mainstay of this entrapment strategy were the food boxes distributed by the Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción (Local Supply and Production Committees, CLAPs), which supplied basic staples and other bare necessities. While the distribution of these benefits has been uneven, many poor Venezuelans depend on them; indeed, CLAP coverage increased in 2024 to 8.2 million from 7.2 million in 2023. Of particular relevance for our argument, nearly 90 per cent of the poorest households received this subsistence aid through the Carnet de la Patria, reinforcing their dependence on discretionary state subsidies.Footnote 51 Reliant on politically conditioned aid for survival, many Venezuelans found it too risky to publicly oppose the regime and express pro-democratic ‘voice’.
Only under the veil of electoral secrecy did the masses occasionally dare to reveal their true preferences and reject the dictator, as in the 2024 presidential election. But when the regime disregarded its massive defeat and stubbornly insisted on staying in power, the vast majority of these discontented people refrained from engaging in street protests – visible ‘voice’ that would have risked their continuing food aid and other essential subsidies. Even those who voted against Maduro were well aware of the regime’s capacity ‘to deploy social surveillance mechanisms, with highly trained intelligence services to detect and neutralise dissent’.Footnote 52 Indeed, pro-government militias (colectivos) marked the homes of protesters in poor neighbourhoods with an ‘X’ and, as a worried community member noted, ‘threatened to take away the CLAP food parcels’.Footnote 53 Consequently, dependence on government aid quickly dampened open defiance: the demonstrations erupting after the 2024 election did not escalate into a regime-threatening tsunami. Because the large majority of poor people cautiously stayed away, the regime managed to contain these limited demonstrations and extinguish them quickly with targeted repression, including the above-mentioned Operación Tun Tun.Footnote 54
In sum, engineered mass loyalty helped forestall a widespread, spiralling uprising – a remarkable outcome, given the regime’s terrible performance over so many years and its blatant fraud in mid-2024. The dictatorship’s mechanisms of dependency, surveillance and intimidation – potent precisely due to the dire socioeconomic conditions it created – deterred collective expressions of pro-democratic ‘voice’ through mass mobilisation, ensuring Maduro’s continued grip on power.
Engineered Elite Loyalty
Another critical reason why, despite economic collapse and depressed living standards, Maduro’s rule persisted so long lay in the high levels of cohesion among the top elite, which – again paradoxically – was reinforced precisely by the country’s economic and political ruin. Expectations that crucial regime supporters, especially the armed forces, would defect, for instance, in light of the opposition’s 2024 triumph proved wrong;Footnote 55 instead, they doubled down on their ‘loyalty’ to the dictator and backed up his electoral fraud. Though lacking strong institutional foundations and facing multiple crises, the regime demonstrated remarkable resilience for many years, sustaining itself through ‘engineered elite loyalty’. Indeed, Venezuela’s unprecedented economic collapse fortified political cohesion among the ruling cadres, helping to avert internal challenges that have toppled other authoritarian regimes.Footnote 56 When the global commodities boom showered Venezuela with seemingly unlimited resource abundance, a wide variety of economic sectors and political groupings were pacified with generous largesse, in licit or illicit ways. Reports estimate that over $300 billion were siphoned off through corruption schemes between Chávez’s takeover of power and 2016.Footnote 57
Under Maduro, however, the drop in global petroleum prices and the deepened mismanagement of Venezuela’s oil sector brought a dramatic decline in export revenues of up to 93 per cent. Yet, instead of weakening the president and making his dictatorship vulnerable, the crisis actually strengthened regime unity. After all, only if they offered unconditional support to the top leader could elites continue to profit from the remaining scarce resources, from lucrative new opportunities created by Maduro’s discretionary economic-liberalisation measures, and from a variety of illicit dealings.
Given the massive collapse of the oil industry under his reign, Maduro ‘operat[ed] through a mixture of market principles, neopatrimonialism, and clientelism’Footnote 58 and initiated a tightly controlled process of ‘splintered economic liberalisation’.Footnote 59 Using ample political discretion, the dictator assigned profit opportunities and rents only to his cronies; anybody demonstrating disloyalty immediately lost access. Thus, by controlling the remaining benefits, the autocrat succeeded in forging obedience. The opaque mix of private and state-owned production in agriculture, minerals and manufacturing, labyrinthine foreign-currency schemes, and illicit trade (including contraband and narcotics) sustained these machinations: anyone seeking to benefit from these revenue sources had to endorse the autocrat’s supremacy and commit to upholding regime stability at all costs.Footnote 60
Thus, the very economic crisis enabled the dictator to forge elite loyalty and cement his backing among the crucial top echelon. Whoever showed signs of disloyalty or disrupted the regime-controlled resource flows with excessive avarice was expelled from the inner circle and lost all perks and privileges. Thus, the limited rents and the dictator’s tight control of access gave regime insiders every incentive to remain united and back Maduro’s grip on power.
To demonstrate his willingness to enforce this elite loyalty, the autocrat rigorously punished indiscipline and potential disruption. For instance, longstanding insider Tareck El Aissami exploited his influential position as Minister of Petroleum (2020–3) to unfairly amass a disproportionate share of rents,Footnote 61 jeopardising the equilibrium within the top elite and signalling alarming political ambition. To maintain cohesion among his most powerful allies – an urgent requirement for regime sustenance – Maduro soon cracked down and used a targeted corruption probe to defenestrate the greedy politician and potential challenger.Footnote 62 Key leaders within the regime, ranging from the official party’s vice-president to the head of the legislature and the top military officer, backed the dictator’s purge of this high-ranking aide, who had allegedly siphoned off $3 billion from the US-sanctioned state-owned petroleum company, PDVSA. With similar exemplary punishment, Maduro also proved his coercive prowess vis-à-vis the military by imprisoning an overly corrupt colonel: ‘in a matter of hours’ Pedro Tellechea went ‘from belonging to the first circle of power … to being an outcast’.Footnote 63
These incidents show that the Venezuelan autocracy went so far as to turn bribery into a mechanism of political control. After all, access to opportunities for corruption and other illicit rents was a principal mechanism through which Maduro co-opted his top officials. The dictator deliberately led his underlings into temptation. Yet excessive abuse of public office for private gain, or any indication of potential disobedience, then gave the ruler the opportunity to remove powerful lieutenants whenever he chose. Knowing that any deviation from absolute loyalty could lead to their downfall, top aides had strong incentives to align with the regime. By reaffirming Maduro’s control over resource distribution, these highly publicised incidents further strengthened the regime’s ability to engineer elite allegiance and prevent internal fractures.
In sum, by eliminating easily available resources, Venezuela’s profound crisis allowed for tightened political control over the remaining rents and paradoxically strengthened the unity of the authoritarian elite. Revenue scarcity gave dictator Maduro an effective means of reinforcing ‘loyalty’ from his top aides.
Fear-Driven Elite Loyalty
Finally, rather than creating instability and intra-elite conflict, external efforts to hold the Maduro regime to international standards of legality and human rights long reinforced elite unity as well: the threat of punishment compelled top aides to remain loyal. This foreign-originated pressure, often overlooked by scholars employing Hirschman’s categories, was crucial for strengthening internal cohesion. Appalled by the autocracy’s misdeeds – ranging from brutal human-rights violations to mega-corruption and international drug-traffickingFootnote 64 – Western nations and NGOs invoked global norms and relied on judicial institutions like the International Criminal Court (ICC) in trying to hold Maduro’s dictatorship accountable.Footnote 65 Indeed, the US government over the years imposed a host of sanctions aimed at undermining regime cohesion by selectively targeting the worst human-rights offenders and the most corrupt cronies. These legal and political measures were expected to incentivise untainted officials to defect and turn against their criminal counterparts, especially the dictator himself.Footnote 66 However, the unintended consequence was the exact opposite: rather than falling due to elite disunity, Maduro weaponised the threat of prosecution to forge fear-driven ‘loyalty’ among his cronies and thus consolidate power. After all, who was untainted among Venezuela’s kleptocratic and repressive elite?
As the ‘justice cascade’ that was expected to bring accountability for human-rights abuses has become profoundly ‘embodied … in domestic and international institutions’,Footnote 67 US courts served leading officials of the Maduro dictatorship numerous criminal indictments. Moreover, the ICC has since 2017 investigated the regime for crimes against humanity.Footnote 68 The electoral fraud of mid-2024 and the subsequent repression intensified international efforts to hold the regime accountable.Footnote 69 Luis Almagro, then Secretary-General of the Organization of American States, asked the ICC to issue an arrest warrant against Venezuela’s dictator and his top aides.Footnote 70
Yet although many believed that the threat of targeted international prosecution would divide regime insiders and destabilise the dictatorship, these foreign efforts consistently failed. Instead, they tragically backfired by reinforcing elite loyalty: the serious risk of judicial action and severe punishment gave Maduro and his allies strong reasons to hold on to power intransigently. The fate of fallen autocrats – such as Panama’s Manuel Noriega, extradited and sentenced to decades in US prisons – served as a stark warning. The prospect of international prosecution, for all its positive intent, seriously threatened the exit option previously available to brutal dictators when their regime faced dangerous challenges. In the past, despots could retire in luxury – like Haiti’s ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, who lived freely on the French Riviera after his 1986 ouster.
But in the present era of global accountability, ‘leaders who fear international arrest will have incentives to entrench in office as a way to forestall punishment’.Footnote 71 For Maduro and his inner circle, giving up power was no longer a viable option; holding on to it at all costs was their only guarantee of physical integrity. Aware of these risks, Maduro increasingly confined his international travels mostly to close allies like Cuba or China; reportedly, he skipped a 2023 diplomatic summit in Argentina due to concerns about potential prosecution.Footnote 72 Even promises of pardons or amnesties designed to ‘enable’ dictators to relinquish power suffer from fundamental commitment problems that are not easily resolved. For example, US indictments are difficult to lift, given the judiciary’s independence, and US presidents have no power to pardon offenders whose cases are pending before international courts.Footnote 73
For these reasons, the ‘justice cascade’ has backfired by solidifying the repressive reign of autocrats who have already committed grievous violations. Tragically, the international legal regime, designed to punish misdeeds and deter further infractions, has led to unintended consequences in countries such as Venezuela, where the dictatorship had already perpetrated various crimes. To avoid severe penalties, Maduro and his top cadres shared an unshakeable determination to maintain power and thwart a regime transition at any cost. The ‘justice cascade’ paradoxically strengthened the cohesion of Venezuela’s autocracy by fortifying ‘loyalty’ among the top elite. Once again, a powerful challenge turned into a source of firm sustenance for the regime.
Conclusion
In recent history, numerous incompetent and repressive autocracies have fallen to drastic challenges. As regards bottom-up mobilisations, surges of crowd protest felled dictatorships ranging from Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab Spring of 2011 to Bangladesh in 2024. Meanwhile, evidence of entrenched corruption spurred voters in Malaysia to end the authoritarian rule of the long-governing United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) party in 2018. As regards top-down challenges, an economic collapse that resembles the Venezuelan catastrophe helped to prompt an internal coup in 2017 in Zimbabwe, which dislodged longstanding despot Robert Mugabe. Thus, when autocrats are responsible for severe economic deterioration or harsh political repression, they run a serious risk of losing crucial support – from the popular masses, regime insiders, or both at the same time. As a result, supremely powerful presidents and their undemocratic regimes can suddenly fall, often with surprising speed, as in Syria in December 2024.
Yet, despite being responsible for an unprecedented humanitarian and economic crisis and despite clearly lacking democratic legitimacy, Nicolás Maduro endured for almost 13 years, through thick and thin. His abysmal performance did not undermine his dictatorial grip on power. On the contrary – as this Commentary highlights – the Venezuelan dictator adeptly turned serious problems and potential sources of instability into mechanisms for solidifying his regime. Tragically, he long succeeded in drawing political benefits from the grave problems that his incompetent rule aggravated.
Specifically, the Maduro regime depleted democratising ‘voice’ and gained increased resilience from the crisis-driven exodus of over a quarter of the population. This enormous ‘exit’ eased potential bottom-up pressures and exported political discontent that could have threatened the ill-performing, corrupt and repressive autocracy. Moreover, to subjugate the large majority of impoverished citizens left behind in Venezuela, the regime exploited their very destitution to entrap them in sociopolitical control mechanisms. Leveraging the stark deprivation caused by Venezuela’s economic collapse, Maduro engineered mass ‘loyalty’ through the political targeting of essential aid. Access to basic necessities including food required submission to the dictator. This nefarious strategy of using scarcity to forge acquiescence crucially helped to forestall large-scale bottom-up challenges.
Moreover, two types of ‘loyalty’ induced regime insiders, ranging from corrupt rent-seekers to human-rights violators, to remain united around Maduro. Indeed, the economic crisis actually tightened cohesion among the inner circle by making his top aides more dependent on the dictator for private rents. Precisely because resources were no longer plentiful nor up for grabs, Maduro’s discretionary allocation became a powerful control mechanism.
Intra-elite ‘loyalty’ was further reinforced by threats of international accountability, a powerful form of external ‘voice’. The ‘justice cascade’ induced the dictator and his closest aides to stick together and cling to power at all costs. Judicial indictments foreclosed safe ‘exit’ options for Maduro and his cronies and exposed them to serious risks of retribution – which paradoxically pushed them to remain loyal to Maduro. For many years, his leading lieutenants doubled down on aligning with the despot for fears of severe punishment. In these ways, the quest for global justice was unintentionally helping to keep evildoers in power and enabling them to prolong their misdeeds.
For all these reasons, domestic democratic forces and the international promoters of liberal democracy were ineffective and made no headway for almost 13 years. The opposition with its persistent demands for free ‘voice’ and its sequential usage of all imaginable strategies and tactics failed to dislodge the autocracy, even after winning lopsided victories in a legislative contest (2015) and a presidential election (2024); and the international community – with its quest for external ‘voice’ – failed to hold the regime accountable through judicial actions. Instead, the Maduro regime maintained surprising solidity and managed to survive all these challenges.
For these reasons, only a military operation by the powerful United States finally managed to oust the firmly entrenched autocrat. Sheer coercion, not one of Hirschman’s categories inspired in economics, was required to decapitate the Venezuelan dictatorship. Interestingly, however, at the time of this writing (January 2026) it seems that, for now, President Trump is pragmatically allowing the surviving power cartel of Maduro’s top aides to maintain their autocratic reign. After all, their currently surviving control mechanisms can at least temporarily guarantee basic stability and thus avert Trump’s fear of having the United States dragged into a potential quagmire, reminiscent of the deeply troubled US intervention in Iraq.Footnote 74 By contrast, an immediate democratic transition could risk turmoil and conflict as Maduro’s former lieutenants might fight tooth and nail to maintain their ill-gotten rents and to avoid transitional justice for their earlier misdeeds.
For sure, the situation in Venezuela is quite fluid and various outcomes are possible over the medium term. Yet, at this moment, the accommodation between the right-wing protagonist of US military intervention and Venezuela’s left-wing, ‘anti-imperialist’ power elite, which has so far managed to maintain domestic control despite Maduro’s ouster, suggests the currently remaining effectiveness of the autocracy’s mechanisms of sustenance. It is the operation and impact of these mechanisms that this Commentary has elucidated by drawing on Hirschman’s famous concepts of exit, voice and loyalty and by applying them to Svolik’s twin problems of authoritarian survival.
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