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Nicaragua’s Dictators and Opposition Reflected in Venezuela

The alliance of 21st-century dictatorships is cracking after Maduro’s removal by the United States, but a democratic transition is nowhere in sight.

By Carlos F. Chamorro (Confidencial)

HAVANA TIMES — The so-called “troika of tyranny” in Latin America — the dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua — a term coined by John Bolton, National Security Advisor during Donald Trump’s first presidency, was always a misleading simplification.

Despite sharing some common elements due to their authoritarian resilience, the 21st-century dictatorships were never a homogeneous bloc, and beyond their strengths and weaknesses, their particularities require the design of differentiated policies toward each country, as is indeed happening in Trump’s second presidency, although always under the exclusive imprint of MAGA interests. Three months after Nicolas Maduro was forcibly removed by the United States, the mirror of Venezuela reveals that the paths of the improvised “Donroe doctrine” do not necessarily lead to a transition to democracy.

Cuba has been a single-party authoritarian regime for more than 60 years — a Communist Party-Army-State system — whose inefficient model of centralized state economy, worsened by the US embargo, depends on massive external economic subsidies, first from the USSR and later from Chávez’s Venezuela. Before reaching the stage of collapse the country has been in for several years, the Cuban regime rejected or was unable to carry out deep economic and political reforms when they were inevitable: after the “Special Period” in the 1990s, during Barack Obama’s opening in 2014, and after the 2021 protests. This now represents its greatest vulnerability in the face of Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure.”

Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez’s populist regime, became the main economic support of Cuba and, to a lesser extent, Nicaragua until 2017. Under Maduro, as heir and coordinator of an authoritarian corporation, economic failure and political repression continued, provoking a massive exodus, crowned by the monumental theft of the 2024 elections. The US military intervention removed Maduro from power but left the chavista regime intact under Delcy Rodríguez, to control oil and natural resources in what Luz Mely Reyes describes as “a kind of 21st-century........

© Havana Times