US President Donald Trump has insisted the United States will now be “running” Venezuela after US forces bombed the capital on January 3 and whisked Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife out of the country to face federal charges in New York.

Trump has promised that “large US oil companies” would be going into Venezuela to “start making money”. And in passing, he has also declared that with Maduro gone, Venezuelans “are free” and the country is already becoming “rich and safe” again.

But autocratic regimes do not depend on their leaders alone. They get their strength from the vast bureaucracies and security apparatuses under the leader and the complicity of individuals down the chain of command.

These structures have been shaken in Venezuela, but not dismantled. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s loyal vice president, has assumed the presidency and the powerful interior minister (Diosdado Cabello) and defence minister (Vladimir Padrino) – the “men with the guns” – are still in control.

So, rather than bringing regime change, Trump is now propping up the Maduro regime from Washington.

Venezuela has been dominated by two leaders for the last nearly 30 years – Hugo Chávez (president from 1999–2013) and Maduro (2013–26).

After his election on a left-wing, populist platform, Chávez launched sweeping social programs inspired by the Venezuelan military officer Simón Bolívar, who is revered in much of Latin America for leading several countries to independence from Spain in the 19th century.

Chávez’s moves to lead a second “Bolivarian revolution” created a new ideology in Venezuela known as chavismo that aimed to build a socialist society and fight against what Chávez called the new US imperialism taking hold in the region.

After Maduro took power on Chávez’s death, chavismo was slowly replaced with a new ideology centred on Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian rule, known as........

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