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By Jesus Mesa and Leonardo Feldman
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When President Donald Trump ordered an early morning raid to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January and brought him to the United States to face trial on narco-terrorism charges, the warnings came fast. House Armed Services Committee ranking Democratic member Adam Smith cautioned that United States military intervention always “ends badly,” citing Iraq and Libya as examples.
Representative Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, drew the parallel directly. “This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan,” Himes said, “in 2003 when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011 when we helped remove Muammar Qaddafi from power in Libya.”
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the architect of the administration’s Western Hemisphere strategy, was dismissive. “The whole foreign policy apparatus thinks everything is Libya, everything is Iraq, everything is Afghanistan,” he said. “This is not the Middle East, and our mission here is very different.”
Six months later, the chaos never came.
For nearly three decades, the scenario Hugo Chávez and Maduro invoked to justify their grip on the country was American boots on Venezuelan soil. Now they are there, and Venezuelans are lining up to meet them. Shell signed a gas development deal. SLB, the world’s largest oilfield services company, returned following a lapse in the license it operated under in May 2025. At least 670 political prisoners have been released since January, and political parties have resumed public activities across the country. In May, Venezuela freed three former police officers who had spent 23 uninterrupted years behind bars, the longest-held political prisoners in the country’s history.
“The most tangible change for Venezuelans is that repression has diminished,” Gaby Arellano, a Venezuelan opposition figure and former National Assembly member who has tracked the transition closely, told Newsweek. “It has not disappeared, but it has decreased.”
Exiled opposition leaders, including Voluntad Popular’s Lester Toledo and Yon Goicoechea and former Petare Mayor Carlos Ocariz, have also begun returning home. Open-air television channels now cover news beyond the official government narrative, including the activities of opposition leader María Corina Machado, something that had not happened in years.
“We have seen all political parties reactivate their organizations, hold public events, organize street activities and assemblies,” Arellano said. “We have to remember that in 2024, any activity that was not authorized by Miraflores [Caracas] was considered a conspiracy.”
A Test No One Planned For
That was the picture before the ground shook. The earthquakes, magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5, struck on June 24 just 39 seconds apart. They killed at least 5,000 people, and online registries are still showing at least 18,100 still missing, while according to a NASA analysis, 69,431 buildings were damaged. Critical electricity, water and sanitation infrastructure was ravaged across the central part of the country.
Rebuilding what the earthquakes destroyed will cost $12 billion to $15 billion, according to Venezuelan economist Asdrúbal Oliveros, with housing, infrastructure, commerce, transportation and logistics among the hardest-hit areas. Alejandro Grisanti of the Caracas-based advisory firm Ecoanalítica put the total even higher, at roughly $20 billion. Either estimate amounts to a sum far beyond what the Venezuelan state can finance alone.
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Economists who study seismic disasters say the size of that bill matters less than what Venezuela does with it. “A natural disaster does not automatically destroy a country’s economic growth. Evidence in Latin America shows that the real impact depends on whether the main revenue driver continues to function and how reconstruction is managed after the shock,” Grisanti posted on X. Chile, hit by a stronger quake in 2010, had largely rebuilt its infrastructure within about a year and completed most housing reconstruction within roughly four years, on the strength of its institutions. Haiti, hit by a weaker one the same year, is still trying to recover.
Since the twin earthquakes leveled parts of central Venezuela, United States forces have been unloading American aid onto Venezuelan soil almost daily. Soldiers move pallets off private planes at the airport in Caracas and onto trucks and helicopters bound for the hardest-hit towns along the coast.
“I never imagined I would be receiving aid from the U.S.,” Yoniel Reyes, a resident of the coastal city of Maiquetía, told the Associated Press after opening one of the packages. “We Venezuelans are thankful, very thankful.”
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It was the first true catastrophe of the post-Maduro era. It was also, for skeptics of the American intervention, the moment the project was supposed to unravel. It has not. In the weeks since the disaster, the investors who rushed toward Caracas in the spring have not canceled their plans. American aid is flowing into the country daily through channels the Chavista government spent years blocking. And by some measures, Venezuelans trust the United States more now than they did before everything underneath them shook.
“It just delays everything a little bit, but doesn’t change anything at all,” Jesse Cole, president of Sky Drop Capital, told Newsweek.
Cole, based in Miami, was among the first American investors to travel to Caracas after Maduro’s capture. He managed a manufacturing facility in Maracaibo in the early 2000s before the Chavez government forced him out in 2011. He returned to Venezuela for the first time in March and was in the process of relocating there when the earthquake hit. “You can see the movement, you can see that the Americans are in control,” he said. “You can see that the American government is stopping the stealing.”
Cole was part of a delegation organized by Signum Global Advisors, a political risk advisory firm, that traveled to Caracas in March and was received by Interim President Delcy Rodríguez at El Palacio de Miraflores, Venezuela’s seat of government since the early 20th century. About half of the visitors in his delegation were from asset managers and hedge funds, many of which owned or had recently bought Venezuelan government bonds and debt issued by state oil giant PDVSA, both of which have been in default since 2017. “Pick a lane in Venezuela and it’s going to be successful,” Cole said, pointing to energy, fintech, mining and tourism as sectors ripe for capital.
His fund, the Venezuela Energy Logistics Fund I, is targeting $250 million in a single close, with a minimum investment of $5 million aimed at family offices and private equity groups, and with a goal of reaching $1 billion in assets under management within three years.
“The earthquake has made it a little harder, but the positive signs are still there.”
Measuring the Trust
Oswaldo Ramirez, managing director and senior political consultant at ORC Consultores, has been tracking Venezuelan public opinion for years. He said the numbers in polling conducted before the earthquake told a story the street already knew. “In December, hope was at 51 percent,” he said, speaking to Newsweek from Caracas. “In February it jumped to 81. Now it is at 65, still 15 points above the average it had throughout 2025.”
Among that pre-earthquake poll’s findings, favorability toward foreign investment stood at 84 percent and trust in transnational companies reached 88 percent. But perhaps the most striking number was this: Trust in the United States stood at 70 percent, in a country where anti-American sentiment ran at 61 percent as recently as 2006, at the height of the Chavez era. Trust in Trump personally reached 68 percent.
Then Venezuela trembled on June 24. It was no longer only a question of whether the transition would produce chaos, but of whether it could survive a catastrophe no one in Washington had planned for.
In the weeks since, Washington has led the international response: pledging $150 million within a day of the quakes, dispatching more than 300 rescue personnel, and mobilizing Southern Command transport planes, helicopters and Navy ships. By early July, nearly 2,000 American troops were participating in relief operations, and American forces had taken over air traffic control and aid logistics at Maiquetía airport, in La Guaira state, the hardest hit by the quakes.
The State Department says it has contributed more than $386 million to the response, delivering over 400 metric tons of shelter and hygiene supplies to roughly 70,000 people, funds independent of the Venezuelan oil revenue the U.S. Treasury has controlled since Maduro’s capture. That contribution places the United States far ahead of every other country. Transparencia Venezuela’s aid tracker lists Washington’s $386 million first, followed by China with $14.7 million and Italy with $10.8 million.
Ramirez has not polled trust in the United States since the quakes hit, but what he is seeing on the ground suggests it has only grown. “The earthquake changed the dynamic,” he said. “Trust in the United States has increased because people are seeing American aid and relief efforts firsthand. At the same time, the disaster has made Venezuelans even more skeptical of the current regime, because it exposed the cracks in its response and its lack of contingency planning.”
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Venezuela’s $100 Billion Comeback Bet
Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, a resource base that decades of forced underinvestment have left almost entirely untapped. Production, which peaked in the late 1990s at 3.5 million barrels a day, has climbed from roughly 800,000 barrels a day in January to 1.1 million by June. Investors see their opportunity in restoring that past production.
The legal framework to close that gap moved quickly after January 3. Venezuela’s new hydrocarbons law, enacted the same month, granted private operators technical and commercial control for the first time, allowing companies to export crude without state intermediaries and capping royalties at flexible rates.
Washington simultaneously expanded its sanctions licensing framework, opening the door for American and allied companies while explicitly walling out Russia, China, Iran and Cuba. There are 32,000 oil wells ready for reactivation, said Cole of Sky Drop Capital, with no domestic equipment or services to bring them back online, an infrastructure gap that investors say represents as much opportunity as obstacle.
“This law reaffirms sovereignty over our energy resources,” Rodríguez said on January 30, after signing the law, adding that she had received a call that same day from Trump and Rubio.
Rodríguez went further on July 8, signing a new set of implementing regulations in Venezuela’s hydrocarbons framework, the first comprehensive overhaul since 1943, and effectively ended PDVSA’s monopoly over the sector. The rules open the full value chain, exploration, production, refining, marketing and distribution to private operators; cap royalties at 30 percent; and create independent arbitration for investor disputes, replacing exclusive jurisdiction in Venezuelan courts. The government is projecting $1.4 billion in new sector investment this year.
The deals followed. Oil exports hit a seven-year high, and Venezuela’s central bank reported oil export revenues of $5.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up 21 percent from $4.5 billion in the first quarter of 2025. U.S. officials point to those figures as evidence that their strategy is working.
“We’re trying to normalize that place,” Rubio said in an interview with Fox News in May. “For the first time in over a decade, the wealth of the country is actually benefiting the people of Venezuela, but there’s more work to be done.”
The administration has framed its strategy in three phases: stabilization, economic recovery and democratic transition, in that order. A State Department spokesperson told Newsweek that oil production has reached its highest level in seven years and that inflation has fallen to single digits for the first time in more than a year. “We are witnessing the reopening of Venezuela to global commerce,” the spokesperson said.
The financial architecture is moving too, though the numbers underscore how far there is to go. Venezuela is preparing what would be the largest sovereign debt restructuring in history, with a debt pile now estimated at $240 billion, well above previous market estimates, according to the Financial Times.
A macroeconomic framework expected from the government this month is set to show the economy has shrunk to roughly $100 billion, down from $370 billion in 2012—Chavez’s last full year in office—a contraction that would put debt-to-GDP above 200 percent.
The earthquake has not derailed that math, but it has taken a toll. Ecoanalítica has cut its 2026 growth forecast to 5.8 percent from a pre-quake estimate near 8 percent, and now projects direct physical damage from the quakes at $9 billion, above the United Nations Development Programme’s preliminary estimate of $6.7 billion. Still, the disaster left the ground that matters most to producers largely untouched. The main producing regions, the Orinoco Belt and the Maracaibo Basin, operated normally through the quakes. Key refineries at Paraguaná and Puerto La Cruz, along with the José export terminal, were undamaged.
For investors like Cole, the disaster has not changed the long-term investment case. If anything, he argued, it has reinforced the need for reconstruction rather than prompting a reassessment. “That’s what it needs. It needed to be rebuilt before, and even more so now,” he said. “This just shines a light on how broken the system was.”
Cole says the calls have not stopped, and the active presence of American troops has made it easier to build trust. “I had several calls in the weeks after the earthquake,” Cole said, listing oil and gas, telecommunications, technology, chemicals and mining among the sectors his contacts are watching. “Nothing’s changed in that regard.”
The technology sector, largely overlooked in the rush toward oil, is already moving. Diego Salas, chief financial officer of Yummy, Venezuela’s largest technology company, and managing partner of Epakon Capital, the country’s most active venture fund, said January 3 changed the calculus for investors in ways that go beyond energy.
“I think there’s a little bit more of an opportunity for investors to invest in more traditional industries and elevate them with technologies,” Salas told Newsweek.
Banking applications are stuck 20 years behind, he said. Logistics networks barely exist. And yet, 98 percent of all transactions in Venezuela are already digital. The economy is de facto dollarized; the bolivar remains the official currency, but the dollar dominates everyday commerce, giving foreign investors a familiar financial footing from day one.
“I’ve seen signs that there are deals that are going to happen with international investors for the first time in five to 10 years,” Salas said.
For many investors, this opening is also tied to family history and identity. Diego Jaramillo, a Venezuelan American who was part of the Signum delegation in March, said he grew up hearing his grandmother and father talk about Venezuela, always fixated on the country’s potential. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild the country for all Venezuelans. Venezuela has extraordinary human talent and enormous long-term potential. I’m grateful for the opportunity to contribute to its future.”
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Between Hope and Disillusionment
The relief effort has bought Washington real goodwill. In a poll conducted by AtlasIntel for Bloomberg in the days after the earthquakes, 75 percent of Venezuelans said they trusted the United States to help manage the crisis and the reconstruction, far ahead of the European Union at 59 percent, the United Nations at 48 percent and China at 39 percent.
One video that went viral in the wake of the quakes captured the shift: A man in a yellow hard hat cheers as an MV-22 Osprey passes overhead. “Bravo. Let’s go. The Gringos are here, man—the humanitarian aid has arrived,” he shouts, before greeting an approaching American soldier: “Welcome to Venezuela!”
For Venezuelans, the shift is palpable.
Marivi, an accountant who lives in Caracas, called January 3 “the first step to get out of this nightmare.” A university administrator at Simón Bolívar University, who asked to remain anonymous, was more effusive. “What they have done in six months is much greater than in these past 27 years,” she said.
“The earthquake is an immense tragedy, but it is also a turning point,” Luis Rivas, a Venezuelan energy executive who recently moved back to the country from Houston, told Newsweek. “The reconstruction effort could accelerate investment if it is managed with transparency and clear rules. I am cautiously optimistic.”
The earthquake also accelerated efforts to unify Venezuela’s democratic institutions. On July 14, the 2015 National Assembly, the last congress elected in free elections, announced a joint working agenda with the interim government beginning August 1, framing it as a road map toward stability, democracy and national recovery.
“The devastating earthquakes have underscored the urgency of unity, responsible leadership, and institutions capable of serving the Venezuelan people,” the State Department said in a statement soon after the joint announcement. “The United States will continue to support Venezuelan-led efforts that produce tangible progress toward a peaceful and democratic electoral transition, while working alongside the Venezuelan people as they recover and rebuild their country.”
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Yet one name remains conspicuously absent from the public negotiations: María Corina Machado. The opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, still in exile, commands 74 percent trust among the general population, according to the ORC Consultores poll, the highest of any political figure in the country, and more than five times the trust Venezuelans place in Rodríguez herself. For many, she is the government they are waiting for.
“There cannot be a real structural change while Delcy Rodríguez remains in Miraflores,” Arellano said. “There must be a newly constituted parliament elected with guarantees for all Venezuelans, where votes are respected and institutions honor the will of the people.”
The Trump administration has been careful not to say so publicly. It has praised Rodríguez’s cooperation while maintaining that democratic transition remains the end goal. “Venezuela today is better off than five months ago and we will continue to urge for the release of all political prisoners,” a State Department spokesperson told Newsweek.
“The U.S. Embassy in Caracas has reopened. Venezuela is stable, open for business and on a path toward a more democratic and prosperous future.” Patience, in other words, remains the strategy. But Ramirez, who has been tracking Venezuelan public opinion through the transition, said the data shows that patience has a shelf life. “People are giving a blank check,” he said. “But that blank check is not eternal.”
Ronal Rodríguez, a researcher and spokesperson for the Venezuela Observatory at Universidad del Rosario in Bogota, one of the leading academic centers tracking Venezuelan affairs in the region, offered perhaps the most precise summary of where things stand. “Everything has changed,” he said, “and nothing has changed.”
What has changed, he argued, is who controls access to Venezuela’s wealth. What has not changed is the structure underneath. “Many believed that Nicolás Maduro’s departure would trigger a democratic transition,” Ronal Rodríguez said. “So far, however, what has emerged is an economic opening, not a transition to democracy.”
Illustration by Mona Eing & Michael Meißner for Newsweek
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