RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Henrique Capriles has run for the Venezuelan presidency twice and come closer than almost anyone to beating Chavismo at the ballot box. Six months into a United States-engineered transition of power in Caracas, he says he has come to read Washington differently than most.
Even as U.S. President Donald Trump 's public tone toward interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez has swung from threats of ruin to open praise, Capriles, one of Venezuela 's leading opposition leaders and now a National Assembly member, says he has learned to separate what Trump says about the caretaker government from what his administration is actually doing.
"I'm not one of those who gets carried away by President Trump's statements," Capriles said in an interview with Newsweek . "I don't take them as some kind of definitive sentence, because we've seen many statements from President Trump, and three days later it's something else."
Hours after the January 3 operation that resulted in the capture of President Nicolas Maduro, Trump warned that Rodríguez would "pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro" if she failed to cooperate. Months later, however, his tone had changed, full of praise for Rodríguez and the interim government , and even extended to Washington intervening on her behalf in federal court.
"Delcy is doing a fantastic job," Trump said Thursday during an event at the Environmental Protection Agency. He pointed to the volume of Venezuelan crude reaching American refineries as evidence of the relationship's payoff.
But rather than reading Trump's comments as evidence of a broader policy shift, Capriles said he has grown accustomed to the president's unpredictable messaging, pointing to the weeks before the January raid, when Trump and Maduro spoke by phone despite the escalating tensions.
"Venezuelans give President Trump credit for taking out Maduro. The truth is, with elections we couldn't get rid of Maduro," Capriles said, pointing to the second anniversary of the July 28, 2024, election, in which Maduro claimed a widely disputed victory that independent observers, including the Carter Center, said he actually lost to opposition candidate Edmundo González.
"Flowers, sanctions, none of that got rid of Maduro either. The game was completely locked. And then Trump came in and did what he did," he added.
The January 3 raid, carried out under the name Operation Absolute Resolve, saw U.S. Special Forces seize Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from a secured compound in Caracas after months of military pressure that the Trump administration framed as an anti-narcotics campaign. Venezuelan officials said 83 people were killed and more than 112 injured in the operation.
Maduro was flown to New York, where he and Flores pleaded not guilty to narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine-importation conspiracy and weapons charges. A federal judge set his trial to begin June 1, 2027, though prosecutors and defense attorneys have said the schedule could shift.
Capriles said the operation might never have happened at all had Maduro accepted defeat in 2024 .
"If Maduro had respected the results, and Edmundo González had assumed the presidency, January 3 would not have happened, in my opinion," Capriles said. "It would have changed the relationship with the international community, but especially with the United States."
Looking back, Capriles said he did not believe, even as tensions escalated through 2025, that Washington would actually go through with a military operation to remove Maduro.
"I never imagined it was going to happen the way it happened. And it happened," Capriles said. "That's why I say Trump gambled. He gambled. And he won."
Trump said at the time that the United States would "run" Venezuela until a safe transition could take place. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro's vice president, was sworn in as interim president two days later, becoming the first woman to hold presidential power in Venezuelan history, under what U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described as a three-phase plan moving from stabilization to economic recovery to political transition.
"You have to give Trump credit—he took out Maduro," Capriles said. "I believe the political process happening in Venezuela, beyond whatever President Trump says, is a process being driven day to day by the Secretary of State Marco Rubio ."
The scale of U.S. involvement in Venezuela's transition has drawn criticism well beyond Chavista holdouts. When the January 3 operation was first announced, Colombian President Gustavo Petro called it an assault on the sovereignty of Latin America and warned it would trigger a humanitarian crisis.
A New York Times investigation published earlier this month, reported by Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev, later described Rubio as Venezuela's de facto "viceroy." The Times reported that Rubio has weighed in on Venezuelan personnel decisions, pushed Rodríguez to purge officials tied to Maduro, and pressured her government to soften a public statement critical of U.S. airstrikes on Iran.
Capriles rejected the framing that Venezuela has surrendered its sovereignty, arguing that the country's history of invoking sovereignty rhetoric has typically served whoever held power in Caracas, not the Venezuelan people.
"If Maduro had still been in Miraflores during the earthquakes, you would have seen Russian helicopters, Chinese, Iranian, Cuban," Capriles said. "The sovereignty argument in Venezuela has always been used out of convenience. A false nationalism."
He said he does not view the current arrangement as a permanent loss of Venezuelan self-determination, but as a phase Venezuelans need to move through carefully.
"I don't believe this is some kind of viceroyalty, that we're going to become the 51st state. I think that's rhetoric," Ca...
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