Operation Absolute Resolve, executed on January 3, 2026, captured Nicolás Maduro at Fuerte Tiuna, Venezuela’s largest military complex in Caracas, and removed him from the country. He is currently held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, facing narco-terrorism charges in the Southern District of New York. The operation succeeded in its immediate objective. What follows is more complicated.
Venezuela under Maduro had become less a functioning state than a hollow security apparatus sustained by external patrons, primarily Cuba, Russia, and transnational criminal networks including the Colombian ELN and remnants of FARC dissidents. Removing Maduro does not remove these networks. In many cases, it removes the constraint that kept them nominally within a state structure.
“When a regime falls, the criminal networks it enabled do not disappear. They adapt, fragment, and compete for the vacuum, often more violently than before. This is the lesson Colombia learned after the death of Pablo Escobar. Venezuela will not be different.”
The structural reality on the ground is this: Delcy Rodriguez has been sworn in as acting president, but real coercive power remains with Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, the most ideological and unpredictable element of the former regime. Cabello controls military and civilian counterintelligence networks built over two decades. Maduro’s capture removed the figurehead. The apparatus remains largely intact.
The strategic challenge now is whether the United States and its regional partners have the institutional capacity to fill the governance vacuum before criminal organizations do. Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, its border with Colombia, and its coastline, which has served as a transit corridor for narcotics moving toward the United States, are all now contested spaces where state authority is absent and criminal actors are present.
The Colombia border as the immediate flashpoint: From an operational standpoint, the Colombia-Venezuela border is the most urgent security concern. The ELN has maintained a sustained presence in Venezuelan territory with Maduro’s tolerance, using it as a sanctuary, a logistics corridor, and a revenue base. That arrangement is now in flux. Colombia’s government under Petro has complicated regional coordination. Bogota’s relationship with Washington has been tense, and joint border security operations are possible but cannot be assumed.
What the transition window requires: The Plan Colombia experience demonstrated that military success creates an opportunity that closes quickly without sustained institutional follow-through. Dismantling the ELN’s operational capacity in the border region, disrupting narcotics transit corridors along Venezuela’s coastline, and preventing Cabello’s network from reconstituting under a new arrangement all require something the Trump administration has not yet articulated clearly: a post-capture strategy with regional partners, not just a unilateral law enforcement narrative.
The lesson from every similar transition in Latin America is the same: the window opened by a military operation is measured in weeks, not years. How Washington uses that window, and whether it invests in the practitioner-level operational knowledge required to navigate Venezuela’s specific security architecture, will define the stability of northern South America for a generation.
