Venezuelan and regional media increasingly view Donald Trump’s foreign policy as a factor of instability and potential destabilization in Latin America. His hard line on Iran is seen not as an isolated episode but as part of a broader pattern of intervention — from legal pressure and diplomatic maneuvers to influence over elections and the internal politics of neighboring countries. Commentators warn that such approaches can simultaneously strengthen allies and undermine security in Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela, while expanding the U.S. sphere of influence through security and migration measures ahead of major events, such as the 2026 World Cup. This selection is based on materials from El Impulso (Venezuela) and YouTube (Venezuela).
Venezuela under External Tutelage: Oil, Elections, and a Weary Distrust of the U.S.
In contemporary Venezuelan political discourse, the United States, Donald Trump, and his influence on the region no longer look like abstract geopolitics. They flow into very concrete questions: will there be electricity and water tomorrow, will a teacher’s salary increase, will the opposition’s political capital devalue, and who really decides how elections are conducted not only in Caracas but also in Bogotá. Two different media pieces — an analytical column on the domestic Venezuelan situation and an examination of the conflict around U.S. statements on the Colombian elections — form a single picture of Latin American skepticism in the face of Washington’s “tutelage.”
The starting point of the first story is deeply local. In a Venezuelan column published on elimpulso.com, political scientist and university lecturer Santiago Andrés Rodríguez describes the mood in the country after the U.S. special forces’ intervention in Caracas and the signing of a “pact” between Delsi Rodríguez and Donald Trump. Since January 3, he says, “huge expectations” have arisen in society: the promised “energy pragmatism,” lifting sanctions on the oil sector, and the arrival of international companies in the industry were supposed to trigger a rapid economic upswing.
However, for most Venezuelans the measure of change is not GDP or the number of signed agreements, but electricity in the outlet, water from the tap, functioning transport, and accessible healthcare. Rodríguez emphasizes that it is precisely the collapse of basic services — daily power and water outages, problems with transport and hospitals — that sets the real backdrop against which any “transition” is evaluated. And against that backdrop, he assesses, the “promised breakthrough” has not materialized: the vast majority, especially the poorest layers, do not feel any improvement in quality of life.
At the center of his analysis is a triangle of forces. On one side, the “rodrigato” of the Rodríguez brothers, controlling the executive and legislative branches and, in his view, building tactical obedience to Washington not for the sake of reforms but to prolong their own hold on power. On the other — the U.S. led by Trump and the figure of Marco Rubio as a symbol of a hard line on Venezuela. The third vertex is María Corina Machado, whom Rodríguez calls the strongest and most legitimate opposition leader in the last three decades, but whom he sees in an extremely dangerous balance between the expectations of the “street” and the logic of protracted negotiations under external pressure. He reproaches her for being overly conciliatory toward Trump and warns of the risk of losing street legitimacy if she does not “measure political time very precisely.”
He pays special attention to the oil economy. The lifting of sanctions and the return of foreign companies were presented as the start of a quick “reactivation” of the economy and wage growth, especially in the public sector. Formally, a salary of around $240 was set, additional bonuses were introduced, including for “professionalization.” But, Rodríguez notes, the beneficiaries are distributed extremely unevenly: some healthcare workers received something, while university professors, including himself, remain without these supplements. As a result, the illusion that the new oil rent would be nationwide has collapsed; instead, it looks fragmented and unfair.
From this he draws a broader conclusion: Trump’s strategy on the oil question operates primarily in the interests of the United States itself. Venezuelan oil is being used to improve the American economy, while the exporting country’s population does not see the dividends. Here one can easily recognize the motives of the long-standing critique of “oil rentism”: oil serves external games and the strengthening of other economies rather than internal modernization. Only now the “piano behind the curtains” is no longer the faceless global market but a very concrete Washington.
At the same time Rodríguez acknowledges that, politically, the sense of hope has indeed intensified: under international tutelage a kind of managed transition seems to be playing out, which should lead to a change of leadership. But this transition, in his logic, does not look sovereign or genuinely national: key decisions are made in Washington and in backroom elite agreements, rather than through processes accountable to civil society. Hence the growing tension between “political time” — the rhythm of negotiations, election calendars, and external signals — and the “real time” of the impoverished street, which wants not another “historic turn” but predictable access to basic services.
Rodríguez does not hide his normative stance. He criticizes the “rodrigato” for playing for delay, Trump for using Venezuela as a tool of U.S. oil and domestic policy, and María Corina for the dangerous balance between external loyalty and internal expectations. At the same time he repeatedly returns to the risk of “frustración”: if after such a surge of hope quick, even partial, improvements do not arrive, society may go through a new cycle of disappointment that will hit the opposition first and foremost. In his view, Machado’s “political capital,” uniquely high for many years, could be wasted if she does not initiate a break with the logic of endless transition and return to a strategy oriented toward street legitimacy and pressure from below.
This inside-Venezuela perspective also colors the perception of another story — this time Colombian, but viewed through the same sensitive lens of U.S. intervention. A video piece titled “ESTADOS UNIDOS NO LO ESPERABA: Petro y su gobierno frenan el plan de Trump para las elecciones 2026” (link) tells of a very specific collision: statements by a high-ranking American official and the response by a Colombian minister. But for a Venezuelan viewer this is not an episodic dispute but another example of Washington’s structural “ingerenicism” in regional politics.
It concerns warnings by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, who spoke of possible sanctions and visa cancellations for those who attempt to “manipulate” the second round of Colombia’s presidential elections. The toolkit is familiar: sanctions and visas long ago became part of the everyday political lexicon for the Venezuelan elite. Here too the familiar choice of words appears: defending democracy, combating manipulation, conditional recognition of results. Against that background, the reaction of Colombia’s interior minister Armando Benedetti — who questions Washington’s right to “import justice” into foreign territory while at the same time acknowledging that visa decisions are a sovereign matter for the United States — from a Venezuelan perspective looks like an attempt to draw a minimal outline of national dignity in an asymmetric dialogue.
The figure of Trump, put in the video title as the author of a “plan” for the 2026 elections, picks up associations already ingrained in Venezuelan memory. It was the Trump administration that most fiercely promoted regime change in Caracas, recognition of parallel power structures, and the use of financial and oil sanctions as instruments of pressure. Now, when the Colombian context speaks of a possible attempt to pre-construct a scenario for the 2026 elections, for a Venezuelan viewer this sounds like a repetition of the same scheme in a neighboring country: long-term planning of the political field from the angle of Washington’s interests.
The video announces “analysis with Mauricio Reina,” which, judging by the format of such programs, centers the question: where is the boundary between a “legitimate warning” and a crude “intervention in internal affairs”? This question almost automatically splits the audience into two camps — supporters of strong external pressure as a tool to defend democracy and defenders of absolute sovereignty, even at the cost of tolerating authoritarian practices. In Venezuela this debate has been going on for a quarter century, and an increasing number of people, burned by the economic consequences of sanctions, lean toward skepticism about “savior” sanctions and visa blacklists.
Both stories — about an oil “breakthrough” that did not reach the pockets of the average Venezuelan, and about Landau’s warnings addressed to Colombian elites — are joined by a common narrative: the U.S. plays the role of regional arbiter who allocates legitimacy, punishes, and rewards based on its own strategic priorities. Where in Washington this may be presented as a moral duty to protect democracy, in Caracas and increasingly in other Latin American capitals it is read as a continuation of the old logic of control.
The political and social dimension for Venezuela is twofold. On one hand, the spread of the practice of sanctions and visa threats to other countries, like Colombia, normalizes the same approach once applied to Venezuela. This consolidates a model in which Washington effectively reserves the right to evaluate the quality of elections and the legitimacy of governments in the region. On the other hand, the Colombian episode opens new windows of opportunity for Caracas: frictions between Gustavo Petro’s progressive government and the U.S. potentially weaken the traditional anti-Venezuelan front in Bogotá, creating space for bilateral agreements on migration, border security, and energy outside the strict framework of the American agenda.
Against this background, domestic Venezuelan fatigue heightens cultural sensitivity to the word “tutelage.” After decades of anti-imperialist rhetoric, cycles of opposition protests, and numerous “historic turning points” without noticeable improvements in services and wages, an expectation of a “quick result” after every loud gesture — military intervention, pact signing, sanction lifting — has taken root in society. When results do not come, the skepticism that grows is less ideological than pragmatic: if life does not become easier, then either external actors pursue their own interests, or local elites use the external factor as a cover to prolong the status quo.
In both the story of a U.S.-led “transition” and the story of warnings about Colombian elections, the same structural flaw is clearly visible from Caracas. The people remain a decoration, a backdrop appealed to in the name of democracy, human rights, or national dignity, but who almost never becomes a real subject of the process. In the first column the citizen appears through complaints about electricity, water, transport, and meager wages; in the second — as an extra in someone else’s game about sanctions, visas, and strategic plans for the 2026 elections.
That is why Venezuelan analysis, like the piece on elimpulso.com, differs from dry news reporting: it bets not on listing facts but on interpreting motives, juxtaposing the elites’ “political time” with the street’s “real time,” and warning of a new wave of frustration. And video pieces like “ESTADOS UNIDOS NO LO ESPERABA…” (link) add to this picture the sense that the Venezuelan experience is not an exception but a symptom of a broad regional trend in which the United States continues to play the role of stern guardian, while Latin American societies increasingly respond with weary but ever clearer skepticism.
