The capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (63 years old / Caracas, 1962) and his wife, Cilia Flores (69 years old / Tinaquillo, 1956), by the United States on January 3, 2026, brought an end to a military regime that devolved into a dictatorship, which began with Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) from 1999 to 2013 and was continued by Maduro. This system led the country into a democratic, social, economic, political, human rights, and cultural decline, ultimately generating a crisis in all areas and causing the collapse of Venezuelan life. This situation triggered a diaspora, as millions of Venezuelans have had to flee the country for political, economic, and/or purely survival reasons.

Democracy was stolen from within; international diplomacy proved ineffective. This solution stems from Nicolás Maduro’s intransigence in refusing to step down, and he will be tried in the United States for narcoterrorism and corruption.

Several questions arise after this action, which seeks the good of Venezuelans but has as many facets as unpredictable effects in Venezuela and globally, altering geopolitics and once again disrupting the coordinates of international relations and coexistence, as experts point out.

It is a world that continues to grow more entangled and complex, where diplomacy and rules have been shattered, and the law of the strongest is spreading, pushing the world toward a neo-feudal era dominated by the power of money, the military, and technology in an authoritarian system fragmented in the name of freedom and security. Some of the questions and risks that political scientists are debating are:

• The legality of the United States intervening in a sovereign foreign country, starting with the fact that it did so without the approval of its Congress and without respect for international law.
• Understanding its true interests, driven by oil.
• Establishing the transition and path that Venezuela will take to recover its democratic normality. US President Donald Trump stated that his country will direct or control Venezuela’s transition to democracy for as long as necessary, while organizing everything related to oil.
• The consequences that this breach of international law will have with respect to other powers such as Russia, in the case of Ukraine, for example, and China, with Taiwan, and their multiple interests. This fact would give carte blanche or legitimacy to the free use of force and power, according to the criteria, perspective, philosophy, or individual interests of each country to intervene in another. It is the fracturing of a global order in pursuit of national interests and alliances.
• It is the Monroe Doctrine with which the United States revives the idea of ​​»America for the Americans»
• Is this the official and de facto establishment of three superpowers (the US, China, and Russia) or the tutelage of regimes around the world that impose their rules in their spheres of influence?
• Is this the action that inaugurates the imminent division or parcelling of the planet, which several experts have warned about for years?
• Is this the decline of democracies as we know them today, paving the way for illiberal and autocratic systems and encouraging neo-colonialism? The new era of neo-imperialism.
• Is this the incapacity of traditional Western democratic governments, which brought progress to the world after World War II (1939-1945), but which today seem ill- prepared to solve 21st-century problems, while corruption and other ills erode them from within?
• It is the threshold of a new, unpredictable world order that fosters uncertainty.

For now, the origin and evolution of Venezuela’s disastrous situation, after a quarter of a century under Chávez and Maduro, has been documented in several books. We revisit the recommendations made to WMagazín by Venezuelan writers in 2017, which are more relevant than ever due to the timelessness of these essays, novels, short stories, chronicles, and poetry collections that create a portrait of Venezuela’s contemporary history:

Alberto Barrera Tyszka

He is the author of the novel Patria o muerte , Mujeres que matan (Tusquets) o El fin de la tristeza (Random House).

La revolución sentimental, by Beatriz Lecumberri (Catarata). It is a book written from the perspective of the other. Beatriz has poured all her experience as a correspondent in Venezuela into these pages, and the result is excellent. It can help someone who observes us from afar and serves as an essential mirror for ourselves.

La herencia de la tribu. Del mito de la independencia a la revolución bolivarian, by Ana Teresa Torres. I also find it to be an extraordinary opportunity to organize who we are and who we are becoming, from our founding myths to our delirious present. It is a journey through our history, moving back and forth, analyzing the factual and the imagined, the events and the yearnings, seeking to find an inner anatomy of Venezuela.

El Estado descomunal. Conversaciones con Margarita López Maya, by David González. Margarita López is a historian and one of the academics who has closely and incisively studied the country’s process. This book can undoubtedly shed light on the  complex—and sometimes incomprehensible—reality that Venezuela is experiencing.

***

Rodrigo Blanco Calderón

He is the author of The Night (a human mosaic about the rifts left by Chávez), Simpatía (Alfaguara) y Los terneros (Páginas de Espuma).

Simón Bolívar. Esbozo biográfico, by Elías Pino Iturrieta. This is the major work of historian Elías Pino Iturrieta. It is part of a valuable and courageous current in contemporary Venezuelan historiography that has identified Bolivarianism as one of the most tragic constants in Venezuela’s political history. Pino Iturrieta analyzes very well  how Venezuela was constituted as a republic precisely against the current of the Bolivarian ideal and how that “betrayal” is the “original sin” that Venezuelans seem condemned to pay for eternally. At least, until they decide to confront the truths of their own history.

El chavismo como problema, (Chavismo as a Problem), by Teodoro Petkoff. Teodoro Petkoff is a legendary figure in the politics of the second half of the 20th century. A former guerrilla fighter, politician, economist, and intrepid journalist, he was among the first to denounce the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union with a book that earned him excommunication from Leonid Brezhnev. This book, Czechoslovakia: Socialism as a Problem, was published in 1969. Forty years later, with the same critical zeal but with all the accumulated experience, Petkoff adapted his own title to the times of the current Chavista dictatorship. It is an essential review for grasping the authoritarian streak that has defined Chavismo from its inception. Petkoff’s thinking continues to unsettle the dictators of the day.

Apaciguamiento (Appeasement), by Miguel Ángel Martínez Meucci, is one of the most insightful reflections on how the Bolivarian Revolution consolidated itself in the years 2001–2004, the period of greatest political confrontation during Hugo Chávez’s first term. Martínez Meucci uses the concept of “appeasement” proposed by Henry Kissinger to explain not only Chávez’s consolidation of power, but, more importantly, the reasons for the opposition’s collapse.

***

Juan Carlos Chirinos

He is the author of Venezuela (a portrait of his country from the outside), Renacen las sombras, El informe sobre Clara (La Huerta Grande).

Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario (From the Noble Savage to the Good Revolutionary), by Carlos Rangel. This is one of the first and most important essays on Latin American “civilization,” in which the celebrated Venezuelan thinker reflects on the discrepancy between what a society is and the image that society has of itself. A classic since its publication, the author himself opens the reflection with these thought-provoking words: “We Latin Americans are not satisfied with what we are, but at the same time, we have not been able to agree on what we are, nor on what we want to be.” It could be said that it is the gateway to understanding the history of Venezuelan and Latin American culture.

País portáti  (Portable Country), by Adriano González León. This work encapsulates the essence of the armed struggle waged by the Venezuelan left, a struggle that clashed with the nation’s democratization process after the long night into which the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez had plunged the country. Its premise is rather simple: an Andean guerrilla fighter must carry a briefcase to a house where his comrades await him, crossing the city from one end to the other on a city bus while the narrator reminisces about the heroic; past of his ancestors. Upon arrival, he is met with the same fate that awaited the entire Venezuelan armed rebellion that attempted to emulate the Cuban revolutionaries: failure. This novel is a snapshot of a country that has never lost its fluid, portable; nature.

Un hombre de aceite (A Man of Oil), by José Balza. In this short novel, Balza achieves the remarkable feat of portraying the oil-rich nation, with all its corruption and depravity, its doubts and luxuries, its joys and perversions, through the life of a high-ranking official at the state- owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). And when we say oil-rich nation, we also mean the entire country, because the 20th century was the century in which Venezuela tied its destiny to the wealth provided by hydrocarbons: and when these cease to be valuable, who knows what kind of value the country will have? This novel is a stark snapshot of a country both blessed and corrupted by black gold.

***

Gustavo Guerrero

He is the author of works such as Historia de un encargo: ‘La catira’ de Camilo José Cela (Anagrama).

La herencia de la tribu. Del mito de la independencia a la revolución bolivariana, by Ana Teresa Torres. This essay offers the reader some essential keys to understanding the situation in Venezuela, recontextualizing Chavista ideology within the country’s history and historical imaginary.

Patria o muerte, by Alberto Barrera Tyzska, and The Night, by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón. These two novels depict, in different but highly effective ways, the drift of a society in decay, where the horizon of the future has been closed off. The hopelessness, despair, and exasperation of Venezuelans are expressed in all three works; but all three are also written with that admirable and fierce irony that reveals the underlying desire to turn this page of our history and piece together the fragments of a shattered nation.

***

Elisa Lerner

Narrator, playwright, and chronicler, her books include Así que pasen cien años (Editorial Madera Fina).

Patria o muerte, by Alberto Barrera Tyszka. An effective portrait of the emotional fever or epidemic that gripped Venezuelans when contradictory rumors spread about the illness and possible decline of the powerful commander. Before—or perhaps simultaneously—the decline of Venezuelan society had already begun, and some of the characters faithfully reflect this.

Lo que cuenta la mujer canalla, by Lena Yau (Kalathos). The author seems to write at a desk with movable Atlantic pages. On the pages of her poetry collection or her first novel, she tends to the jabillo tree that provided a garden for her childhood. The Caracas mountain in What the Scoundrel Woman Tells; becomes a precise poem because, in Lena’s work, intertextuality is not merely a beautiful arbitrariness that faithfully follows the original phrase, but a way of illuminating her heart while fulfilling her oceanic roots. The miracle occurs. One is a poet in Caracas and a writer in Madrid, or viceversa. In short, it is the grove bled dry by emigration that Lena Yau heals through the poem.

***

Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez

He is the author of the novels El adiós de Telémaco. Una rapsodia llamada Venezuela, Roman de la isla bararida, En las ruinas, El baile de Madame Kalalú and the short story collection La noche y yo (Páginas de Espuma).

El culto a Bolívar, by Germán Carrera Damas. This book initiated a reading that is now spreading and extending to other titles related to the figure of Bolívar. It focuses on how, from its inception, Venezuela created a theology around Simón Bolívar, in which this figure became sacred and untouchable. From his exploits onward, it was assumed that the only possibility of progress for the country lay in returning to the conservative ideas of a 19th-century military man. This thinking proved very convenient for the Venezuelan military caste, which has barely relinquished power since 1830 because they feel they own the country and believe that only barracks-based thinking and action allow it to be governed.

Patria o muerte, by Alberto Barrera Tyszka. A brilliant novel that won the Tusquets Prize, in which various characters experience firsthand the contradictions, dramas, and passions awakened by the illness and death of the country’s most recent military strongman, Hugo Chávez.

Venezuela Imán, by José Antonio Rial. A novel by the Spanish/Venezuelan author José Antonio Rial that depicts the genesis, the expansive, Adamic impulse, that characterized Venezuela in the 1950s, when immigrants arrived from the desolate postwar Europe seeking a new horizon in this promising land, full of riches and opportunities. The story unfolds during another military dictatorship, but precisely in the moments leading up to the establishment of the civilian governments that shaped the country between 1958 and 1998, governments that greatly benefited from the effort, culture, and passionate work ethic that these immigrants brought to the country that welcomed them with open arms.

***

Ana Teresa Torres

She is the author of works such as La herencia de la tribu. Del mito de la independencia a la revolución bolivariana (The Tribe’s Legacy: From the Myth of Independence to the Bolivarian Revolution). Ana Teresa Torres has selected books, but the comments are not her own; they are taken from other experts, as she indicates at the end of each recommendation.

In Red, by Gisela Kozak Rovero (Alfa, 2011). “In Red recounts events that befell multiple characters whose lives unfold in Venezuela in the new millennium. The common thread in these stories is to reveal the secret workings of an extremely tense and fascinating historical period dominated by grand pronouncements, mass movements, and the stark experience of the invasion of private life by the events of collective life. More than a book of short stories or a novel, it is a choral narrative that reveals the power, the suffering, and the painful beauty of a ferocious era” (Oscar Marcano).

Caracas muerde (Caracas Bites), by Héctor Torres (Puntocero, 2012). “Héctor Torres has skillfully crafted a mosaic of horror, sadness, and bloodshed that is also a merciless and realistic portrait of present-day Caracas. A Caracas that retains traces of the once welcoming and friendly old city, a city that refuses to abandon us. These stories feature office workers, reckless motorcyclists, humble shopkeepers, teenage killers, sweet girls with crimson smiles, corrupt police officers, and men and women cornered by life who have chosen to survive the city in every way possible. Each text is a kind of flash that illuminates a particular moment of daily anguish, as the narrator of these pages expresses at one point: ‘Caracas is not inhabited, it is suffered.’ In this way, the narrator also becomes a witness and chronicler of his surroundings, giving space in the text to a series of characters and situations that symbolize an aspect of urban life. All of them, in some way, reflections of a collective violence”: (Manuel Cabesa).

País. Poesía reunida 1981–2011 (Country. Collected Poems 1981–2011), by Yolanda Pantin (Pre-Textos). “The ‘recognition’ of oneself is followed by that of the country, but that nation has become ‘unrecognizable,’ it only has an image in the ruins of a collective history that strikes with the force of a landslide. Violence, indifference, lies, humiliation: a country ‘scarred’ that makes the reconstruction and recognition of the feeling of homeland, the intimate and personal history, the memory that can be recounted with the wonder, attention and ‘terrifying fear’ characteristic of this voice, even more urgent”: (Marina Gasparini).

***

Lena Yau

She is the author of Hormigas en la lengua (Ants on the Tongue / Baile del Sol), Bring Your Back to Make My Table (Gravitaciones), and What the Scoundrel Woman Told (Kalathos).

Así que pasen cien años. Crónicas (So a Hundred Years Pass: Chronicles), by Elisa Lerner (Madera Fina Publishing). Elisa Lerner, a writer with a steady hand and an incisive gaze, approaches the country from multiple perspectives. This is the Venezuelan panorama; she dissects it, crunches apart every fiber, scatters, gathers, and reassembles our idiosyncrasies, turning each question into reflections that answer us, X-ray us, and challenge us. Lerner understands and helps us understand Venezuela as a society through writing, the visual arts, theater, music, criticism, film, academia, politics, customs and traditions, consumption, and oil.

The continued relevance, both in diagnosis and projection, of lines such as the following is surprising: “If in Venezuela politics is more cunning than memory, more cunning and ephemeral present than projection and transcendent memory, it is because, deep down, we remain chained to the dictatorships we have had and that continue to live in our democratic life, like a disturbing abstraction”.

• With translation assistance from Robert Lienhard.

***

Other articles from our English edition that may interest you:

All articles from our English edition are available HERE.

WMagazin’s Top 50 Books of 2025, Listed by Literary Genre. You can watch HERE.

This is how life, beauty, love, sex, and happiness have changed in the 21st century, according to 250 writers, artists, philosophers, sociologists, and scientists. Read the article about the book HERE.

László Krasznahorkai, 2025 Nobel Laureate in Literature: “Human beings remain the same, dangerous to themselves”. You can watch it HERE.

Complete series of Artificial intelligence in the world of books and literature:

• Artificial Intelligence in the World of Books and Literature (1): Authorship and the New Role of Humans in Creation. You can watch it HERE.
• Artificial Intelligence in the World of Books and Literature (2): Writing and creativity in the posthumanist era. You can read the article HERE.
• Artificial intelligence in the world of books and literature (3): Cultural revolution and paradigm shift. You can read the article HERE.

***

Subscribe to WMagazín’s free newsletter at this link.

We invite you to become a patron of WMagazín and support quality, independent cultural journalism. It’s easy; you can find the instructions at this link.

If you’d like to learn more about WMagazín and its special sections, CLICK HERE.

• @WinstonManrique
• @W_Magazín
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Tiktok