Who imposes the new order when the losers of the old regime decide to sabotage it?
Amnesties measured against the yardstick, along with courts, the Armed Forces, disarmament, and organized crime: who is reintegrated, who is disqualified, and who is tried.
The essentials
Every deep transition forces decisions about who commands during the change, who is vetted out, who is reintegrated, who is disqualified, who is tried, and who definitively loses the capacity to sabotage the new order. The reintegrable would be officials, technicians, and mid-level cadres without grave responsibility for crime or structural repression. The barred would be political operators, complicit judges, big-league corrupt officials, and cadres whose record makes them incompatible with the new system. The prosecutable would be grave violators of rights, large-scale looters, chiefs of armed networks, embedded organized crime, and major operators of the repressive apparatus.
As a sovereign republic. If the security forces remain party-aligned, reform gets sabotaged. If they are purged without criteria, the state is left without operational capacity. The reconciliation that works is not the one that forgets; it is the one that classifies, sanctions, repairs, and closes the door on repetition.
As the 51st State. Military integration must not be imagined as the automatic absorption of the existing Armed Forces. A part of the current personnel—the most professional, the least compromised by crime, the least politicized, and the most fit to operate under modern discipline—could be reinserted after a rigorous process of functional vetting, training, and control. Another part could be reorganized as the National Guard of the State of Venezuela, with functions of territorial defense, emergency support, the safeguarding of critical infrastructure, cooperation with federal commands, and security compatible with the new order. The rest would have to be demobilized, barred, or prosecuted as appropriate.
For years the regime instrumented parastatal structures—armed colectivos, street chiefs, prison networks—as a technology of control through fear. Under American federal jurisdiction, the possibility that groups with that level of armed power, territorial autonomy, and informal backing from the political apparatus could reproduce themselves on Venezuelan soil drops drastically.
From the book The 51st State, Parts III, VI, and VIII.
The sources
- Executive Order 14157, Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (January 20, 2025). Federal Register federalregister.gov (accessed October 2, 2026) · archived copy
- U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Annual Cocaine Report and National Drug Threat Assessment materials.
- Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, September 2026 press release (OHCHR) ohchr.org · archived copy
- The 51st State, Parts III, V, VI, and VIII.