The South whispers back

Nicolás Maduro has never stood so close to the edge as he does now, twelve years after he first rose to power in Venezuela. For weeks, U.S. forces have been surveying and positioning themselves near Venezuelan waters. What began as a legally contestable attack on vessels in the Caribbean has taken on the contours of war, complete with the presence of the most powerful aircraft carrier in the American fleet, the USS Gerald R. Ford, leading the operation.

These movements have led many analysts to conclude that, unlike in previous episodes, when the United States threatened to unseat Maduro only to retreat, silently and conveniently, depending on the shifting winds of oil politics, the American president may now be prepared to move forward with what, according to John Bolton, Trump once described as "cool": the prospect of an American invasion of Venezuela.

South America has never been prepared for a large-scale war, much less one involving the world’s most formidable military power. Trump (and every other government on the continent) knows that Maduro would receive no meaningful regional military support, not due merely to capability, but to political will.

Since 2018, when Maduro crushed what remained of Venezuela’s democratic framework, becoming in practice a full-fledged dictator, he has been receiving clear signals that the continent, if not already changed, was beginning to change. Almost immediately after the fraudulent election, the United States announced it would not recognize the results. This reaction was predictable: relations between Washington and Caracas have long been a choreography of gestures, sometimes courtly threats, sometimes sharp rhetoric, sometimes discreet agreements. But it was the response that followed which carried a quiet message Maduro failed to hear.

The Lima Group, formed to address the Venezuelan crisis, joined the U.S. in rejecting Maduro’s reelection. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, and others sent a clear message: “No, things are no longer like this here.” What might have been just another diplomatic memo instead became an unsettling warning. South America, which for decades tolerated democratic backsliding in the name of pragmatic conveniences, was growing less willing to do so.

What followed was severe isolation. Maduro’s government was repudiated by most democratic nations and subjected to harsh political and economic sanctions, culminating in his inclusion on an international wanted list with a multimillion-dollar reward attached. Yet here we are in 2025, and Maduro remains in power. Barred from stepping onto the soil of almost any country under threat of arrest, he turned to radicalization to survive. Political prisons swelled, repression became state policy, and poverty became the defining condition of Venezuelan life, extreme poverty reached 77% in 2021.

But radicalism alone cannot sustain a regime, certainly not one so close to the United States. That is where Russia and China stepped in, each in its own way, as implicit guarantors of a project whose survival mattered far more to them than to the region. Venezuela began operating Russian jets; Chinese funds ensured just enough liquidity; and thus, as a pawn on a larger anti-American chessboard, Maduro survived.

Putin, almost by accident, extended the regime’s lifespan. In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine by land, air, and sea, the global market, still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, suffered another shock, especially in oil prices. One of the world’s largest reserves? Venezuela, which has managed to survive again through new agreements forged in the shadows.

The war goes on, but the landscape is different now. Trump knows it. Maduro knows it, too and it shows in the unusually polite way he now refers to the American president as “Mr. Trump,” a stark contrast to the fiery tone he once used toward Washington. In one of several surreal performances about “peace,” he even sang Imagine to an audience.

Whether Maduro’s fate will ultimately hinge on a continental military conflict is uncertain. But it is possible that, for Trump, the symbolic value of toppling Maduro outweighs any calculation of military cost or the prospect of disrupting narcotrafficking networks. Maduro shows every sign of sensing the end. Yet, despite the U.S. military presence at his doorstep, his greatest threat may be something far subtler, far less aggressive, and exponentially more significant.

In the wake of the Lima Group’s stance in 2018, a new current of change surged on November 25, 2025, thousands of kilometers from Miraflores. In Brasília, the First Panel of the Brazilian Supreme Court voted unanimously to conclude the trial that convicted former president Jair Bolsonaro for attempting to overthrow the democratic order, ordering the immediate start of his 27 years prison sentence.

Nearly four decades after Argentina convicted military officers for crimes committed during the dictatorship of 1976–1983, Brazil broke its historical pattern of amnesty and impunity for military crimes. For the first time in the nation’s history, four-star generals were convicted alongside their political leader for attempting to violently abolish democratic institutions.

The whisper that South American governments murmured in 2018 about the kind of continent they had been, and the kind they wished to become, became a clear voice from the region’s largest democracy, repeating for Maduro, for the world, and for itself: “No, things are no longer like this here.”

Argentina, shaped by the trauma of dictatorship, elected Javier Milei. Chile, once ruled by Pinochet, elected Boric. Bolivia, after decades under Evo Morales, elected Rodrigo Paz. Brazil, whose memory of dictatorship shaped the Workers’ Party, elected Bolsonaro, and then faced the consequences of that choice. Yet in November 2025, the country, through its institutions, said once more: “No, things are no longer like this here.”

What Maduro failed to hear in 2018 is being stated again. Whether he is able to listen now is uncertain, his ears are drowned out by the roar of American jets rehearsing in his backyard. But if South America could speak, Maduro would hear: “You no longer have a place here.” In this neighborhood, voters who elect progressives may change course next election, just as voters who elect conservatives may shift direction later. That is how it should be. That is how it must be.

This movement, more than aircraft carriers or incendiary rhetoric, is what truly threatens Maduro: a continent that, with all its contradictions, is beginning to recognize itself in its own institutions; a continent that, even while stumbling, appears intent on moving forward.

Maduro has hijacked the Venezuelans' right to choose, shamed South America for more than a decade, and, if he could finally listen, perhaps he would perceive the growing murmur coming from neighboring democracies. A sound that does not demand heroism, revolutions, or unanimity; just something simpler and, paradoxically, more difficult: the continuous willingness to change, not towards the United States, with its old, confused, and self-absorbed system, but at the right pace and with the conviction shown by Brazil to proudly confront old ghosts, perhaps we can thus move towards Uruguay: discreet, constant, almost stubbornly peaceful, as a possible beacon, not out of ambition, but out of a desire for normality.