Paola Bautista de Alemán was warned last spring that she was in danger in her native Venezuela.
“In March 2025, we received an alert from someone inside the regime, who told me that they were going to get me and put me in jail. So I had to leave the country,” says the Venezuelan political scientist, journalist and activist who is now a visiting fellow at the University’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Bautista de Alemán hid at a friend’s house, then two days later flew to Spain. Her husband and their three teenage children remained in Venezuela. The family was reunited in August in South Bend, when she arrived to start her fellowship at Notre Dame.
She closely followed the news when the United States military conducted its January 3, 2026, raid in Caracas, capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple were flown to New York to face federal charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking.
For the scholar and author of The Transitions of Democracy: Between Freedom and Authoritarianism, their capture came as a welcome surprise. “I think that for all Venezuelans it was a relief,” she says, because the dictator will face justice. She is guardedly hopeful that Venezuela might be ready to begin its journey back to democracy. She longs for the day she can safely return home.
For decades, Venezuelans have endured an authoritarian government and high levels of crime, corruption and scarcity of basic goods. This year, their country suffers the highest inflation rate in the world, with projections exceeding 600 percent for 2026. Nearly 8 million people have reportedly left Venezuela since 2014; its current estimated population is 28.6 million.
Bautista de Alemán serves as national vice president of political education and programs at Primero Justicia (“Justice First”), a Venezuelan political party. She’s also president of the Institute of Political Studies FORMA, a center for political training and research.
After Maduro’s capture, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would govern Venezuela for an unspecified period and manage its oil reserves. Under pressure from the U.S., the Venezuelan National Assembly approved a measure to open the oil sector to private investment, a reversal of the country’s 50-year-old nationalization policies.
Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, whom Bautista de Alemán considers no more trustworthy than Maduro, was sworn in as the country’s interim president. Soon thereafter, Rodríguez announced a mass amnesty plan for political prisoners, a response to pressure from the Trump administration that she halt repression and demonstrate an effort to stabilize the country. By the end of February, more than 540 political prisoners had been released, but many others were still imprisoned or missing.
To understand current events in Venezuela, one must understand what has happened since 1999, the year Maduro’s presidential predecessor, Hugo Chávez, came to power. Running the nation on a self-described socialist model, Chávez remained president until his death in 2013.
The news portrays a single event, the U.S. raid, that happened on one day, “but what’s behind it is the struggle of a whole country,” says Bautista de Alemán, who was a young adult when Chavez came to power.
“All my adulthood has been fighting for democracy in my country. I grew up in a democratic system that was backsliding. Hugo Chávez was not the cause but was a consequence of the erosion of the democratic system,” she explains. The Venezuelan people believe in and formerly enjoyed democracy; for 27 years, they have been voting, organizing and speaking to international institutions in an effort to regain democracy — to no avail, until now, she says.
Roselis Díaz De Freitas is a Venezuelan student working on her master’s degree in international human rights law at Notre Dame Law School. Born after Chavez came to power, she says her life and professional decisions have been framed by the country’s political context.
As an attorney who, like Bautista de Alemán, earned her degree from Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, she has represented victims of political persecution in Venezuela, as well as victims of human rights violations in other Latin American countries. She has often needed to keep a low profile to protect herself.
When she heard about the U.S. raid that removed Maduro, she called relatives in Caracas. She was relieved to hear they were safe. At least 75 people on the ground were killed during the raid, according to news reports.
“I had mixed feelings, because you’re not happy seeing your city is being bombed,” but at long last something is happening, she says.
Díaz De Freitas expresses cautious hope for democratic change but reports ambivalence among Venezuelans, who fear continued repression and worry their hopes for a democratic future may be dashed. “We’re used to worst-case scenarios,” she says.
“You have to see the whole context, which is a huge democratic crisis. We don’t have a democratic society. We don’t have a space to talk about this openly,” she says, noting the nation’s news organizations are controlled by the government, while some social media platforms are banned.
“We don’t have access to free information and free debates in a democratic space. If you talk against the government, you could be imprisoned, tortured, disappear or be killed,” she says. Venezuelans live in a society where masked police officers often approach people on the street and demand their cell phones. If an officer finds names or phrases or messages that show disagreement with the ruling government, the phone’s owner is likely to be jailed, she adds.
In 2023, former lawmaker María Corina Machado — the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate — won a presidential primary with more than 90 percent of the vote, but the government barred her from continuing in the race to unseat Maduro. Bautista de Alemán’s political party was part of the coalition that supported Machado’s candidacy.
The election took place in July 2024. Maduro was declared the winner despite substantial evidence of a landslide victory for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia. Tally sheets from polling stations indicated that González won with 67 percent of the vote.
The Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nonprofit dedicated to advancing democracy and human rights, and a United Nations panel of experts concluded that the election lacked transparency and failed to meet international standards of integrity. Mass protests triggered a government crackdown with arrests of opposition figures. González fled to Spain.
“Where was the international community when this happened? How is it that a dictator can steal elections, violate human rights, kill and torture?” Bautista de Alemán asks. “Nobody was paying any attention. It’s like we were condemned to live under these circumstances.
“Sometimes good thoughts and prayers are not enough to solve this kind of problem,” she adds. “I’m Catholic and I do know that praying is very important, but it’s not the only thing that you can do.” Maduro was violating human rights and committing crimes against humanity, she says, and organized crime and terrorism had found a safe haven in Venezuela.
Before Maduro’s arrest, Bautista de Alemán had no chance of returning home. She has friends and colleagues who were jailed, killed or disappeared. Now she hopes she might be able to visit. While at Notre Dame, she is writing a book about the Venezuelan opposition movement.
Venezuela’s constitution calls for a new election when the presidency becomes vacant, while the vice president governs on an interim basis. However, on February 9, Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the country’s unicameral National Assembly and Delcy Rodríguez’s brother, ruled out immediate elections, saying the country must first go through a process of “stabilization.”
Bautista de Alemán remains optimistic. “It’s not as fast as we would like, but things are happening,” she says. Based on conversations with friends and family back home, she sees that some Venezuelans are cautiously losing their fear of speaking publicly about politics. “They support what the U.S. did in general,” she says.
She encourages Americans to learn about her nation’s history and its relationship with the U.S. “This is the story of a country that chose to move forward toward democracy and found in the United States a true ally along the way. We are profoundly grateful for that friendship and solidarity,” she says.
She also asks Americans for their prayers. “We feel them, and they give us strength,” she says.
Bautista de Alemán sees a strong likelihood that Machado will be elected president once democracy is restored. The former legislator has faced criticism for giving her Nobel medal to Trump as a gift. Bautista de Alemán and Díaz De Freitas agree this was a calculated move to strengthen political bonds between Venezuela and Washington, D.C.
“She gave the medal, not the prize,” Bautista de Alemán argues, calling the gesture “a sign of appreciation and brotherhood from the Venezuelan people to the U.S. people, represented by President Trump.”
To prosper, she says, Venezuela will have to establish new partnerships with U.S. and European companies regarding its oil reserves. Both women prefer that Venezuela seek out U.S. partners rather than firms from Russia, China or Iran.
Bautista de Alemán follows each day’s news, hoping conditions will improve enough for a visit. The help Venezuela most needs now, she says, is assistance in a transition to democracy, with free and fair national elections the most essential goal. “We need to be able to talk and express ourselves, and freely critique the government,” she says.
Díaz De Freitas doesn’t know where she’ll be after she graduates in May, but she knows what she’ll be doing. “Even if I’m outside of Venezuela,” she says, “I’m still going to be working toward the improvement of my country.”
Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine.