Still, there are solutions—but they aren’t easy. To tackle TOC, states need:

✅ Political will
✅ State capacity
✅ International coordination

Unfortunately, Venezuela has almost none of these under its current government...

This creates a vicious cycle:
💸 The regime depends on illicit revenue.
🔫 It uses TCOs as security proxies.
🛑 It resists cooperation with other states.

Result? Efforts to fight crime can undermine regime survival, meaning real reform is unlikely without regime change.

Why would a government allow this? Because, under Maduro, the state needs organized crime. Drug trafficking, illegal gold mining, and criminal alliances fund the regime and bolster its coercive power.

This is state capture in reverse: the state as a criminal group.

In the article, I make four core arguments:
1️⃣ Venezuela protects foreign TCOs like the ELN and ex-FARC.
2️⃣ It helped grow Tren de Aragua from a prison gang to a megabanda.
3️⃣ It exported that gang across Latin America.
4️⃣ The state itself operates as a criminal enterprise.

Organized crime in Latin America isn’t just a story of weak states—it’s often a story of complicit states.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Venezuela, where the state does more than tolerate criminal groups: it protects, fosters, and even acts as one.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Raúl and I are thankful to so many people who made this possible, including Iñaki Sagarzazu, with whom we initially conceived of this project way back in 2016.

Víctor Mijares
@maripuerta.com
@nosumacero.bsky.social
@antuliorosales.bsky.social
Francisco Sánchez
Isabel Rowan Scarpino
@orcunselcuk.bsky.social
@dsmilde.bsky.social
Manuel Sutherland
@svitalem.bsky.social
Verónica Zubillaga

Our amazing contributors include:
@adriboersner.bsky.social
@benedictebull.bsky.social
Victoria Capriles
Marsílea Gombata
Rosa Amelia González
@beccahanson.bsky.social
@pablohernandezb.bsky.social
Charles Larratt-Smith
@daniel-leon87.bsky.social
Miguel Ángel Martínez Meucci
Michael McCarthy

The book examines and develops the concept of authoritarian consolidation and then applies it to Maduro's Venezuela. Together with our contributors, we suggest a multicausal explanation for the consolidation of authoritarianism, with each chapter devoted to one of these plausible explanations.

Thank you, Heather, great work on your piece!

Who knew?

We've talked about this!