Two days after María Corina Machado’s high-stakes return to Venezuela last week, she walked into her low-slung party headquarters, which had been raided and vandalized by supporters of the regime that had forced her into exile. The graffiti had been painted over and the debris had been cleared. Machado was there for her first major meeting back in Caracas, with about 100 family members of political prisoners. Machado could see that many held photos of their detained relatives. Many also wore shirts that read Libertad.

“They persecute the innocent using all the power of the state,” Machado said in a speech. She didn’t mention names, but everyone in the crowd knew that she was referring to the cadre of leaders now running the country under U.S. tutelage. Still being held were at least 400 political prisoners, according to civil-society groups, people Machado referred to as “our absolute priority” and “our heroes.”

Eglis Manaure was in the small crowd, holding a photo of her husband, Enrique Nauris Parada, one of the 400. He had been detained since 2020. Listening to Machado speak, Manaure thought not only of the prospect that her husband might finally be freed, but also that his jailers might soon be punished. “Whatever form of justice she”—meaning Machado—“decides,” Manaure told us after the meeting. In the days following her return, Machado has begun talking about justice, reparations, and the “dismantling of the repressive state.”

Put another way: One U.S. ally in Venezuela appears to be calling for the prosecution of another. It is an early glimpse into the rivalry the United States will now have to manage as it oversees Venezuela’s democratic transition.

For 10 months, ever since what President Trump described today as the “conquest of Venezuela,” the administration has consolidated power around a single pliant figure: Interim President Delcy Rodríguez. Through Rodríguez, the U.S. was able to negotiate an opaque petroleum agreement that Trump, in a dubious claim, has called “the biggest oil deal in world history.” (Trump, in another dubious claim, said today that “we’re taking in hundreds of billions of dollars of oil.”) In a January interview with The Atlantic, he said of Rodríguez: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price.”

But as of last week, the U.S. is no longer ruling over a unipolar Venezuela. Machado is by far the most popular figure in Venezuelan politics.

In recent days, her supporters have crowded highways and plazas and churches across parts of the country to get a look at the returned leader. People have wept in the streets. Last Tuesday, while Machado met with the families of political prisoners, Rodríguez held her own rally, where she danced on a stage to popular songs—a stunt that was widely mocked by Venezuelans. And yet it was Rodríguez, watching her power come under threat, who derided Machado’s return as a “show.”

In its first 10 months running Venezuela, the Trump administration chose to work with vestiges of Nicolás Maduro’s regime—ostensibly in the name of stability and economic growth—instead of prioritizing a rapid democratic transition. It appeared to discourage, if not outright block, Machado’s return. That approach simplified the challenge of steering a foreign country, allowing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump to extract what they wanted from Rodríguez.

There was no democratic structure to build, no immediate quest for accountability, no need to mediate among competing political factions. The State Department argued that it was supporting incremental reforms that were more likely to stick, and said that a hasty appearance by Machado could cause government institutions and the country’s military to split. But all the while, anger was growing among Venezuelans who had celebrated the removal of Maduro in January. “What Trump has done so far was the easy part,” Steven Levitsky, a professor of Latin American studies at Harvard, told us.

“Pushing an authoritarian clique out of power is the hard part. It’s going to take a complex negotiation.”Machado’s return has hastened that negotiation.

Last Monday, a senior State Department official told journalists that, as part of the Trump administration’s three-phase plan for Venezuela’s return to democracy, Rodríguez would need to declare a “permanent vacancy in the presidency” once electoral reforms are completed, triggering a six-month period before new elections can occur. This process is highly likely to result in a Machado presidency by mid- to late 2027, at the earliest. Machado’s team has already begun pushing to speed up the pace, knowing that dragging out the process could erode her position.

“Machado is operating on a very tight timeline,” Paul Angelo, a Latin America expert who was previously at the Defense Department and is now at the consultancy McLarty Associates, told us. “She’s the most popular character in the country, but she’s also someone whose cachet as the leader of a unified opposition likely has its limits.”Neither the United States nor Machado has articulated a postelection plan for Rodríguez and the rest of the Maduro regime should Machado win. There are no easy options: The United States, or another country, could offer them safe haven. Machado could offer them amnesty. Or they could remain in Venezuela, subject to prosecution—the preference of most Machado supporters.

“The ideal is that the Venezuelan courts themselves, the Venezuelan justice system itself, can try and convict those responsible for human-rights abuses,” Martha Tineo, a co-founder of Justicia, Encuentro y Perdón, which tracks forced detentions in Venezuela, told us. “No political agreement of any kind can be above justice.”The reality is more complicated. If Rodríguez is to remain in power though the elections, potentially standing as a candidate, she will almost certainly want an assurance that she won’t be jailed after the vote.

The same is true for much of her regime, including top military and police officials who have committed well-documented human-rights abuses. But the prospect of impunity is abhorrent to Machado’s supporters. Bridging that divide now falls on the United States. Those involved in the democratic transition—reforming and rebuilding Venezuela’s judicial and electoral systems—believe that Washington has the final say over their work. “This whole process originated with a green light from the United States,” one Venezuelan working on the transition told us.

Trump’s oil deal could also be complicated by Machado’s return and the restoration of a political opposition in Venezuela. Most of Machado’s supporters believe that the deal is unconstitutional and could be canceled once an independent judiciary is established. (The Trump administration hasn’t released many details about the deal, but has said it was structured to endure over time.) Although Machado had been trying to remain in the White House’s good graces, at her first press conference in Caracas, on Thursday, she said that the agreement “does not reflect the levels of transparency that Venezuelan society wants.”

In Rubio’s telling, he cautioned Machado only once against coming back to Venezuela. That was immediately after the devastating June earthquake. At the time, he told reporters last week, the administration was exclusively concerned about ensuring the delivery of aid and feared that her arrival could derail those efforts. That judgment eventually changed. Several weeks ago, Rubio said, the Trump administration warned Rodríguez’s government that Machado had a right to make her widely anticipated return, clearing the way for it to happen.

“We spoke to the interim authorities and just said, ‘Look, our expectation is that she’s a Venezuelan; she belongs in her country,’” Rubio said. “She should be allowed to return, and she should be allowed to return unperturbed.”Rubio has said that the administration will measure Rodríguez’s actions, rather than her rhetoric about its gradual road map for transitioning to an elected government. The map includes plans announced after the most recent round of transition talks among regime figures and a subset of opposition groups, aimed at reforming the country’s highest court and electoral body.

Rubio has been open in acknowledging the administration’s willingness to use the threat of reimposing sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector, or on leaders such as Rodríguez and other senior members of her government, as a coercive tool to avoid foot-dragging.

“No matter what people say along the way, as long as it happens, this is a results-based process,” Rubio said. “So far, frankly, on everything we’ve asked for in this process, be it the economic reforms, the political reforms—it’s happening.”Administration officials have voiced periodic frustration with Machado, who they have suggested has at times been impractical and perhaps too willing to compromise stability and economic growth in pursuit of democratic ideals. A State Department spokesperson told us that Machado’s party, Vente Venezuela, had been invited to this month’s transition talks in Caracas but did not attend.

Rubio’s plans for Venezuela are nested within a larger Latin America strategy predicated around three interlinked goals: building American commercial primacy by accruing new business deals that squeeze out Chinese firms in the process; defeating drug cartels, using visa sanctions, terror-group designations, and the Pentagon’s militarized partnerships with countries such as Ecuador and Colombia; and choking off illegal migration. Officials see the region’s overall rightward shift as an opportunity to accelerate this approach.

Their growing Shield of the Americas initiative is not only a tool for coordinating action against drugs and crime, but also a political counterweight to legacy institutions such as the Organization of American States, which Trump allies see as ineffective and unwilling to act against the region’s leftist strongmen.

Administration officials have pointed to Bolivia, which earlier this year was paralyzed by protests against economic reforms enacted by a conservative government, as a cautionary tale. Bolivia attempted an abrupt change in the midst of an economic crisis, and it backfired for the government. They believe that if Machado had been allowed to take over right after Maduro’s ouster, the same sort of turmoil might have come to Venezuela.

Rubio and other officials have argued that to avoid this kind of outcome, immediate action to revive Venezuela’s economy, particularly in the oil sector, was paramount. Rubio has defended the U.S.-Venezuela oil deal as a practical choice that can ramp up oil output in a way that Chinese and Russian firms never did, and he has downplayed Machado’s criticism of it. But if she becomes the country’s democratically elected president next year, her views will be much more difficult for the Trump administration to ignore.