Mike Baker

It is always messy in one way or another.

And just because Maduro is gone, it does not automatically mean Venezuela becomes democratic, stable, or free.

It's not a one-man dictatorship.

Maduro was the face of the regime, but not the entirety of it.

There are still powerful figures inside Venezuela who matter a great deal.

That's a rather statement of the obvious, I suppose.

Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, who controls the military.

Diosdado Cabello, their regime's chief enforcer and political strongman.

And the Rodriguez siblings, Delcy Rodriguez and Jorge Rodriguez, who control key levers of state power, specifically oil and propaganda.

Add to that a number of senior military officers who've spent years enriching themselves under both Hugo Chavez and Maduro.

These people don't simply disappear because Maduro is gone.

Unless, as mentioned, there have been negotiations quietly underway and behind Maduro's back.

So the next phase could get complicated, unless, again, there were pre-negotiated understandings with some of these key actors.

Whether such deals exist is not yet clear, but without them, transitions like this tend to be unstable.

Another point worth making, operations like this do not succeed without help from the inside, for the most part.

Maduro had grown increasingly paranoid in recent years, and particularly this past year.

He tightened his inner security circle and relied heavily on Cuban security personnel for personnel protection, as we've discussed here on the PDB.

And yet, in an operation of this precision, the trigger to act usually comes from one of two things.

Either exceptionally solid, real-time intelligence on

location and security of the target, or recruited assets inside the system who can facilitate action on the ground.