The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Is Venezuela Ready to Move On? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

Venezuela has been dragged through the mud thanks to Chávez and Maduro, but it might be seeing its first genuinely positive development in decades.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3Zg90Fh

Hey, everybody. Peter Design here, coming to you from Colorado. And today we're talking to talk a little bit about Venezuela because we've had some interesting developments. The sitting president, woman by the name of Delci Rodriguez, has announced an asylum for everyone. Going back to 1999. 1999 is when Hugo Chavez became president and started the country down on its decivisational spiral. It gutted the energy company. Everyone started to basically lose the educational attainments they had had. Venezuela used to be the third most advanced. country in the Western Hemisphere after the United States in Canada. And under Chavez, he drove it into the ground. And then his successor, Nicholas Maduro, who used to be Chavez's bus driver, proved to be

quite a thug, stole even more from the place than Chavez did and continued to drive it into the ground. And his VP is Delci Rodriguez. Now that the United States has removed Nicholas Maduro from the stage, Rodriguez is now in charge and she's offered this amnesty. So basically, any crimes that were committed by anyone from 1990. until president, wiped clean. This is probably, I don't want to overplay this,

because there's a lot that still needs to happen. This is probably the best news that has come out of Venezuela in 20 years. 30 years? Almost 30 years. Okay, so when you have an authoritarian government, whether it's a dictatorship like the Maduro Chavez system or a colonial rule or communists

or whatever it happens to be, usually when the system ends, it ends one of two ways. Number one, a key personality dies and there is no clear successor and the place just kind of disavals into anarchy. Or number two, other groups form and you get a more ossified opposition and the two start fighting and eventually that fighting becomes very literal and you eventually get a civil war. And neither of these options are great because in the first one, the institutions were destroyed by the authoritarian. And so there's nothing to carry on after the authoritarian is gone. and Civil War I would like most people to understand is generally not good for much of anything.

This is potentially a third way that has been tried by very, very few places, and even fewer successfully. But I think the best example I can give you of how a general amnesty works can work is South Africa. Everybody knew that the apartheid government was a little off. And when the apartheid government fell at the end of the Cold War, there was something very similar. program where all of the whites who everyone knew were torturing the blacks were given blanket pardons and all of the blacks, especially the more militant groups who had basically been killing people for decades in their resistance against the apartheid government, were also given pardons. And what I have to remember is that is step one. Starting with a blank slate,

very important, deciding to bury the past and move on, very important. But even if everyone is in agreement that this is the right path, the step two is very important. And the way the South Africans did that was something called a Truth and Reconciliation Committee where basically everybody got together and shared with everyone else what they had done. So the Zulu Nationalists talked about their murder brigades. And the white nationals talked about their torture techniques. And it was raw. And it was awful.

And it was jarring. But by being honest with one another, they set the stage for a pluralistic society. And while South Africa has many, many, many, many, many problems. democracy is not one of them. If Venezuela is going to turn the page, something like that is going to happen. And if something like that happens, it is going to be awful. There are political prisons that are in the process now have been shut down as part of this asylum program. And kudos to Marco Rubio, who is the U.S. Secretary of State, who has basically pushed Rodriguez in this direction. But it's not just enough to wipe the slate.

You also have to have an open, honest conversation among yourselves about why it happened, how it happened, what happened, who did what. And with that, you can then potentially move forward with a new constitution, a new political system, and have a true fresh start. That is now what's in front of Venezuela. But I got to say, when this all started, I looked at Delsey Rodriguez, who was one of the most, famous thugs and one of the most famous looters of the country and I did not expect this step. So for one rare moment, I'm actually a little bit optimistic about how this could go. Don't fuck it up.