In a mere half-hour, the rule of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro came to an end when he was captured by US special forces acting on the direct orders of President Donald Trump. Trump had been threatening military intervention in Caracas for months to end the rule of an adversary whom Washington considers a “hostile regime” involved in international drug trafficking.
Maduro’s downfall cannot be interpreted solely through the lens of Venezuela’s internal transformations, as the country grapples with one of its deepest economic and social crises due to sanctions and currency collapse. It also carries broader geopolitical implications, directly impacting unresolved regional issues, including the Western Sahara conflict. For decades, Caracas, along with Cuba, has been one of the most prominent supporters of the Polisario Front, a separatist movement in Latin America.
Maduro, who inherited the Bolivarian project from his predecessor Hugo Chávez in the late 1990s, maintained his country's position within an axis opposed to the United States and its allies. He made support for the Polisario Front an ideological and political extension of this stance, whether through recognizing the so-called "Sahrawi Republic" or by providing the Front with diplomatic cover and international relations.
The Bolivarian stronghold… the last bastion in Latin America
Throughout his years in power, Venezuela has become a vital strategic depth for the separatist cause, at a time when many countries in South and Central America have begun to withdraw their previous recognitions and are gradually moving towards supporting the autonomy initiative proposed by Morocco as the realistic and final solution to the conflict.
Despite major international shifts and Donald Trump's return to the White House for a second term, Maduro remained steadfast in his position, even going so far as to send clear political messages. The most recent of these was his reception, just days before Trump's inauguration, of a Polisario leader, whom he referred to as the "Prime Minister of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic," reaffirming his support for what he calls the "right to self-determination."
This approach was not isolated. Maduro had previously received the Polisario leader, Brahim Ghali, in March 2023 at the Miraflores Palace, granting him a state honor and bestowing upon him symbolic decorations. He also signed cooperation agreements with Ghali described as "strategic," a move aimed at granting the Polisario Front international political legitimacy, despite its dwindling global support.
Furthermore, Maduro has been keen to leverage the Polisario issue as a means of rapprochement with Algeria, which has provided him with a political foothold in North Africa. During an official visit in 2022, he and President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced their agreement to support the Polisario Front, within the context of a regional alignment hostile to Morocco. Rabat and an Early Reading of the Transformations
Morocco, for its part, understood that Maduro's continued rule meant maintaining a separatist foothold in the Americas. Therefore, since 2019, it has chosen to support Juan Guaidó, the head of the National Assembly, as the interim president of Venezuela. This support later culminated in Guaidó's explicit declaration of support for the autonomy proposal under Moroccan sovereignty.
With Maduro's downfall, the Polisario Front loses one of its most important supporters at a critical international juncture, as international consensus grows on the priority of a realistic political solution. This consensus was enshrined in Security Council Resolution 2797, adopted on October 31, 2015, which called on the parties to negotiate on the basis of the autonomy proposal.
A blow that came after a series of collapses.
However, what makes Maduro's downfall even more painful for the Polisario Front is that it comes within a long series of collapses of regimes that support it, a series whose beginnings can be traced back to the killing of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Gaddafi had been the primary financier and main sponsor of the Polisario project since the 1970s.
Confessions by former Libyan officials later confirmed that the "Sahrawi Republic" was nothing more than an intelligence and political tool in a regional conflict, before becoming a chronic burden on its supporters.
This same series of events continued with the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria in late 2014. This regime, along with Algeria, had remained one of the most prominent defenders of the Polisario Front, and Polisario elements were even involved in fighting alongside it as mercenaries, according to testimonies from defected Syrian officials.
In contrast, since the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, Morocco has chosen to stand against the Assad regime, closing its embassy in Damascus in 2012. It was among the first countries to recognize the new transitional authorities in 2015, culminating in the closure of the Polisario Front's headquarters in the Syrian capital—a move that ended decades of relations between the two sides.
Allies Under Pressure… and Growing Isolation
Alongside the fall of regimes, the Polisario Front faces a sharp decline in the strength of other allies, such as Iran and Hezbollah, which suffered devastating military strikes from the United States and Israel during 2015, significantly diminishing their regional influence.
Hezbollah, accused of supporting and training Polisario Front members in Tindouf, is currently experiencing its weakest period after losing key leaders, while Iran has faced unprecedented internal unrest since the beginning of 2016, threatening the cohesion of its regime.
In light of these transformations, the Polisario Front appears today more isolated than ever, having lost the support of dozens of African countries and facing an accelerating European shift in favor of the Moroccan initiative. It no longer has any real support except from Algeria, which in turn is under increasing international pressure to enter into serious negotiations and end the Sahara conflict on the basis of autonomy.
