Donald J. Trump was approaching the end of the longest State of the Union address that has been unwrapped before the US Congress since 1964, when he pivoted toward what has happened around “our new friend Venezuela” since the capture of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores on January 3. He talked about the millions of barrels en route to the US and celebrated how the collaboration with Delcy Rodriguez is helping to boost the economies of both countries, giving renewed hope for families who have suffered in Venezuela. And then, he said that, right there, among those seated in front of him, was Alejandra González, the niece of Venezuela politician Enrique Márquez, who had been jailed but was released after the Maduro extraction. Trump then announced, Oprah style, that her uncle was there. “Come down, Enrique!” Trump said, a door just behind González opened, and Márquez entered amid a round of standing applause to embrace his niece.
A familiar scene from TV, from shows around the world during the last 60 years, Sábado Sensacional included. An emotional moment indeed, but for Venezuela watchers it sure was another plot twist in The Year of What the F: “What the F is Enrique Márquez doing there?”
Enrique Marquez (63, a native from Maracaibo) ran for the election as a rogue candidate supported by another party, Centrados en la Gente, that along with some other organizations got 2% of the vote in July 28, 2024. The Venezuelan Communist Party and REDES, the small political outfit of dissident chavista Juan Barreto, backed him.
Márquez was a victim of the unprecedented crackdown that followed the July 28, 2024 election in Venezuela, unleashed by the chavista regime—with Delcy Rodríguez as vice president—while Maduro blatantly stole the presidential contest that Edmundo González Urrutia won by a landslide.
On January 7, amidst the spike in forced disappearances that came before Maduro’s last presidential inauguration, security forces took Enrique Márquez and threw him in El Helicoide for a year, until January 2026.
But way before that, Márquez was a member of Un Nuevo Tiempo, the Zulia state-based party of Manuel Rosales and Omar Barboza. He was elected for the 2015 National Assembly, where the anti-Maduro coalition held a majority, and became the chamber’s vice president in the first year when Henry Ramos Allup grabbed the spotlight. He had entered institutional politics 15 years earlier, as a lawmaker for center-left party La Causa R in the first Chávez legislature (2000-2006). By 2010, when the opposition was returning to parliamentary politics to face the ruling PSUV, Márquez had joined Rosales and Barboza in UNT. In 2018, as the opposition boycotted that year’s presidential vote amid political bans and State repression on potential candidates, Enrique Márquez decided to back Henri Falcón, who ended up losing against Maduro. Márquez was sacked from his post in UNT as a result. In the years that followed, he held a lower profile as the opposition shifted toward Juan Guaidó’s interim presidency and international pressure as the strategy to remove Maduro from power.
He made a comeback in 2021, when the Guaidó movement was looking doomed and the Maduro regime was trying to regain a degree of recognition abroad. With a disjointed opposition at home after years where efforts were aimed at the international community, Guaidó critics in the Venezuelan opposition—namely Rosales and Henrique Capriles—decided it was time to move away from the interinato and return to electoral politics. Over at the chavista aisle, National Assembly president and Maduro strategist Jorge Rodríguez convinced the dictator that a new electoral board was necessary to get its opponents running for elections again—according to Rodríguez, this would make the regime look democratic. For that purpose, the National Electoral Council would need to be “more balanced” than the previous ones, and therefore include an additional opposition representative (the arrangement since the Chávez-Tibisay Lucena era was that the opposition could only have one out of five).
And voila. In May 2021, after weeks of negotiations between Rodríguez and the Capriles-Rosales camp, Enrique Márquez was appointed as CNE rector along with Roberto Picón, a software engineer that advised the opposition on electoral strategy throughout the 2010s, and who Maduro kept imprisoned for a year in 2017-2018.
With another three pro-Maduro CNE rectors, Márquez and Picón oversaw the December 2021 regional election that saw the opposition break with years of electoral boycott, an event that showcased chavismo’s growing weakness at the ballot box. The CNE still behaved like a puppet for Maduro, but Márquez and Picón managed to document many of the abuses and protest the decisions taken by Pedro Calzadilla, a history professor and friend of Maduro.
In May 2023, with the Calzadilla-led CNE under pressure to organize a primary election for Maduro’s rivals in collaboration with a separate independent board, Maduro forced the resignation of his own appointees. Márquez and finally Picón had to quit on the following days too. In the second half of the year, María Corina won an independent primary election with overwhelming support, and Maduro set up the current electoral board embodied by Elvis Amoroso, the man who told the world Maduro won the 2024 elections without showing any proof.
When chavismo refused to allow María Corina Machado from competing in the election, the Unitary Platform faced the need of having someone else running on her behalf. Enrique Márquez was among the names discussed as the candidato tapa (Machado’s stand-in), though some people said Machado did not like him. The candidacy of González Urrutia, an obscure diplomat that was quite far from being a real politician, was finally accepted by CNE. The fraud of the century took place. But after the fraud, Márquez went to the Venezuelan Supreme Court (TSJ) and demanded that the CNE presented the voting tallies that proved that Maduro, as the CNE alleged, was the winner. The TSJ ignored Márquez, but his speech lambasting Amoroso’s CNE and Maduro’s trickery was aired by State television, whose producers were probably not expecting a moment like that. Especially considering that much of society and those who endorsed Machado and González Urrutia were under a state of terror outside.
Soon after, while members of the Machado-led Comando con Venezuela were forced to hide and flee the country, Márquez announced he would dedicate his efforts to bringing together a movement in defense of the Venezuelan Constitution. Between August and December 2024, Márquez attempted to challenge Maduro using the regime’s own authoritarian institutions. For instance, he formally asked the TSJ to review its own ruling backing the CNE’s results. In November, Márquez and a number of moderate and leftwing figures (including Barreto and former presidential hopefuls Andrés Caleca and Falcón) called Chief Prosecutor Tarek William Saab for a meeting in the prosecutor general’s office, to press for the release of people arrested in the post-election crackdown, especially dozens of minors that were still imprisoned back then.
Another possibility is that the Trump administration is pitching Márquez as a reliable figure that could join Delcy’s local management.
All of this went ignored, of course, as the Maduro regime was capping off its transformation into a brutal police State dominated by Diosdado Cabello. In New Year’s Eve, days before he was captured, Enrique Márquez addressed the public with the following message:
On July 28, a social, democratic, civic, constitutional force materialized, one that we must sustain and strengthen. Failing to recognize what happened on July 28 will unfortunately have consequences that will bring more suffering to Venezuelans.
It is necessary to seek mechanisms that open the way to peaceful change, allowing us to achieve democratic coexistence and thus open the doors to the future for a country that is determined to change.
Let us defend our Constitution with perseverance, with civic and citizen strength.
That is my commitment to Venezuelans.
I wish you all the best in 2025. Happy New Year!
Enrique Márquez
On January 7, amidst the spike in forced disappearances that came before Maduro’s last presidential inauguration, security forces took Enrique Márquez and threw him in El Helicoide for a year, until January 2026.
Now, Trump is presenting Márquez as living proof of how many people are getting freedom in Venezuela thanks to him and the US military. This is in sync with Delcy Rodriguez’s attempt to sell herself as an open ruler, who announces that El Helicoide will be closed and that an insufficient amnesty law would heal the wounds of political polarization. However, hundreds of political prisoners remain in jail, and El Helicoide is just one gulag in an entire archipelago where crimes against humanity have been committed by the chavista regime.
The surprising appearance of Enrique Márquez in Washington DC has sparked another interpretation. Is Donald Trump launching a campaign to sell Márquez as a transition leader, once he decides that Delcy Rodriguez has reached her expiration date?
Marquez is one of the people that has been discussed as a potential transition figure in Venezuela, given his personal prestige and ties with moderate sectors of opposition and chavismo that go back decades.
In other words, on paper he has the profile to act like a hinge between a sector of the opposition that is not entirely loyal to Machado, and an old brand of chavismo that was marginalized by Nicolás Maduro. For example, Márquez is a founding member of the Grupo de Boston, an old parliamentary caucus set up during the 2000-2006 National Assembly composed of chavista and opposition lawmakers meant to interact and exchange views with US Congress representatives. And he has links to Francisco Arias Cárdenas, an Army general and close comrade of Chávez that briefly became his opponent before returning to the comandante’s coalition (Arias Cárdenas, once a presidential candidate and former Zulia governor, now has a seat in the National Assembly that just approved an amnesty law). Apart from this, Márquez has little name recognition within Venezuela. After having read this, you probably know more about him than most people in the country.
Another possibility is that the Trump administration is pitching Márquez as a reliable figure that could join Delcy’s local management. For instance, appointing him to lead the elections authority, after showing up as an honored guest in Trump’s State of the Union address, would go a long way to show that the US is in control and that elections, while not imminent, could be somewhat free and fair.
Was Marquez just an actor in a Trump TV stunt? Perhaps, that should be our base scenario. But maybe he’s something else. Time will tell. Or Corporate.
