With the US recognising González as the winner of the recent election, and many other Latin American countries criticising Maduro's "victory," the question of the extent to which foreign governments can exert pressure on authoritarian regimes to change becomes relevant.
Obviously, other countries being mad without following it up through concrete actions won't particularly bother any authoritarian leaders. Economic sanctions are always an option if one wants to make a material difference - if successful, innocent people will be worse off (and there are certainly questions as to whether that's okay or not) but it does interfere with an authoritarian's ability to govern effectively. When people are struggling, as discussed in class, they are far less likely to accept non-democratic rule.
The flip side of that is the potential for the regime to then paint outsiders as external threats that need to be countered, uniting people against a common enemy - similar to how North Korea was discussed earlier in the tri. There would be a range of factors that affected how likely people are to buy this narrative, very few of which would be inside the control of external actors. It seems far less likely in a competitive authoritarian state such as Venezuela without such total control of information flows, especially at this moment in time where the majority of Venezuelans have lost faith in the government - though anti-Western imperialist narratives do resonate quite strongly in Latin America, so that could perhaps be exploited.
Anything more powerful than condemnations and economic measures are kind of out of the question, especially post-Iraq. Respecting state sovereignty even when governments are horrifically oppressive seems to be the norm, and regimes that blur the lines between democracy and non-democracy like Venezuela would not be high on the priority list of inevitably controversial interventions if they were to occur.
If you thought this blog post would have a definite conclusion to make about the efficacy of external pressures, you are wrong. Every academic article I read ends with "it depends," and that's probably the right answer here too. I doubt it will do anything in Venezuela, but that rests on my vibes-based prediction that other states won't take meaningful actions against the Maduro regime. Support for opposition efforts will likely remain verbal, which is functionally rather useless.
Good points, Jack. It's a bit more complex than "if people are struggling, they are far less likely to accept authoritarian rule" - though that is part of it, sometimes struggling people are less likely to participate in anti-regime demonstrations for example. But being popular and successful helps with not having to rely on coercion, which Maduro cannot credibly claim. (Also, I note the wanton flouting of censorship here! Madure has been exploiting anti-imperialist narratives, as Chavez did before him, for years - it's possible that he's not as credible as before).
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