In Our Name: Venezuela
What a country calls liberation tells you what that country has become.
On January 3rd, 2026, American aircraft crossed into Venezuelan airspace. By morning, Nicolás Maduro was in chains and a word was on every screen: Liberation. Officials invoked Panama 1989, Noriega captured, democracy restored, mission accomplished.
We built a knowledge graph to test that claim.
What We Did
We encoded nine cases of U.S.-involved leader removal as structured data: Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Grenada 1983, Panama 1989, Romania 1989, Haiti 1994, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, and Venezuela 2026. Each case was scored on five dimensions:
- Military resistance: Did the incumbent military fight?
- Insider role: Did regime insiders facilitate the removal?
- Leader fate: Was the leader killed, captured quickly, or did he flee?
- Successor type: Did the opposition take power, or a regime insider?
- Intervention type: External invasion, internal coup, or hybrid?
We ran SPARQL queries against the RDF graph. We used NetworkX for community detection and similarity analysis.
What the Graph Found
Venezuela's nearest match is Chile 1973, not Panama 1989.
| Case | Similarity |
|---|---|
| Chile 1973 | 69.8% |
| Romania 1989 | 63.5% |
| Guatemala 1954 | 62.0% |
| Libya 2011 | 59.6% |
| Iraq 2003 | 54.6% |
| Haiti 1994 | 44.4% |
| Panama 1989 | 43.7% |
| Grenada 1983 | 40.0% |
Panama, the official comparison, ranks seventh of eight.
SPARQL Discovery
Query: Find actors who are both betrayers AND successors.
Results:
- Pinochet (Chile 1973)
- Iliescu (Romania 1989)
- Cabello (Venezuela 2026)
Three names. Three men who stood beside their leaders and then stood in their place.
NetworkX Discovery
Community detection split the graph into two clusters:
Community 0: Panama, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, Libya
Community 1: Chile, Romania, Guatemala, Venezuela
The algorithm placed Venezuela with the insider-betrayal cases, not the liberation cases. It didn't know what Panama means to American memory. It only knew Panama belongs to a different cluster.
The Chile Template
On September 11, 1973, jets appeared over Santiago. The military didn't defend Allende, they killed him. The Americans hadn't sent the jets. They had done something more elegant: made the coup possible and watched it happen.
Venezuela matches this structure:
| Chile 1973 | Venezuela 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| The military | Did not defend him | Did not defend him |
| The insiders | Opened the door | Opened the door |
| The leader | Dead by evening | Gone by morning |
| The Americans | Behind the curtain | On the stage |
| After | The general ruled | The minister waits |
Testable Predictions
If the template holds:
- Cabello governs, Machado does not
- Oil contracts flow north
- Elections are delayed or managed
- The Americans stay
If the template breaks:
- Machado enters government
- Free elections within the year
- Cabello faces the same court as Maduro
- The Americans leave
We do not claim certainty. The confidence intervals overlap. What we claim is narrower: Panama does not fit. The story we were told is not the story the structure tells.
Technical Implementation
- Ontology: OWL classes (Case, Actor, Role) with object properties (hasActor, playsRole, structuralParallel)
- Knowledge Graph: 256 RDF triples encoding 9 cases, 27 actors, and structural parallels
- SPARQL: Pattern matching on dimension thresholds and role co-occurrence
- NetworkX: Similarity edges via Euclidean distance, community detection via greedy modularity
Sources: Historical cases from Britannica and State Department archives. Venezuela 2026 from Fox News, NPR, CNN, Chatham House.
The next months will make their own record. If Machado governs, if elections come, then the template was wrong and we will say so. But if it is Chile again, if it is the same story wearing new clothes and landing on new airstrips in the dark, then we will know what was done on January 3rd. Not what it was called. What it was.
The full analysis, including the formal ontology, SPARQL queries, inference engine, and statistical methodology, is available on GitHub
Leer en español →
Aureliano Vale
January 4, 2026
