Venezuela can seem to be a place of dissonant extremes.
Since the United States swooped in and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, in January, the country’s politically connected elite have talked of an economic revival, driven by President Trump’s promises to “unleash prosperity” by commandeering Venezuela’s beleaguered oil industry.
At the same time, hundreds of political prisoners, many gaunt and traumatized after years of abject conditions in fetid jails, have been released. Most are terrified to speak about their ordeals lest the government, essentially unchanged except for the loss of Mr. Maduro, come back for them. Hundreds more remain locked up.
But between the blessed and the cursed there is a yawning middle ground where nearly all other Venezuelans — professors, doctors, bricklayers, street vendors — spend their days sifting through the rubble of an obliterated economy. For this sizable slice of the population, U.S. intervention has changed little so far and holds only a faint prospect of anything better.
On a recent day, four professors of politics and economics gathered for coffee around a plastic table on the campus where they teach, the Central University of Venezuela in the capital, Caracas. They recounted how a downward economic spiral over the course of Mr. Maduro’s 13 years in power had pushed them into poverty.
“In the last five years, the currency devalued so much that my salary equaled four dollars a month. Which is to say, I forgot I had a salary,” said Pedro García, 59, who now heads a union of retired professors.
Over time, he said he canceled more of his classes to sell bits of home-cooked food to people stuck in lines for subsidized fuel at a gas station outside his apartment. Then he sold his mother-in-law’s bed, and her freezer, and his bicycle. His pension is a pittance — “not enough to keep me from dying of hunger,” he said.
His colleague, Carlos Hermoso, an economist, leaned in, furrowed an eyebrow and said that the U.S. promise to reinvest proceeds from Venezuelan oil it sells back into the country could give the illusion of “growth,” but that it would be a “mirage” for the vast majority of Venezuelans.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I hope that the United States turns Venezuela into its factory in its competitive war with China,” Mr. Hermoso said, taking pains to clarify he would never entertain such a wish if the straits were not so dire. “That would be a step forward for us.”
The Trump administration says that it has started sending millions of dollars in sales of Venezuelan oil to the government in Caracas and that it would “assure these funds are spent transparently and for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.”
Rebuilding the oil industry alone, however, could cost more than $180 billion and take more than a decade, according to analysts at Rystad Energy, a research firm, and even then the country would produce less than it did at its peak in the 1990s.
The value of Venezuela’s currency, the bolívar, has continued to drop since Mr. Maduro was ousted, falling by at least 36 percent since January, leaving the monthly minimum wage at the stupefying level of 27 cents.
While the United States has intervened in Venezuela’s economy, it has not stepped in to prop up its central bank’s hard currency reserves like it recently did for Argentina.
On Thursday, Venezuela’s leader, Delcy Rodríguez, announced that while the minimum wage would remain the same, workers would be ensured bonuses that added up to $240 a month. Independent studies show that for food alone, a Venezuelan family of five would typically need to spend $610 per month.
The public coffers remain largely empty, and basic services like transportation, education and health are hollowed out. Nearly eight million Venezuelans fled over the course of Mr. Maduro’s dozen years in power, and very few have seen enough hope in his replacement to want to return.
Venezuela’s transition is still in its early stages and reversing years of decline will not be quick or easy.
But for now pessimism dominates.
One morning in Caricuao, once considered a desirable bedroom community in Caracas set amid greenery out near a zoo, a line to board rickety buses ran hundreds of people deep. Many of the buses were welded together: a Dodge cab to a Chevy chassis.
The queue passed under a station for the city’s metro — once seen as South America’s best — but over the course of the entire morning commute that day, not one train came.
Despite the indignity, it was a scene of order and calm. Or perhaps it was resignation.
Yelmira Jiménez, the head of a bus drivers’ association in the area, said the lines were always long because most buses were stuck in lines of their own at gas stations. Drivers can spend days waiting to reach the pumps.
She explained that Venezuela’s government had imported 7,000 Chinese buses in 2011, and in 2015, it opened a half-billion dollar plant for a Chinese company to manufacture them locally. But mismanagement and corruption had forced the plant to close just years later.
With the local currency falling in value, few drivers could afford repairs, let alone regular maintenance. They were piecing together what they could.
“Look at the passengers packed like sardines — every dream has been robbed from them, even though this is supposedly an oil-producing country,” she said. “The single thing that’s changed since they took Maduro is I feel more comfortable talking to a gringo journalist.”
In the impoverished hillside neighborhoods that encircle Caracas, the despair is more acute. Residents described schools with only one teacher for every age group, stores lacking any fresh produce, years spent searching and failing to find a job. Petty criminals had left the country, some residents said, because there was so little left to rob.
According to a rare study on poverty in the country conducted by Andrés Bello Catholic University in 2024, three-quarters of the population lacked sufficient income to meet daily needs and more than half experienced what the study called “multidimensional poverty” that looks beyond income to include education, housing and employment.
In a study by the same university a decade earlier, around when Mr. Maduro took power from his predecessor Hugo Chávez, both of those numbers were roughly 50 percent lower.
Many said they saw the situation as a corruption of Mr. Chávez’s legacy by Mr. Maduro. Ana Bracho used to work as a minor functionary in the government, and had Mr. Chávez’s likeness tattooed on her wrist. Her neighborhood had enthusiastically supported the socialist revolution in the 1990s and 2000s.
A few years ago, she quit her job and got the tattoo scrubbed and replaced with one of a flower. She said her increasingly public criticisms of Mr. Maduro meant that socialist party functionaries in her neighborhood prevented her from gaining access to welfare programs that provide basic food staples and cooking gas.
“Back in the day, the slogan used to be, ‘Together, everything is possible,’” Ms. Bracho said. “I guess everything included robbery and malnutrition. Unemployment until death — that’s what we have.”
The four professors gathered over coffee seemed to concur. The sheer volatility of the economy, the dearth of formal jobs, the decade-plus of mass emigration — it all seemed too much to comprehend, even to lifelong scholars who study those same questions. In any case, who had the time to keep track? They were all hustling to make ends meet.
For many, the dream of escaping the grind is a recurring one. Nélida Salazar has given up on it for herself, but she invests everything in her youngest son, Santiago Jesús Díaz, 15, who has been showing promise as a baseball prospect. He wants to be a major league right fielder.
To afford a training academy, the occasional new mitt and an athlete’s diet for her son, Ms. Salazar has sold everything of value that she owned. Her husband and eldest son contribute nearly everything they earn as police officers.
She makes candies at home and earns a couple of dollars a day selling them. When she cannot afford fresh eggs for her son to eat, she pulverizes discarded egg shells into a kind of protein powder. She avoids opening her refrigerator when he is home because its emptiness makes her cry and she can sense his awareness of the immense pressure on him to succeed.
“When I pray, I say, ‘Please, God, give me work, give me work, give me work,’” she said. “If someone said, come clean my house, clean my toilets, I would. But there’s no one asking.”
Isayen Herrera and María Victoria Fermín contributed reporting.
