Washington writes the contract to stay in Caracas
Ten months after the night-time assault that removed Nicolás Maduro, the State Department negotiates with Delcy Rodríguez a status of forces agreement that would give United States troops a legal basis to remain. The scope is deliberately narrow, and the contract is what would make the occupation survive the government that began it.
The State Department is negotiating a status of forces agreement (SOFA) with the government of Delcy Rodríguez that would lay the legal ground for a long-term United States military presence in Venezuela, according to United States officials cited by The New York Times. The talks, reported on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, are led by the department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The SOFA regulates how foreign soldiers live, move and are disciplined in a host country, and it is the instrument through which Washington keeps troops abroad without calling them occupiers. In a statement quoted by the Times, the State Department said it has negotiated such pacts with more than 100 countries and that they “promote defense cooperation by providing a clear, predictable legal framework for U.S. forces to work on mutually agreed activities.”
What the agreement covers for now
The scope under negotiation is narrower than the phrase “long-term presence” suggests. According to the Times, the agreement covers activities the two sides agree on in advance — ship visits, training, exercises and humanitarian assistance — and leaves the number and location of troops to future agreements. A senior United States official in Caracas, cited by the Times, put any discussion of bases “way, way down the road” and said there is no conversation about bases.
The diplomatic track runs beside the military one on a different calendar. Rubio received Venezuela’s foreign minister, Oliver Blanco, on Monday, November 2, 2026, and the official summary of the meeting spoke of reconciliation between political factions, future elections and the release of political prisoners, with no mention of a military pact. The State Department briefed congressional staff on the negotiations in late October, according to the Times.
United States service members are already in the country, in small numbers: a full-time military attaché and a small Marine detachment at the embassy in Caracas, reopened under the Rodríguez government. In June 2026, after the earthquakes, Southern Command sent about 2,000 troops to Venezuela and the surrounding area, and all of those who entered have since left, the Times reported.
Cooperation in the field is already under way. On Friday, October 30, 2026, the United States provided drones and intelligence to Venezuela’s military for an attack on a camp of the National Liberation Army (ELN) in Apure, on the Colombian border, according to four United States officials cited by the Times.
Trump described the arrangement in his own vocabulary. In a speech in Washington on Monday, November 2, 2026, he referred to “our conquest of Venezuela,” the Times reported, and on the eve of the midterm elections he counted the oil as an achievement, describing hundreds of billions of dollars arriving “every single day”, according to Mother Jones.
What the January operation left
The agreement would put rules around a presence created by force. In January, United States troops killed scores of people in a night-time assault on Venezuela and took Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, to New York, where Maduro awaits trial on drug trafficking charges. Rodríguez, his vice-president, took office as interim president under Washington’s oversight and has not faced an election.
The pact is one piece of a wider militarization of the region. Trump and his aides have ordered operations alongside the forces of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela; the military has carried out dozens of lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that legal experts cited by the Times describe as extrajudicial killings; and the United States keeps troops and assets at bases across Central and South America. Many Venezuelans describe the arrangement as a new form of Western colonialism, the Times reported, and the sight of United States troops in the country is the part that most fuels that reading.
A status of forces agreement turns a military operation into an institution: a term, a legal personality and a counterpart bound by a text.
That is the step that changes the nature of the arrangement. A deployment ordered by a president can be reversed by the next order; a presence written into an agreement survives the government that signed it, because undoing it requires the consent of both parties and a procedure. The contract is what makes the presence durable.
The counterpart carries the weakness. Rodríguez governs without an election, after an operation that removed her predecessor, and anything she signs binds a country whose electorate was never consulted on the presence of foreign troops. Neither government has confirmed the negotiation in public: Caracas has not spoken, and the Venezuelan embassy in Washington did not respond to the Times. There is no announced number of troops, no signature date, no published text, no account of how the pact would pass through Venezuela’s armed forces, and no vote in the United States Congress on the presence.
The negotiation leaves open who would hold the power to withdraw that consent once it is written into a signed text: a government that no election installed, or the electorate that would have to live under it.