In January, the Trump administration predicted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s imminent downfall as he wrestled with an energized opposition, debilitating U.S. oil sanctions and international isolation after dozens of nations proclaimed his leadership illegitimate.
Today, Mr. Maduro appears in firm control. The opposition is grappling with a corruption scandal and its efforts to rekindle street protests have fallen flat. Venezuela’s crisis-racked economy is showing subtle signs of improvement. And governments across Latin America are facing their own political turmoil, distracting from once-burgeoning international efforts to remove the Venezuelan strongman from power.
“Maduro is probably feeling better about himself right now than he has in the last several years,” said Fernando Cutz, a former official of the U.S. National Security Council who worked on policy toward Venezuela. “I am less optimistic right now than I have been in the last three years. I don’t see any reason to forecast that 2020 will bring positive change for the people of Venezuela.”
The rosier outlook for Mr. Maduro underscores the difficulty for the U.S. and its allies in ousting a leader who has control of the armed forces and police and readily uses those forces to repress the opposition. It also highlights the excessive optimism of the Trump administration and what critics of the American policy said were unrealistic expectations that pressure tactics would easily force Mr. Maduro and his lieutenants from power.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. On Jan. 23, Juan Guaidó, the head of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, declared himself interim president. Within days, the U.S. and dozens of other countries recognized him as Venezuela’s rightful president over Mr. Maduro, a leftist autocrat accused of fraudulently winning re-election in 2018.
“Nicolás Maduro is a dictator with no legitimate claim to power, and Nicolás Maduro must go,” Vice President Mike Pence said in April.
Instead, as the months passed, Mr. Maduro hunkered down, and Mr. Guaidó lost momentum as opposition efforts to flip the military and unseat the Venezuelan leader failed. By September, one of Mr. Maduro’s staunchest adversaries in the U.S. was sidelined with the removal of White House national security adviser John Bolton, who told Latin American leaders in August that Mr. Maduro was “at the end of his rope.”
In October, the region was roiled by violent protests in Ecuador, Chile and Bolivia, allowing Mr. Maduro to point to that turmoil to distract from his misrule in Venezuela and the chronic food and medicine shortages it has caused.
Venezuela’s economy, which the International Monetary Fund projected would contract by 35% this year, is performing somewhat less dismally than it has been. Crude oil exports rose to 935,000 barrels per day last month, from 637,500 barrels a day in September, according to website TankerTrackers.com, as tankers docked in Venezuela despite U.S. sanctions aimed at crippling its lifeblood industry.
The government has stopped enforcing price and currency controls and eased import restrictions. The economy is getting a boost from 4 million migrants who have fled since 2015 and are now sending back billions of dollars annually for relatives left behind. The government has quietly permitted dollarization to take hold, with many shoppers fortunate enough to have greenbacks spending them freely.
“There’s been an upturn,” said Osman Bolívar, a telecommunications businessman in Valencia who saw a 35% increase in sales at his stores the last two months. “One hundred percent of the products that we sell are sold in dollars.”
Mr. Bolívar said the economy remains dire and he doesn’t expect major improvements unless there is a political change—a prospect he sees dimming.
“We’ve adapted in order to survive,” he said. “What Guaidó has proposed is just a dream.”
Elliott Abrams, the top U.S. envoy to Venezuela, said it was “flatly wrong” that the situation was improving for Mr. Maduro or that the opposition was losing momentum. Mr. Abrams pointed to this year’s overall decline in oil production, the continuing humanitarian crisis and recent antigovernment protests. He noted that Western Hemisphere countries recently agreed on sanctions against Venezuelan officials to increase pressure on Mr. Maduro.
“If the situation were stabilizing, Russia and China would be lending more money to the regime, knowing it could pay them back,” Mr. Abrams told The Wall Street Journal. “Instead they are working hard to get money out now and are committing zero new money, because they know the regime’s situation is so precarious.”
Within the opposition, however, a corruption scandal is now causing infighting and undermining its claims to being an honest alternative to Mr. Maduro’s regime. Earlier this month, Venezuelan news website Armando.info reported that opposition lawmakers, in exchange for alleged kickbacks, lobbied in favor of a businessman under investigation in Colombia for alleged links to the Venezuelan government’s corruption-plagued food program.
The nine lawmakers, members of a congressional oversight committee, reportedly wrote letters supporting the businessman to the office of Colombia’s attorney general, which is conducting the probe. The website said the man has ties to Alex Saab Morán, a Colombian businessman the U.S. indicted in July over accusations he ran global money-laundering operations that diverted hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds into overseas accounts for the Venezuelan regime.
Mr. Saab’s Colombia-based lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment. Mr. Saab has previously denied allegations of corruption.
“All of this really solidifies Maduro,” said David Smilde, a scholar on Venezuela at Tulane University. “We are seeing a crumbling of this opposition unity that started last January.”
Lawmakers from Mr. Maduro’s Socialist Party and the president’s powerful allies mocked the opposition over the alleged influence-peddling.
“No one is clean in this corruption fight in the opposition,” Diosdado Cabello, a top Venezuelan official, wrote on Twitter. “Accusations will come and go between them, they’re a society of political mercenaries. This is getting good and we will be victorious.”
Mr. Guaidó suspended the accused lawmakers from their congressional responsibilities while opening an investigation into the alleged wrongdoing.
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“As a society, we have to say ‘enough,’” he said, speaking of corruption. “As civil servants who have sworn to protect the Venezuelan people, we can’t allow it.”
Luis Vicente León, a leading Venezuelan pollster and political analyst, said the scandal was sure to undermine trust in the now dispirited opposition and further undercut Mr. Guaidó’s approval rating, which had already fallen about 20 points since the start of the year to 40% before the scandal emerged in October.
“There is no way that this won’t have a negative political impact,” he said. “The question is how deep will the negative impact be. You can’t separate the image of the opposition from its main leader.”
—Jessica Donati in Washington contributed to this article.
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