Venezuela is facing a deepening crisis of state-led repression and criminal infiltration, according to separate warnings issued this week by a UN investigative panel and opposition leader María Corina Machado. 

A report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission released on December 11 found that the regime-aligned Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) has spent more than a decade carrying out arbitrary killings, political detentions, torture, and sexual and gender-based violence under what it described as a system of entrenched impunity. “The documented facts show the role of the GNB in a pattern of systematic and coordinated repression,” said Marta Valiñas, who heads the UN Mission.

Investigators said the government’s security doctrine has blurred military and policing functions, enabling the Guard to act as a central instrument of internal control. Evidence gathered by the panel indicates repeated use of disproportionate force during major protest cycles and routine abuses inside Guard-run detention centres. The judiciary’s inability or unwillingness to pursue cases—along with efforts to manipulate evidence—has reinforced systemic impunity, the Mission found. It concluded that senior political and military leaders, alongside Guard officers, may face liability under the Rome Statute.

Members of Maduro's government have long rejected accusations of human rights abuses and repression, slamming them as "falsehoods and fabrications."

In a separate development, Venezuela’s National Assembly on December 11 voted to repeal Caracas' commitment to the Rome Statute, the international treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“It only serves the designs of American imperialism,” said National Assembly president Jorge Rodriguez, seemingly unaware that Washington is not a party to the Rome Statute and has often criticised the ICC, especially under the administration of President Donald Trump.

On the same day in Oslo, where she had travelled in secret to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado issued her own warning, arguing that Venezuela’s deterioration goes beyond institutional repression to a form of internal occupation by "foreign operatives" and criminal groups that she says operate with the regime’s consent.

“Venezuela has already been invaded. We have Russian agents, we have Iranian agents. We have terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, which operate freely in concert with the regime,” she said. Machado added that guerrilla groups and cartels now exert control over large parts of the population, feeding drug trafficking, human smuggling, and prostitution networks that have turned the country into “the centre of crime in the Americas.”

Machado contends that the durability of President Nicolas Maduro's government – which is being targeted by the Trump administration with sanctions, oil tanker seizures and a military buildup in the Caribbean – depends on illicit revenue streams that bankroll an expansive repressive apparatus. Echoing Trump's claims linking Maduro to drug cartels, she pointed to drug trafficking, black-market oil sales, arms trading, and human trafficking as core funding sources.

Responding to a reporter's question about the recent US seizure of an oil tanker off Venezuela's coast, the firebrand opposition leader vigorously called on the international community to sever the financial flows propping up the regime. “We need to cut off those streams. And once that happens and the repression weakens, it’s over. Because that’s all the regime has left: violence and terror,” Machado said.