Hours after Nicolás Maduro was captured by U.S. forces and removed from Venezuela, the country’s official presidential website remains online, unchanged, and still presenting Maduro as president — a striking digital contradiction at the center of a historic geopolitical rupture.
As of 4:26 p.m. Central Time, the official website of the Despacho de la Presidencia (presidencia.gob.ve) was fully operational, continuing to display photographs of Maduro at public events, routine government headlines, and ceremonial announcements dated to December. The site shows no emergency notice, no acknowledgment of Maduro’s removal from power, and no indication of a transition of authority.
Maduro’s capture has been publicly confirmed by the United States government and widely reported by major international news organizations. Images released by President Donald Trump show Maduro in U.S. military custody, and U.S. officials have stated that he is being transported out of the country to face criminal proceedings in the United States.
Despite these confirmations — and despite widespread military activity in Caracas, including airstrikes, fires, airspace closures, and the shutdown of civilian aviation — Venezuela’s most prominent digital symbol of executive power remains frozen in a pre-collapse state.
The unchanged website underscores a profound disconnect between the physical seizure of state power and control over the country’s civil and digital infrastructure. In previous coups, invasions, and forced regime changes, official government websites are typically among the first assets to be taken offline, seized, or rapidly updated to reflect new leadership. In this case, however, the presidential portal continues to present the image of a functioning Maduro administration that no longer exists.
The site’s persistence raises unanswered questions about who currently controls Venezuela’s non-military institutions, including its communications systems, civil service, and digital assets — and whether any interim authority has yet asserted control over them.
The broader context surrounding Maduro’s removal has drawn intense global scrutiny. U.S. lawmakers from both parties have acknowledged they were informed of the military operation after it began. Democratic leaders including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Adam Smith have condemned the action as unconstitutional and warned it sets a precedent for unilateral regime change. International commentators, including The Guardian, have characterized the operation as an illegal coup and compared it to the logic used by Russia to justify its invasion of Ukraine.
For now, however, one of the clearest indicators of institutional disarray lies not in military briefings or diplomatic statements, but in a government homepage that has failed to register the single most consequential event in Venezuela’s modern political history.
Screenshots of the site were taken while it remained publicly accessible. Its status is expected to change as control over Venezuela’s remaining state infrastructure consolidates. Until then, the country’s official presidential website stands as a digital artifact of a government that, in real terms, no longer exists.
