He is an autocrat who is condemned inside and outside his country for stealing the country’s last election. Yet on Friday, Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who has overseen his country’s dramatic decline — including rampant inflation, power outages, famine, mass migration and the collapse of the nation’s democracy — is scheduled to be sworn in for a third term.

If he serves the full six years, it will extend his party’s rule into a third decade.

Mr. Maduro will return to Miraflores, the presidential palace in Caracas, even after millions of Venezuelans used a ballot box express a desire for change. And he will do so amid his sharpest crackdown yet, with police and military in riot gear covering the capital’s streets; journalists, activists and community leaders in prison; and wide expansion of its surveillance apparatus.

The man the United States and others say won the election, Edmundo Gonzalezremains in exile, forced to flee to Spain or face arrest, while the country’s most important opposition leader, Maria Corina Machadohe was in hiding inside Venezuela.

On Thursday, she made her first appearance since August, joining street protests against Mr. Maduro in Caracas, the capital. She stood on top of a truck while thousands of supporters, all risking detention, chanted “freedom! freedom! freedom!”

There have been several other recent protests against the government, and the ever-present threat that security forces will imprison civilians is likely to make it difficult for Ms. Machado to continue rallying supporters to the streets.

Mr González said he would return to Venezuela on Friday under his own oath – but the government has put a $100,000 bounty on his head and it is unclear how he plans to avoid arrest if he does.

For his part, Mr. Maduro faces the possibility that President-elect Donald J. Trump, who is filled his foreign policy team with Maduro’s enemieswill take a hard stance against him, possibly imposing additional economic sanctions.

In response, the Venezuelan leader has spent the past six months amassing a raft of foreign prisoners, which analysts and former US diplomats say he hopes to use as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the United States and other nations.

Since July, Venezuelan security forces have picked up about 50 visitors and holders of dual passports from more than a dozen countries, according to the watchdog group Foro Penal.

“They are pawns for exchange,” said Gonzalo Himiob, founder of Foro Penal.

Mr Maduro wants the lifting of US sanctions, which have devastated the Venezuelan economy, and international recognition, among other policy changes.

Venezuelan officials say they have detained at least nine people with US citizenship or residency status, and officials accuse some of them of plotting to kill Mr Maduro.

The United States does not have a diplomatic presence in Venezuela, and a State Department representative said the US government is not even sure where its citizens are being held.

Relatives of the three detained US citizens said they had not heard from their loved ones since they disappeared months ago and had received only limited communication from their own government.

David Estrella, 64, a father of five, crossed into Venezuela overland from Colombia on September 9, according to his ex-wife Elvia Macias, 44.

Ms. Macias, who is close to her ex-husband, described him as an “adventurer” who – full of optimism that the situation in Venezuela “isn’t that bad” – went to visit friends.

He worked in quality control for pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey, was about to retire and had already visited Venezuela once, she said.

Mrs. Macias wept as she recounted celebrating Christmas without him.

“This situation has had a huge impact on our lives,” she said.

Mr. Maduro’s socialist-inspired movement has led the country since 1999, when his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, took office. In July, Mr. Maduro faced the most difficult election challenge so far, facing Mr. González, a former diplomat who became Mrs. Machado’s surrogate when the government forbade her to run.

Even amid an intensified campaign of repression, many Venezuelans have come out strongly to support Mr. González. And in the days after the election, the opposition collected thousands of vote counting sheets, their publication on the Internet and saying that they showed that Mr. González convincingly won.

Mr. Maduro nevertheless declared victory, a claim questioned by independent observers, including the Carter Center, the United Nations and the national electoral council.

The United States recognized Mr. González as the winner – and even Maduro’s allies such as President Gustavo Petro of Colombia and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, both leftist neighbors of Venezuela, have distanced themselves.

Neither will come to the inauguration.

Mr. Maduro has held foreigners for political purposes before. But his government has never held so many at once, according to Foro Penal, a watchdog group.

Some analysts say Mr. Maduro decided to arrest foreigners because he saw that it was getting what he wanted.

In 2022 i and again in 2023The United States struck deals with the Venezuelan government, in which Washington released high-profile Venezuelan allies in exchange for American citizens held by Mr. Maduro.

It was part of a shift in the way America deals with governments and others who imprison Americans abroad.

In the past, US policy was not to negotiate with the hijackers, for fear that breaking the deal would encourage hostage-taking.

But it left imprisoned Americans with little hope of rescue, and critics said it even contributed to the deaths of people like James Foley, the journalist killed by ISIS in Syria in 2014.

The United States has since shown more willingness to negotiate. But some critics argue that it provokes the very practice Mr. Maduro engages in.

Tom Shannon, who held a senior position at the State Department in the Obama and Trump administrations, said he believed Mr. Maduro was encouraged by recent hostage affairs Russia and Iran.

However, he did not consider the termination of business to be a mistake.

“I think one of our jobs is to take care of American citizens abroad,” Mr. Shannon said. “And it’s very hard to just write people off and say, ‘oh, bad luck, I’m so sorry’.”

Instead, he said the US government should “inflict a level of pain on the hijackers that makes it clear that this will not happen again.”

Other U.S. citizens detained in Venezuela include Wilbert Castañeda, 37, a Navy SEAL who traveled to Venezuela to visit his girlfriend, according to a statement from his mother, Petra Castañeda, 60.

Mr. Castañeda, a father of four, was arrested by the authorities in late August. By September, his face was plastered on state television, and Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s interior minister, accused him and others of participating in a plot to kill the president.

Ms Castañeda, who lives in California, said her son was innocent.

“The whole family is very worried, we are desperate,” she said. “We cling to the hope that the United States will be able to reach an agreement with Mr. Maduro.”

Stephen William Logan, 83, a retired teacher in West Virginia, said he didn’t even know his son Aaron Barrett Logan, 34, had gone to Venezuela. Then, in September, State Department officials called his family and informed them that he was being detained.

Mr. Logan said his son worked in the United States for a major bank as a “penetration tester” — testing the bank’s security by trying to hack into its systems.

Mr. Cabello accused the younger Mr. Logan of being involved in the same murder plot.

“I don’t even know how to visualize it,” the elder Mr. Logan said of the conditions his son lived in, wondering if it was like a “concentration camp.”

Representatives of Mr. Trump’s transition team declined to comment. The State Department has not declared any US detainees wrongfully detained, which could bring them additional help within the US government.

In Caracas, many attended an anti-Maduro protest on Thursday, although similar gatherings were met with violence by security forces and ended in participant’s death.

Among those on the streets was Laura Matos, 21, who said “everyone” told her “don’t go out.”

But “I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said. “I said, ‘I want something to happen, I want the newly elected president Edmundo González to be sworn in, I want Venezuela to experience change’.”

“We don’t deserve to be like this,” she continued, as fellow protesters honked plastic horns around her. “We deserve more, to have a better future. Young people like me deserve to be able to study and work and stay in our country.”

Alain Delaquerière contributed to the research.