Between 2004 and 2013 Venezuela authored more regional architecture than any Latin American state of its size in history — ALBA in 2004, PetroCaribe in 2005 with concessional terms the IMF valued at no less than 0.7% of members' GDP, and a leading role in UNASUR and CELAC — while after 2013 it became the object around which the hemisphere's institutions reorganized: suspended from Mercosur in 2016 and 2017, self-expelled from the OAS between 2017 and 2019, the cause of the Lima Group's creation in 2017 and of PROSUR's in 2019, and the subject of the largest coordinated recognition-of-government action of the modern era in 2019 (Jardón et al., 2020; Palestini, 2021; Ribeiro Hoffmann, 2019; Nolte, 2021; Hasar, 2025). The aim of this review article is to synthesize the fragmented scholarship on Venezuelan foreign policy, Latin American regionalism, extra-regional patronage, and recognition politics into a sin- gle account of this transformation. The research applies a structured review methodology: a cor- pus of 76 peer-reviewed studies published 2019–2026, verified item by item, is synthesized with institutional and documentary sources and organized through a three-period, four-arena recon- struction of Venezuela's institutional standing. The original contribution of the article is the con- cept of hub inversion — the transformation of a state from author of regional institutions into the object around which rival institutions organize — operationalized in a Hemispheric Position Matrix whose every cell is documentarily anchored. Key findings: the exclusion cascade of 2014– 2019 was executed almost entirely through institutions Venezuela had once shaped or joined, making the isolation a mirror image of the earlier activism; extra-regional deepening with Russia, China, and Cuba compensated the lost hemispheric position only in regime-survival terms, not in positional terms (Gratius, 2022; Kosevich, 2023; Bull & Rosales, 2026); and the isolation proved sticky through mechanism change — the recognition coalition of 2019 collapsed by 2023, yet non-recognition of the 2024 election, the escalation of the Essequibo dispute before the In- ternational Court of Justice, and exclusion from every functioning hemispheric body reproduced the isolated position by new means (Mijares, 2025; Pomson, 2025; Legler, 2020). The concept and matrix are transferable to other cases of institutional authorship reversed, from interwar re- visionists to contemporary Nicaragua.