Defending Venezuela from U.S. Imperialism

Don’t Help Demonize Maduro

by Gary Olson / October 11th, 2025

Steve Ellner, one of my go-to sources on Venezuela, cautions that although the Maduro government has unquestionable shortcomings and is not above criticism, the left’s priority today shouldn’t be purity tests. It should be about the struggle against US imperialism, as it invokes the Monroe Doctrine and evidence-free, “narco-terrorist” narratives on behalf of regime change in Venezuela. There is a relentless effort to demonize Maduro, and some on the putative left fail to recognize the need for a strong state and how difficult it is to construct socialism when your country “has been singled out by Washington for special attack, a fact that has been thoroughly documented.”

Ellner continues, “If Maduro is brought down, the far right — headed by Maria Corina Machado, who says she wants to see Maduro and his family behind bars — will undoubtedly dominate the new regime with Washington’s blessing. If this were to happen, the most likely scenario would be the kind of brutal repression that has historically followed the downfall of previous governments from Indonesia in 1967 to Chile in 1974.” Eric Zuesse adds that Machado is the “U.S. Deep State’s Venezuelan puppet, successor to Juan Guido and Leopoldo López.”

Given the above, it was disheartening but not totally surprising that Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City, recently said he believes “Nicolas Maduro and Miguel Diaz-Canel are dictators.” This ill-timed and totally unnecessary statement parrots the CIA’s false narrative about Maduro and helps legitimize decades of U.S. aggression against Venezuela and Marco Rubio’s call for regime change in Caracas. I’m afraid Mamdani is sounding a bit like Bernie Sanders.

Will the US Invade?

At this point, it’s unclear whether the U.S. will actually invade Venezuela, attempt to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution, install a puppet government, and gain control of the country’s oil, gas, and precious metals. So far, there have been four strikes (September 2, 15, 16, and October 3) on vessels in international waters, but not a scintilla of evidence that the vessels were carrying drugs. Some 4,500 troops (insufficient for a land invasion) and eight warships are stationed off Venezuela’s coast. In addition, several fighter jets have been moved to Puerto Rico. The U.S. State Department has raised its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest from $5 million to $50 million.

The Chilean Case

Here we might recall that on September 4, 1970, the Chilean Left held an enormous rally of some 800,000 workers and peasants who marched before President Salvador Allende, who was standing on the balcony of the Moneda Presidential Palace in Santiago. They chanted, “Build People’s Power! Allende, Allende! The People Will Defend You!” And perhaps more importantly, they pleaded, “We Want Guns! We Want Guns!” For clearly debatable reasons, Allende refused to arm the workers and peasants, and on September 11, a military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the socialist government. Allende was too late in finding out that there is no “peaceful road to socialism” when faced with the implacable force of U.S. imperialism that refuses to allow the “threat of a good example.” Maduro learned from the Chilean case and has distributed AK-47s to millions of citizens who are eager to defend the country’s sovereignty.

We know there has been a strategic retreat by U.S. imperialism in the face of China’s rise and the U.S./NATO defeat in Ukraine. Trump’s fascism is directed at “the Homeland” and the Western Hemisphere. But Trump — who couldn’t even defeat Yemen —might pause at the prospect of coffins coming home from Venezuela.

Finally, a note: John Pilger’s documentary War on Democracy (2007) opened my students’ eyes to U.S. imperialism in Latin America as no classroom lecture could have done. Among the film’s countless attributes were interviews with Hugo Chavez and how the Venezuelan people (and military) rallied to save him from being toppled by Washington. Even given the passage of time, Pilger’s film remains timely for understanding what’s happening today.

Gary Olson is Professor Emeritus at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. Contact: glolson416@gmail.com. Per usual, thanks to Kathleen Kelly, my in-house ed. Read other articles by Gary.

Will the US Attack Venezuela?

by Roger D. Harris / October 10th, 2025

Spoiler alert – it already has. This is not a glib answer but a comment on the nature of the conflict. The US mission to wrench Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution out from its roots has a quarter-century pedigree. Stick around to the end of the article for an assessment of the likelihood of an overt military attack inside Venezuela. But first a little historical context.

Regime change has failed…so far

 In 2002, a US-backed military coup temporarily ousted Hugo Chávez. A mere 47 hours later, the people of Venezuela spontaneously arose and returned their rightfully elected president.

 Washington has persistently interfered in the internal affairs of Venezuela, pouring millions of dollars to rig elections. Yet, the perpetually divided and unpopular US-fostered opposition is more isolated and discredited than ever.

Undeterred by its 2002 failed coup, the US has repeatedly sponsored attempts to achieve by violence what they could not do by interfering in Venezuelan elections. In 2020, the so-called “Operation Gideon” was designed to kidnap President Maduro. Derisively dubbed the “Bay of Piglets,” this coup attempt along with numerous others failed. Local fisher folk apprehended the mercenaries.

Among the many diplomatic efforts at regime change by Washington, the Lima Group was cobbled together in 2017. The cabal of 11 rightwing Latin American states and Canada aspired to facilitate “a peaceful exit” to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. By 2021, nearly half of the Lima Group countries had elected progressive governments and that diplomatic offensive fizzled.

Meanwhile in 2019, the US anointed unknown 35-year-old Juan Guaidó as “interim president” of Venezuela. On December 21, 2022, his own opposition found the puppet so toxic and corrupt that they gave him the boot.

Previously in 2015, Barack Obama certified that Venezuela was an “extraordinary threat” to US national security. He imposed unilateral coercive measures designed to destroy the Venezuelan economy. Euphemistically called “sanctions,” this form of collective punishment is illegal under international law. Regardless, each subsequent US president has continued and to varying degrees augmented the economic warfare.

Combined with oil commodity prices cratering – the source of almost all of its foreign earnings – Venezuela experienced the largest peacetime economic contraction in recent world history. Inflation reached 2,000,000% and the days of the Bolivian Revolution appeared to be numbered. However by 2023, in a heroic effort under the resolute political leadership of President Maduro, Venezuela reversed the economic freefall and recorded a 5% GDP growth rate, which has continued in a positive direction.

 US trapped in its imperial imperative

Without further detailing the multitude of illegal US regime-change machinations, it is sufficient to say that the very successes of the Venezuelans have forced Uncle Sam to escalate the conflict. Forced because, as an imperial power, the United States is structurally driven by its inherent pursuit of hegemony – rule over all potential challengers. This compulsion is codified in its official security doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance.”

Venezuela has indeed been a challenge. Even before Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998, former President Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the country’s oil reserves – the largest in the world – in 1976. Chávez increased state control over the oil industry and expropriated international oil company assets.

Chávez’s precedent of using the country’s natural resources – including Venezuela’s substantial reserves of natural gas, iron ore, bauxite, gold, coal, and diamonds – to fund social programs, rather than handing them over for private profit, is anathema to the US. Not only does the imperium lust over the oil for its own corporations, but control of such strategic resources are geopolitically critical for maintaining global dominance.

Venezuela has also been a leader in promoting regional unity that is independent of the US, forging alliances such as CELCA and ALBA. It is a close ally with Nicaragua and Cuba, also on the US enemies list. Through OPEC, Friends in Defense of the UN Charter, and other initiatives, Venezuela has encouraged Latin American unity with Africa and Asia. Venezuela has “strategic partnerships” with China and Russia and is close to Iran. A champion of Palestine, it broke relations with Israel in 2009. Venezuela also supports an emerging multilateral international community.

For all these “offenses,” the Bolivarian Revolution’s existence is insufferable to the Yankee hegemon…to be crushed.

The guard rails are down

Trump is operating with virtually zero institutional constraints. A mere five congressional Democrats recently awoke from their slumber to send a letter meekly suggesting that presidential “powers are not limitless.” But the Senate just voted against a war powers resolution to constrain attacks on Venezuela.

Democrat representatives on the House Foreign Affairs Committee posted on X: “Trump and Rubio are pushing for regime change in Venezuela. The American people don’t want another war.” However, their colleagues in the Senate provided a unanimous mandate to the very same Republicans who ran on a “Maduro must go” platform. They rushed to do so, without debate, in the very first hours of the new administration.

Within the bipartisan consensus for regime change in Venezuela, the differences are cosmetic. The Democrats would prefer to overthrow the sovereign state “legally.” Truthout reports that some senior Democrats warned “fellow members against opposing Trump’s war, saying that it would be tantamount to throwing their support behind Maduro.” If the Republicans precipitate an attack, the Democrats at best will agree with the ends but not the means.

The follow-the-flag press prepares public opinion for a strike

On September 26, NBC News reported “from the White House” that the US is planning strikes inside Venezuela. The one-minute video is actually of a guy standing in the street outside the White House, claiming that he had chatted with four unidentified “sources.” Subsequently, this unsubstantiated scoop went viral, picked up by almost every major corporate press outlet.

The New York Times editorialized: “Mr. Trump has grown frustrated with Mr. Maduro’s failure to accede to American demands to give up power voluntarily and the continued insistence by Venezuelan officials that they have no part in drug trafficking.” What doesn’t occur to these Pentagon scribes, is that neither has Mr. Trump shown any enthusiasm for giving up power voluntarily or even admitting to the documented conclusion by the US in drug trafficking.

In one of its typical propaganda pieces trying to pass as a news story, the Times tells us “what we know” about Washington’s offensive against Venezuela: “the endgame remains opaque.” Apparently, they don’t know jack, because the endgame is regime change. In remarks aimed at Venezuela, Mr. Trump threatened: “We will blow you out of existence.”

All the elements are in place for a strike inside Venezuela

• Diplomatic relations with Venezuela have been broken since 2019.
• In 2020, the US indicted President Maduro for narco-terrorism, placing a $15 million bounty on him, subsequently raised to $25m and now $50m.
• On January 20, Trump took office. Executive Order 14157 declared a “national emergency” and designated international drug-trafficking groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs) and “specially designated global terrorists,” citing authority under the Alien Enemies Act.
• By February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that FTOs posed an “existential threat” and laid the groundwork for treating cartels allegedly linked to President Maduro as enemy combatants.
• In May, the administration opened the path to use military force against FTOs.
• Then in July, a “secret directive” authorized military operations against FTOs at sea and on foreign soil.
• By August, the US launched a massive naval deployment off the coast of Venezuela. By October, troop deployment reportedly reached 10,000.
• On September 2, the US blew up the first of four or five alleged drug boats in international waters off of Venezuela, resulting in extrajudicial murders of the crews.
• By mid-September, the Pentagon notified Congress under the War Powers Resolution that US forces were engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels.
• This was followed on October 1 by the Defense Department’s “confidential memo” and more congressional briefings that the US was engaged in armed conflict.
• Trump then terminated the last back-channel diplomatic contacts with Venezuela.

If the “international community” can’t halt the ongoing US/zionist genocide in Palestine, the Yankee juggernaut faces little effective resistance in the Caribbean. A US attack inside Venezuela is imminent!

Bringing a Howitzer to a Knife Fight: US Armada Off Venezuela

Washington’s escalating regime-change offensive against Venezuela uses drug interdiction conflated with combatting “terrorism” as a pretext for expansion of imperial militarism

by Roger D. Harris | Oct 8, 2025 | 13 Comments

Donald Trump boasted striking small boats off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast to “blow the cartel terrorists the hell out of the water.”  Claiming destruction of enough drugs to kill 25,000, he called the extrajudicial murders “an act of kindness.” Then he ominously hinted at a US land invasion of Venezuela now that the marine route for drugs had been obliterated.

Mythical “Cartel de los Soles”

The Miami Herald described the “precision strike” as targeting the Tren de Aragua (TdA) criminal organization. Then, in the very next sentence, the newspaper lauded the strike at the “heart of Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles,” as if the two entities were one in the same. The rest of the article addressed the Cartel de los Soles, forgetting that it was TdA that had supposedly been blown out of the water.

The criminal network, we are told, had been “embedded within [Venezuelan President] Nicolás Maduro’s regime and accused of moving massive quantities of cocaine overseas.”

Trump sees no need to back his claims. His fourth estate stenographer based its investigative reporting on unidentified “sources with knowledge of the situation.” The Herald revealed that their three anonymous informants knew all about the “‘Caribbean Route’ — long one of the busiest corridors for speedboats ferrying cocaine to Europe and the United States.”

The Miami-based newspaper claimed, without presenting evidence, that “inside Venezuela, authorities have turned to…extortion of businesses.” But who needs evidence when the US Justice Department had indicted the Venezuelan political leadership as a “narco-terrorist enterprise” in 2020? Further, Washington placed a $50 million bounty on Maduro this August. If that is not proof of culpability, nothing is.

Regarding the Cartel de los Soles, the Herald allowed that “Maduro has denied the accusations.” And so has President Gustavo Petro in neighboring Colombia. He observed that it “does not exist; it is a fictitious excuse used by the extreme right to overthrow governments that do not obey them.”

Recently retired head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Pino Arlacchi, pronounced the cartel “a product of Trump’s imagination… useful for justifying sanctions, blockades and threats of military intervention against a country which, incidentally, sits on one of the planet’s largest oil reserves.” Venezuelan analyst Clodovaldo Hernández described the cartel and its alleged connection to Maduro as “nothing more than a reheated dish that was never edible.”

False narrative on drugs in the Caribbean 

Casting doubt on Trump’s avowal that the boats were carrying “fentanyl mostly,” a congressional CRS report reported that Mexico is the main source of illicit fentanyl entering the US. PolitiFact also found that most fentanyl comes from Mexico. And the State Department had hitherto mainly described land/over-the-border routes for fentanyl.

According to reports from the United Nations, the European Union, and the US Drug Enforcement Agency, Venezuela is essentially free of drug production and processing – no coca, no marijuana, and certainly no fentanyl. The authoritative UN 2025 World Drug Report identifies Colombia and secondarily Peru and Ecuador as the major coca growers and/or cocaine producers.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the cocaine traffic is from the Pacific, not from Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, according to the US National Drug Threat Assessment. The world’s leading cocaine exporter is Ecuador, using banana boats owned by the family of Trump’s ally and right-wing president of the country, Daniel Naboa.

The war on “terrorism” 

The Herald marveled how Trump dispatched an armada of warships – destroyers and a nuclear submarine – plus F-35 stealth jets and 4,500 troops for drug interdiction. In contrast, the knowledgeable military press, such as the US Army-funded Stars and Stripes, skeptically described the deployment as “bringing a howitzer to a knife fight.”

In fact, drug interdiction is a ruse for Washington’s goal of regime-change in Venezuela, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

US administrations have steadily merged the war on drugs with the war on terror, framing Latin American drug trafficking as a national security threat to justify military operations. George W. Bush rebranded Plan Colombia as counter-terrorism, and Barack Obama increased the military buildup.

This laid the present groundwork for Trump, who tied migration to terrorism and cast Venezuelan refugees as a criminal invasion. The president labeled Venezuelan migrants as terrorists to expand executive authority to carry out naval deployments, extrajudicial strikes, and mass deportations. And he weaponized the human rights discourse to criminalize migrants.

Further, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and directed the Pentagon to prepare options for military force against cartels. However, conflating “organized crime/drug cartel” with “terrorism/wartime enemy” is legally and conceptually problematic.

Such measures not only violate international norms but also amplify a narco-terror narrative. They falsely link the Venezuelan government to major drug trafficking while promoting domestic support for intervention in Venezuela.

Imperial mission not accomplished 

This latest escalation of the US offensive against Venezuela is an implicit admission that previous efforts have failed to achieve regime change. And it’s not from lack of trying.

In a revealing interview, former US ambassador to Caracas, James Story, confessed that unilateral coercive measure, so-called “sanctions,” were employed to asphyxiate the Venezuelan economy. But the economy is recovering, and for the first time since 2020 oil exports surpass 1 million bpd. The US embassy, Story admitted, was used to nurture the astroturf opposition. Yet today, Washington’s designated leader of the far right, María Corina Machado, is isolated, polling a 92% disapproval rating.

The people have rallied around the Maduro political leadership, which has suffered no defections. The military-civilian union remains unbroken, while Maduro has invoked “emergency powers.” Literally millions have enrolled in the militia to defend their country.

This presents a quandary for the Western press in service of Washington’s prerogatives, because what kind of “dictatorship” risks handing out arms and trains the people in military combat? Coming to the rescue, the twisted minds at BBC quote a source claiming that Maduro’s real intent is not to employ these forces in defense but cynically to sacrifice them as a “human shield” to increase the human cost of any potential US military action.

Behind the press’s rhetoric of fentanyl and freedom lies its support of the imperial mission to extinguish a sovereign revolution unwilling to submit. Venezuela’s defiance endures as an intolerable challenge to Washington’s dominion in its self-proclaimed “back yard.”

Roger D. Harris, a founding member of the Venezuela Solidarity Network, is on the board of the Task Force on the Americas and on the secretariat of the US Peace Council.