(More statements) Oppose US imperialist aggression against Venezuela
[Editor's note: Readers can find previous statements released by Socialist Alliance (Australia), United Left Platform (US), Solidarity (US), Fourth International, International Marxist-Humanist Organization, and Revolutionary Communist International Tendency, as well as some other joint statements here. A joint statement by Asian left organisations can be read here.]
Indonesian left: Solidarity against US imperialist intervention and aggression against Venezuela
Signed by various left and progressive Indonesian organisations, December 23
We strongly condemn the dangerous escalation of US imperialism and its allies against the sovereign Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
The announcement of Operation Southern Spear, the deployment of US troops in the Caribbean, the unilateral closure of airspace, and the deadly attacks that have killed dozens of civilians under the pretext of fighting drugs, are a repetition of a well-known pattern of provocation and aggression.
The pretext of a "war on drugs" is merely a cover for its true objective: to seize Venezuela's vast mineral and energy resources, establish imperialist dominance in the region, and intimidate and subjugate its sovereign people.
US imperialism seeks to impose its interests through threats, economic warfare, illegal blockades, political pressure, and brutal military force. These plans constitute coercive measures that not only violate sovereignty and international law but also threaten the peace, stability, and right to life of the Venezuelan people and the security of the Latin American region as a whole.
These actions are the most blatant manifestation of modern imperialism, which seeks to shackle a free nation.
Therefore, we clearly and loudly declare: DO NOT TOUCH VENEZUELA! HANDS OFF VENEZUELA!
We express our unwavering class solidarity with the working class and people of Venezuela, who continue to confront imperialist aggression with dignity and courage. We stand firmly with their struggle to defend their sovereignty and rights.
We call on all labour movements, peoples, and progressive, democratic, and socialist forces in Indonesia and throughout the world to strengthen international solidarity in the struggle against imperialist war plans and aggression.
SOLIDARITY WITH THE WORKERS AND PEOPLE OF VENEZUELA — REJECT IMPERIALIST INTERVENTION!
- Kesatuan Perjuangan Rakyat (Unity of the People's Struggle)
- Federasi Serikat Buruh Militan (Militant Trade Union Federation)
- Lao Lao Papua
- Sentral Gerakan Buruh Nasional (National Labor Movement Center)
- Komite Politik Nasional (National Political Committee)
- Perserikatan Sosialis (Socialist Union)
- Organisasi Kaum Muda Sosialis (Socialist Youth Organization)
- Lingkar Studi Kerakyatan (People's Study Circle)
- Lintas Komunal (Cross-Communal)
- Lingkar Belajar Kaum Muda (Youth Learning Circle)
- Benang Merah (Red thread)
- Sosialis Muda Papua (Young Papuan Socialists)
- Bintang Muda (Young Star)
- Resistance
- Alter
- Lingkar Studi Sosialis (Socialist Study Circle)
- Liga Pemuda Sosialis (Socialist Youth League)
If your organization wishes to sign this joint statement of position, please contact bit.ly/WA-AJ or https://t.me/ArahJuang
Progressive International: Venezuela under siege
Observatory of the Progressive International, December 18
From the Observatory of the Progressive International, we call to mobilize all progressive forces and friends of the UN Charter to defend the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and its people from the US acts of war declared against it.
President Trump has announced a “total and complete blockade” of all U.S.-sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela — an escalation that amounts to economic warfare against an entire nation. The White House now couples this measure with a reckless designation of the Venezuelan state as a “foreign terrorist organization,” boasting of a naval armada encircling the country.
Blockades are instruments of collective punishment. They do not distinguish between a minister and a midwife, a general and a granjero. In a country who relies on its oil exports as a lifeline for its domestic economy and its support for sister nations such as Cuba, severing maritime routes is a deliberate strike on food, medicine, energy, and millions of livelihoods across the Caribbean.
We have seen the logic behind this escalation before. In 2019, as Washington ratcheted its brutal sanctions, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the “circle” tightening around Venezuela and acknowledged “the humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour.” Those words were but a confirmation that a policy premised on strangulation was “working” as intended, precisely by deepening civilian suffering to force political outcomes.
Today’s blockade doubles down on that same doctrine — what has now been coined the ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine: the imperial license that Washington has granted to itself to trample fundamental rights and international law in service of a project of hemispheric domination.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller described Venezuelan oil as the fruit of “American sweat, ingenuity and toil.” This claim is an outrageous inversion of history and an incitement to theft. Venezuela owns the world’s largest proven oil reserves by virtue of geological endowment and generations of labor by Venezuelan workers — not U.S. corporations or U.S. taxpayers. In 1976, Venezuela legally nationalized its petroleum industry to reclaim control over its primary source of wealth, a sovereign act recognized under international law.
The real theft has been ongoing for decades: the United States and multinational oil companies extracting profit from Venezuelan natural resources under conditions of unequal exchange, and today’s blockade seeks to formalize that expropriation by force.
The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela — and its neighbors across Latin America and the Caribbean — enjoy the rights of sovereign equality and the fruits of regional stability that their peoples have won over decades of struggle. The region has endured a century of blockades, coups, and coercion dressed up as “freedom.” We reject categorically the transformation of sanctions into siege warfare and the normalization of starvation as statecraft.
From the Observatory today, our call is for solidarity in defense of sovereignty: for the workers who keep the power plants running; for the nurses and teachers who hold together public services; for the campesinos and comunas who feed their communities; for the students who carry the promise of Venezuela’s future.
From the Observatory, we will continue to document the US assault on international law, and to build the broadest front of solidarity—Latin American, Caribbean, and global—to secure peace and a dignified future for the Venezuelan people.
Sovereignty is indivisible: an attack on one is an attack on all. We must resist the normalization of siege as a legitimate act of economic statecraft; we must protect the integrity of the UN charter; and we must insist that these coercive measures be lifted immediately.
Joint statement: Down with US aggression! Defend Venezuela!
Joint statement by International Workers’ League, International Workers’ Union – Fourth International and Revolutionary Communist International Tendency, December 28
The U.S. government, led by the far-right Donald Trump, is advancing its warmongering and interventionist offensive in the Caribbean, particularly against Venezuela.
In December, it declared a total blockade on oil tankers entering or leaving the country, after arbitrarily seizing several ships from Venezuela and appropriating tonnes of Venezuelan oil. This comes after having perpetrated nearly three dozen attacks against ships in the Caribbean and Pacific seas, leaving a hundred dead, under the false pretext of “combating drug trafficking.” This is extremely serious for a country that is highly dependent on oil export revenues.
Alongside this blockade, Trump is preparing a military intervention in Venezuela to remove Maduro and impose a far-right government. To this end, he has stationed a huge naval fleet in the Caribbean. Whether by invasion, air strike or economic suffocation, the objective is the same: to impose a puppet government on the country.
The excuse of the “war on drugs” is only a pretext for imperialist maneuvering. The history of US interventions shows that its policies are not intended to stop drug trafficking. On the contrary, US federal agencies have collaborated with drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia, and their interventions have not served to stop trafficking, but rather to reorganize it under U.S. control. Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was serving a 45-year prison sentence in the U.S. for drug trafficking, exposes the farce.
The Trump administration’s recently published document on National Security Strategy explicitly states its goal of having puppet governments in Latin America. Pro-imperialist governments that implement neoliberal plans and open the economy to multinationals are no longer enough. They want far-right governments that are completely subservient to Trump. To that end, they are even exerting economic and political pressure to influence elections. They are making progress with Milei, Kast, Bukele, Asfura and want to continue with Uribe in Colombia.
As part of this, Trump has rejected Maduro’s proposal to hand over all the country’s oil and minerals in exchange for remaining in power, as reported by The New York Times. Trump wants to impose María Corina Machado as a puppet government, by any means necessary. However, Trump does not have everything in his favor. More than 70 percent of Americans oppose the plan to invade and attack Venezuela.
This position of the US government is extremely dangerous, as it will affect workers in Venezuela, Venezuelans living in other countries and the peoples of Latin America as a whole. It has been decades since there has been a military attack or direct invasion by the U.S. on the Latin American continent.
That is why we call for a broad united campaign with all those who oppose imperialism’s attacks on Venezuela and Latin America. So far, there has been no anti-imperialist mobilzation against Trump’s intervention that meets the magnitude of the existing threat. It is very important and urgent to change this and move forward in unity of action in view of the seriousness of the situation.
No confidence in Maduro
Fighting against Trump and his interventionism does not mean, under any circumstances, giving any kind of political support to Maduro. His government is not anti-imperialist, much less socialist. In fact, to this day, the U.S. transnational Chevron continues to operate in Venezuela and is the main exploiter and exporter of Venezuelan oil. It is a capitalist dictatorship that governs by imposing austerity measures on the working people, a government of doublespeak and fake socialism.
The wages of Venezuelan workers have been pulverized by inflation. Today, the minimum wage is less than one dollar per month. Labor and trade-union rights have been violated as part of Maduro’s pro-boss and anti-worker austerity policy. As a result of all this, basic services are in a state of complete disrepair.
Imperialist sanctions, and now this warmongering and interventionist offensive, only serve to aggravate the situation, further deteriorating the already dramatic living conditions of working people. That is why we will be at the forefront of the fight against Trump’s intervention in Venezuela, but without giving political support or placing our trust in Maduro.
We must wage a strong and united anti-imperialist campaign
We reject Donald Trump’s statements demanding that “all the oil, land and other assets stolen from the United States be returned,” as if these resources had ever belonged to him. The truth is that it is U.S. imperialism, in collusion with the Venezuelan governments of the day, both those of Punto Fijo and those of Chávez, and even more so the current Maduro government, that have historically plundered energy, oil, mineral, land and other resources. What Trump intends, in his inter-imperialist dispute on the continent, is to reinforce and reassure this plundering with a puppet government, such as that of María Corina Machado and the bourgeois sector she represents.
The Maduro government, for its part, with its austerity and repressive policies, is only facilitating an eventual intervention by increasing the unpopularity of his regime among the working population.
In this sense, we believe that to confront imperialism we need to unify workers and the Venezuelan people to demand that Maduro’s government implement a program that begins with the defense of democratic freedoms, the release of political prisoners who repudiate imperialist aggression, an increase in the minimum monthly wage and pensions to the level of the basic basket of goods, the restoration of curtailed labor, contractual and trade union rights; an end to the repression of workers’ organizations; the granting of political rights to left-wing parties such as the PCV, PPT, Marea Socialista, PSL, among others; the cessation of the surrender of resources from the Orinoco Mining Arc (AMO) and the Orinoco Oil Belt (FPO), and the rejection of imperialist interference and its threats of intervention.
It is essential that we, as labor and mass movement organizations, promote the broadest unity of action to reject and confront military aggression, the criminal bombings in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific, the oil blockade — all of which are acts of war — as well as any further military intervention. In any confrontation between the armed forces of the United States and Venezuela, workers and popular organizations must advocate for the military victory of the latter and the defeat of U.S. imperialism.
In the United States, we recognize how these imperialist attacks are directly linked to the Trump administration’s attacks on the American working class, as well as to the long history of U.S. interventions against Latin America and the working class in general, and we encourage mass mobilization to stop this completely, including the cancellation without payment of all neocolonial debts controlled by the U.S.
Latin American governments that claim to oppose Trump’s intervention must call for mobilizations, something they have not done so far. Lula, Petro, Sheinbaum — who claim to reject Trump’s intervention — must call for days of mobilization and directly help Venezuela to evade sanctions, assisting in the export and import of goods and providing military support against U.S. aggression.
Our call is for the workers and peoples of the United States and Latin America to unite and mobilize against the actions being carried out by US imperialism on the continent, which must be denounced for what they are: acts of war against all the peoples of this continent in general and against the Venezuelan people in particular.
•We completely reject the naval blockade against Venezuela and its oil!
• No to the theft of Venezuelan oil and the hijacking of oil transport ships!
• Down with imperialist sanctions against Venezuela!
• Stop the bombings and assassinations in the Caribbean and the Pacific!
• No to the invasion of Venezuela!
• No confidence in Maduro!
• Arms for the workers! Full freedoms to mobilize against imperialism! Suspend debt payments and reverse the sell-out contracts for the resources of Orinoco!
• We completely reject Donald Trump’s acts of war on the continent!
• Lula, Petro, Sheinbaum — who say they reject Trump’s intervention — must directly help Venezuela to repel these actions militarily!
• Trump and U.S. imperialism out of Latin America and the Caribbean!
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