Canada Cites Democracy to Support

Trump’s Coup in Venezuela

by Yves Engler / January 7th, 2026

As part of justifying Donald Trump’s crass imperial aggression in Venezuela, Canadian officials have taken up the mantra of “democracy”.

In one post on the weekend Mark Carney opined about “the democratic will of the Venezuelan people” while in a follow-up statement the prime minister boasted that “Canada has not recognised the illegitimate regime of Maduro since it stole the 2018 election.” But Canadian hostility to the independent, socialist minded government dates to a time when no credible observer questioned the government’s electoral legitimacy.

Ottawa has been hostile to the Venezuelan government for over two decades. The Jean Chretien government wasn’t overly concerned about democracy in April 2002 when the military took President Hugo Chavez prisoner and imposed an unelected government. Ottawa passively supported a coup, which lasted only 48 hours before popular demonstrations, a split within the army and international condemnation returned Chavez. While most Latin American leaders condemned the coup, Canadian diplomats were silent. “In the Venezuelan coup in 2002, Canada maintained a low profile, probably because it was sensitive to the United States ambivalence towards Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez,” writes Flavie Major in Promoting Democracy in the Americas.

Taking up his post three months after the coup, Canada’s ambassador to Venezuela, Allan Culham was hostile to Chávez. According to a WikiLeaks publication of US diplomatic messages, “Canadian Ambassador Culham expressed surprise at the tone of Chavez’s statements during his weekly television and radio show ‘Hello President’ on February 15 [2004]. Culham observed that Chavez’s rhetoric was as tough as he had ever heard him. ‘He sounded like a bully,’ said Culham, more intransigent and more aggressive.”

The US cable quoted Culham criticizing the national electoral council and speaking positively about the group overseeing a presidential recall referendum targeting Chavez. “Culham added that Súmate is impressive, transparent, and run entirely by volunteers,” it noted. The name of then head of Súmate, Maria Corina Machado, was on a list of people who endorsed the coup against Chavez, for which she faced charges of treason. Machado signed the now-infamous Carmona Decree that dissolved the National Assembly and Supreme Court and suspended the elected government, the attorney general, comptroller general, and governors as well as mayors elected during Chavez’s administration. It also annulled land reforms and reversed increases in royalties paid by oil companies.

In January 2005, Global Affairs invited Machado to Ottawa. Machado oversaw Súmate, an organization at the forefront of efforts to remove Chavez as president. Just prior to this invitation, Súmate led an unsuccessful campaign to recall Chavez through a referendum in August 2004.

Canada also financed Súmate. According to disclosures made in response to a question by NDP foreign affairs critic Alexa McDonough, Canada gave Súmate $22,000 in 2005. Minister of International Cooperation José Verner explained that “Canada considered Súmate to be an experienced NGO with the capability to promote respect for democracy, particularly a free and fair electoral process in Venezuela.”

In fact, alongside large sums from Washington, Canada has provided millions of dollars to groups opposed to the Venezuelan government over the past two decades. According to a 2010 report from Spanish NGO Fride, “Canada is the third most important provider of democracy assistance” to Venezuela after the U.S. and Spain. In a 2011 International Journal article Neil A. Burron describes an interview with a Canadian “official [who] repeatedly expressed concerns about the quality of democracy in Venezuela, noting that the [federal government’s] Glyn Berry program provided funds to a ‘get out the vote’ campaign in the last round of elections in that country.” You can bet it wasn’t designed to get Chavez supporters to the polls.

The Stephen Harper government didn’t hide its hostility to Chavez. When Chavez was re-elected president with 63 per cent of the vote in December 2006, 32 members of the Organization of American States — which monitored the election — supported a resolution to congratulate him. Canada was the only member to join the U.S. in opposing the message.

Just after Chavez’s re-election, Harper toured South America to help stunt the region’s rejection of neoliberalism and U.S. dependence or as a Global Affairs official told Le Devoir “to show [the region] that Canada functions and that it can be a better model than Venezuela.” During the trip, Harper and his entourage made several comments critical of the Chavez government. Afterwards the prime minister continued to demonize a government that had massively expanded the population’s access to health and education services. In April 2009 Harper responded to a question regarding Venezuela by saying, “I don’t take any of these rogue states lightly.” A month earlier, the prime minister referred to the far-right Colombian government as a valuable “ally” in a hemisphere full of “serious enemies and opponents.”

After meeting opposition figures in January 2010, Minister for the Americas Peter Kent told the media, “Democratic space within Venezuela has been shrinking and in this election year, Canada is very concerned about the rights of all Venezuelans to participate in the democratic process.”

The head of Canada’s military joined the onslaught of condemnation. After a tour of South America in early 2010, Walter Natynczyk wrote: “Regrettably, some countries, such as Venezuela, are experiencing the politicization of their armed forces.” (A Canadian general criticizing another country’s military is, of course, not political.)

After Chavez died in 2013, Harper declared that Venezuelans “can now build for themselves a better, brighter future based on the principles of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.” But when Maduro won the presidential election later that year Ottawa called for a recount, refusing at first to recognize the results.

In response to Venezuela’s economic troubles, the rightward shift in the region and Donald Trump’s hawkishness, Canada ramped up its bid to oust Venezuela’s elected president in 2017. Under Chrystia Freeland’s direction, Canada helped create the Lima Group, imposed sanctions, broke off diplomatic relations, took Venezuela to the International Criminal Court and recognized a marginal opposition figure as president in January 2019.

None of this had anything to do with an equal voice for every Venezuelan. Rather it was about trying to keep a country trying to go its own way in line with the US empire.

Canadian support for the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro has nothing to do with “democracy”.

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Yves Engler is the author of 13 books. His latest book coauthored with Owen Schalk is Canada's Long Fight Against Democracy. Read other articles by Yves.

The US Propaganda Campaign to Smear Venezuela’s New President Delcy Rodriguez

by Stansfield Smith / January 8th, 2026

The US “regime change” operation against Venezuela has been defeated. The Bolivarian Revolution remains firmly in power. Now, Washington’s campaign against the Chavistas attempts to paint Interim President Delcy Rodriguez as compromising on the heritage of Presidents Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez. The Wall Street Journal ran an article Venezuelan Regime’s New Strategy: Appease Trump to Survive, referring to Delcy Rodriguez’ official statement January 4 (below).

The Washington Post on January 6 could state “the Trump administration appears to have quietly settled on Delcy Rodríguez, Nicolás Maduro’s right hand, as the figure it prefers to lead Venezuela after Maduro’s fall. This was not an improvised choice. Reportedly, it is the result of prolonged negotiations in which she presented herself as the natural successor to Maduro.” In fact, Venezuela operated according to its constitution, approved in a national referendum, where the vice president takes office if the President cannot fulfill his duties. The vice president is Delcy Rodriguez. Her becoming president follows Venezuela’s highest law. Trump had nothing to do with it.

Trump’s remarks on January 3 that Rodríguez had spoken with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and appeared “quite courteous,” saying “we’re going to do whatever you need,” aimed to sell the story of her acquiescing to Washington. But Rodríguez swiftly contradicted that story hours later, appearing on state television to declare that “there is only one president in this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros.”

January 5, the Wall Street Journal escalated the campaign to smear now acting President Delcy in an article that came out two days after she assumed presidential powers. It claimed the CIA viewed Delcy as the best-positioned short-term successor to President Maduro. The intention is to make us think the CIA has a special connection with her. In fact, by this time, she was already interim president, and Washington saw it could do nothing about it but sell the story she is there by US choice.

This US fake news campaign seeks to sow division in the Chavista movement and among defenders of Venezuela by instigating rumors that the kidnapping of Maduro involved a “mole,” and that Delcy Rodriguez had a deal with the CIA and Trump.

In addition, much is made of part of her January 4 statement out of its context: “We invite the US government to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation oriented towards shared development within the framework of international law to strengthen lasting community coexistence.” Some interpret this as compromising if not a step towards capitulation. In fact, she emphasized Venezuela does not want war, but a “respectful international relationship between the United States and Venezuela, and between Venezuela and the countries of the region, based on sovereign equality and non-interference…That has always been the position of President Nicolás Maduro and it is the position of all of Venezuela at this time.” This is also exactly what Cuba has always asked of the United States.

Her whole statement: Message from Venezuela to the World and to the United States

Venezuela reaffirms its commitment to peace and peaceful coexistence. Our country aspires to live without external threats, in an environment of respect and international cooperation. We believe that global peace is built by first guaranteeing peace within each nation.

We consider it a priority to move toward a balanced and respectful international relationship between the United States and Venezuela, and between Venezuela and the countries of the region, based on sovereign equality and non-interference. These principles guide our diplomacy with the rest of the world.

We extend an invitation to the US government to work together on a cooperation agenda aimed at shared development, within the framework of international law, and to strengthen lasting community coexistence.

President Donald Trump: our peoples and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war. That has always been the position of President Nicolás Maduro and it is the position of all of Venezuela at this time. That is the Venezuela I believe in, to which I have dedicated my life. My dream is for Venezuela to be a great power where all good Venezuelans can come together.

Venezuela has a right to peace, development, sovereignty, and a future.

Delcy Rodríguez, Acting President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

Unfortunately, many who should know better fell for the US rulers’ propaganda campaign. A Consortium News piece declared, “Did Venezuela VP Hand Over Maduro in Deal With the US?” Rather than exposing US psyops, which earned it its high reputation, here it gives it legitimacy. Another, Tariq Ali, once a respected Trotskyist anti-war activist, claimed on X that “the US is backing Delcy who has promised them whatever they want.” And reposts long discredited Eva Golinger, “Internal Coup? Was Maduro Betrayed by his VP?” And, “Sure seems like Delcy Rodriguez was the CIA source on the inside who set Maduro up and handed him over to the United States.” None of these smears are based on any evidence.

On January 4, President Trump declared, “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Delcy Rodriguez has responded, “The Venezuelan people are a people who do not surrender, and we do not give up…President Nicolas Maduro’s instructions have been given. Let’s go out and defend our homeland…We are ready to defend Venezuela…We will never again be slaves.”

Manolo de los Santos’ excellent article explains who Delcy Rodriguez is. “The Rodríguez family’s revolutionary credentials are etched in struggle. Their father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a leader of the Socialist League, a Marxist-Leninist organization, was tortured and murdered by the Punto Fijo regime in 1976. Both Delcy and her brother Jorge (the President of the National Assembly) emerged from this tradition of clandestine and mass struggle for socialism. President Maduro himself was a cadre of the same organization. To suggest betrayal among them or capitulation born of cowardice or opportunism ignores four decades of shared political formation, persecution, and leadership under relentless imperialist aggression and the class character of their revolutionary leadership.”

Now, not only do we have the US government repudiating the world and international law by invading a country and seizing its president for admitted concocted reasons. We must face the fact that the US psyops system continues to be so effective that it is able to dupe leading long-time opponents of the US empire, like Tariq Ali, into being mouthpieces for its own “regime change” propaganda.

Stansfield Smith, ChicagoALBASolidarity.com, stansfieldsmith100@gmail.com. Stan has been involved in anti-war organizing for 45 years, and has written a number of articles about Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, as well as previous articles related to the subject here. They have appeared in Monthly Review online, Orinoco Tribune, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Popular Resistance, and others. Read other articles by Stansfield.

Kidnapping Blues: The Maduro Abduction Precedent

by Binoy Kampmark / January 8th, 2026

Once done, it remains, by nature and fact, irreversible. The precedent of indicting and abducting a serving head of state and his spouse, dropping them into the jurisdiction of another country to face criminal charges of inventive pedigree (narcoterrorism foremost among them), is the stuff of nightmares in international statecraft. With the now former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores facing such charges in New York, other world leaders are doubtless feeling a prevailing gloom. Is there anything stopping US President Donald Trump from deploying the US military and law enforcement agents from nabbing the next sitting leader in the middle of the night? Even more broadly, is there anything stopping other States from doing the same?

This is something that has excited discussion in various political quarters, notably in East and Southeast Asia. Regarding the sullen, fleshy North Korean despot, Kim Jong-Un, the question is a pressing one. Certain lawmakers certainly think so. South Korean Rep. Lee Jun-seok, leader of the Reform Party, noted the brazen indifference the Trump administration had taken to renaming Maduro as a “leader of a transnational crime ring” instead of accepting him as a legitimate head of state. “The logic applied to President Maduro could also be applied to the North Korean leader,” reasoned Lee on Facebook. The US Justice Department had, after all, indicted North Korean hackers in 2021, using rather hyperbolic language in describing them as the “world’s leading bank robbers”.

The former mayor of Daegu, Hong Joon-pyo, was similarly confident that the North Korean leader “must have been startled by this.” Here, we were witnessing “a return to the logic of power and the era of imperialism”. That said, the tendency of brutish US power to apprehend and dispose of sovereign heads of state, was not spanking, new exercise. “There was the invasion of Panama in 1989, the arrest of [Manuel] Noriega in 1990, and the United States has also played the role of world’s police in events such as the case of Chile [the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973] and the execution of [Saddam] Hussein.” A truly sterling record.

Kim Dong-yub of the University of North Korean Studies also considered the Maduro precedent “deeply concerning” for Pyongyang, offering the following, tormented formulation: “When an adversary believes decapitation can arrive without warning, under the guise of policing or asset recovery, the rational response is to automate retaliation and compress decision time.” Leaving aside the torturous prose, the nervousness at the prospect of such a fate inflicted by so fickle a world leader is bound to be palpable.

The North Korean leader, for his part, responded to the events in Venezuela with military drills involving the firing of two hypersonic missiles into the Sea of Japan. The activity in question was, according to him, “clearly aimed at gradually putting the nuclear water deterrent on a high-developed basis”. This was “necessary” because of “the recent geopolitical crisis and complicated international events”. Kim also expressed pride in the “important achievements” that had been made in preparing the country’s nuclear forces “for an actual war”.

North Korea’s Foreign Ministry was less oblique in a statement on Maduro’s fate. “The incident is another example that clearly confirms once again the rogue and brutal nature of the US, which the international community has so frequently witnessed for a long time”.

In Southeast Asia, the abduction precedent particularly troubled the Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. “The leader of Venezuela and his wife were seized in a United States military operation of unusual scope and nature,” he brooded in a social media post. “Such actions constitute a clear violation of international law and amount to an unlawful use of force against a sovereign state.” Irrespective of the reasons behind the move, “the forcible removal of a sitting head of government through external action sets a dangerous precedent”, eroding “fundamental restraints on the use of power between states and weakens the legal framework that underpins international order.”

Malaysia’s neighbour, Indonesia, was similarly troubled by the Maduro precedent. A January 5 statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed “grave concern over any actions involving the use or threat of force, which risk setting a dangerous precedent in international relations and could undermine regional stability, peace, and the principles of sovereignty and diplomacy.”

In the Philippines, the official response, given the security ties between Manila and Washington, was less testy. It was left to various lawmakers to state a few troubling truths. Rep. Perci Cendaña of the left-wing Akbayan Party-list saw the actions of the Trump administration as birds of a feather with the “similar aggressive acts of Russia in Ukraine and China in the West Philippine Sea”.

Mamamayang Liberal Party-list Rep. Leila de Lima considered the operation against Venezuela one of disturbing redux, the US having again morphed “into an aggressor state” and sabotaging the rules-based international system. In doing so, its conduct had normalised the actions of Russia in the ongoing Ukraine War, Chinese expansionist aggression in the South and East China Seas, and Israel’s genocidal policy against the Palestinians. It was time, she opined gravely, to consider her country’s reliance on the US “for moral leadership on the world stage and as an ally for regional security and a rules-based international order.”

With the thuggish Donroe Doctrine running with strapping vigour, and the Trump administration hungering for additional scalps in its name, de Lima’s sentiments, along with those of her colleagues, are hard to fault.

The US Justice Department, Fake Cartels, and Maduro

A Shameful Sham

by Binoy Kampmark / January 7th, 2026

The Trump administration is increasingly resembling a government previously abominated by the current US president as entangling, bumbling, and prone to fantasies. President George W. Bush was well versed in baseless existential threats stemming from Mesopotamia, supposedly directed by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. There was a critical problem in this assessment: in his dry drunk state, Bush was criminally wrong, proposing a doctrine in response to the attack by al-Qaeda on the United States on September 11, 2001 heavy on violence and slim on evidence.

The patchy formulation came to be known as the Bush Doctrine, permitting the United States to unilaterally and pre-emptively attack any country allegedly posing a threat to its security despite never evincing any genuine means of doing so. There would also be, Bush stated in his address to the nation, “no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts [of 9/11] and those who harbor them.”

Such streaky reasoning eventually fastened upon Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), apparently at the ready to strike the US and its allies. If not Baghdad, then certainly an opportunistic terrorist proxy would be more than willing to deploy them. In his 2003 State of the Union Address, Bush solemnly stated that “the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.” Such weapons might be used “for blackmail, terror, and mass murder” or provided or sold “to terrorist allies, who would use them without the least hesitation.”

As the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq proceeded with its increasingly bloody bill of sale, there were no WMDs to be found. Saddam, foolishly as things would have it, destroyed or disarmed those weapons he had made free use of in the Iran-Iraq War. This hardly mattered. There was shoddy intelligence aplenty, including false claims that Iraq had tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium powder from Niger, and cloudy lines of cooperation between Baghdad and al-Qaeda. With school boyish enthusiasm being shown by the evangelical UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the Saddam threat ballooned for Bush. Neoconservatives rejoiced at this chance of cratering, erasing and reforming the Middle East.

The Donroe Doctrine, childishly envisaged and clumsily applied, has an unmistakable analogue with that of Bush. In repurposing the Monroe Doctrine for the Western Hemisphere, excluding threatening foreign interests in Latin America and extinguishing governments adversarial or unsympathetic to the United States, Trump scorns the evidence. A fundamental reason for abducting President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, by way of example, was accusing him of being a narco-terrorist amenable to nasty foreign interests. Elevating his stature as a threat, he was accused of being a figure of the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns).

This pattern stretches back to the first Trump administration, when a grand jury indictment alleged that Maduro, along with other officials, “participated in a corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy between the Venezuelan Cártel de Los Soles and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia”. Five years later, when the Treasury Department retrieved the initial text, the Cartel was designated a “terrorist organization”. Come November 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed the State Department to do the same.

With an eerie sense of the past cantering into the present, we find the US Justice Department conceding that there was no link between Maduro and this sinister cartel. This stands to reason, given that the group does not exist as a tangible organisation. The allegation has long been contentious, but those close to Trump were not willing to be swayed by that dullest compendium of subject matter unfashionably called “the facts”.

Believers in virgin births, tooth fairies and Sky Gods sometimes intrude into the making of American foreign policy, and Rubio, in justifying extrajudicial killings of those on board alleged narco-vessels in the Caribbean Sea by US military forces had this to say: “We will continue to reserve the right to take strikes against drug boats that are bringing drugs toward the United States that are being operated by transnational criminal organisations, including the Cartel de los Soles.”

The 2020 indictment mentioned the cartel no fewer than 32 times. The new indictment makes a mere two references to a term that has ceased to be an entity and become a concept, revised as a “patronage system run by those at the top.” It does not feature as an organisation along with the list of alleged “narco-terrorists” outlined in the fourth paragraph.

Those versed in the slippery argot of drug trafficking in Latin America have concluded that the Cartel de los Soles is a colloquialism minted by Venezuelan media to out despoiled officials sporting the sun insignia on their uniforms. It became a matter of usage in the 1990s, making it less a description of organisational reality than identifying a broader system of corruption.

From the outset, Venezuelan figures such as interior and justice minister Diosdado Cabello dismissed the cartel as the product of a fevered imagination. In August last year, he coolly remarked that US officials, when bothered, would name the target of their indignation “the head of the Cartel de los Soles”. The organisation makes no appearance in the United Nations’ annual World Drug Report, preferring to reference Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, and Brazil’s Primeiro Comando Capital (PPC) and Comando Vermelho (CV). The US Drug Enforcement Agency’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment makes reference to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua, “a violent criminal organization founded between 2012 and 2013” that “mainly operates within Venezuelan migrant communities” in the United States. No favours are done naming the Cartel de los Soles, however.

The rewritten indictment against Maduro reveals how presidential doctrines can be used to force evidence upon a Procrustean bed, sawing or extending it to fit the set dimensions of a dogma. The crime of aggression against Iraq in 2003 was based upon forged evidence, implausible links and flimsy assumptions. The crime of aggression against Venezuela on January 3 reprised the performance. Instead of a uranium hoax, we got the Cartel of the Suns.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.