The Architectures of Ruin – How Sanctions Kill in Venezuela and Beyond

by Michael Holmes | Feb 25, 2026 

The collapse of Venezuela is often narrated in the West as a simple morality play – a cautionary tale of socialist overreach and the inevitable rot of authoritarianism. Francisco Rodríguez’s “The Collapse of Venezuela” dismantles this caricature, showing with unusually rigorous economic evidence that roughly half of the country’s catastrophic decline was caused not by ideology alone, but by escalating US sanctions that choked off access to finance, oil markets, and essential imports. This review examines his account of Venezuela’s internal political and economic unraveling. It also highlights a major new study Rodríguez co-authored in The Lancet Global Health showing that Western sanctions worldwide are associated with more than half a million excess deaths per year, a toll comparable to that of modern wars.

Few economic collapses outside of wartime have been as sudden and as devastating as Venezuela’s. To understand how a country with the world’s largest oil reserves saw its economy shrink by more than seventy percent in less than a decade, one must look beyond the slogans and study the interaction between domestic power struggles and an external sanctions regime that steadily constricted the country’s economic lifelines. Francisco Rodríguez, a leading Venezuelan economist and former head of the Venezuelan National Assembly’s Congressional Budget Office, provides this necessary autopsy in his meticulous study, The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012–2020. Rodríguez, who currently serves as a professor of international affairs at the University of Denver and has spent decades at the intersection of high finance and public policy, brings a rare blend of technical rigor and historical perspective to a subject too often surrendered to polemicists. Central to his findings is the startling empirical demonstration that roughly half of Venezuela’s total economic catastrophe was caused directly by United States sanctions.

His career has long been marked by a fierce independence that drew fire from all sides; notably, during his tenure at the Congressional Budget Office, he came under intense pressure from both a radical opposition that detested his objective findings and government officials – including a then-legislator named Nicolás Maduro – who sought to suppress economic data that contradicted the official narrative. His work matters now because it challenges the convenient consensus that Venezuela’s ruin was entirely self-inflicted, demonstrating instead how a combination of domestic mismanagement, an escalating conflict between the government and the opposition and unprecedented American sanctions created a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions.

The Pre-Chávez Purgatory and the Ghost of the Caracazo

To understand the rise of Hugo Chávez, one must first confront the wreckage of the era that preceded him. The decades leading up to his 1998 election were defined by a profound disconnect between a wealthy oil-exporting elite and a growing underclass living in the sprawling ranchos of Caracas. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, the “Puntofijo” pact – a power-sharing agreement between the country’s main centrist parties – maintained a veneer of democratic stability. But beneath this surface, the social fabric was tearing. Despite being the richest country in South America, Venezuela’s wealth remained concentrated in a tiny fraction of the population, while the majority saw their purchasing power evaporate.

This era culminated in the 1989 Caracazo, a series of massive anti-government riots sparked by IMF-mandated austerity measures that hiked gasoline prices and bus fares overnight. The state’s response was not one of negotiation but of terror. A brutal military crackdown left hundreds, perhaps thousands, dead in the streets of the capital. The Caracazo was the death knell for the old order; it proved that the democratic facade could no longer contain the social pressures of a nation where millions lived in extreme poverty. The blood on the pavement in 1989 created the moral and political vacuum that Hugo Chávez, then a young paratrooper, would eventually fill. When he was elected in 1998, it was a populist rebellion against an indifferent elite that had presided over decades of stagnation and state violence.

The Bolivarian Promise: Prosperity and Institutional Decay

The initial years of the Chávez era were marked by a genuine, if flawed, attempt to redistribute oil wealth. As Rodríguez notes, the “Bolivarian Revolution” was not merely a rhetorical exercise. Through the creation of social missions – the misiones – the government poured billions of dollars into healthcare, education, and subsidized food programs. For the first time in Venezuelan history, the state made its presence felt in the slums, not through police truncheons, but through clinics and literacy programs. Poverty rates plummeted from over fifty percent at the start of the decade to nearly twenty-five percent by 2012. This tangible improvement in the lives of the poor secured Chávez’s enduring popularity and allowed him to win multiple internationally monitored elections.

Rodríguez is skeptical of many flagship anti-poverty programs under Chávez, suggesting that several were inefficient or poorly designed and that a substantial share of the observed poverty reduction would likely have occurred anyway during a period of exceptionally high oil prices that boosted state spending across the board. He also points to Chávez’s 1999 constitution as a turning point in the erosion of institutional balance, arguing that the redesign of the political system progressively weakened checks and balances and concentrated power in the executive, which deepened mistrust and hostility between the government and the opposition. In a context with no meaningful power-sharing arrangements and where control of the state meant control over vast oil revenues, politics became a zero-sum game, helping drive both Chavismo and a radicalized opposition into an increasingly desperate struggle in which losing office carried existential economic and political consequences.

The democratic mandate of the revolution was almost immediately met with violent resistance from a radical opposition that enjoyed significant backing from the United States. In 2002, this faction launched a short-lived military coup that briefly ousted the democratically elected Chávez, an act of extra-constitutional aggression that was immediately recognized and supported by the U.S. government. This support for a putsch exposed the hypocrisy of a Western “democracy” discourse that was, in reality, driven by a desire to protect old-guard interests and oil access. When the coup failed due to a massive popular uprising, this same radical opposition pivoted to an all-out oil embargo and general strike in late 2002 and 2003, effectively paralyzing the nation’s economy and causing immense suffering among the civilian population. This was the first time a scorched-earth strategy was deployed in the modern era – a precedent showing that the opposition was willing to destroy the nation’s primary source of livelihood to get into power.

The seeds of future ruin were also sown in how the subsequent prosperity was managed. The government relied on a massive expansion of state spending fueled by record-high oil prices. Rodríguez emphasizes that Chávez’s government saved little in stabilization buffers, leaving the country highly exposed and fiscally fragile when the oil market eventually turned downward. Institutional checks and balances were dismantled in favor of a personalistic rule that often prioritized political loyalty over technical competence. When Chávez died in 2013, he left behind a nation that was more equitable but also profoundly fragile, its entire economic architecture resting on the volatile price of a single commodity.

The Scorched Earth and the Sanctions Force Multiplier

The transition to Nicolás Maduro coincided with a catastrophic perfect storm: the death of a charismatic leader, a sharp, unexpected decline in global oil prices, and the exhaustion of a state-led model that had failed to diversify. By 2014, Venezuela was in a deep recession, but it was not yet a terminal collapse. Rodríguez’s most significant contribution is his empirical breakdown of what happened next, identifying the specific point where a manageable crisis turned into a historic catastrophe.

He argues that US sanctions, particularly those imposed in 2017 and 2019, fundamentally altered the trajectory of the decline. Before 2017, the Venezuelan government still had access to international credit markets and could maintain its oil infrastructure. The August 2017 executive order signed by the Trump administration effectively barred Venezuela from the US financial system, preventing the government from restructuring its debt or accessing international financing. Rodríguez uses a rigorous counterfactual analysis to show that while the Maduro government’s mismanagement caused the initial recession, the sanctions served as a “force multiplier” that dramatically accelerated the decline.

The most lethal blow came in 2019 with the imposition of an oil embargo. Venezuela’s refineries, built to process heavy crude with American machinery and diluents, were suddenly cut off from their primary market and source of supply. Rodríguez calculates that nearly half of the total economic contraction during this period – a loss of revenue and GDP staggering in its scale – can be traced directly to the severing of Venezuela from the global financial system. The sanctions did not just target the regime’s bank accounts; they targeted the state’s ability to generate the revenue needed to maintain the power grid, water systems, and public health infrastructure. This was the “scorched earth” politics: a deliberate strategy by both internal actors and external powers to treat the national economy as a battlefield where the civilian population was the primary casualty.

The Moral Cost of Financial Warfare

The moral weight of this evidence lies in the recognition that the “maximum pressure” campaign was a conscious choice by Western powers to prioritize regime change over human life. By framing the conflict as a battle for “democracy,” the US and its allies justified policies that they knew would result in widespread deprivation. Rodríguez documents how the freezing of Venezuelan assets abroad, including the seizure of CITGO and the nation’s gold reserves in London, left the country without the means to import essential medicines and food even during a global pandemic.

This was not a passive failure of policy but an active strategy of suffocation. The opposition, led by Juan Guaidó and backed by Washington, gambled that the suffering of the populace would eventually force the military to turn against Maduro. It was a gamble that failed the political test – the military remained loyal – but succeeded in destroying the social fabric of a nation. The results were quantifiable: a collapse of public services, the return of eradicated diseases, and a mass exodus of over five million refugees, the largest such displacement in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Global Sanctions Kill Over Half a Million People Every Year

Rodríguez’s work on Venezuela is part of a broader research agenda on the human consequences of economic warfare. In a landmark study called “Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis”, which was published in The Lancet Global Health – one of the world’s most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals – Rodríguez and his co-authors analyze the global mortality effects of sanctions across more than 150 countries over five decades.

Using four advanced statistical methods designed to identify causal effects in observational data, they estimate that unilateral economic sanctions by the US and Europe are associated with approximately 564,000 excess deaths per year in recent years – a number comparable to, and in some estimates exceeding, annual war deaths worldwide. The heaviest burden falls on children and the elderly, with more than half of the deaths occurring among children under five.

Although the paper often uses the technical term “unilateral sanctions,” the data show that the mortality effects are driven primarily by sanctions imposed by the United States and, to a lesser extent, the European Union, while UN multilateral sanctions show no statistically significant mortality effect. Sanctions reduce government revenues, restrict access to foreign exchange, disrupt imports of medicine and food, and generate financial over-compliance that blocks even humanitarian transactions. In effect, the study suggests that modern financial sanctions function less like targeted diplomatic tools and more like broad economic sieges whose primary victims are civilians.

Read alongside The Collapse of Venezuela, the Lancet study broadens Rodríguez’s argument from a national tragedy to a global pattern. Venezuela becomes not an outlier but an extreme case of a wider phenomenon: the use of financial power by wealthy states in ways that impose humanitarian costs on populations with little influence over their governments. If the book documents how sanctions helped turn a deep recession into a societal collapse, the Lancet paper suggests that similar, if less visible, dynamics may be unfolding across much of the sanctioned world.

Conclusion: The Laboratory of Imperial Ruin

In the end, Rodríguez’s work reveals a haunting truth about modern international life: that the tools of global finance can be as destructive as any conventional weapon. Venezuela was not just a victim of its own leaders’ hubris, but a laboratory for a new kind of imperial warfare – one that operates through banks and treasuries rather than battalions. The book serves as a devastating indictment of a world order that allows the most powerful states to starve a population in the name of their own imperial agenda.

Rodríguez is sharply critical of the role of the United States in backing hardline sectors of the Venezuelan opposition that embraced extra-institutional, confrontational, and at times openly undemocratic strategies, arguing that Washington’s recognition policies, sweeping sanctions, and recurrent regime-change rhetoric further radicalized the conflict and poisoned an already polarized political environment. By increasing the perceived stakes of losing power and strengthening actors on both sides who favored maximalist approaches, US policy, in his account, made negotiated compromise less likely and deepened Venezuela’s institutional and economic collapse. For Rodríguez, the only viable path out of this destructive equilibrium lies in sustained negotiations that lower the stakes of political competition through credible power-sharing arrangements and mutually accepted institutional guarantees – steps he sees as essential for restoring economic stability, political coexistence, and the conditions for a genuinely democratic system.

Rodríguez underscores that Venezuelan public opinion has consistently favored a negotiated, peaceful solution over confrontation: survey data he cites show that nearly two-thirds of respondents – 64.8% – support resuming negotiations between the government and the opposition, while only a quarter oppose them. At the same time, an overwhelming majority reject external economic pressure – 75.1% favor easing economic sanctions. These figures, drawn from multiple surveys, suggest that ordinary Venezuelans prefer dialogue and de-escalation, yet their preferences have been sidelined by hardline strategies on all sides: Maduro’s government, a US policy built around sanctions and regime pressure, and a radical wing of the opposition aligned with that approach have each, in different ways, pursued zero-sum tactics that run counter to the population’s clear desire for negotiations and relief from economic warfare.

The tragedy of Venezuela is a reminder that when the elephants fight, it is the grass – the millions of ordinary people who simply wish to live in dignity – that is trampled into the dust. The history of Venezuela in the twenty-first century is thus a story of a country that tried to reclaim its sovereignty from an indifferent elite, only to find itself crushed between the incompetence of its protectors and the cold-blooded resolve of its enemies. Francisco Rodríguez has provided more than an economic study; he has written a requiem for a republic that was sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical ambition. A nation’s ruin is rarely a solo performance; it is a symphony of local greed and global cruelty, played out to the silent accompaniment of those too hungry to scream.

Michael Holmes is a German-American freelance journalist specializing in global conflicts and modern history. His work has appeared in Neue Zürcher Zeitung – the Swiss newspaper of record – Responsible Statecraft, Psychologie Heute, taz, Welt, and other outlets. He regularly conducts interviews for NachDenkSeiten.  He has reported on and travelled to over 70 countries, including Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine, Kashmir, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Uganda.  He is based in Potsdam, Germany.

 

Watching Uncle Sam From Seoul

by Jeffrey Robertson | Feb 25, 2026 | 

Since Trump’s election, Seoul’s analysts asked questions. Commentators voiced unease – and “Liberation Day” proved their concerns well founded as the U.S. imposed a series of dynamic tariffs driven by social media and personal sentiment. Yet the depth of ties between Washington and Seoul led many to judge the tariffs difficult, but not insurmountable.

Somewhere between Venezuela and Iran, attitudes started to change.

Operation “Absolute Resolve” – the U.S. military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro – occurred in the early hours of 3 January 2026. In Seoul, it started new conversations. Commentators overlooked the fact that it did not respond to an actual or imminent armed attack and lacked United Nations Security Council authorization. What they could not overlook, however, was the widening credibility gap.

For many in South Korea, the issue was not rule of law but predictability: if U.S. strategy is improvisational, leader-driven, and selectively legal, then commitments framed as ironclad look contingent. What happens when this extends to the Korean Peninsula?

The South Korea–United States alliance once operated according to a clear, if imperfect, logic: it paired deterrence with conditional engagement. Even during acute crises, policymakers anchored strategy in process – through multilateral frameworks such as the Six-Party Talks, sustained alliance coordination, and calibrated military signaling. They sought to manage risk, not stage disruption. They pursued a defined objective: preserve stability on the peninsula, prevent escalation, and keep diplomatic space open. That structured approach – whatever its flaws – contrasted sharply with improvisation, because in Korea the costs of unpredictability are existential, not merely reputation.

Operation Absolute Resolve, by comparison, looked less like strategy than improvisation – political signaling without clear strategic objectives. That distinction matters. The Korean Peninsula’s security dilemma is structural and enduring, not a venue for episodic displays of strength. In a theater where miscalculation carries existential risk, improvisation is not resolve; it is instability.

The emerging confrontation with Iran compounds Korean anxieties. From Seoul’s perspective, the Iran conflict – marked by sanctions, strikes, assassinations, counter-strikes, long-term economic strangulation, and sudden financial coercion – has lacked a clearly articulated strategic rationale.

What is the rationale? Democracy and human rights? Containment? Nuclear rollback? Regime change? The security of Israel? A hidden deeper strategy weakening China’s access to Iranian energy? There is no clearly defined objective.

South Korea now confronts the prospect of an immediate devastating economic impact, a distinct lack of U.S. readiness after a major Middle East conflict, and increasing uncertainty about how Washington will conduct itself in the region – including in its future dealings with North Korea.

For South Korea, this is not abstract. The strategy of Donald Trump’s “fire and fury” with North Korea in his first term unfolded through late-night tweets and abrupt rhetorical escalations, outpacing formal diplomatic coordination between Seoul and Washington. Tweets threatened direct and imminent action, suggested aircraft carrier battle groups heading towards the Korean Peninsula when they were going in the opposite direction, challenged North Korea’s leader directly, and dismissed the knowledge of experts working in the field.

Strategy moved at the speed of social media rather than long-established alliance and diplomatic processes. But these concerns were already present.

Venezuela and Iran have precipitated a new concern. In a crisis, would the United States even consider South Korea’s interests or would they focus solely on an impossible-to-decipher US strategy, or even worse,  the personal interests of the Trump family?

From Washington’s perspective, the Korean Peninsula functions as a strategic fulcrum. Its location allows the United States to project influence into the broader Indo-Pacific. It is a forward position against China, a check on Russia’s Far East ambitions, and a symbol of alliance credibility. In this logic, Korea is a pivot.

As China challenges the US in the region, South Koreans fear that the Korean Peninsula will be a fulcrum to defend US interests in the region. As in 1950, China could not both invade Taiwan and prevent the collapse of North Korea. The Korean Peninsula remains the fulcrum.

The unspoken fear is that the priority of the United States is not the Korean people and their security – it is American dominance and the Trump family fortune.

Historically, the alliance worked because U.S. and Korean interests substantially overlapped. Both sought deterrence, stability, and eventual denuclearization. Both valued institutional consultation. When disagreements emerged – over burden-sharing or trade – they were nested within shared strategic assumptions.

Today, those assumptions are less solid. Tariffs justified as patriotic assertion, military operations framed as spectacle, and diplomacy outsourced to ad hoc real estate envoys all contribute to an acute instability. None individually break the alliance. Together, they erode confidence.

Korea is not turning anti-American. Public opinion remains broadly supportive of the alliance. But support is increasingly conditional. Younger policymakers speak openly of hedging strategies – diversifying partnerships, strengthening indigenous capabilities, and expanding diplomatic autonomy. These are not acts of betrayal. They are insurance policies.

Some even dare to wonder what opportunities lie in the BRICS or what acquiescing to China’s dominance in the region would bring.

Koreans are losing faith not in American strength, but in American steadiness. If Washington treats every theater as a stage for disruption – whether in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Ukraine, or elsewhere – Seoul will conclude that the Peninsula is simply another act in a global drama.

And that realization marks a quiet but profound shift: from dependence to distance, from trust to calculation. The alliance may persist for a while, but its emotional core – the sense of shared strategic destiny – is rapidly thinning.

Venezuela and now Iran are having an impact beyond their immediate regions. 

Jeffrey Robertson previously worked for the Australian Government in the fields of foreign policy and diplomacy with a focus on East Asia. He now writes from the other side of the line – as an academic, consultant, and sometimes spy fiction ghostwriter. He writes and updates research at https://junotane.com.

The Price of Perfect Nihilism

by Andrew P. Napolitano | Feb 26, 2026 


When President Donald Trump first announced that he had ordered the Pentagon to attack fishing boats and speedboats on the high seas which he said carried dangerous drugs destined for willing buyers in the United States, many of us who monitor the government for its indifference to the Constitution perceived it as truly criminal and utterly scandalous.

The military commits murder when it intentionally kills a civilian non-combatant who poses no immediate threat to the U.S. or to military personnel. The crime is committed by all personnel in the chain of command who knowingly participate in these attacks.

The order to kill civilian non-combatants is an unlawful order which the military personnel who receive it have a legal and moral duty to challenge and either decline to carry out or resign from the military.

It was scandalous because the president and his secretary of defense boasted about it.

When this view was articulated by six members of Congress, the secretary of defense sought — without a hearing — to reduce the military pension of one of them who is a retired Navy captain, and the Department of Justice sought to indict all six. Trump called for their summary execution.

The federal judge to whom the challenge of the Pentagon’s pay reduction order was assigned ruled that never in American history had a recipient of a military pension had it reduced for pure speech, much less a recipient who is also a U.S. Senator. He invalidated the pension reduction.

Then, when the DoJ presented its case against the six members of Congress to a grand jury in the District of Columbia and asked the grand jurors to indict the six for disturbing the morale of the military, the grand jury declined to do so.

Bear in mind that at a grand jury proceeding, there is no judge or defense counsel present. The grand jurors hear only what the government wants them to hear; and still they told the government: No.

I offer this background as a baseline to examine the thinking of the Trump administration officials involved in this sordid business. They believe they can kill and punish without due process and prosecute those who verbally challenge them.

While the military committed murder, the prosecutors who sought to indict members of Congress for speech committed misconduct in office because they employed the tools of government in direct contravention of the Constitution.

It gets worse.

Last year, we learned that after a targeted attack on a speedboat in September had failed to kill all of its occupants, the admiral in charge ordered a second strike so as to kill the three survivors as they were clinging to debris and trying to stay alive. This, too, was an act of murder; and, like all these boat attacks, a war crime.

War crimes are not pardonable by the president and may be prosecuted by any sovereign nation at any time. War crimes have no statute of limitations or venue requirements for prosecution.

In response to the public and congressional outcry over the murders of the hapless boat attack survivors, the Pentagon began to rescue survivors whom it failed to kill. When Pentagon lawyers asked DoJ lawyers what to do with them and DoJ lawyers asked for the evidence of their crimes, the Pentagon demurred and promptly transported them home. What evidence there was — if any — was destroyed by the Pentagon, yet another crime.

Last week, we learned of two developments that altered this landscape. When two of the survivors whom the military brought home served notice of their intent to sue the government for a violation of their civil rights by attempting to kill them, and when the families of two of the non-survivors of the same attack served notice of intent to sue the government for wrongful death, we learned that the Pentagon had stopped its policy of rescuing survivors and began calling in the Coast Guard— which is no longer in the Pentagon but rather in the Department of Homeland Security — to do the rescuing.

We also learned last week that when an attack on Dec. 30 left eight survivors, and the Coast Guard was called to rescue them, it took 44 hours for the Coast Guard rescue plane to arrive on the scene.

The Pentagon now refuses to inform the Coast Guard of its planned attacks — as it apparently mistrusts its sister agency with any foreknowledge of killings. Those DHS folks are apparently in no hurry to rescue survivors either. The Coast Guard plane that eventually arrived at the site of the Pentagon attack only to find an empty sea took an absurd 3,000-mile circuitous route from Los Angeles north to Lake Tahoe then west to Sacramento then south passing over Los Angeles to Costa Rica and then west to the search area 650 nautical miles out to sea in the Pacific Ocean.

What’s going on here?

What’s going on is a deliberate series of secret macabre government decisions that — contrary to law — it is better for survivors to drown at sea than have all this played out in a federal court room. The law, of course, regards these uncharged persons — living and dead — as innocent and it imposes upon the military that killed them, not a largely domestic agency it mistrusts, the legal obligation to rescue the survivors.

This criminal indifference to human life transgresses the natural law, the Constitution and federal statutes. But it is worse than that. It reveals a deep-seated nihilism animating the Trump administration. Nihilism rejects all standards of human behavior, recognizes no restraints on the exercise of power and accepts no universal concepts of right and wrong.

The price for this nihilism abroad is a government at home that fails to protect the rights of persons, operates without transparency and respects no laws. Who voted for this?


Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO – DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

ICE Brings the War Home

Immigration Agents Mimic Past U.S. Dealers of Death

by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt | Feb 26, 2026 |

Originally appeared at TomDispatch

Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers pulled over several cars in Eagle County, Colorado. They took the people away in handcuffs, according to a witness, and left the cars idling at the side of the road. When family members of the disappeared immigrants arrived, there was no sign of their loved ones. What they found instead were customized ace of spades playing cards that read “ICE Denver Field Office.”

When I saw an image of that card, the memories came flooding back. I’d seen something similar many years before. Sitting in the U.S. National Archives building — Archives II — in College Park, Maryland, sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s, I’d spent parts of several afternoons watching film footage shot by — and of — U.S. troops in Vietnam back in the 1960s. One of those silent military home movies always stuck with me.

That short film opened with a Vietnamese woman clutching a child next to a group of 10 or 15 other children huddled together. They all look wary. Worried. Scared. The camera lingered on a young girl, perhaps five years old, clutching a baby. If that girl survived, she would be around 64 years old today.

After several shots of those children, the source of their fear was revealed. The film cut to a group of foreign young men — heavily armed U.S. soldiers. They were tanned and gaunt, smoking and talking, standing over the corpses of some young Vietnamese men or boys. We see the dead bodies at a distance, again. Lying together and yet eerily alone. Next, the film cuts to a collection of weapons — perhaps a cache found in or near the Vietnamese village where all of this occurred — that resembled old junk more than lethal armaments. The film kept cutting between short scenes of American troops and Vietnamese bodies until it happened.

I’ve never forgotten the scene that followed because I was initially shocked that it had been immortalized on film. I was also surprised that the film had never been destroyed. But then I remembered how ubiquitous such activity was at the time. How soldiers bragged about it. How it was covered — positively — in the U.S. press. How it even showed up in the Congressional Record, not as an outrage deserving of investigation but essentially as a thank you to a manufacturer of playing cards.

In the next scene, we see a soldier pull an ace of spades from what looks like a big stack of such cards. He’s nonchalant. He’s clearly not worried about an officer seeing what he’s doing. He obviously knows he’s being filmed. He reaches down and, as another soldier presses his boot into the chest of that corpse to hold it steady, he tries to insert the card into the mouth of one of the dead Vietnamese. It’s apparently not so easy. It takes a bit of doing, but it proves possible. The next scene shows an ace of spades sticking out of the dead boy’s mouth. The camera lingers. It’s oddly and sickeningly cinematic. The following scene shows another Vietnamese, his face blackened. There’s a battered ace of spades jammed in his mouth, too.

“Impeding” ICE

Such “death cards” — generally either an ace of spades or a custom-printed business card claiming credit for a kill — were ubiquitous among U.S. troops in Vietnam in those years. Some soldiers, like those in that unit of the 25th Infantry Division operating in Quang Ngai Province in 1967, used a regular ace of spades of the type you’d find in a standard deck of cards. But Company A, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, for instance, left their victims with a customized ace of spades sporting the unit’s nickname “Gunfighters,” a skull-and-crossbones, and the phrase “dealers of death.” Helicopter pilots, like Captain Lynn Carlson, occasionally dropped similar specially made calling cards from their gunships. One side of Carlson’s card read: “Congratulations. You have been killed through courtesy of the 361st. Yours truly, Pink Panther 20.” The other side proclaimed, “The Lord giveth and the 20mm [cannon] taketh away. Killing is our business and business is good.”

The cards found last month in Eagle County harken back to that brutal heritage. They were the same general size and shape as those shoved into the mouths of dead Vietnamese: black and white 4×6-inch cards with an “A” over a spade in their top left and bottom right corners. A larger ornate black-and-white spade dominates the center of the card. Above it is the phrase “ICE Denver Field Office.” Below it, you find the address and phone number of the ICE detention facility in nearby Aurora, Colorado.

The 10 people taken away by ICE in Eagle County are now reportedly being held in that very same Aurora Detention Facility.

In a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Democrats in Colorado’s Congressional delegation called out ICE’s use of the ace of spades. The card, they wrote, “has long been known as the ‘death card’ and has been used by white supremacist groups to inspire fear and threaten physical violence. It is unacceptable and dangerous for federal law enforcement to use this symbol to intimidate Latino communities.” They continued: “This behavior undermines public trust in law enforcement, raises serious civil rights concerns, and falls far short of the professional standards expected of federal agents.”

ICE’s Denver field office offered a boilerplate response to TomDispatch when questioned about the use of the cards. “ICE is investigating this situation but unequivocally condemns this type of action and/or officer conduct,” a spokesperson wrote in an email, adding, “Once notified, ICE supervisors acted swiftly to address the issue.” The spokesperson said that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which deals with employee misconduct, will conduct a “thorough investigation,” but the Colorado lawmakers asked for more. Those lawmakers called for an independent investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.

“As the son of immigrants and the father of two young children, I am horrified by the abuses being committed by the Trump administration — from the streets of Minneapolis to right here in Eagle County,” said Democratic Representative Joe Neguse, a member of the delegation that wrote the letter. “These outrageous, aggressive intimidation tactics,” he added, “are meant to stoke fear among our neighbors, and it is immoral and wrong. This administration must be held accountable, and we cannot allow this to continue unchecked.”

ICE Denver has a much different opinion. “Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, ICE is held to the highest professional standard,” the spokesperson there told TomDispatch. “America can be proud of the professionalism our officers bring to the job day-in and day-out.”

Americans think otherwise. A clear majority of voters — 63% — disapprove of the way ICE is doing its job after more than a year of immigration crackdowns across the United States, according to a January poll by the New York Times and Siena University. Sixty-one percent of voters said that ICE had “gone too far,” including nearly one in five Republicans. The poll was conducted after Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and legal observer, was gunned down in Minneapolis by an ICE officer.

Federal immigration officers have shot at least 13 people since September, according to data compiled by The Trace, killing at least five, including Good and Alex Pretti, a Minnesota resident who was gunned down by Border Patrol agents last month. Before their killings, Good and Pretti had been observing the activities of agents. Federal officers frequently confront and threaten those observing, following, and filming them for “impeding” their efforts. In numerous prior instances, they had unholstered or pointed weapons at people who filmed or followed them.

A recent report by the Cato Institute notes that it is “crucial to understand that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) consider people who follow DHS and ICE agents to observe, record, or protest their operations as engaging in ‘impeding.’” It goes on to note that DHS “has a systematic policy of threatening people who follow ICE or DHS agents to record their activities with detentions, arrests, and violence, and agents have already chased, detained, arrested, charged, struck, and shot at people who follow them.” In the wake of Good’s death, to take one example, the Justice Department opened an investigation of Good’s widow for allegedly “interfering” with an ICE operation — apparently for filming the shooting.

A Death Card Moment

Killing, wounding, threatening, or investigating observers are just some of the many abuses and violent tactics of immigration officers in the era of Donald Trump. Others include brutally beating detainees, employing banned chokeholds, or spraying chemical irritants on protesters. They also have carried out arbitrary and unlawful arrests and detentions, fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades into crowds, and shattered the windows of vehicles.

Colorado specifically has seen numerous abuses by immigration agents in addition to the use of those death cards. ICE officers in Colorado continue to arrest people because of the color of their skin and in violation of a federal judge’s order, according to a complaint filed earlier this month by the  American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and two Denver law firms. In November, U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson found that ICE was routinely conducting illegal arrests in the state.

“Just in Colorado, we’ve seen ICE agents pepper-spray protestors in the face. We’ve seen ICE drag elderly women on the ground,” said Judith Marquez, a volunteer for the Colorado Rapid Response Network and a campaign manager for the Colorado Immigrants Rights Coalition. “We don’t want to wait for another Renee Nicole Good to be murdered.”

Alex Sánchez, president and CEO of Voces Unidas, the immigrant rights group that took possession of those death cards in Colorado, fears that ICE might be using such cards as an intimidation tactic elsewhere, too, but that information about such acts remains unreported because those affected are unlikely to trust local law enforcement officers, elected officials, or even mainstream human-rights groups.

In the wake of the killings of Good and Pretti, the Trump administration quickly branded those observing ICE as domestic terrorists, and federal authorities insisted that Minnesota had “no jurisdiction” to investigate those killings, while blocking the access of state investigators to evidence at the crime scene.

As U.S. District Judge Alex Tostrud wrote in an 18-page decision: “Federal agents collected evidence from the scene… They won’t share it with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension [BCA]… After BCA agents arrived, federal agents blocked them from accessing the scene.” Earlier this month, Tostrud, an appointee of President Donald Trump no less, lifted the emergency order he had issued the day of Pretti’s shooting that required federal investigators to preserve evidence gathered at the scene of that fatal shooting.

In the absence of independent oversight of the crime scenes, TomDispatch asked DHS if the federal agents who gunned down Good and Pretti had left death cards at the scene of those killings.

The Department never responded.

For more than two decades, America’s forever wars have been coming home in large and small ways. But in 2026, death cards made famous in a war that ended more than 50 years ago — a war that America’s president dodged via a draft deferment for seemingly spurious bone spurs — have made a reappearance. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a war of extreme brutality rooted in racism would have resonance with ICE any more than that those macabre calling cards are on brand for a self-proclaimed peacemaker president who has made war on Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria,  Venezuela, and Yemen, as well as on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. While he might not have actually dealt those cards in Colorado, it’s hard not to see them as Donald Trump’s death cards.

Copyright 2026 Nick Turse

Nick Turse is a senior reporter at The Intercept and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

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