American Imperialists Pillage Venezuela
The Trump administration carries out a vicious assault on Caracas, kidnaps President Maduro, and ushers in a new puppet government.
In the early hours of January 3rd, 2026, the American imperialist machine carried out an assault on the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, first eliminating air defenses, then a wave of attack helicopters and special forces troops. Military installations, airports, and air bases were the main targets, as the strike was oddly limited, not characteristic of a full invasion. The Venezuelan military put up very little resistance, suggesting the chain of command was inoperative, the military was completely caught off guard, or this was potentially a planned spectacle. The invaders successfully captured President Maduro and his wife at Fort Tiuna after his protection unit was overrun before they could reach a saferoom. Maduro was kidnapped to a Navy vessel in the Caribbean and transported to New York, where he was paraded around the city before being indicted on fabricated charges alleging he conspired to traffic drugs to the United States.
The stark difference in this regime change operation was that the administration isn’t even bothering to hide its real intentions. Trump outright announced the real reason for the ‘intervention’ was to control and exploit Venezuelan oil, spouting the bewildering lie that the oil was “stolen.” A few days after the attack, Trump extorted the interim government for 30 to 50 million barrels, equivalent to $2 billion. Later that week, Trump was already holding a public meeting with oil billionaires on how best to divide up the spoils. As if this round of imperial war did not echo Bush’s Iraq War enough, Trump even declared fentanyl to be a ‘weapon of mass destruction,’ to pile on this obviously false narrative. One does have to wonder who this lie is even being crafted for, as their actions are quite literally self-contradictory. It’s possibly for the MAGA base, but it turns out they fully support the “Donroe Doctrine” regardless.
In the weeks after the invasion, the interim government has been working behind the scenes with the CIA and Trump issue reforms on their state-run oil policy, essentially opening the door for foreign investment against the Venezuelan constitution. It’s clear to everyone now that the new government has abandoned defending the principles of the Bolivarian Revolution and is now a puppet of US oil companies. This episode is among the dozens of coups the American regime has imposed on Latin America. As nations like Vietnam have proven, an organized and disciplined workers’ revolution is the only thing that can cease imperialist aggression.
Military Provocation & Sanctions
This invasion comes after a four-month-long taunting campaign where the American military carried out dozens of airstrikes on civilian boats off the coast of Venezuela and the surrounding Caribbean. A blockade was established, cutting off Venezuela from world trade and seizing seven oil tankers. Meanwhile, satellite images and statements from the President’s own mouth showed the American military building up a massive fleet of warships with over 10,000 troops in Puerto Rico and bases in the Caribbean, making it obvious that an invasion was imminent. Accompanying the buildup were occasional intimidation missions with bombers flying near Venezuelan airspace, likely to provoke a preemptive counter-attack.
During the January 3rd assault on Caracas, the Defense Department stated that Delta Force operators were the unit that carried out the abduction in accordance with a DOJ bounty. This bounty was established by Trump in 2020 at $15 million, increased by the Biden administration to $25 million, and then doubled to $50 million by Trump in August of last year. Using this DOJ warrant, the Trump administration was able to sell the very flimsy justification that Maduro was a ‘narcoterrorist’ and therefore didn’t need congressional approval to attack another sovereign nation. The only evidence the government is using linking Maduro to a long-defunct drug cartel called Cartel de los Soles, which was revealed to be a 1990s CIA asset. Inexplicably, on January 6th, the DOJ revised its claim that it was even a real group, debasing their own fabricated charge against the Venezuelan President.
The outcry from Democratic leadership in the wake of this illegal invasion was that Trump needed to get congressional approval before using military force; however, such a basic Constitutional concept taught to every social studies student has been long dead for decades, especially after the AUMF under Bush.
Kamala Harris, who is somehow not politically ostracized for opening the door to fascism, chimed in by robotically reciting the party line that Maduro is a ‘brutal dictator’ but also that this was ‘unlawful and unwise.’ Harris says that “Wars for regime change or oil that are sold as strength but turn into chaos,” yet she participated in just this; watching as Biden increased Maduro’s bounty and kept sanctions in place with the exact same goal of regime change. It was Harris who, when asked whether there is anything she would have done differently than Biden over the past four years, famously said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of… and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.” The Democratic Party is a party with the same imperialist goals as Trump, but takes a far less aggressive approach.
The analogy ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ could not ring more true as sanctioning, a precedent started by Obama in 2015, expanded by Trump and continued by Biden-Harris, has provably caused the displacement of at least 7.7 million and the excess death of at least 40,000 people— dozens of times more than even the propagandist number of deaths Maduro is responsible for. Sanctions as a policy are collective punishment, not ‘democracy’ promotion.
Even if Trump cared about the minor legal speed bump of consulting Congress, this outcry especially fell on deaf ears since plenty of Democrats actually support overthrowing Maduro and have been rallying for the destruction of Venezuela for decades, through war or sanctions. On top of that, Democrats voted unanimously to approve Marco Rubio for State Secretary last year, the loudest and most tactful war monger in the cabinet. If we may recall, Rubio is the cowardly rat who grew up fantasizing about overthrowing Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s revolution that freed the Cuban people from tyranny. Rather than becoming a fighter, Rubio used his inherited wealth and prestige to be a lawyer and became the best ass-kisser in Washington, fully living up to his sobriquet “Little Marco.”
The Real Narcoterrorists
The irony in all of this is that Delta Force is the same group, along with other Special Forces units, that has been involved in countless drug trafficking schemes throughout the past decade, uncovered by investigative journalist Seth Harp in his latest book. This group has been guarded behind layers of qualified immunity and local corruption in Fort Bragg that has seen multiple drug crimes, rapes, and even murders get completely swept under the rug, leaving victims’ families completely in the dark.
In one instance, two Special Forces soldiers were caught trying to load 40kg of cocaine onto a military flight from Colombia, a shipment worth millions of dollars. In another, “Staff Sergeant Tonya Long, a customs inspector attached to 7th Group who got caught smuggling more than $1 million in cash back to Fort Bragg in hollowed-out electronics.”
A decent portion of the book centers on Billy Lavigne, who was one of the many drug dealers in Fort Bragg who killed another soldier in front of his daughter in a suspicious ‘self-defense’ shooting. There was also the Raeford Drop Zone, a Delta Force training ground that was used as “a base for a long-running international drug-smuggling conspiracy,” which flooded North Carolina with methamphetamine for years.
With known rapist Pete Hegseth, who vows to restore the military’s “warrior ethos” running the Defense Department, the unaccountable frat behavior will only get worse going forward.
The Media Manufactures War
Despite a majority of the American public opposing an invasion of Venezuela, the press ramped up its propaganda assault in the past month by flooding pro-intervention op-eds and gutless ‘neutral’ news coverage that doesn’t frame these attacks as war crimes. One article from ABC even described that US invaders returned fire “in self-defense” and lauded the intelligence agencies that illegally stalked Maduro beforehand. Similarly, a Semafor report showed that the plans for the illegal invasion were leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post beforehand. Both outlets refused to publish them to “protect US troops,” even though they may have had the power to delay or even halt the invasion. This indicates just how little the lives of the hundred or so Venezuelans killed in the attack are worth to the American press. Meanwhile, writers like Eric Levitz from Vox feebly pushed the lie that somehow Trump’s motivations for the invasion were not connected to oil, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Venezuela notably has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, at over 303 billion barrels. Some uninformed commentators have noted that Venezuelan crude oil is particularly heavy, arguing that it is less profitable than lighter reserves and therefore not a motive for invasion. However, it’s quite the opposite: this heavy crude is perfectly suitable for the US market, as roughly 70% of US refineries, mostly located in Texas, run most efficiently on heavier crude, while almost all require a mix of heavy and light.
The other motivation is the trade war with China that elites across their narrow political spectrum have been dreading. The largest importer of Venezuelan oil has been China, which has been challenging the hegemony of the US dollar as the ‘world’s reserve currency,’ providing non-aligned nations with far more equitable trade terms. Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, leader of the American ICE gestapo, said this to a CNN interview, essentially saying ‘how dare they sell to China.’ As nations fear becoming captured by US economic policy and the capitalist crises compound, this trend will only accelerate.
The most embarrassing rumor that the media helped spread is headlining an offhand comment that Trump made that Maduro copied his dance, and that was the real reason for the invasion. Whether it had a kernel of truth or not, the story is a complete distraction— as if the invasion that had been building for months, with weeks of coordination, was not inevitable, but because the President got offended at a dance. Here, liberal media shows how they’re just as fantastical as the conservative media, suggesting that politics is just the work of one crazed madman who makes irrational decisions rather than the very calculated system of imperialist war for profit that it is.
While most of those liberal outlets are making the obvious parallels to Bush’s Iraq War, they are effectively still covering for Trump since they’ve been advocating Maduro’s overthrow for years at this point. Now that it has finally happened, they are suddenly sending mixed signals about whether the invasion was a positive. The New York Times issued soft criticism of how Trump’s justifications were questionable in pieces like “Rubio Helped Oust Maduro Running Venezuela May Prove Trickier,” then outright lied to defend the invasion with pieces like “Majority of Latin Americans Endorsed Trump’s Raid in Venezuela,” conveniently only citing three countries in Latin America with dubious polls. Rags like CBS, now owned by failed journalist Bari Weiss, doubled down, publishing obviously fake polls like “90% of Venezuelans inside the country say they feel grateful to President Donald Trump for removing Nicolás Maduro from power” which is far more than Americans or the Venezuelan diaspora and “78% said they would vote for María Corina Machado” which is a practical impossibility given her 11% approval rating.
Realistically, illegally waging war on another country and kidnapping their President should be outside the bounds of liberal democratic norms and should be working against Trump. However, liberal publications only bolster Trump’s rally-around-the-flag effect by posing no rhetorical opposition. The primary problem is that these liberal media institutions support the end, just not the means, and have been manufacturing consent for that end for over a decade.
History Repeats
While the images coming out of Caracas were nothing short of shocking, they were, historically, almost one-to-one reenactments of the past. For one, the initial air bombardment showed much visual resemblance to Iraq in 2003, with the city at night being lit with explosions and US helicopters firing missiles into buildings. It’s also impossible not to compare the kidnapping of Maduro to the invasion of Panama, which ended in the capture of President Manuel Noriega on this day, January 31st, 1990, after five weeks of brutal fighting. Some residents compare the resulting destruction of Panama City and El Chorillo to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
Noriega was an intelligence asset for the CIA to combat Soviet influence, backed by the US in the 1984 election. Shortly thereafter, Noriega broke off that relationship, instead gaining connections to drug cartels and accepting support from the Soviet Union. Being one of the most important passageways for US ships, this sour relationship was untenable. After cancelling elections and refusing to step down, the US saw an opportunity to replace Noriega by rapidly ramping up pressure and then launching its full-scale invasion. If the myth of the ‘Rules Based Order’ was not shattered in the mind of the American public in that moment, certainly the half of a dozen interventions and invasions including Venezuela since then, ought to.
María Machado’s Hubris
With Maduro gone, the Trump administration has agreed to work with the interim government led by the acting President Delcy Rodríguez. In an astonishing bit of irony, Trump refused to support the opposition party’s bid to lead the country after the Western press put in an immense effort to peddle their leader, María Corina Machado.
The Nobel Committee essentially handpicked Machado to win the Peace Prize in 2025 over many more deserving nominees, such as Francesca Albanese, Hind Rajab, Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, and the Children of Gaza. The selection prompted a wave of praise, further manufacturing the justification for war on Maduro’s ‘dictatorship.’
In a press conference, Trump flat-out denied her as a possible leader, saying, “It’d be very tough for her to be the leader,” and that she “doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country.” Later, it was reported that part of the reason for Trump’s refusal was that she had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize rather than declining it. But this is also after Machado went out of her way to heap flattery on Trump at every chance she got, even dedicating the award to him in her acceptance speech.
On January 15th, Machado visited Trump at the White House and gifted the award to him, even though it was technically non-transferable. All of this just for Trump to give a careless thanks on social media, saying it was “a wonderful gesture of mutual respect” before never mentioning her again. Machado proves yet again the famous quote (from Henry Kissinger of all people):
“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
Though she didn’t die per se, her career is surely dead. It’s her audacious naivety to think that just because the US would overthrow your government for you, that they would also have the grace of installing you in power as well.
The Next American Puppet State
Despite Trump’s and then Rubio’s offhand claim that the US would “run Venezuela,” it seems that interim President Rodríguez is willing to support American ambitions rather than oppose them. This suggests either that the interim government is too afraid to oppose the US after the invasion or that Rodríguez and others were conspiring against Maduro and arranging his kidnapping. Refusing to go along with the American exploiters means certain death for the current government, not even talking about the untold numbers of civilian deaths such a takeover would cause; they likely see cooperation as the lesser of two bad choices. However, the lack of resistance to the US military on the ground and the seeming disconnect of the defense command structure at a time when the country should’ve been on high alert seem to point to either a “negotiated exit” or a conspiracy.
The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) seems to agree with the latter, lambasting the “subordinate and tutelary government” that accepted visitation from CIA director John Ratcliffe and is now making deals with the Trump administration to align with US interests. On January 16th, Anadolu reported that Rodríguez submitted a proposal to reform the country’s hydrocarbons law to enable foreign investment in untapped oil fields without infrastructure. In a statement, PVC denounced this as a clear violation of the constitution and of Venezuela’s sovereignty. They continued saying that this puts Venezuela’s oil industry in “a profound crisis that is not only a consequence of the criminal unilateral coercive measures imposed by imperialism, but also of the failure of government policy, characterized by corruption, improvisation, and the progressive dismantling of institutions.” It appears that Rodríguez is trying to use the the false pretense of “modernization and economic efficiency” in order to obfuscate the fact that this capitulation is directly against the interests of the Venezuelan people.
There’s less legitimacy to claim that Maduro gave himself up since now it appears the heaviest fighting of the invasion was in Fort Tiuna, where about 75 were killed. The only evidence of this was that Maduro himself, in the weeks leading up to the invasion, was offering concessions to Trump in October, and fairly big ones at that. According to a Times report, Maduro was ready to open oil and gold projects to US companies through preferential contracts and even redirect oil exports from Iran, Russia, and China to the US. By removing Maduro and flexing America’s imperialist muscle, Trump can claim to have ‘restored peace’ by removing a ‘dictator’ while still achieving the same ends.
Reshaping the Imperialist World Order
In the broader picture, the US is exerting its new method of control, restating the terms of global trade: give the US concessions or face punishment. While other administrations used sanctions and ‘free trade’ to gain hegemony, the US is past that point now. This invasion is part of the policy of tariffs: threaten a country and then force it to give up resources or accept better trade terms. Often, the bully does not have to exert force. As we’ve seen with allied countries in the EU, Korea, and Japan, Trump is pressuring with massive tariffs that are effectively embargoes, then extorts them with ‘trade deals’ to lift the pressure. As with threats toward Greenland, the Trump administration may have already calculated that an invasion is unwise, but it will likely use them to extract concessions from the EU instead.
The unfortunate reality is that countries like Mexico and Brazil have to back down and stay silent, since they could be next. That’s even though they should act in the interests of all other nations and oppose US hegemony. Eventually, history shows that the fascist Lebensraum policy comes to an end when the empire extends itself so far and creates so many enemies that it collapses under its own weight.
Some have even cried that this illegal invasion goes against US interests, is bad for the US, and is not what America does. But this is the most American thing Trump can do on the world stage. America is the world’s representative of capitalism, and aggressive, murderous foreign policy is what it has been doing for the past century or more. There’s a reason Trump lauds the Roosevelt Corollary and the Monroe Doctrine: they are embedded in American political identity. Imperialism is not chaos as liberals frame it. It is part of capitalism’s design: the system needs war to keep states in line and uses military force to support dollar hegemony. The US Dollar, since it is no longer backed by gold, is effectively backed by military force because it literally cannot fail unless the government falls, which only happens when the military is defeated or overthrown internally.
Conclusion
The media has been successful in presenting the pseudo-left narrative, framing public discontent, largely from the middle-class Venezuelan diaspora who had the luxury to leave, as inspiring and progressive. The media does this across the Global South, showing spontaneous demonstrations and framing them as rising against the ‘dictatorial’ government, bound to liberate the country from tyranny. Besides the fact that Western media only highlights right-wing demonstrations, it’s a disguised right-wing frame made in bad faith— that somehow disorganized protestors, that the American pillagers will inevitably co-opt, will bring freedom. But in the Venezuelan context, this is contradicted by the groundswell of protests against the American empire in the days following the invasion. There is clearly a sizable constituency, uncoincidentally the poor, who still support Maduro for the progress that PSUV made since 1999.
Even many on the left get this wrong. It is not a binary choice between American imperialism and Maduro. But there is certainly no symmetry between the two. It’s impossible to deny the immense pressure placed on Venezuelan leadership by outside forces, whether it be sanctions, election meddling, or assassination attempts. That doesn’t absolve the handful of tyrannical crimes Maduro is responsible for, but that pales in comparison to the silent murder of having your country controlled by an American puppet regime and exploited for profit.
Criticism only makes sense from the left— that the Bolivarian Revolution did not actually institute socialism— since it clearly explains the downfall happening today. If Chavez had been guided by Marxism and prepared for the inevitable day that the US military would come knocking, this could have been avoided. That includes becoming self-sufficient, building up defenses, diversifying the economy, and running a command-economy structure.
The only way to end this is by defeating capitalism. And you cannot just vote it out. As this instance has shown, even when a leader like Chavez radically reforms the country and makes a serious effort to protect the country’s sovereignty, freedom is not achieved by handing over the reins of capital to the state. The means of production must be placed in the hands of the working class, the capitalists must be suppressed, and their power eliminated.
Again, it is not imperialism or Maduro. It’s not a matter of throwing your hands up because neither will bring liberation; all that does is serve the imperialist line by equating the two and pushing people into a campist defense of Maduro. The liberation of the Venezuelan people will only come through a serious communist revolution that refuses to concede to the exploiters.
“Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”
—Emiliano Zapata
Only where citizens organize to rise up against imperialism, aim to break oil dependency, and build a state run by the workers can freedom be achieved. We are in an age when the declining rate of profit will ravage the capitalist world, and workers of all nations will have an opportunity to throw off their chains once and for all.