Venezuela Under Siege
America's next imperial war is already underway; Trump threatens a ground invasion while the corporate media manufactures consent.
The American regime is now openly launching an illegal war to take over Venezuela, Latin America’s most resource-rich nation, under no pretext at all. This is the beginning of yet another imperialist war and another chapter in America’s evil legacy of war profiteering.
In the past two months, the United States has attacked at least ten fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela, murdering a total of 43 people. Trump moved warships into aggressive positions in the Caribbean, including an aircraft carrier, guided missile destroyers, and amphibious assault ships. A massive 10,000 extra troops join the buildup of naval hardware in Puerto Rico. Satellite images revealed newly stationed F-35s, an AC-130 gunship, and an MQ-9 Reaper drone at Puerto Rico’s military bases. On October 15th, an American B-52 bomber took off from Louisiana, illegally entered Venezuela’s airspace, flew around for a few hours, and landed at a Caribbean base. A recent cellphone video in Trinidad also captured an American surveillance drone flying off its coast. On another occasion, a B-1 bomber took off from Texas, inexplicably flew near Venezuelan airspace, and returned.
Trump has been openly agitating for a coup to overthrow Maduro since his first term, with neocons like Marco Rubio in his ear. Since orchestrating brutal sanctions has failed at removing President Maduro, Trump has expanded this plan from just ‘regime change’ to a full-scale ground invasion. It’s no longer a secret what is about to happen: the US is going to war.
War Mongering
The most overt proof of America’s intentions comes straight from President Trump’s mouth when he openly said he is considering a ground invasion. In a press conference, he said to the media, “We’re certainly looking at land now, because we got the sea very well under control.” Trump, that same day, also authorized the CIA to carry out covert lethal operations in Venezuela. Let us remember that this CIA is headed by John Ratcliffe, who, at the beginning of his term, said he would make the CIA less risk-averse, calling it “going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do.”
As for the imperialist motivations of Trump and his bloodthirsty neocon cabinet, the motivation was always oil. Venezuela is by far the most oil-rich nation in the world, with an estimated 303 billion barrels of oil, double Iraq’s reserves. It’s hardly a secret either; when Trump met with Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó in June of 2023, he boasted that he would help ‘take over’ Venezuela’s oil. “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten to all that oil; it would have been right next door.” Since the US has levied massive sanctions on Venezuela and essentially cut it off from the export market, it only produces the 12th most oil in the world currently. The other strategic objective of the US is to politically cut Venezuela off from the BRICS coalition, which it sought to join in 2023. Despite being quite fractured, this coalition is the strongest counter to American hegemony, suggesting the US may be urgently trying to disrupt the partnership before it becomes official.
To describe the intensity of this drive for war, the Admiral of the Southern Command, Alvin Holsey, who is in charge of the Latin America and the Caribbean region, suddenly resigned on October 16th. Holsey left his position quietly, issuing a very brief public statement. Rep Adam Smith of the House Armed Services Committee said of his abrupt departure, “Prior to Trump, I can’t think of a combatant commander who left his or her post early, ever.” It’s extremely hard to believe the timing of this is just a coincidence, suggesting there was an internal disagreement over the Venezuela question. The velocity of these moves makes war seem more imminent than ever before in the last two decades.
Boat Strikes
On September 2nd, the US military began air striking civilian boats in the Caribbean, claiming them to be smuggling drugs. The first of these boats was struck coming from the port of San Juan de Unare, headed for Trinidad, which is less than 70 miles away. For reference, this peñero boat was about 540 miles from Puerto Rico and 1550 miles from Florida, nowhere remotely close to the United States. President Trump baselessly labeled the victims “narcoterrorists” part of a “violent drug trafficking cartel.” The attack that murdered 11 people was flaunted in a social media post and was internationally condemned as a blatant extrajudicial killing, let alone the fact that there was no proof that it even had drugs or weapons on board. No attempt to intercept the boat was made either.
Trinidad’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar praised the war crime, saying, “I have no sympathy for traffickers; the U.S. military should kill them all violently.” Brazil’s President Lula da Silva had a much more commendable response, saying to the UN Assembly, “The most effective way to combat drug trafficking is to cooperate to suppress money laundering and limit arms trades,” then adding, “using lethal force in situations that do not constitute armed conflict is like executing people without trial.”
The second boat was a small fishing vessel attacked on September 15th, murdering 3 people. On the ground, reporting found one of the now widows of one of the victims, who confirmed that her husband was a fisherman. The Trump administration openly shared the video of the incident as they gloated in killing those they deem ‘violent terrorists,’ ominously threatening “WE ARE HUNTING YOU.” Trump also falsely asserted that the boat was “headed to the US,” which had no basis; no outlet could obtain proof that it was even in international waters (let alone US waters), which is exceedingly unlikely given the boat’s small size.
The third was attacked on September 19th, also killing three people, this time aided by the Dominican Republic, which claimed but did not definitively prove that their navy recovered cocaine from the speedboat. It was destroyed 90 miles from the southern-most point of Hispaniola, three-quarters of the distance from Venezuela.
The fourth attack occurred on October 3rd, murdering 4 people. Secretary of Defense Hegseth adamantly claimed that intelligence had confirmed drugs were onboard, but also refused to provide that intelligence.
A fifth attack was carried out on October 14th, which murdered 6 people on a fishing boat off the coast of Venezuela. Two of the men were from Trinidad, ironic given that Trinidad’s Prime Minister has been encouraging the strikes. Columbia’s President Gustavo Petro, in response to a citizen of his country being killed in the attack, said, “This means that officials from the US and the Dominican Republic would be guilty of the murder of Colombian citizens.” Petro has also called for investigations into Trump and other officials from other countries involved in the strike.
A sixth attack on October 16th murdered 2 people, and the survivors were allegedly returned to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia.
More strikes have happened since, with increasing frequency. Reporters are struggling to get concrete evidence, as the only information released about the attacks has been coming from the White House and Pentagon, openly flaunting these murderous attacks. In one of these admissions, known rapist and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tweeted, “If you are a narcoterrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat [Al-Qaeda]. Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you.” The New York Times reported that a total of ten illegal strikes have occurred so far, eight in the Caribbean and two in the Pacific. There could be more strikes that have gone unreported. The one thing that is clear is that this will be a ramp to increase aggression against Venezuela.
Lies & Double Standards
These attacks come after the Trump administration designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, the same group which Trump falsely blamed for ‘taking over an apartment complex’ in Aurora, Colorado, to stir up anti-immigrant hatred during the election season. Despite the intelligence community reporting earlier this year that the Maduro government has no ties to this criminal organization, the Trump administration has worked to associate the two together to justify further aggression. According to the AP in March, “Trump also declared the group an invading force, invoking an 18th-century wartime law that allows the US to deport noncitizens without any legal recourse. Under the Alien Enemies Act, the administration sent more than 250 Venezuelan men to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they remained incommunicado and without access to an attorney until their July deportation to Venezuela.” The dual assault on immigrants and the country of Venezuela is by design.
Meanwhile, the United States’ own intelligence has shown that there is no link between Venezuela and drug trafficking. In fact, according to a leak from a US official, no fentanyl is produced in the country. A now disbanded group known as ‘The Cartel of the Suns,’ a CIA asset from the 1990s, is being used by the State Department as evidence for trafficking. It was a few Venezuelan national guardsmen who used to oversee cocaine shipments to America, which used to flood inner cities, but it dissolved a long time ago. Overall, less than 8% of drugs like cocaine that make it into the US come from the Caribbean area.
The concerted effort to antagonize and provoke the Venezuelan government to retaliate in some way that would justify a massive escalation, much like how Israel manufactured a justification to attack Iran in June of this year. A strong parallel can also be drawn to the over 35 years of war on Iraq, where the US wanted to disrupt or take over the country’s oil supply on behalf of oil baron capitalists. The US essentially invented a reason to invade, went through with it, and leveled the country in the process. An even eerier similarity to today is when Saddam Hussein invited independent weapons inspectors to search for the WMDs and put to bed the conspiracy. Maduro is now offering Trump mineral rights, oil rights, and other concessions, such as quotas on oil sales to China, in an effort to de-escalate the situation. In both cases, the leaders’ efforts at diplomacy failed since the US was already dead set on war. Immediately after the offer was made, the Trump administration denied all offers to come to the table.
State Secretary Marco Rubio is the spearhead of this imperial policy of forcing ‘regime change’ in Venezuela. Rubio, while foaming at the mouth for blood, labeled Maduro an “illegitimate” leader and indicted him for drug trafficking to the US. Rubio also describes Maduro as a “fugitive from American justice,” and has a bounty reward of $50 million for his arrest. A White House official said Trump would use “every element of American power” to stop drugs from entering the US.
Rubio also has a major stake in this. Rubio is financially backed by billionaire Paul Singer, who owns hedge fund Elliot Capital Management, which controls CITGO, the foreign wing of Venezuela’s state oil company. Since 2019, CITGO has been in legal limbo since US sanctions effectively seized the company from Venezuelan control. One of the first things that will happen if the US can install a puppet government is that control over oil companies will be sold to US oligarchs like Singer.
On the issue of ‘democracy’, the saber-rattling is entirely unique to Maduro since Trump and the US is perfectly willing to work with other, often worse dictators around the world such as President Erdoğan of Turkey, Sultan Haitham bin Tariq of Oman, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani of Qatar, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvator, the Saudi family, and, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Though the uniquely strong connection between Israel, a fascist apartheid state, and the US government is well-known by now, the admiration that Trump has for the Gulf monarchies is particularly ironic.
The UAE and the Saudi dictatorships have had an abysmal human rights record for decades, including slavery and genocide, to name a few, while not even trying to claim to have any democracy or equal rights. It’s especially telling how embedded this aggression toward Venezuela is that the establishment liberal media does not pick up on this blatant hypocrisy. Liberals, especially when given the financial incentive of being part of a corporate media apparatus, will always choose to defend overt far-right authoritarianism before even the vaguest of socialist experiments.
The grossest double standard is Trump’s relationship with Argentina, led by far-right libertarian freak Javier Milei, whom he calls his ‘favorite president.’ Milei’s policies have crashed the economy, and inflation has obliterated the peso’s value, leading to a poverty crisis. The country is also now on its twenty-third IMF loan, raising its total international debt to $41.8 billion. In the wake of this, Trump has announced a $20 billion bailout for Argentina, which was later raised to $40 billion. The plan aims to maintain a right-wing ally, reorient the country away from China, and dollarize the Argentinian economy. What’s going on here is that America is willing to both dump tens of billions of dollars onto a failed leader who is aligned with the US, but refuses to allow another leader in Venezuela to exist in opposition to US interests, even if it takes another imperial war and hundreds of billions of dollars to remove him.
History of the Bolivarian Movement
Chávez
For our purposes, it’s worth telling how this relationship developed. In 1992, Hugo Chávez, a military leader, attempted a coup against Carlos Andrés Pérez’s corrupt government, gaining popular support from the masses. At the time, Venezuela was suffering from a poverty crisis and deep inequality due to IMF-mandated austerity measures and lavish overspending by the government, which brought no benefits to the people. For 35 years, the country was ruled by a two-party oligarchy that resembled democracy but kept the same ruling class firmly in charge. After the failed coup, the country rallied around the reform candidate Rafael Caldera, who finally broke the two-party system. Caldera pardoned Chávez after serving two years in prison, but the country was still in an economic crisis, desperate for revitalization. Chávez returned to the political stage, rallying popular support and winning a monumental landslide victory in the 1998 Presidential election. This major victory became known as the Bolivarian Revolution, in which average Venezuelans finally exercised political autonomy in a country that had always been ruled by oligarchs.
The movement was somewhat socialist in character, aiming to nationalize large parts of the economy and to use the wealth generated to fund universal social programs that would benefit the people directly. In his own words, he called it ‘21st Century Socialism,’ which was essentially just social democracy. This was also part of the Latin American Pink Tide in the early 2000s, where popular left-leaning leaders won power and united to fight against American imperialism. Though the project was certainly not of the Marxist tradition and ultimately maintained capitalism, Chávez still faced strong opposition from the elites (the former oligarchy) and international capitalists looking to slice up his country.
In 2002, a CIA-backed coup organized by reactionary conservatives, the business federations, and a few high-ranking military officers ousted Chávez for 47 hours. Loyalist military officers, backed by a massive pro-Chávez mobilization of poor and working people, took back the Presidential Palace by force and restored Chávez to the presidency.
Chávez would hold his popular mandate until he died in 2013, amid a deteriorating economic and political situation. Chávez, during his presidency, maintained a very strained relationship with the United States, as the country was falsely blamed for being a potential source of drug trafficking and terrorism.
Maduro
It was then that Maduro took power, rising from Vice President to President, a move that was technically unconstitutional. Maduro made it clear he was a successor to the Bolivarian Revolution and would carry on Chávez’s legacy.
Due to a failing economic system, driven by lower oil revenues and the previous administration’s failure to offset them with savings, the people turned to mass protests in 2014. At the same time, crime was spiraling out of control as Maduro’s government responded with harsh media crackdowns, use of tear gas on protestors, mass arrests, and covert ‘security operations’ which were likely extrajudicial killings. The police and the military shot at protestors with 43 being killed by the end of this period.
Following the turmoil, America and international NGOs cited democratic backsliding, human rights abuses, and erosion of institutional checks to place targeted sanctions on Venezuela’s government. Despite these struggles and abuses, many people still upheld Maduro as a protector of the Revolution, while others understandably were shocked by the oppression.
Economic Terrorism
In 2017, during Trump’s first term, the US used the Kingpin Act to impose additional economic sanctions, tried to force capital flight, and ramped up political pressure. This round restricted Venezuela’s access to US financial markets and prohibited new purchases of Venezuelan debt, with immediate effects. In 2018, more sanctions targeted Maduro and many governing officials.
Then, in January of 2019, the Trump administration’s Treasury and State Department collaborated to impose savage trade restrictions on Venezuela’s oil sector. As the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, its reliance on oil rents made the economy particularly vulnerable to a complete embargo. The US froze $7 billion in PDVSA (the state oil company) assets, blocked payments to PDVSA, and prevented American firms from selling naphtha, a key chemical used in drilling for crude oil, to Venezuela. In April 2019, the US sanctioned the Central Bank of Venezuela, making it nearly impossible for the country to operate internationally or access financial markets. Later in 2019, additional sanctions expanded to other sectors, including gold mining, mineral mining, banking, and major food distribution companies. Even shipping companies that transported Venezuelan oil to Cuba were targeted in this sweeping attack on the economy.
Though these measures would be slowly rolled back after Trump left office, the damage was already done, and the country fell into a brutal crisis as inflation crushed the economy and the Venezuelan people with it. The country’s production tanked since the export demand disappeared. Inflation was already on the rise in the 2010s as the country became more politically isolated from the world, but reached a peak in January of 2019 at an estimated 2.7 million percent yearly increase. The effects were immediately devastating: real wages plummeted, and food and medical imports fell by 71% and 61%, respectively, leading to a massive shortage of life essentials. Scarcity led to rationing and blackouts across the country, and entire industries shut down; infrastructure would slowly deteriorate. It was documented that malnutrition, especially among children and vulnerable groups, rose sharply. Dollarization took hold as citizens switched to US Dollars for local transactions as a stable medium of exchange, putting the government in more of a political dilemma. Unemployment peaked at 47.9% during this time, roughly equivalent to wartime levels in other countries. As a result, a mass emigration followed. About 6.7 million Venezuelans were forced to leave their home and resettle thanks to the barbaric American interference.
Uncoincidentally, five years later, this mass migration was scapegoated by American politicians, most notably, Donald Trump, who used it to justify a fascistic immigration crackdown. Not only did the US implode the Venezuelan economy and deliberately starve its people, but it also blamed its own domestic economic stagnation on the refugees of that implosion. Though the country was in a difficult situation before the sanctions, to call it throwing gasoline on the fire would be putting it lightly. The United States knowingly exploited the situation to force regime change, and when it didn’t get what it wanted, it destroyed the country, just like it did in Iraq in 2003.
‘Democracy’
It is generally believed that the 2024 election had widespread election fraud backing Maduro’s win. At the same time, there was also significant interference from the imperialist West, where the American government directly funded and trained the opposition party. At the same time, the US was supporting social media campaigns to sow further discontent in the country.
Though it is understandable for anti-imperialists and supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution to overcorrect and to deny the fraud outright, we shouldn’t be dogmatic in our understanding of what is going on. The left should be able to acknowledge the fact that ‘democracy,’ as we know it, is not real democracy since capitalists do everything in their power to rig elections for themselves.
To refer to a group in the country, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), a Marxist-Leninist party, was firm in stating that Maduro’s government had defrauded the electoral process and had turned the worst of the economic crisis on the people rather than the capitalist class. They also acknowledge that, though it is a complex situation, the attempts by the US to overthrow Maduro and install a puppet regime electorally or with military force are unacceptable. From the materialist perspective, it is not difficult to walk and chew gum: the fact that Maduro has taken an authoritarian turn to cling to power should be expected, but by no means justifies the interference of the American imperialists. This is a conflict between two bourgeois powers; a conflict that is extremely lopsided and ends in the decimation and immiseration of Venezuela, should America get what it wants.
Manufacturing Consent For War
The key to these inhumane interventions in a particular country is manufacturing consent. That’s precisely the reason that Venezuela’s opposition party leader, María Corina Machado, won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her alleged “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” In an impressive act of irony, Machado, a puppet of American corporations, immediately dedicated her award to Donald Trump, the person who helped destroy Venezuela and tried to overturn a democratic election in his own country. This dedication of the “peace” award also comes right after Trump supported the genocide and starvation of Palestine, along with bombing Iran and Yemen, which constitute blatant war crimes. Machado also supports Trump’s strikes on Venezuelan boats, which killed the very people she claims to represent. Not to say the Nobel Peace Prize has much credibility in the first place, since other notoriously horrible people have won it, including Henry Kissinger, who is responsible for a dizzying list of war crimes, along with overseeing the genocides in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and East Timor.
Machado’s Presidential run brought together a coalition in favor of tearing down the government built by the Bolivarian Revolution and reconstructing a right-wing ‘democratic’ government that would completely bend the knee to American capital. Machado campaigned on the oxymoron of ‘popular capitalism,’ which would “make citizens shareholders in industries through the market.” What this means in practice is the complete privatization of state-owned industry and the sale of oil and mineral rights to multinational corporations.
It’s no wonder Machado is known as Venezuela’s Margaret Thatcher, whom she says strongly influenced her. Machado’s politics boils down to just that: selling the country to American billionaires to enrich the right-wing Venezuelan oligarchs. She is also known for saying “being rich is good,” in trying to criticize Hugo Chávez for being “the president of the poor—yes, the very poor, who loved him—because there’s no more effective way to control a society than to subject it to dependency. To die with one’s hand outstretched.” That’s even though the poverty to begin with was caused by neoliberals, who allowed American imperialists to ransack the country’s resources. Despite fronting someone who would restore democracy, it’s clear that economic democracy— that is, the right of every person to a basic standard of living and education— was not part of her plan. The ‘democracy’ that America cares about is just whoever is willing to fill the pockets of oil barons.
Comparatively, Guyana, the small nation East of Venezuela, has an even more corrupt government, led by the People’s Progressive Party. The PPP has held near-unanimous power for just as long as the Chávez-Maduro administration and has an undeniable record of rigging the electoral process. Though it began as a far-left revolutionary party, the PPP transformed in the 1990s, liberalizing and privatizing the economy, encouraging foreign capital, and cutting deals with corporations. Currently, oil revenues are funneled disproportionately to insiders like PPP officials, there’s little to no oversight on corruption, and almost none of the resource wealth is spent on the people of Guyana. The ruling party openly showers favors on supporters, leverages bureaucracy, and uses state resources to maintain political loyalty. Many argue that the Guyanese government is creating a highly authoritarian police state that has been impeding on free speech rights. The government has a record of abusing the judiciary to punish and suppress the independent press. There are documented cases of arbitrary arrest and unlawful detention, especially of protestors. Unsurprisingly, there is zero pushback from the US on this front. In fact, relations between America and Guyana could not be stronger as oil production has rapidly surpassed a record 770,000 barrels per day, which goes straight to Exxon’s coffers; meanwhile, an astonishing 48% of the population lives in poverty.
At the center of this is the corporate news justifying intervention. Take the opinion writers at the New York Times, like Bret Stephens, who celebrate Machado as some guardian angel of democracy while lying about the country’s recent history and the obvious reason for Venezuela’s struggles. Stephens is no stranger to getting blood on his hands, but in this piece, he flat-out says that Trump has no other option than to do ‘regime change.’ Stephens literally says Trump is right about his plan of murdering fishermen to “Induce enough fear, and the bad guys might run.” As if that wasn’t fucking insane enough, next, Stephens explains how he hopes Trump has the willingness to perform a ground invasion, acknowledges that it will kill an untold number of people, thus putting Trump out of contention for a Nobel Peace Prize, and compares the situation to reclaiming Nazi occupied Europe. Yes, that is how hard the corporate media is selling this war.
Conclusion
What we absolutely cannot allow is for corporate media and the fascist American government to convince us that war on Venezuela, or any imperial war, is justified under any circumstances. We must realize that war is not just some natural thing that arises out of nowhere; capitalists manufacture it in their pursuit of infinite growth and expansion. Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Back in 1916, Lenin wrote about exactly this:
“Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries. And this [wealth] is shared between two or three powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth (America, Great Britain, Japan), who are drawing the whole world into their war over the division of their [wealth].”
Today, we are still living in that same world Lenin wrote about over a hundred years ago. Capitalism continues to dominate and cause brutal crisis after brutal crisis. Humans have not escaped this stage of development. It is only when the working class joins together to overthrow the capitalist class that we can advance toward a more equal and just society where imperial war becomes obsolete.
Could Venezuela be America's next Vietnam? How many Americans may die fighting there?
https://thedemlabs.org/2025/10/21/venezuela-is-america-next-vietnam-trump-illegal-war/