[Two articles on Venezuela]
The Current Situation in Venezuela: A Government in Charge, a People Resilient
By VIJAY PRASHAD and CARLOS RON
Photograph Source: Vicepresidencia de Venezuela – Public Domain
On the early morning of January 3, the United States government launched a massive attack on Caracas, Venezuela, and three of the country’s states. Roughly 150 aircraft swarmed the skies, bombing with exceptional ferocity. Amongst these aircraft were EA-18 Growlers equipped with the most advanced electronic warfare systems, such as the Next General Jammers, as well as AH-64 Apache and CH-47 Chinook helicopters. Residents of the city had never experienced such sustained violence: loud explosions, massive plumes of smoke, and aircraft—seemingly unconcerned about counter-attacks —plunged the city into darkness. Later, at a press conference, US President Donald Trump said, ‘The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have. It was dark and it was deadly’. The United States does not spend more than $1 trillion annually on its military without having built the world’s most lethal arsenal. This was hyper-imperialism in hyper-drive.
Elite Delta Force troops descended from the helicopters to the location where President Nicolás Maduro was spending the night. They faced resistance from soldiers on the ground, but overwhelming firepower from the air killed many Venezuelan and Cuban soldiers (24 Venezuelans, according to the Venezuelan Army, and 32 Cubans, according to Havana). Once ground resistance was neutralised, the Delta Force seized President Maduro and Venezuela National Assembly member, Cilia Flores, Maduro’s wife. They were taken to the USS Iwo Jima and then flown to the United States to stand trial in the Southern District of New York, based on an indictment alleging that they ‘corrupted once-legitimate institutions to import cocaine into the United States’. Six people are accused in the indictment, including Maduro and Flores.
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, Vice President Delcy Rodriquez assumed leadership in Maduro’s absensce. She held a widely publicized meeting with all the main political leaders, including the Minister of Interior Diosdado Cabello who was also named in the indictment. In this initial meeting, Rodriquez called for the release of Maduro and Flores, emphasised that Maduro remains the legitimate president, and confirmed that the government remained intact and at work to assess the situation. Within a day, Rodriquez—now sworn in as acting president in the absence of Maduro –said that she is open to discussion with the United States to prevent another attack, though she continued to insist on the release and return of Maduro and Flores. Certainly, the scale of the attack by the United States made it clear that Venezuela cannot sustain a full barrage from the US over a period, thus, reopening dialogue will be necessary, especially regarding Trump’s primary interest: the oil industry. Rodriquez comes from a revolutionary family, her father Jorge Antonio Rodriquez being the founder of the Socialist League, in which Delcy Rodriquez and Maduro once served as cadres. There is no question of any surrender of the Bolivarian process, which is a fundamental political line for Rodriquez and the team that is leading Venezuela’s government.
As dawn broke on 3 January and the stench of bombs lingered in the air, the population was both alarmed and shocked. It is important to emphasise that the 2003 Operation Shock and Awe bombing campaign in Iraq was dwarfed by the bombing of Operation Absolute Resolve (2026) against Venezuela. The bombs were way more powerful, and the weapons systems far more sophisticated and overwhelming. Yet it did not take long for people to take to the streets. A spontaneous open-mic outside the Presidential Palace of Miraflores drew crowds to speak out against the attack on their country. Most speakers spoke passionately with great feeling about the Bolivarian process. They understood that this attack was against their sovereignty, and-–more significantly–-that this was an attack on behalf of the Venezuela’s old oligarchy and US oil conglomerates. Their clarity was striking, yet corporate media ignored this coverage.
The weakness of the new mood in the Global South
A few hours before the attack on Venezuela, President Maduro met with Qiu Xiaoqi, the high envoy of President Xi Jinping. They discussed China’s Third Policy Paper on Latin America (released December 10), in which the Chinese government affirmed, ‘as a developing country and a member of the Global South, China has always stood in solidarity through thick and thin with the Global South, including Latin America and the Caribbean’. They reviewed the 600 projects that are being jointly conducted between China and Venezuela and the $70 billion Chinese investment in Venezuela. Maduro and Qiu chatted, and then they took photographs which were posted widely on social media and shown on Venezuelan television. Qiu then left with the Chinese Ambassador to Venezuela Lan Hu and the directors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Latin America and Caribbean department, Liu Bo and Wang Hao. Within hours, the city was being bombed. That day, the spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said, ‘Such hegemonic acts of the US seriously violate international law and Venezuelan sovereignty, and threaten peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean region. China firmly opposes it’. Beyond that, little could be done. China does not have the capacity to roll back US hyper-imperialism through military force.
Within Latin America, the rising Angry Tide – led by Argentina’s Javier Milei – celebrated the capture of Maduro, while Ecuador’s right-wing President Daniel Noboa made the point not only about Venezuela, but about the need to defeat the Pink Tide that had been inspired by Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarianism: ‘All the criminal narco-Chavistas will have their moment. Their structure will finally collapse across the continent’. Argentina led a group of ten countries to block a condemnation of the US violation of the UN Charter at a meeting of the thirty-three-member Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). These countries were Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago. It is a sign of the Angry Tide’s growing influence that CELAC, once able to stand for sovereignty, is now dragged into support for US adventurism in Latin America and for Trump’s orientation toward the revival of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine.
CELAC was established in 2010 from the Rio Group (1986) in 2010 to form a regional body excluding the United States (as the Organisation of American States does), which is why its creation was helped along by the Pink Tide. Its first co-chairs were right-wing Chilean President Sebastián Piñera and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. This kind of unity of the right and left over the idea of sovereignty is now weakened beyond recognition. A failure of CELAC to act has meant that not only its orientation (including the passage of the idea that the Latin America is a Zone of Peace in the 2014 Havana summit) has been dismissed, but so too has the Charter of the Organisation of American States.
Trump has openly pledged to revive the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, first articulated by US President James Monroe to combat not only European interference in the Western hemisphere but also the growth of independence led by people such as Simón Bolívar, one of Latin America’s greatest heroes. Bolivarianism was revived by Chávez as one of the core ideological frameworks of the Pink Tide. Trump’s open embrace of the Monroe Doctrine and his call for a “Trump Corollary” (do what it takes to enforce the Doctrine) signals the US aim to restore old oligarchies across the hemisphere and grant US conglomerates free rein (potentially even reviving the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a trade initiative defeated by Chávez and others in 2005). This is class struggle on a continental level.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. Carlos Ron is Venezuela’s vice minister of foreign affairs for North America and president of the Simón Bolívar Institute for Peace and Solidarity Among Peoples.
The US War on Venezuela began in 2001
[Editor’s note: The article below was previously published on Socialist Action’s website on January 2, 2026, but was removed due to technical formatting errors that made it virtually unreadable. The article provides valuable historical information to the Vijay Prashad/Carlos Ron article above that recounts the January 3, 2026 U.S. terror bombing of Caracas and the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.]
The current US attacks against Venezuela are part of a two-decade process led by the US and the Venezuelan right wing to undermine the Bolivarian project and its bold decision to use the country’s oil wealth for the betterment of its people. January 02, 2026 by Vijay Prashad
The United States had no problem with Venezuela per se, not with the country nor with its former oligarchy. The problem that the United States government and its corporate class have is with the process set in motion by the first government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
In 2001, Chávez’s Bolivarian process passed a law called the Organic Hydrocarbons Law, which asserted state ownership over all oil and gas reserves, held upstream activities of exploration and extraction for the state-controlled companies, but allowed private firms – including foreign firms – to participate in downstream activities (such as refining and sale). Venezuela, which has the world’s largest petroleum reserves, had already nationalized its oil through laws in 1943 and then repeated in 1975. However, in the 1990s as part of the neoliberal reforms pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and by the large US-owned oil companies, the oil industry was substantially privatized.
When Chávez enacted the new law, it brought the state back into control of the oil industry (whose foreign oil sales were responsible for 80% of the country’s external revenues). This deeply angered the US-owned oil companies – particularly ExxonMobil and Chevron – which put pressure on the government of US President George W. Bush to act against Chávez. The US tried to engineer a coup to unseat Chávez in 2002, which lasted for a few days, and then pushed the corrupt Venezuelan oil company management to initiate a strike to damage the Venezuelan economy (it was eventually the workers who defended the company and took it back from the management). Chávez withstood both the coup attempt and the strike because he had the vast support of the population. Maria Corina Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, started a group called Sumaté (“Join Up”), which placed a recall referendum on the ballot. About 70% of the registered voters came to the polls in 2004, and a large majority (59%) voted to retain Chávez as the president.
But neither Machado nor her US backers (including the oil companies) rested easy. From 2001 till today, they have tried to overthrow the Bolivarian process – to effectively return the US-owned oil companies to power. The question of Venezuela, then, is not so much about “democracy” (an overused word, which is being stripped of meaning) but about the international class struggle between the right of the Venezuelan people to freely control their oil and gas and that of the US-owned oil companies to dominate Venezuelan natural resources.
The Bolivarian process
When Hugo Chávez appeared on the political scene in the 1990s, he captured the imagination of most of the Venezuelan people – particularly the working-class and the peasantry. The decade was marked by the dramatic betrayals by presidents who promised to secure the oil-rich country from IMF-imposed austerity and then adopted those same IMF proposals. It did not matter if they were social democrats (such as Carlos Andrés Pérez of Democratic Action, president from 1989 to 1993) or conservatives (such as Rafael Caldera of the Christian Democrats, president from 1994 to 1999). Hypocrisy and betrayal defined the political world, while high levels of inequality (with the Gini index at a staggering 48.0) gripped the society. The mandate for Chávez (who won the election with 56% against 39% for the candidate of the old parties) was against this hypocrisy and betrayal.
It helped Chávez and the Bolivarian process that oil prices stayed high from 1999 (when he took office) till 2013 (when he died at 58, very young). Having taken hold of the oil revenues, Chávez turned them over to make phenomenal social gains. First, he developed a set of mass social programs (misiones) that redirected oil revenues to meet basic human needs such as primary healthcare (Misión Barrio Adentro), literacy and secondary education for the working-class and peasantry (Misión Robinson, Misión Ribas, and Misión Sucre), food sovereignty (Misión Mercal and then PDVAL), and housing (Gran Misión Vivienda).
The state was reshaped as a vehicle for social justice and not an instrument to exclude the working-class and peasantry from the gains of the market. As these reforms advanced, the government moved to build popular power through participatory instruments such as the communes (comunas). These communes emerged first out of popular consultancy assemblies (consejos comunales) and then developed into popular bodies to control public funds, plan for local development, generate communal banks, and form local, cooperative enterprises (empresas de producción social). The communes represent one of the Bolivarian process’ most ambitious contributions: an effort – uneven but historically significant – to construct popular power as a durable alternative to oligarchic rule.
The US-imposed hybrid war on Venezuela
Two events took place in 2013-14 that deeply threatened the Bolivarian process: first, the untimely death of Hugo Chávez, without doubt the driving force of revolutionary energy in the country, and second, the slow and then steady collapse of oil revenues. Chávez was followed as president by the former foreign minister and trade unionist Nicolás Maduro, who tried to steady the ship but faced a severe challenge when oil prices, which peaked in June 2014 at roughly USD 108 per barrel, fell dramatically in 2015 (below USD 50) and then by January 2016 (below USD 30). For Venezuela, which relied upon foreign crude oil sales, this decline was catastrophic. The Bolivarian process could not revise the oil-dependent redistribution (not just within the country but in the region, including through PetroCaribe); it remained trapped by dependence on oil exports and therefore by the contradictions of being a rentier state. Equally, the Bolivarian process had not expropriated the wealth of the dominant classes, which continued to lean heavily on the economy and society, and therefore prevented a full-scale transition to a socialist project.
Before 2013, the United States, its European allies, and oligarchic forces in Latin America had already forged their weapons for a hybrid war against Venezuela. After Chávez won his first election in December 1998 and before he took office the next year, Venezuela saw accelerated capital flight as the Venezuelan oligarchy took their wealth to Miami. During the coup attempt and the oil lockout, there was more evidence of capital flight, which weakened the monetary stability of Venezuela. The United States government began to lay the diplomatic groupwork to isolate Venezuela, characterizing the government as a problem and building an international coalition against it. This led, by 2006, to restrictions on Venezuela for access to international credit markets. Credit rating agencies, investment banks, and multilateral institutions steadily raised borrowing costs, making refinancing more difficult well before the US placed formal sanctions on Venezuela.
After the death of Chávez, and with oil prices lowered, the United States began a focused hybrid war against Venezuela. Hybrid war refers to the coordinated use of economic coercion, financial strangulation, information warfare, legal manipulation, diplomatic isolation, and selective violence, deployed to destabilize and reverse sovereign political projects without the need for full-scale invasion. Its objective is not territorial conquest but political submission: the disciplining of states that attempt redistribution, nationalization, or independent foreign policy.
Hybrid war operates through the weaponization of everyday life. Currency attacks, sanctions, shortages, media narratives, NGO pressure, judicial harassment (lawfare), and engineered legitimacy crises are designed to erode state capacity, exhaust popular support, and fracture social cohesion. The resulting suffering is then presented as evidence of internal failure, masking the external architecture of coercion. This is precisely what Venezuela has faced since the US illegally placed financial sanctions on the country in August 2017, these were then deepened with secondary sanctions in 2018. Because of these sanctions, Venezuela has faced the disruption of all payment systems and trade channels and forced overcompliance with US regulations. Meanwhile, media narratives in the West systematically downplayed sanctions, while amplifying inflation, shortages, and migration as purely internal phenomenon, reinforcing regime-change discourse. The collapse of living standards in Venezuela between 2014 and 2017 cannot be divorced from this layered strategy of economic asphyxiation.
Mercenary attacks, sabotage of the electrical grid, creation of a conflict generated to benefit ExxonMobil between Guyana and Venezuela, invention of an alternative president (Juan Guaidó), provision of the Nobel Peace Prize to someone calling for a war against her own country (Machado), attempted assassination of the president, bombings of fishing boats off the Venezuelan coast, seizure of oil tankers leaving Venezuela, buildup of an armada off the coast of the country: each of these elements is designed to create neurological tension within Venezuela leading to the surrender of the Bolivarian process in favor of a return to 1998 and then an annulment of any hydrocarbon law that promises the country sovereignty.
If the country were to return to 1998, as Maria Corina Machado promises, all the democratic gains made by the misiones and the comunas as well as by the Constitution of 1999 will be invalidated. Indeed, Machado said that a US bombing of her fellow Venezuelans would be “an act of love”. The slogan of those who want to overthrow the government is Ahead to the Past.
In October 2025, meanwhile, Maduro told an audience in Caracas in English, “listen to me, no war, yes peace, the people of the United States”. That night, in a radio address, he warned, “No to regime change, which reminds us so much of the endless, failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on. No to CIA-orchestrated coups d’état.” The line, “no war, yes peace”, was taken up on social media and remixed into songs. Maduro appeared several times at rallies and meetings with music ablaze, singing, no war, yes peace, and – on at least one occasion – wearing a hat with that message.
