For the past few weeks the Trump administration has intensified its long-standing aggression against Venezuela by deploying warships (including a nuclear submarine) in the Caribbean Sea in a purported anti-narcotics operation. US forces have carried out at least five incidents of strikes on boats in Venezuelan waters to date, killing 37 people. Trump’s latest move has been to authorise the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.
President Nicolas Maduro, as Venezuela’s current leader, has been a focus of this ‘war on drugs’ narrative, justifying the US’s illegal actions by demonising him as a ‘narco-terrorist’ engaged in drug trafficking, despite UN evidence to the contrary. The US also portrays him as being an illegitimate leader, offering a bounty of $50 million for his capture.
But overthrowing the Bolivarian Revolution has been a project of US imperialism ever since Huge Chávez became President in 1999 and set about transforming the country through a series of far-reaching measures including healthcare, education, land redistribution and anti-poverty programmes.
Key to these revolutionary changes was, and still is, the massive wealth in oil reserves that Venezuela has – the largest in the world – and the revenues generated from them. Chávez’s massive programme of wealth redistribution redirected these oil revenues to collective social purposes rather than funding the opulent lifestyle of Venezuela’s elites.
Additionally, to help realise his vision that “another world is possible”, not just for Venezuela, Chávez also envisaged (and ultimately helped create) key regional organisations to unite Latin American voices and provide progressive economic alternatives to neo-liberalism.
Aghast at what this represented, both politically and economically, the US has ever since then, in concert with the extreme right-wing elites in Venezuela, sought to destabilise the country and effect ‘regime change’.
In 2002, a US-backed military coup temporarily ousted Chávez before a spontaneous popular uprising restored him to the presidency. Other US tactics to destabilise the country have included massive funding of opposition groups to try –unsuccessfully – to win elections, coupled with disinformation campaigns to isolate the country, campaigns of violence on the streets, further coup attempts and domestic sabotage.
But the most powerful US weapon against Venezuela has been an increasingly severe set of economic sanctions, illegal under international law, designed to destroy the economy and bring the country to its knees.
The US sanctions, first introduced by Obama in 2015 and ramped up by Trump in his first presidency into a crippling economic, trade and financial blockade, led to a 99% fall in oil revenues and well over a hundred thousand unnecessary deaths.
Complementing this, Trump has at various times threatened military action against Venezuela. He also backed minor politician Juan Guaidό’s attempt to bring about ‘regime change’ by declaring himself ’interim president’ in 2019. But despite lavish bankrolling of his activities, including insurrectionary adventures, with confiscated Venezuelan assets, this attempt at ‘regime change’ fizzled out when the right-wing Venezuelan opposition ditched Guaidó in December 2022.
Throughout and to this day, the British government has supported the US’s policy, even levying its own sanctions and withholding 31 tons of Venezuelan gold worth roughly $2 billion lodged in the Bank of England’s vaults.
Despite all this, the Venezuelan economy has survived – even growing by between 5 to 6% in 2024 – though at the cost of great hardship for millions of ordinary Venezuelans.
But the political and economic dynamics motivating this drive by US imperialism to secure ‘regime change’ have not lessened.
Politically, Venezuela’s commitment to Latin American independence and resistance to neo-liberalism are anathema to the US’s historic and continuing commitment to the Monroe Doctrine. Recent progressive left electoral successes in Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, Brazil and Uruguay, for example, are seen by the US government as a challenge to its dominance.
Economically, Venezuela is a rich country with vast mineral reserves, but the prize is its oil. In 2023 Trump himself publicly admitted that he wanted to overthrow Maduro to secure control over Venezuela’s oil, mirroring the way he boasted in 2020 that he was militarily occupying Syria’s crude oil-rich regions in order to “take the oil”.
The overthrow of the Bolivarian Revolution would enable the US to control Venezuela’s oil and help sustain the US’s faltering economy, as well as shore up the rhetoric of Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda.
But Trump is being challenged domestically, in the media and Congress. Although Congressional Democrats have long supported sanctions against Venezuela, their Senate resolution requiring Trump to seek Congressional authorisation before any further military strikes purportedly aimed at drug cartels was defeated 48-51 (with two Republicans in favour and one Democrat against).
Opposition in Latin America and the Caribbean is much more forthright. The region is clear about the enormous implications if the US were to be successful in securing ‘regime change’, especially for the future of blockaded Cuba, which has been in US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s sights for longer than Venezuela, and for heavily-sanctioned Nicaragua. Trump has also been making very similar threats against President Petro’s government in Colombia, calling openly for ‘regime change’.
Encapsulating these concerns, the ALBA bloc of countries issued a statement strongly condemning the US’s actions: “These manoeuvres not only constitute a direct attack on the independence of Venezuela, but also a threat to the stability and self-determination of all the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (…) We categorically reject the orders from the United States government to deploy military forces under false pretexts, with the clear intention of imposing illegal, interventionist policies that are contrary to the constitutional order of the States of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
The Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC) has launched a petition urging governments and political actors internationally to join in opposing military intervention and all threats to peace in the region.
The British government has disgracefully failed to join the criticism being voiced in Latin America and the US of Trump’s illegal actions, committing only to “fighting the scourge of drugs…accordance with the fundamental principles of the UN Charter”.
A linked letter to Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper is therefore urging them to join the international effort against military intervention and in support of peace.
VSC will be joining with forces across the British labour, peace and solidarity movements to express maximum opposition to US military aggression in the weeks and months ahead.