NO to U.S. War on Venezuela!

Jan 5, 2026

The following is excerpted from a presentation given in Los Angeles on November 16, before the U.S. seized the president of Venezuela.

The U.S. military has been gathering a massive military force in the Caribbean Sea, complete with bomber planes and drones, missile launchers, 10,000 troops and the USS Gerald R. Ford, world’s largest aircraft carrier. Fourteen percent of the U.S. Navy is now in the Caribbean, according to Fox News (Oct. 21).

So far, this huge force has been used for deadly attacks on small boats off the coast of Venezuela. Since September 2, the U.S. has blown up 21 boats, killing at least 80 people. To justify these killings, Trump administration officials say that these people were drug smugglers, carrying drugs to the U.S. They say it’s all to protect the American people, because drugs coming into the U.S. kill tens of thousands of Americans every year.

This is the same government that cuts health care for the American people. No, this is not about protecting Americans. That’s the standard line the U.S. government uses every time it starts a war around the globe. The U.S., the dominant economic and military power in the world, wages war to reinforce and extend its control over the rest of the world.

The U.S. target this time is Venezuela. The U.S. government has issued an indictment against the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, on charges of “narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.”

The U.S. government says Maduro is a leader of a drug trafficking cartel, the “Cartel of the Suns” (Cartel de Los Soles), which it accuses of “flooding” the U.S. with cocaine. There is no evidence for these claims. It is known that some of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. comes from Colombia, but there is no evidence that Maduro or other members of the Venezuelan government are involved in producing, transporting or selling cocaine.

Nonetheless, the U.S. threat against Venezuela is real, and the Trump administration has been escalating it. The administration recently doubled the U.S. award for Maduro’s head to 50 million dollars, and Trump told journalists that he has authorized the CIA to carry out operations within Venezuela.

To oust the Maduro government, the U.S. could invade Venezuela, or just bomb the country, or try to instigate a coup d’état to overthrow Maduro.

But recent U.S. invasions have met local resistance, turning into bloody wars of occupation and dragging on for many years. And bombing alone has not led to the downfall of a government in the past. To the contrary, bombings often rally the local population behind the government under attack, no matter how unpopular that government may be. As for a U.S.-orchestrated coup d’état, the U.S. has actually tried it three times in Venezuela since 2003. It failed every time.

There may still be the possibility of the U.S. making a deal with Maduro and allowing him to stay in power, in exchange for concessions. In fact, the New York Times reported in October that, to reach a deal, Maduro had offered to transfer Venezuela’s oil and gas fields to U.S. oil companies, and that he also accepted to cut trade relations with U.S.’s rivals—China, Russia, Iran and Cuba.

When asked about this by a journalist, Trump used the opportunity to show off U.S. dominance. He said: “He’s offered everything. You’re right. You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States.”

… We’ll see what happens, but whatever the U.S. ends up doing, it will be to show who’s boss. And working people will pay the price—above all in Venezuela. But working people here in the U.S. also pay the price of U.S. wars abroad, in money and lives.

Why Does the U.S. Want Maduro Out?

The U.S. wants to oust the Maduro government because Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, tried to loosen the U.S.’s tight grip on Venezuela’s economy. Chávez had earned the U.S.’s hostility by running for president, and winning, against a government that was allied with the U.S. Then, after taking office, Chavez tried to establish a small measure of independence from the U.S. by developing relations with historical U.S. rivals like Cuba, China and Russia. He also used a small part of Venezuela’s oil revenues to start some social programs that would benefit workers and the poor, his electoral base.

These were practical policies for Chávez to reinforce his position as the leader of Venezuela—not ideological policies. But the U.S. could not allow them. For one, Russia and China are two big military powers which are capable of competing with the U.S. over the world’s resources and markets. So, for these two countries to have direct access to Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, is a threat to the century-old dominance of U.S. oil companies. And any country trying to have some independence can encourage others to do so.

But the U.S. failed to overthrow Chávez, mainly because Chávez’s social programs had gained him popularity among the working class and poor. When the U.S. orchestrated a coup d’état against Chávez in 2003, for example, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets in protest, and the coup attempt fizzled out.

Chávez died of cancer in 2013, at the age of 58. But the U.S. attack on Venezuela continued during the presidency of his successor, Maduro. In 2015, the Obama administration imposed sanctions designed to squeeze the Venezuelan economy, which significantly worsened the impoverishment of the population.

The price of oil had dropped a year earlier and that had already had a devastating impact on Venezuela, given that much of Venezuela’s economy depends on those exports. As a result of the 2015 sanctions, many U.S. companies stopped doing business in Venezuela. This further harmed Venezuela’s economy, since the U.S. was Venezuela’s most important trading partner, accounting for more than half of the country’s exports and imports.

In 2019, the first Trump administration expanded the economic sanctions on Venezuela. The U.S. banned U.S. and foreign companies and individuals from doing business with Venezuela’s state-run oil company. In addition, the U.S. and other governments allied with the U.S. froze Venezuelan government assets and blocked its financial operations.

This 10-year-long, brutal U.S. economic siege of Venezuela has caused a human catastrophe. Between 2015, when the sanctions began, and 2024, about eight million people, more than one out of four Venezuelans, have left the country to flee poverty and hunger. The majority of these migrants went to other Latin American and Caribbean countries, but more than half a million of these migrants have ended up in the U.S., more than doubling the number of Venezuelan immigrants in this country.

That actually is a very large number, considering that these migrants have no money and have to put their lives in danger to pass, on foot, through the jungle between Colombia and Panama called the Darién Gap. This is a remote and dangerous area of rainforest, swamp and mountains, where the Pan-American Highway is broken. It is a no-go zone for travelers because of its difficult terrain and high likelihood of being attacked by criminal gangs—which is also true for these migrant families’ journey through the rest of Central America and the vast territory of Mexico.

And these are the people that Trump and his cronies are calling criminals and threatening with deportation—back to starvation in their country caused by the U.S.’s imperialist policies, that is!

It’s not just a question of the last 25 years. U.S. imperialism pushed the working population of Venezuela into poverty for a whole century, despite the fact that Venezuela sits on the world’s largest oil reserves and has been a major oil exporter since the 1920s.

The U.S., Venezuela, and Oil

Even though it was Royal Dutch Shell, a British-Dutch company, that first extracted oil in Venezuela, big U.S.-based monopolies like Standard Oil quickly moved in and took over most the country’s oil industry. By the end of the 1920s, Venezuela had already become the second-largest oil producer in the world, after the U.S., and the biggest oil exporter. During World War II, Venezuelan oil proved to be crucial for keeping the U.S. war machine running, and U.S. oil companies continued to produce a lot of oil in Venezuela after the war also, pocketing the lion’s share of Venezuela’s oil wealth. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was estimated that Venezuelan oil accounted for 40% of Standard Oil’s worldwide profits.

While Venezuela remained underdeveloped, the small part of the oil wealth that stayed in Venezuela went to the luxury of a small wealthy elite. New hotels, office buildings, apartments and highways gave parts of Caracas, the capital, a modern look, but next to this showcase, much of the city consisted of slums where workers and the poor lived.

The oil companies imposed this situation on Venezuela’s population through repression. For about 40 years after oil was discovered in Venezuela, the country was run by a series of military dictators, who were little more than puppets of the oil companies. The military governments outlawed all political parties.

The inequality and repression led to a social explosion. In January 1958, a rebellion inside the military sparked demonstrations, strikes and clashes with police, which persisted for more than a year. This massive revolt coincided with the Cuban Revolution, which ousted another U.S.-sponsored dictator in the region. So, the U.S. moved to stabilize oil-rich Venezuela by allowing elections and installing a civilian government in February 1959.

But behind this new political façade, the oil companies stayed in control. The plunder of Venezuela within the imperialist order continued. Whenever the oil price dropped on the world oil market, the Venezuelan economy fell into recession. The slums of Caracas and of Maracaibo, the center of Venezuela’s oil industry, kept expanding.

In 1976, the Venezuelan government joined a world-wide trend and nationalized much of its oil. But that did not ease the dominance of the oil companies over Venezuela. In fact, U.S. oil companies, along with U.S. banks, profited handsomely from nationalization in the Venezuelan oil industry.

The Venezuelan government paid the oil companies large sums for facilities that were old and run-down, and now the government also had to pay for the cost of any new investments and exploration. So, the government had to borrow money from U.S. banks. The Venezuelan government was also forced to hire the very same U.S. (and British) oil companies to do the work, since they had the resources and technology.

Venezuela ran up big debts with big interest payments, which the government had no money to pay for—especially after a worldwide recession in the early 1980s caused the oil markets to crash. The banks and the IMF forced the Venezuelan government to impose heavy austerity measures on the population, raising hunger and deprivation to new levels.

In February 1989, protests against the government’s austerity measures led to food riots in Caracas. For five days, people looted supermarkets. The army was brought out to shoot down people who were trying to feed themselves and their children. Officially, hundreds of people were killed, but the real number was in the thousands.

No, the governments of Chávez or Maduro did not create the poverty and hunger in Venezuela, as U.S. officials and media commentators claim. In fact, when Chávez came to power in 1998, it was, to a great extent, because persistent poverty and hunger had totally discredited the existing government—behind which was U.S. imperialism, the real reason for the poverty and hunger.