The Trump regime, fascist, aberrant, cruel, and kleptocratic as always, and a Wilderness of Mirrors made of lies, illusions, propaganda, lunatic conspiracy theories and alternate realities, falsifications which capture, distort, commodify and dehumanize us all, has now deployed an invented criminal syndicate as a mirage and casus belli for the imperial conquest and dominion of Venezuela as regime change and colonial theft of her vast oil resources, the one strategic asset which grants control and hegemony over everything else, throughout the world.

      In many ways it is an ideal claim, for a nonexistent threat which cannot be proved also cannot be disproven, much like its model the Nazi claim of a “Jewish conspiracy”. We can no more prove any claim for which no evidence exists because it is wholly specious, nothing but nightmares of reason and fairy dust, nor disprove a negative case such as “prove you are not a Jew”, a communist, anything construed as an enemy of the state; but this does not mean such claims are not dangerous. One may watch the new film on Nuremberg to see precisely where such things lead.

     Thus far Trump’s mad quest to centralize all authority to himself from the state and to steal Venezuela’s oil wealth using war on drugs as a pretext has fewer than a hundred penniless fishermen as its victims, but with massive naval forces poised to rain death and destruction on the nation’s cities the scale of such war crimes may be about to become horrifically generalized.

     Let us meet this threat on its own ground of struggle, with a Pan-American Strategy of Resistance and solidarity in liberation struggle for the independence, self-determination, and sovereignty of all human beings and for our universal human rights as guarantors of each other’s humanity both here in the colonialist-imperial United States now captured by a Fourth Reich of white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and amoral capitalist kleptocratic terror committed to the subversion of democracy, and throughout the region of the North and South American continents which it claims as its dominion.

     The fleet of conquest now poised to eat the heart of Venezuela may be an unstoppable force, but the tyranny which commands it is vulnerable to disobedience, and like Jacob wrestling the angel our mission is not to defeat it, for like much in life it is more powerful than we, but we do not need to; we need only remain undefeated by it. In this great struggle against systems of oppression and carceral states of force and control our victory is to be Unconquered in refusal to submit or to abandon our humanity and duty of car for each other, and this is a kind of victory which can never be taken from us.

      As the battle cry of the Spanish Civil War and its glorious International Brigades goes, No Pasaran, friends.   

      As written by Tom Phillips in The Guardian, in an article entitled Venezuela accuses US of using ‘narco-terrorism’ allegations to justify ‘regime change’; “Venezuela’s government has accused the US of peddling “ridiculous hogwash” about its supposed role in sponsoring “narco-terrorism” as Washington continued to turn up the heat on Nicolás Maduro’s regime and leftwing European politicians warned South America faced being plunged into “a torrent of bloodshed”.

     On Monday, the Trump administration officially designated a Venezuelan group known as the “Cartel de los Soles” (the Cartel of the Suns) a terrorist organization – despite widespread doubts over its actual existence.

     The move was the latest chapter in a four-month US pressure campaign, officially designed to combat South American drug traffickers but which many suspect is a pretext to overthrow Maduro who Trump tried, but failed, to topple during his first term.

     Since August, the US president has ordered a huge naval deployment off Venezuela’s northern coast and a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged narco-boats travelling the Caribbean Sea.

     Observers believe Monday’s decision by the state department – which accuses Maduro of leading the putative Cartel of the Suns – could open the door for some kind of imminent US military intervention on Venezuela soil.

    Venezuela’s government hit back, calling the designation “a despicable lie” designed to justify “an illegitimate and illegal intervention against Venezuela in the classic US regime-change format”. It said the supposed cartel was “nonexistent” and called the US accusations “slander”.

     After the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, arrived in the Caribbean in mid-November, speculation intensified that US military chiefs were preparing to launch some kind of operation against land targets within Venezuela.

     In an open letter, leftwing European politicians including the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and Labour MP Richard Burgon, warned of “the imminent threat of US military intervention in Venezuela”.

     “If the US launches a military intervention in Venezuela, it would mark the first interstate war by the United States in South America,” the group wrote, noting how past US military operations in Latin America linked to the “war on drugs” had “delivered not security but a torrent of bloodshed, dispossession, and destabilisation”.

     European governments have reportedly become so concerned about the prospect of future potentially illegal strikes in the region that France and the Netherlands had joined the UK in limiting intelligence sharing with Washington, AFP reported on Sunday.

     On Saturday, Reuters said four US officials had told its reporters Washington was poised to launch a new phase of Venezuela-related operations in the coming days. Two officials claimed the options under consideration included trying to overthrow Maduro, although the news agency emphasised that Trump had yet to make a decision. Last week, the US president signaled he was willing to talk to Maduro and expected to do so “in a not too distant future”.

     Amid growing tensions, at least half a dozen major airlines suspended or cancelled their flights in and out of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last week warned of “heightened military activity in or around Venezuela”.

     Those airlines included Portugal’s TAP, Spain’s Iberia, Colombia’s Avianca, Brazil’s Gol, the Latin American carrier Latam and Turkish Airlines. Venezuelan carriers continued to operate, as did Panama’s Copa Airlines.”

     As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s military pressure on Maduro evokes Latin America’s coup-ridden past:

US forces and CIA actions target Venezuela’s leader, recalling coups and assassinations across the region; “The ghosts of sometimes deadly Latin American coups of the past are being evoked by Donald Trump’s relentless military buildup targeting Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocratic socialist leader, whom Washington has branded a narco-terrorist.

     Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president of Chile toppled in a military coup in 1973, and Rafael Trujillo, the longstanding dictator of the Dominican Republic who was assassinated in 1961 in an ambush organized by political opponents, are just two regional leaders whose fates serve as a warning to Maduro.

     Allende is believed to have killed himself, although some doubt that explanation, as troops stormed the presidential palace in the Chilean capital, Santiago, in a coup – fomented by then president Richard Nixon’s administration – that ushered in the brutally repressive military regime of Gen Augusto Pinochet.

     The CIA is believed to have supplied the weapons used to kill Trujillo.

     Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, escaped into exile after being overthrown in a 1954 coup also instigated by the CIA. But the event triggered a 30-year civil war that killed an estimated 150,000 people and resulted in 50,000 disappearances.

     The agency is also thought to have made at least eight unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba’s communist regime, which is still in power and is closely allied to Maduro.

     The plot to depose Castro also included the failed Bay of Pigs invasion carried out by Cuban exiles and organized by the CIA in the early months of John F Kennedy’s presidency in 1961, but which was defeated by Cuba’s armed forces.

     Now, as the US stages its biggest naval buildup in the region since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, some believe Maduro’s life is equally at risk.

     Washington is preparing to carry out military strikes imminently inside Venezuela on already pinpointed targets that have been identified as military facilities used to smuggle drugs, according to reports.

     US officials are leaving little doubt that this could lead to fatal consequences for Maduro.

     “Maduro is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to,” the Miami Herald quoted a source with close knowledge of US military planning as saying. “What’s worse for him, there is now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that one thing is to talk about death, and another to see it coming.”

     The Trump administration has offered a $50m bounty for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan leader, after announcing in August that it was doubling the $25m reward initially offered during Trump’s first presidency.

     Explaining his decision this month to authorize covert CIA actions against Venezuela, Trump pointedly refused to say whether US forces were authorized to “take out” Maduro. However, Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA Latin America analyst, said the intense security surrounding the Venezuelan leader in effect rendered the reward a “dead or alive” proposition, meaning any attempt to snatch him is likely to result in his death.

     “Anybody who’s going to try to take him is going to be so heavily armed that any defense that he put up would lead to them pulling triggers,” said Armstrong.

     “Let’s say it’s locals and they want the bounty. Most of them will assume that they’ll get the bounty dead or alive. Our forces would be a little bit more disciplined, but then imagine the adrenaline that anybody trying to do a snatch would have coursing through their veins. They’re going to be trigger-happy.

     “Only a fool would think that they can go in there and say, ‘OK, let me put handcuffs on you and escort you to the car.’ That’s not how it’s going to work.”

     Maduro has survived at least one apparent attempt on his life, when two drones exploded as he was speaking at a military parade in Caracas in 2018. Television footage shows several members of his security team rushing to his side to shield him after the explosions.

     Maduro accused neighboring Colombia of being responsible, although some opponents suggested the episode was a false flag operation staged to win sympathy.

    In May 2020, Venezuelan security forces foiled an attempt by about 60 dissidents, accompanied by two former US Green Berets, to capture and oust him in a plot that involved infiltrating the country by sea. The episode was afterwards dubbed the “Bay of Piglets” in mocking reference to the botched plot against Castro.

     But a fresh sign of Washington’s determination to get its hands on Maduro emerged this week when the Associated Press reported that a US agent, working for the Department of Homeland Security, had unsuccessfully tried to bribe the Venezuelan president’s pilot into diverting his plane to enable American authorities to capture him.

     The Trump administration has deployed a daunting array of military hardware off the Venezuelan coast in what appears to be an intimidating statement of intent to bring about regime change in the country.

     Last week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Gerald Ford, the biggest aircraft carrier in the US navy, would sail from Europe to join a military force consisting of destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, B-1 and B-52 bombers, and special forces helicopters.

     At least 57 people have been killed in more than a dozen US military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Washington has accused Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials of being at the head of a cartel smuggling drugs into the US. Maduro denies the charge and experts dispute the significance of Venezuela’s role in the illegal drug trade.

     Trump has intensified the pressure further by authorizing the CIA to carry out covert activities inside Venezuela, although the contents of his instructions are classified and unknown.

     Armstrong argued that Trump was aware that his policy could prove fatal for Maduro.

     “What person wouldn’t be aware of that potential because you’re trying to take out a head of state, a tenacious head of state,” he said.

     “We do assassinations on a routine basis of people that we suspect of not even being senior members of groups that we consider to be terrorists. If we’re authorizing the assassination of regular combatants in the war on terror, how crazy is it to think that the administration would authorize the use of lethal means, if necessary, to snatch the head of a cartel.”

     Another former CIA officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because of their previous involvement in targeted assassinations in the Middle East, said decisions to authorize such killings were normally taken with great care and based on threat severity.

     “It is very specific and usually because there is a lethal threat to America and our allies. They are done super carefully,” the former agent said.

     “The president and the [national security council] come up with the plan, and then they decide who’s going to take the shot … Is it going to be the military [or some other agency], will it lead to war?”

     High-profile assassinations in recent times include Osama bin Laden by a Navy Seal team in 2011; Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qods force, killed by a drone strike ordered by Trump in 2020; and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s former deputy in al-Qaida, who was killed by a drone in Afghanistan in 2022 during Joe Biden’s presidency.

     “Bin Laden was an easy decision – he killed thousands of Americans, and even before the 9/11 attacks he had done lesser stuff,” said the ex-officer. “Suleimani, too, was easy because he had killed so many Americans.”

     Maduro, however, presents a less clearcut target, even though Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has described the Venezuelan regime as “the al-Qaida of the western hemisphere”.

     “The idea of going after a guy, Maduro, who is a sitting leader of a sovereign country, whether we like the country or not, just seems really strange and disproportionate,” the former agent continued. “Maduro is not Hitler. Bin Laden, Suleimani and al-Zawahiri were not heads of countries.

     “If you look at our history, even in the last 40 or 50, years, we’ve been staying away from going after world leaders.”

     Disclosures about the CIA’s role in backing coups and assassination attempts on foreign leaders during the 1950s and 1960s led to committees being established in Congress to oversee the agency’s activities.

     While there is no evidence that Trump has authorized Maduro’s assassination, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, told senators during his confirmation hearings that he would make the agency less risk averse and more willing to conduct covert action when ordered by the president.

     Armstrong suggested the administration’s preferred course was to goad Maduro’s opponents in the Venezuelan military and other parts of society to topple him in a coup, setting the scene for a democratic transition while precluding the need for direct US action.

     But some analysts believe such a scenario would probably spawn a replacement loyal to the leftist movement spearheaded by Maduro’s late predecessor, Hugo Chávez – with a full-blown democratic transformation potentially taking years to bear fruit.

     Angelo Rivero Santos, a former Venezuelan diplomat in the country’s US embassy and now an academic at Georgetown University, said the chances of a coup were likely to be dashed by domestic realities and the fact that even Maduro’s critics have rallied around the flag in response to recent US pressure.      “The year 2025 is not 1973,” he said, referring to the coup that deposed Chile’s Allende. “Statements from the opposition show that this is not heavily supported inside the country.”

     As written by Daniel Mendiola in The Guardian, in an article entitled

The US ‘war on terror’ has killed millions. Now Trump is bringing it to Venezuela; “For the last two months, US forces have amassed outside Venezuela and carried out a series of lethal strikes on civilian boats. The Trump White House has ordered these actions in the name of fighting “narco-terrorists” – a label apparently applicable to anyone suspected of participating in drug trafficking near Latin American coastlines. More than 80 people have already been killed in these pre-emptive strikes, and war hawks are calling for expanded military action to depose the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro.

     Watching this play out, I am reminded of a passage from the geographer Stuart Elden’s award-winning 2009 book, Terror and Territory. In discussing how to study the “war on terror”, Elden observed that it did not make sense to study terrorism as something unique to non-state actors.

     “States clearly operate in ways that terrify,” Elden said. “The terrorism of non-state actors is a very small proportion of terrorism taken as a whole, with states having killed far more than those who oppose them.”

     A large body of research supports this claim.

     Researchers with Brown University’s Costs of War project, for example, have found that US-led interventions in the “war on terror” from 2001 to 2023 killed over 400,000 civilians in direct war violence. They also show evidence that when considering indirect deaths – for example, people in war zones dying from treatable medical conditions after clean water or medical infrastructure was destroyed – death toll estimates rise to at least 3.5m. Moreover, even beyond direct war zones, a recent study in the Lancet found that sanctions during the same period were also extremely deadly, causing as many as 500,000 excess deaths per year from 2010 to 2021.

     In short, we have already spent decades terrorizing civilian populations around the world in the name of fighting terror. This is well known, and yet the Trump White House is reinvigorating the “war on terror” anyway. Still more, it is trying to do it with even less oversight on the president’s license to kill than has been exercised in the past.

     While on the surface Trump’s second term has been characterized by a disorienting barrage of executive orders and culture war polemics, the administration has in fact been running a cohesive authoritarian playbook aimed at conferring near limitless powers to the presidency. These concerted efforts have played out in numerous policy arenas from immigration, to higher education, to economics, to even determining who is a citizen.

     Consistent with this pattern, Trump is asserting the same unchecked authority over the violent capacities of the US military.

     As I have written previously, a key tactic of the Trump White House has been eviscerating the oversight of the courts, making it impossible to impede the executive branch from continuing to break the law, even when it gets caught red-handed. However, another frequent strategy – perhaps less visible, though equally anathema to a system of limited government – has been to simply sidestep oversight by asserting that, even when law in theory places limits on presidential power, the exercise of this power is still “unquestioned”; according to this thinking, the executive branch apparently has the prerogative to interpret what those limits are.

     Of course, in a serious constitutional system, this would be preposterous. In practice, there would be no limits to presidential powers, rendering the constitution moot. Nonetheless, this is exactly the type of power that Trump is asserting over the military, both at home and abroad.

     The court case related to Trump’s efforts to suppress protests in Chicago using troops sheds critical light on how this strategy works. Federal law allows a president to deploy troops domestically if there is a “rebellion” that is making it impossible to “execute the laws of the United States”. Accordingly, some lower court judges have reasonably blocked the deployment of troops, finding that the administration has been unable to prove that these conditions were met. Just look at the facts: protests had on average only been about 50 people at a time, and they have clearly not made law enforcement impossible since ICE – the federal agency being protested – has vastly increased arrests during this time.

     True to form, however, Trump’s lawyers have argued that these details are irrelevant. In their view, there is actually no need to prove a rebellion is happening because the president has the authority to define rebellion anyway. In other words, the law might impose limits on how the president can use the military, but the president gets to decide what those limits are.

     While lower courts have so far prevented this nakedly authoritarian legal theory from taking hold, the argument itself is still massively consequential: first, because an extremely Trump-friendly supreme court will hear the case soon and could very well endorse these claims; and second, because this is essentially the same logic that the Trump administration has used to justify killing civilians off the Latin American coast. Indeed, just as the Trump administration is asserting the exclusive right to define “rebellion” regardless of the facts on the ground – thus eliminating any real limits on the power to deploy troops domestically – the Trump White House is similarly asserting the unencumbered right to define “terrorist”, along with the corresponding right to take deadly action with virtually no outside oversight.

     In public statements, Trump has defended treating drug smugglers as terrorists by citing the harm done by drug overdoses, in effect suggesting that drug traffickers are directly killing US citizens. Ignoring the fact that Venezuela doesn’t produce fentanyl, the main driver of overdoses in the US, Trump has even gone so far as to float the mathematically impossible claim that each boat strike has saved 25,000 lives. Of course, officials have provided zero public evidence that the boats attacked were carrying drugs at all, much less tried to explain how blowing up boats would have any impact at all on drug abuse in the US.

     But again, why would they? The whole point of the argument is that such facts don’t matter because Trump simply has the unchecked authority to use lethal force. In fact, the justice department has suggested that officials do not even have to publicly list which foreign organizations are classified as killable terrorists, much less provide evidence to support this designation.

     Ultimately, Trump’s actions in and around Venezuela are best understood as a new phase in the “war on terror” – an ongoing tragedy that has already had deadly consequences for millions – though now with even fewer guardrails. The bottom line: Venezuela is not just some chess piece in an abstract game of geopolitics, and we are doing a disservice to humanity if we let war hawks in government and media spin it this way. We are talking about real people, and as very recent history shows, countless lives are at stake.”

     As written by Steven Greenhouse in The Guardian, in an article entitled

Brutish, bullying, imperialistic: the Ugly American is back; “For decades, president after president has sought to rid the US of its image as a bullying, imperialistic nation. But with his blustering, often brutish behavior toward other countries, Donald Trump has rapidly revived that notion. Under Trump, the Ugly American is back.

     Trump has done this by using US power in aggressive and arrogant ways – by attacking other countries’ policies and then threatening to punish them if they don’t bow to his demands. Trump is doing exactly what international law says national leaders shouldn’t be doing. He has repeatedly inserted himself into other countries’ affairs, browbeating their leaders, berating their policies and disrespecting their sovereignty. Too often, Trump treats other countries as vassals of the US (and of his ego).

     The phrase “the Ugly American” was popularized by a 1958 novel with that title; it described the insensitivity and ineptness of US diplomats who often didn’t speak the language where they were stationed and rarely spoke to the people there. Over the years, that term was increasingly used to describe insensitive and arrogant US tourists and insensitive and arrogant US policies toward other nations.

     Trump has acted like an Ugly American in many ways. He has interfered in Brazil’s internal affairs by all but ordering it to drop the prosecution of its rightwing former president (and Trump buddy) Jair Bolsonaro for conspiring to stage a coup to return to power. When Brazil didn’t drop the prosecution – Bolsonaro was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison – Trump imposed a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods.

     In recent weeks, Trump has played the Ugly, even Crazed, American toward Canada when he grew outraged after seeing a television ad, sponsored by the province of Ontario, that contained excerpts of a Ronald Reagan speech critical of tariffs. In retaliation, Trump imposed an additional 10% tariff on Canadian goods. That move further angered Canadians who were already furious about Trump’s absurd idea to make Canada the 51st state.

     Trump has also sought to bully Colombia. He said the US would cut off aid to that country after its president, Gustavo Petro, complained that the US had struck a Colombian fishing boat and killed a fisher as part of Trump’s campaign of attacking boats allegedly transporting drugs. Using ugly, undiplomatic language, Trump called Colombia’s president an “illegal drug leader”.

     Simultaneously come Trump’s on-again, off-again threats to launch military strikes against Venezuela. They are a reminder of Washington’s baldly imperialistic interventions in, among other places, Vietnam, Grenada and Iran, with the 1953 coup ousting a leftist prime minister. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, is corrupt, repressive and authoritarian, and stole an election, but military intervention would be a throwback to the worst days of Ugly Americanism.

     Trump has also interfered in the European Union’s affairs. In an era when social media is overflowing with so many untruths that it makes it hard for democratic governments to function, even survive, the European Union has understandably required social media platforms to weed out lies and other disinformation. But Trump has lambasted the EU’s Digital Services Act, asserting that it discriminates against US tech companies. His administration has angered the EU by threatening to impose new tariffs and restrict the visas of some EU officials.

     Trump has improperly interfered in Argentina’s politics by saying he would grant a $40bn bailout, but might pull that money if the party of Argentina’s rightwing president, Javier Milei, didn’t win legislative elections on 26 October. “If he loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina,” Trump said. Milei’s party won, with an interventionist Trump taking some credit, saying: “He had a lot of help from us.”

     Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, interfered in German politics by attacking mainstream parties for building a “firewall” against letting far-right parties such as the AfD into a governing coalition. In a speech last month to Israel’s Knesset, Trump interfered in that country’s politics in an extraordinary way, calling on Israel’s president to pardon the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on the corruption charges he’s facing.

     In Trump’s hour-long tirade to the UN general assembly in September, he sought to play Boss of the World. He told the UN’s 193 member nations to jettison their climate change policies, saying concerns about global warming were “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”. He added: “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail and I’m really good at predicting things.” Trump told the assembled diplomats they should sharply curb immigration, and in an ugly slap in the face, he said: “Your countries are going to hell.”

     Even as many UN delegates grimaced, Trump said: “On the world stage, America is respected again like it has never been respected before.” Donald Trump can dream, but Ishaan Tharoor, a global affairs columnist for the Washington Post, wrote on X that a senior foreign diplomat had told him: “This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?”

     Trump’s Ugly American policies have done grievous damage to Washington’s image abroad. Foreigners’ favorability ratings of the US plummeted in a Pew poll, and 51% of Europeans see Trump as an enemy of Europe, according to a Le Grand Continent/Cluster 17 survey. In a diplomatic loss to the US, Vietnam is embracing Russia as a partner because its leaders are so upset with Trump’s tariffs and other policies. For similar reasons, India is rushing to improve ties with China.

     On the refugee front, Trump has adopted policies that are plainly biased. Slamming the door on refugees, he has slashed annual quotas from 125,000 to 7,500. He is overwhelmingly rejecting those fleeing persecution and war, yearning to breathe free, while favoring white Afrikaners from South Africa. Amnesty International said that “Trump’s racist refugee cap abandons refugees around the world”, while Human Rights First called the new policy “blatantly racist”.

     Trump has become the 800lb gorilla of world affairs, throwing around Washington’s extraordinary weight in ways that injure and infuriate other countries – by imposing tariffs willy-nilly, by blowing up boats in the Caribbean, by berating other countries’ policies and leaders. Trump hasn’t earned other countries’ respect so much as their fear and ire. Much of the world is alarmed about what the swaggering gorilla will do next, and much of the world questions the gorilla’s judgment. Why is he sabotaging the global economy with his tariff mania? Why has he embraced Vladimir Putin for so long? Why has he railed against anyone and everyone trying to fight global warming?

     One must admit that even with his Ugly American tendencies, Trump sometimes does the right thing, but often belatedly. He finally put pressure on Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire. He finally imposed some meaningful sanctions on Russia (although his support of beleaguered Ukraine remains far too tepid).

     Unfortunately, it’s not easy for other countries to stand up to Trump’s bullying. It’s difficult to resist when the leader of the world’s most powerful nation is so uninhibited about wielding his power. But we’ve seen mighty China stand up to Trump on tariffs, while Brazil’s president rebuffed Trump’s demand to drop charges against Bolsonaro. Even tiny Denmark has stood up to Trump’s imperialistic demands on Greenland.

     Let’s hope that more countries stand up to Trump’s wrong-headed, bullying diplomacy. And let’s hope that many more Americans, including the cowed members of Congress, stand up to Trump when they see how colossally harmful his Ugly American policies are.

     There’s no denying that Trump’s Ugly Americanism will leave the US and the world worse off. His tariffs have slowed global economic growth and increased tensions with dozens of countries. America’s allies have grown increasingly angry and distrustful and will be less willing to cooperate with the US. With Trump smashing so many diplomatic norms, Russia and China are feeling freer to act as they wish. And Trump’s cozying up to autocrats while showing coolness toward human rights activists will hold back democracy movements worldwide.

     It’s ugly stuff.”

     As I wrote in my post of October 23 2025, Trump’s Undeclared War on Venezuela; In the shadows of the Conquest of the Americas from indigenous peoples and the Monroe Doctrine which authorized American Imperialism and colonialism throughout our continent, the Trump regime is committing war crimes against civilian Venezuelans in its two front undeclared war, the bogus and performative strikes on fishing boats on the pretext of a war on drugs and the campaign of ethnic cleansing and white supremacist terror waged by ICE within our nation, which began with and has specifically targeted Venezuelan nationals.

     All of these war crimes and crimes against humanity are in service to the wealth and power of white elites who wish to profit from theft of Venezuela’s enormous oil resources, capitalist plunder again under a pretext as a Red Scare which echoes and reflects the Bay of Pigs and our decades long vendetta against Cuba for throwing out our mafia casinos. Trump’s actions also horrifically recapitulate both the Red Scare of the McCarthy era here in America as the repression of dissent and the Red Scare which birthed Operation Condor and our coup in Chile which replaced the people’s champion Allende with the fascist tyrant and American puppet Pinochet.

     Yes, the Maduro regime has betrayed the Revolution and become everything the magnificent liberator Hugo Chavez once stood against, but for this; both insist on the independence and sovereignty of Venezuela and represent the forces of anticolonial liberation struggle in the Americas. And this makes all the difference.

     Herein follows some of my writing on the democracy movement in Venezuela, of which the Nobel Prize winner Maria Corina Machado is a figure, though a very problematic one regarding her actions as a proxy for the Trump regime and American colonialism.

     What’s the difference between Trump’s planned coup attempt against Maduro and the people of Venezuela themselves bringing regime change?

      Imperialist conquest and dominion is nothing like democracy which arises from the liberation struggle of the people; and the test of disambiguation is who seizes and owns the power, the people or some foreign master?

     And one thing more; I care nothing for why someone kills or enslaves another, silences or brutalizes others as repression of dissent or the enforcement of authorized identities, versions of history or reality, or virtue as submission to authority; and neither do their victims.

      Ideologies mean nothing weighed against the simple tests of Who Holds Power, and Who Is Suffering?

      For what is human is most real.

     As written by in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump is threatening Venezuela. But his own country looks a lot like it: The US president’s efforts to consolidate power are strikingly similar to historical authoritarian moves in Caracas; “Here in the Americas, we have a peculiar tradition. Every time there is a major election, prominent figures on the right find themselves compelled to repeat some version of the vaguely menacing prediction: if the candidate for the left wins, we will become “the next Venezuela”.

     Whether Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia or Ecuador, countries throughout the western hemisphere keep this tradition. Donald Trump has also participated in this ritual, proclaiming during the 2024 election cycle that if Kamala Harris won, our country would become “Venezuela on steroids”.

     Oddly spoken with disdain.

    Harris, of course, lost the election, so we will never know how Venezuela-esque her version of the US might have been. But we are seeing Trump’s America, and the reality is: it’s looking a lot like Venezuela.

     Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez – a charismatic yet polarizing leftwing figure – political discourses have shrouded Venezuela in conflicting layers of partisan caricature, often making it difficult to parse what is actually happening. At this point, however, there is no doubt that the country is in crisis.

    Migration statistics alone provide compelling evidence. Amnesty International and the UN refugee agency estimate that nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014 – as much as 25% of the population. Hyperinflation and food shortages have driven this exodus, compounded by authoritarianism and increasing repression under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, who has held on to power since 2013 through elections with overwhelming evidence of fraud.

     Significantly, the US has hardly been an innocent bystander. Not only have we frequently doled out reprehensible treatment to Venezuelan asylum seekers, but we have also played a role in creating the conditions that are forcing people to migrate in the first place. The US has maintained a belligerent stance toward Venezuela for more than two decades – for example, supporting a short-lived coup to overthrow Chávez in 2002, as well as hitting the country with sanctions – and the Trump administration has recently escalated the conflict by ordering a series of deadly strikes on civilian boats suspected of smuggling drugs off the Venezuelan the coast. Reports also indicate that Trump is considering an intervention to depose Maduro, and the CIA may already be carrying out covert operations in the country.

     Journalists and legal analysts have done excellent work explaining how these strikes are illegal according to US and international law, in addition to being murderously cruel. There has also been great coverage of how the demonization of Venezuelan immigrants – including a steady stream of propaganda painting Venezuelan immigrants as gang members and terrorists – has long been a centerpiece of Trump’s platform.

     These actions are disgraceful on their own terms. But they are also bitterly ironic: even while terrorizing Venezuelans in the name of defending democracy, Trump has, in fact, been running a strikingly similar authoritarian playbook. Noteworthy parallels include dismantling constitutional limits on presidential authority, manipulating electoral districts to inflate his party’s representation in Congress, and using state power to repress political opponents.

     In Venezuela’s case, the story begins with a fraught referendum. Immediately upon taking office in 1999, Chávez decreed a new executive power: the ability to call for a referendum on writing a new constitution. The legality of the claim was dubious given that the Venezuelan legal system already had mechanisms for updating the constitution, and a simple majority popular vote was not one of them. Nonetheless, the Venezuelan supreme court relented, and when the referendum passed, Chávez asserted a heavy hand in creating the process for how a constitutional assembly would work. Moreover, he unilaterally gave this assembly outsized powers to govern, suspending Congress and the supreme court in the meantime. Unsurprisingly, the resulting constitution of 1999 expanded executive authority considerably, and the entire process established a precedent to continue using these largely hand-picked constitutional assemblies to overrule congress whenever the opposition gained ground.

     While there are, likewise, calls for a constitutional convention coming from Trump allies that could function in a similar way, this hasn’t actually been necessary in the US. Rather, the conservative supermajority on the supreme court has managed to effectively do the same thing on its own: repeatedly ignoring plain text as well as its own precedent in order to assign new powers to the presidency while at the same time eviscerating longstanding checks from other branches of government and independent agencies alike. In short, even without literally rewriting the constitution, the supreme court has in practice served as a comparable constitutional assembly, fundamentally reshaping constitutional norms to create a “unitary executive” with fewer checks on executive power than ever before.

     Taking this comparison even deeper, there are also important parallels in Trump’s efforts to stack Congress through “gerrymandering”: a trick that hinges on exploiting the mathematical quirks of single-member, winner-take-all districts. For example, in a system where every district has an isolated winner-take-all race, even if one party gets 49% of the vote across the country, that does not mean that it will end up having 49% of the representation in Congress. In fact, if each district is a perfect microcosm of society with 49% of voters supporting this party, it could actually end up with zero seats in congress, despite representing roughly half the population.

     In short, single-member, winner-take-all districts have the potential to massively inflate or deflate a party’s overall electoral showing, depending on how the voters are distributed among the districts. And if the party in power gets to redraw the districts, they can easily rig the game. Knowing full well the consequences, the US supreme court blessed this approach during Trump’s first term, and now at a time when Republicans have a clear advantage in controlling redistricting, the justices are poised to make it even easier. Within this context, Trump is pushing Republican-governed states to capitalize.

     Significantly, Chávez’s early efforts to consolidate power used a similar mechanism. Though under-appreciated now, Venezuela’s earlier election system under its 1961 constitution actually included a clause guaranteeing minority representation, and officials developed a clever method to allocate seats roughly proportional to a party’s overall support. This made gerrymandering impossible, limiting the ability of the ruling party to press their advantage by further manipulating districts. In 1999, however, Chávez’s constitutional assembly eliminated this system, changing the rules so that most congressional seats would instead come from winner-take-all districts. The effect – at least in the short term while Chávez consolidated power – was to considerably inflate his party’s congressional representation.

     Along with expanding executive power and manipulating congressional elections, a third commonality – repression of political opponents – needs little explanation. Even before Maduro apparently resorted to overt election fraud, the Chávez government faced accusations of intimidating judges and arresting opposition candidates. Vocal critics of the government have also reported heavy-handed tactics from formal military and paramilitary forces alike.

     As we now watch Trump deploy troops in Democratic-led cities across the country; turn federal agencies such as Ice and into personal secret police who operate with impunity; and push to systematically arrest political opponents, the parallels are obvious.

     Ultimately, while there is every reason to believe that Venezuela is in crisis, there is no reason to believe that Trump’s military aggression will have any benefit for the people of either country. The bottom line: the Trump administration has demonstrated time and time again that it has no qualms about wreaking havoc on Venezuelan civilians – nor on its own. Trump’s abuses of power at home and in the Caribbean are two sides of the same coin. We must condemn both.”

     As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s bullying of Latin America isn’t part of any plan – he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing: The president’s threats to attack Venezuela are regressive, dangerous and almost certain to backfire; “Running for president in 2024, Donald Trump vowed to avoid costly, often disastrous overseas US military interventions like Iraq and Afghanistan. This was a key plank in his isolationist “America first” platform. Yet within months of his inauguration, US forces were bombing Yemen and Iran. Looking south, Trump threatened to seize the Panama canal. Now, the Pentagon is gearing up for attacks on “terrorist” drug cartels deep inside Colombia and Mexico. Of most immediate concern is a possible renewed White House effort to forcibly impose regime change on Venezuela.

     Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s hard-left authoritarian president, believes this effort is already under way. He says the US is waging “undeclared war” on his country after several deadly strikes on Venezuelan vessels in international waters – Trump shared a video of the latest attack, which killed four people, on his social media last Friday. The president also notified Congress last week that the US is engaged in “armed conflict” with drug cartels. He claims, without providing evidence, that the targeted boats were carrying US-bound illegal narcotics – and that Maduro is responsible. He has placed a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head.

     Latin American governments are fretfully watching a big US military buildup around Venezuela, including warships, F-35 fighter jets, an attack submarine and 2,200 marines. Such powerful assets are not much use in drug interdiction. But they could be used offensively, or to support special forces raids and airstrikes. On Thursday, Venezuela accused the US of an “illegal incursion” by at least five F-35s. Maduro says he is readying a state of emergency to “protect our people … if Venezuela [is] attacked by the American empire”.

     What is Trump up to? Drug smuggling is a serious problem – but killing people on a whim on the high seas, while common and difficult to prosecute, is still illegal. And anyway, the UN says, most of the cocaine entering the US comes from Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, and is mostly not trafficked through Venezuela. Draft-dodger Trump likes to act the tough commander-in-chief. He is now trying to deport Venezuelan migrants, many of whom originally fled to the US to escape sanctions he himself imposed. Some analysts suggest he covets Venezuela’s abundant oil, gas and mineral resources.

    It’s true that Trump and John Bolton, his then national security adviser, hoped to replace Maduro in 2019 in what Caracas claimed was a regime change plot. It’s also true that Maduro’s 2024 re-election victory was widely condemned as fraudulent. Given a free choice, Venezuelans would almost certainly sack him. And clashing ideologies are a factor, too. Maduro, unworthy heir to Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution, is an affront to Trump’s imperial idea of a US-dominated western hemisphere, where the 1823 Monroe doctrine rules again and neoliberal, free-market capitalism operates without restraint.

     Yet given his hapless blundering on other key foreign issues, the most likely explanation for Trump’s behaviour is that, typically, he hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing – in Venezuela or Latin America as whole. There’s no plan. He throws his weight about, makes impetuous misjudgments, stokes fear of foreigners and bases policy on whether he “likes” other leaders. In 2019, with Maduro on the ropes, Trump blinked. Today, full-scale military intervention in Venezuela remains unlikely. More probable is an intensified pressure campaign of destabilisation, sanctions, maritime strikes, and air and commando raids.

    Far from weakening and isolating the regime, Trump may achieve the exact opposite. Maduro is already using the crisis to assume dictatorial “special powers” and rally public opinion behind patriotic calls for national solidarity. Trump’s bullying of other left-leaning Latin American countries such as Colombia – and presumptuous cheerleading for rightwing populists in Argentina and El Salvador – is spurring a regional backlash, too. Most governments abhor the thought of a return to the bad old days of Yanqui meddling in Washington’s “back yard”.

     Trump’s attempt to use punitive tariffs and sanctions to strong-arm Brazil into pardoning its disgraced former hard-right president Jair Bolsonaro backfired spectacularly last month. Huge crowds took to the streets of Brazilian cities to defend what they rightly saw as an assault on Brazilian sovereignty and rule of law. The popularity of Bolsonaro’s successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, soared. “We are not, and never again will we be, anyone’s colony,” he declared. Lula told Trump, in effect, to get lost. Then, when they met at the UN general assembly, Trump backed off and played nice. Keir Starmer, please note.

     The perception of a great leap backwards in US-Latin America relations grows ineluctably. “His administration views Latin America primarily as a security threat, associating it with drug trafficking, organised crime and incoming migration,” Irene Mia of the International Institute for Strategic Studies warned earlier this year. “The US approach has become essentially negative, prioritising unilateral action and dominance rather than partnership,” she said, adding: “The region is being treated less as an equal partner and more as a sphere of influence to be controlled in line with US strategic interests.”

     Trump’s hawkish advisers are part of the problem: notably Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, and Marco Rubio, a former Republican senator for Florida who is secretary of state and national security adviser. For Rubio, a longtime critic of leftwing rulers in Cuba and Nicaragua, Maduro is unfinished business. Defending the boat attacks, he declared: “Interdiction doesn’t work. What will stop them is when you blow them up … And it’ll happen again.” Coming from the top US diplomat, this is quite a statement.

     Trump’s efforts to reprise the role of Latin American neighbourhood policeman, emulating former president Theodore Roosevelt – a big stick-wielding serial interventionist – are regressive, dangerous and self-defeating. Long-term, the big winner will most likely be Beijing, an increasingly influential regional actor, investor and leading member of the Brics group of nations. As the US burns its bridges across the world, Trump is making China great again.”

     As I wrote in my post of August 11 2024, When Must Revolution Be Waged Against Revolution? The Case of Venezuela; In Venezuela a democracy revolution challenges the brutal regime of a dictator which has ruined the economy and made of its citizens a vast precariat in what was once envisioned as a socialist paradise.

      Tyranny and a carceral state of force and control are a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle under imposed conditions which require liberation by seizures of power through force, especially anticolonial revolutions.

     All states are constituted by violence and are themselves embodied violence; in the words of George Washington; “Government is about force, only force.”

     When must revolution be waged against the revolution? When it has become the tyranny it seized power from, as nationalism rather than as a colony, and this is exactly what has happened in Venezuela.

     Yes, America and her proxies has waged economic and political warfare against Venezuela for many long years, sometimes as terror, sometimes as farce; but no one compelled Maduro to begin random mass executions and imprisonments either. This revolution is all on him.

     And this time, it is the poor and desperate underclasses of Venezuelan peasants who have risen up to seize their power and claim that liberty which is the birthright of all human beings, without the strings of invisible American and global capitalist puppetmasters.

     Here is a true revolution of the people, and though I have long championed the Chavez revolutionary state and its legacies of anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist liberation versus America and called out and resisted the outrageous and terroristic policies of our government including those of both the Trump and Biden regimes toward Venezuela, we must recognize and rethink the meaning of the glorious and wholly legitimate democracy revolution against Maduro.

     And we must do everything we can to help the people of Venezuela liberate themselves from tyranny, and bring stability and freedom from want to the region. 

       As written by Tom Phillips in The Guardian, in an article entitled World must confront Maduro’s ‘campaign of terror’, Venezuelan opposition leader says; “Venezuela’s main opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has accused the country’s strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, of unleashing a horrific “campaign of terror” in an attempt to cling on to power.

     Two weeks after Maduro’s widely questioned claim to have won the 28 July election, human rights activists say he has launched a ferocious clampdown designed to silence those convinced his rival Edmundo González was the actual winner. More than 1,300 people have been detained, including 116 teenagers, according to the rights group Foro Penal. At least 24 people have reportedly been killed.

     Speaking from an undisclosed location where she is in hiding, Machado – a charismatic conservative who is González’s key backer – urged governments around the world to oppose Maduro’s intensifying crackdown.

    “What is going on in Venezuela is horrific. Innocent people are being detained or disappeared as we speak,” said the 56-year-old former congresswoman, who endorsed González after authorities barred her from running.

     Maduro’s regime has nicknamed part of its clampdown Operación Tun Tun – “Operation Knock Knock” – a chilling reference to the often late-night visits to perceived government opponents by heavily armed, black-clad captors from the intelligence services or police.

     Tun Tun’s targets have included activists, journalists and prominent opposition politicians – but most detainees appear to be the residents of working-class areas who rose up en masse against Maduro for the first time in the two days after his disputed claim to victory.

     One Tun Tun propaganda video published on the Instagram account of the military counterintelligence service, DGCIM, last week showed one of Machado’s campaign organisers, María Oropeza, being detained to the sound of the nursery rhyme from the 1984 horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which Freddy Krueger attacks children in their dreams. “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you! Three, four, better lock your door!” warn the song’s sinister lyrics.

     A second DGCIM video showing another arrest is soundtracked by a horror-film adaptation of Carol of the Bells, whose modified lyrics warn: “If you’ve done wrong, then he will come! … He’ll look for you! You’d better hide!”

     Asked if she feared she and González would soon receive a visit from Maduro’s security forces, Machado replied: “At this moment … in Venezuela, everybody is afraid that your door could be knocked [on] and your freedom could be taken away – even your life is threatened. Maduro has unleashed a campaign of terror against Venezuelans.”

     “Every single democratic government should raise their voices much more loudly,” said Machado, who believed the repression laid bare “the criminal nature” of a regime that knew it had lost by a landslide to González and was now seeking desperately to cling to power. “[Maduro’s government has] decided that their only option to stay in power is using violence, fear and terror against the population.”

     Campaigners for human rights and democracy say the speed and scale of the repression is virtually unprecedented in the region’s recent history. Maduro has claimed he is pursuing criminals and terrorists who are behind a fascist, foreign-backed conspiracy to topple him.

     “In Latin America, there hasn’t been a repressive crackdown of such magnitude as has happened in Venezuela since the days of [the Chilean dictator] Augusto Pinochet,” Marino Alvarado, an activist from the Venezuelan human rights group Provea, told El País last week.

     Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, the president of the Washington Office on Latin America advocacy group, told the New York Times: “I have been documenting human rights violations in Venezuela for many years and have seen patterns of repression before. I don’t think I have ever seen this ferocity.”

     Tamara Taraciuk Broner, the director of the rule of law programme at the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank, said the arbitrary arrests – and a social media crackdown that has temporarily blocked X and Signal – suggested Maduro wanted to take Venezuela in an even more despotic direction. “It looks as if they want to go towards [being] a full-fledged dictatorship,” she said. “You need to be very brave to take to the streets now in Venezuela … they are trying very hard to intimidate people so they don’t take to the streets.”

     The government’s attempt to create an atmosphere of fear was on show last Saturday as thousands of opposition supporters gathered in Caracas to hear Machado speak despite the risk of arrest.

     Unlike at other opposition marches in recent years, many protesters declined to give their names to journalists for fear of persecution, and some wore masks. After the march, at least one reporter was detained by security officials and accused of “stirring up hatred”. Machado came in disguise, wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up.

     “Before I came out today, my daughter threw herself on top of me and made me promise that I would come home,” said one 28-year-old demonstrator, describing how her best friend was captured hours before.

     Tellingly, the next major anti-Maduro mobilisations are set to be held predominantly outside Venezuela, where about 8 million of its estimated 29 million citizens live after fleeing abroad to escape economic chaos and political repression. Machado has called on supporters to gather across the globe on Saturday 17 August, for “a great worldwide protest … for the truth”.

     Machado urged Maduro – who has governed since being elected after the death of his mentor Hugo Chávez in 2013 – to “accept his defeat and understand that we are offering reasonable terms for a negotiated transition”. Those terms included “guarantees, safe passage and incentives”.

     Maduro has publicly dismissed talk of a negotiation but some believe one option for him could be exile in an allied country such as Cuba, Turkey or Iran. Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, last week offered him temporary asylum en route to such a destination, although Maduro quickly rejected his offer.

     Machado pledged not to seek “revenge” or to persecute members of Maduro’s administration, although her campaign-trail promises to “forever bury” socialism and her past calls for foreign military intervention make many Chavistas profoundly suspicious of the right-wing politician.

     Machado recognised the role the leftwing leaders of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico – who have not recognised Maduro’s claim to victory – could have in convincing him to enter “a serious negotiation for a democratic transition”.

     “But we have to stop [the] repression and the cost of repression has to be increased. These are red lines that the Maduro regime is crossing as we speak,” Machado added. “

     As written by Luke Taylor in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘A climate of terror’: Maduro cracks down on Venezuelans protesting contested election win; “After apparent efforts to steal the election, the president sent forces to round people up in ‘Operation knock-knock’; “Cristina Ramírez was readying her sofa bed in Buenos Aires for the arrival of her friend visiting from Venezuela when she received a text message suggesting Edni López could be delayed. Officials in Caracas airport had stopped her, apparently over an issue with her passport.

     Four days later, López remains under the detention of the Venezuelan authorities and her family grows increasingly worried by the minute that the university professor could be caught up in a brutal crackdown on protests over Nicolás Maduro’s apparent efforts to steal the presidential election.

     “We know almost nothing. We have not been permitted to get Edni a lawyer and we still do not even know what she has been charged with,” said Ramírez, her voice cracking with anxiety. “The uncertainty is hard to describe. We just hope she can be freed soon.”

     After a wave of public unrest following the disputed election, Maduro promised to “pulverize” the popular movement against him, dispatching security forces to round up opposition activists in the so-called “Operation knock-knock”.

     More than 1,100 people so far have been rounded up since the election, according to Caracas-based rights watchdog, Foro Penal.

     Prominent political figures have been seized, including Freddy Superlano, the national coordinator of the opposition Voluntad Popular party, who was dragged from his home by masked men.

     Venezuela’s attorney general, a Maduro loyalist, announced on Tuesday that opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González would be investigated for “incitement to insurrection” after they called on security forces to “side with the people” instead of repressing protests.

     María Oropeza, a campaign co-ordinator for the opposition Vente party in the state of Portuguesa, livestreamed her own arrest late on Tuesday.

     “Help me,” she pleaded live on Instagram as intelligence officers battered the lock off her front door. “I did nothing wrong, I am not a criminal. I am just another citizen who wants a different country”.

     Oropeza had spoken out against the mass detentions just hours before she herself was detained.

     But others with no political affiliation have also been caught up in Maduro’s dragnet, said Rafael Uzcategui, co-director of rights NGO Laboratorio de Paz, who suggested the operation was intended to terrify Venezuelans into submission.

     “There were rumours that Maduro was targeting electoral observers but we investigated the arrests and they are too massive to see any real pattern. Many of those detained have no political affiliation and have not even participated in the protests. What we are seeing is simply an effort to sew a climate of terror,” he said.

     Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, condemned Maduro for committing “serious human rights violations” on Wednesday and joined the likes of Guatemala, Argentina and Peru in rejecting Maduro’s “self-proclaimed” victory.

     The US – as well as other governments more sympathetic to Maduro, including Brazil, Mexico and Colombia – have called on the Venezuelan leader to publish a breakdown of the vote count, which he has so far refused.

     “I have no doubt that the Maduro regime has tried to commit fraud,” Boric told reporters.

     In his appearance on state television, a defiant Maduro has decried an international “fascist” conspiracy to overthrow him and accused WhatsApp of “spying” on Venezuela.

     The former bus driver has shown clips of protesters in the mass demonstrations followed by their alleged confessions, promising he is “willing to do anything” to stay in power.

     Many ordinary Venezuelans have deleted messaging apps on their mobile phones for fear that security forces could use their chat history for proof of dissent.

     Edni López’s family say they have received information that the 33-year-old has been taken to another facility from her detention center three times, possibly for questioning, but they still have no idea what she is accused of.

     López teaches management classes at the Central university of Venezuela and consults humanitarian organisations, Ramírez said, adding she has no political affiliation and did not participate in the recent protests.

     “She is very empathetic, philosophic and competent, which is why she brought all these things together to help people through her work,” Ramirez said.

     “Edni’s case is emblematic of what’s new about the repression that we’re seeing in post-election Venezuela,” said Adam Isacson, a director at the Washington Office on Latin America. “Usually in the past, the regime was hiding its illegitimate detentions under a veneer of legality, going through legal proceedings and allowing access to defense attorneys, for example. Now, even basic habeas corpus rights are being routinely violated.”

     As written by Tom Phillips and Patricia Torres in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Maduro has lost the streets’: in Venezuela’s barrios, former loyal voters risk all in protests; “Thousands from the capital’s favelas, once strongholds for the ‘revolution’, have faced a brutal crackdown after challenging last month’s presidential election result

     Millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to vote their widely loathed authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro out of power last Sunday – but Tibisay Betancourt was not one of them.

     “I voted for him,” said the 60-year-old masseuse, a loyal supporter of the president’s Chavista movement who lives in a housing estate apartment given to her by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez.

     Within hours of casting her vote, Betancourt had cause to rue her choice. As turmoil gripped the streets of Caracas after Maduro’s disputed claim to have won the election, she sent her son, Alfredo Alejandro Rondón, to a nearby shop to buy a bottle of Sprite for his sick father. Minutes later his brother, Yorluis, said he had seen Alfredo being beaten and dragged away by members of the Bolivarian national police.

     By Thursday morning, the high school graduate was one of hundreds of prisoners languishing behind bars at a police base on the east side of town, facing possible terrorism charges that could land him in jail for up to 30 years.

     If she could speak to Maduro, Betancourt said, “I’d tell him to let the innocent people go and to order the police to stop hitting people in front of the children.” She was one of hundreds of mostly working-class citizens who had gathered under a ferocious Caribbean sun to seek news of their incarcerated loved ones.

     Venezuela’s embattled president – who has presided over a catastrophic economic collapse since inheriting Chávez’s socialist-inspired “revolution” in 2013 – says more than 1,200 people have been seized as part of a crackdown on the alleged “traitors” and terrorists who took to the streets to demonstrate against what they call a stolen election. “And we’re going to capture 1,000 more,” Maduro declared, vowing to imprison those detained in maximum security jails.

     Acts of violence and vandalism undoubtedly occurred during the explosion of dissent, fuelled by anger over economic hardship and a migration crisis that has shattered families and seen some 8 million Venezuelans flee abroad. The metro station at the heart of El Valle – the blue-collar district where Maduro was raised – has had its windows shattered, and the area’s main street is stained with black marks where tyres and trees have been burned. Maduro visited the area with police on Wednesday night and claimed vandals had tried to destroy a local hospital.

     But many of the families outside the Zone 7 police detention centre said their loved ones had been arrested for simply attending peaceful protests or speaking out against Maduro’s administration online.

     Friends of Carla Madelein López, 32, said members of a feared special forces unit called the DAET had arrested her at home on Wednesday after she supposedly posted a message on social media criticising the government. “It’s a [forced] disappearance,” said one close friend as he waited outside the jail for news. He suspected López had been arrested after a tip-off from a neighbour via a mobile phone app Maduro has encouraged citizens to use to snitch on government enemies.

     Nearby, a 46-year-old man who asked not to be named fell to his knees and let out a wail of despair as he described how his son had been taken during a protest in Catia, a working-class area in west Caracas that has long been a bastion of Chavismo. “He’s just turned 18,” the father said, as black police vehicles resembling cattle trucks rolled out of the prison compound packed with detainees on their way to court.

     A 27-year-old woman, who also asked not to be named, described how her boyfriend had been shot in the hand with a rubber bullet and arrested after the pair had attended a peaceful rally organised by the opposition politicians who claim to have beaten Maduro in the election – former diplomat Edmundo González and his ally María Corina Machado.

     “He’s not a terrorist – he’s an entrepreneur,” said the detainee’s father, who, like Maduro, hails from El Valle and grew up in one of its deprived hillside favelas.

     The father said most El Valle residents had turned against Maduro – who calls himself the “president of the people” – because of the economic meltdown that had unfolded on his watch, leaving jobless Venezuelans with empty fridges and broken homes. “Maduro has lost the streets. Nobody likes him,” the 63-year-old said as he waited for news of his son.

     “Edmundo won [the election] in El Valle just like he won all over the country,” the man said of González, whose victory has been recognised by countries including the US, Argentina, Uruguay and Costa Rica. “And all the young people were trying to do was express the impotence they feel.

     “It’s just like everywhere in Venezuela. People are tired. They are tired of the lies. They are tired of these people thinking they are the bosses of everything.”

     Observers say such feelings are a key part of what distinguishes the current push to remove Maduro from previous attempts, such as Juan Guaidó’s failed bid to spark an uprising in 2019 or 2017’s mass protests.

     For years after Chávez’s election in 1998, the barrios of Caracas were overwhelmingly loyal to the comandante’s “revolution” and its use of petrodollars from Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to bankroll social welfare programmes and empower the poor.

     “Our hardest supporters were there [in the barrios],” said Chávez’s former communications minister, Andrés Izarra. “If you look at the voting record in all these communities, they were all hardcore Chavismo. We were winning like 80 or 85% of the vote.”

     Maduro retains some support in such areas, which are adorned with propaganda murals saying things such as “I have faith in Maduro”.

      “María Corina is a terrorist and an arselicker,” said José Ángel Seijas, a 58-year-old Chavista, as he played chess in a plaza at the foot of one El Valle favela. Showing off an old picture of himself alongside a youthful Maduro on his phone, Seijas urged his president to take no prisoners in his clampdown on objectors: “We want an iron fist against these punks.”

     But Venezuela’s economic disintegration under Maduro over the past decade – which the president blames on US sanctions but critics attribute primarily to rampant corruption and economic mismanagement – has seen the mood in the barrios overwhelmingly shift.

     Izarra said Maduro’s worst fear was such communities rising up against him en masse, as began to happen for the first time in the hours after the president’s disputed claim to have won a third term. Enraged by that declaration – for which Maduro has yet to provide proof – thousands of residents from barrios such as Petare swept west towards the presidential palace on motorbike and by foot before being pushed back by security forces.

     “We’ve had enough! Enough!” shouted Rafael Cantillo, 45, who came down from a Petare favela called El Campito to demonstrate last Monday.

     “There are people here from Mariche, from Petare, from El Campito, from Valle-Coche, from Caucagüita, from everywhere,” he said, reeling off the names of Caracas’s sprawling low-income communities where hundreds of thousands live.

     Izarra said that the mass mobilisation of Venezuela’s poor explained Maduro’s clampdown, as authorities battled to nip the barrio mutiny in the bud. “That’s why this huge security operation is under way to try to stop this,” added Izarra, who lives in exile in Germany. He predicted that more repression lay ahead.

     Interviews with relatives of detainees outside the Zone 7 jail suggested the crackdown was overwhelmingly targeting residents of working-class areas, such as Antímano, Catia and Petare. Stefania Migliorini, a human rights lawyer who had come to offer legal support, said the prisoners included men, women and minors. “People who were simply going to a protest, or going back home, or going to work, were arrested,” she said. “This is an extremely harsh situation.” Migliorini’s group, Foro Penal, says at least 16 people have so far been killed, five of them in Caracas.

     Protesters have vanished from the streets in recent days as security forces and armed pro-government gangs called colectivos are reported to be trawling the barrios for targets. A relative of one prisoner told the BBC police had been chasing young people through one community and “shooting at them as if they were on a safari in Africa”.

     But the demonstrators have vowed to return from their redbrick hilltop homes, and Machado called fresh protests for Saturday morning.

     “This time it will be different – this time things are different, because they’ve lost everyone who lives in the poor areas,” said Cantillo, as marchers scattered for cover to avoid being detained or hurt.

     “Tell the world this government is no good,” he implored as his group sought shelter from security forces.

     As he spoke, the women who had accompanied Cantillo from their favela broke into song. “It’s going to fall! It’s going to fall!” they chanted. “This government is going to fall!”

     As I wrote in my post of November 27 2022, A Chance For Change in American-Venezuelan Relations; There are few things which reveal those truths power would keep hidden through silence and erasure, rewritten histories, lies, falsifications and propaganda, than the liminal spaces where no rules exist, the blank spaces on our maps of human being, meaning, and value marked with the legend Here Be Dragons to indicate unknowns; like the purgatorial realm between Venezuela and Colombia wherein nothing is Forbidden and angels and devils walk among the lost and the mad, the depraved and the illumined.

     Here the limitless possibilities of becoming human are a chiaroscuro of the bestial and the exalted; here is the place to forge a new humankind free from the legacies of the past and the authorized identities of systems of dehumanization and unequal power, and of the tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue; for here in such places of liberation nothing can seize us for its own purposes.

     With Chaos comes the new and the unforeseen; here is terror and abjection, but also that most fragile of our powers, hope. Be thou joyful in the embrace of our monstrosity, for the future is ours.

      As written by Travis Waldron in Huffpost, in am article entitled Russia’s War Has Given Biden A Chance To Ditch Trump’s Failed Venezuela Policy; “Amid climbing gas prices that are likely to increase in the coming days, the Biden administration pushed to reengage one of the United States’ staunchest geopolitical foes this week: the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro, an authoritarian leader the United States has targeted with increasing rounds of sanctions for the last half-decade.

     The White House confirmed on Monday that Biden had sent a group of U.S. officials to Caracas for renewed talks last weekend. White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the “ongoing” discussions included dialogue about “energy security” — a suggestion that the U.S. had discussed potentially easing the de facto embargo it placed on Venezuela’s oil industry in 2019.

     The attempt to reengage Maduro is the latest sign that the U.S. is reassessing its foreign policy in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to mitigate the effects of isolating Russian President Vladimir Putin — including potential fuel shortages that have pushed domestic gas prices to record highs.

     U.S. overtures to Venezuela sparked bipartisan criticism, particularly from hawkish foreign policy voices that have egged on an aggressive approach to Maduro. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) criticized the White House on Monday for placating a human rights abuser who has overseen disputed elections and dismantled Venezuelan democracy in exchange for domestic political relief that may not materialize.

     But many others have welcomed the potential shift, and not just because Venezuelan oil may help reduce gas prices that reached $4.17 per gallon across the United States on Tuesday even before Biden announced a new ban on Russian oil imports.

    The United States’ approach to Venezuela, which has spent the last five years mired in economic, political and migration crises, has been disastrous: It has failed to mitigate the humanitarian damage of those crises, and perhaps even helped make it worse.

     Now, Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine may have provided just enough space for a much-needed reset to finally begin.

     “The puzzle we’ve all had for the past several months is: Why doesn’t the Biden administration do something to change course from the Trump policy?” said David Smilde, a University of Tulane professor and Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. “It took the conflict in Ukraine to provide the straw that broke the camel’s back, to get Biden to change things around a bit.”

     Biden administration officials met with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro over the weekend for discussions that could spark a reset in relations between the U.S. and Venezuela, which has been subject to heavy sanctions from the U.S. for the last five years.

     The U.S. and Venezuela have sparred for two decades, ever since socialist President Hugo Chávez won his first election in 1999. Maduro, who assumed the presidency upon Chávez’s 2013 death, has been a thorn in the side of Biden’s two immediate predecessors.

     In 2015, President Barack Obama sanctioned seven Venezuelan government officials amid concerns that Maduro’s government had engaged in widespread corruption, as well as crackdowns on political opponents. President Donald Trump followed with new sanctions in both 2017 and 2018, when Maduro emerged victorious from elections that his opponents, the United States and many international organizations alleged were rife with fraud.

    In 2019, the U.S. (along with dozens of other countries) recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate leader and launched a “maximum pressure” campaign meant to dislodge Maduro from power.

     Trump’s approach to Venezuela, while popular in some quarters, was quickly exposed as nakedly political and broadly impractical. He empowered hard-line appointees whose saber-rattling toward Maduro included repeated refusals to take implausible military actions off the table. This was primarily meant to shore up support among Venezuelan voters in South Florida, the fastest-growing Latino population in the swing state, and among large populations of Cuban American voters who see Maduro as an extension of Cuba’s Communist government.

     From that standpoint, Trump’s approach was successful: It helped him gain massive ground among Latino voters in the Miami area and easily win Florida in the 2020 election. But by nearly every other measure, the maximum pressure campaign toward Venezuela has been an abject, and sometimes tragicomic, failure.

     The U.S. pressure campaign further brutalized Venezuela’s economy, which had already experienced hyperinflation and severe energy, food and medicine shortages. But it largely failed to hit Maduro and top government officials.

     Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s weaponization of humanitarian assistance for political purposes, along with its decision to undermine negotiations between Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition, cratered any hope of real progress and did almost nothing to alleviate a humanitarian crisis that had driven millions of Venezuelans into extreme poverty or out of the country.

    By the time Trump left office, Guaidó was largely impotent at home and losing support abroad, and his opposition movement deeply splintered. Maduro, by contrast, was by most accounts stronger and more stable than he was when the campaign kicked off, free to continue to crack down on political opponents, dissenters and human rights.

     Ties between Caracas and Moscow had also deepened: As the U.S. ramped up pressure on Caracas, Russia expanded its oil holdings in Venezuela and helped Maduro and his government evade American sanctions.

     The policy was, in sum, the exact catastrophe many experts had warned it would become.

     “Sanctions without a more comprehensive strategy are an absolute waste of time,” said Brian Fonseca, a foreign affairs professor at Florida International University and former analyst at the United States Southern Command. “Sanctions are an instrument meant to encourage discussion, but there’s got to be discussion.”

     Still, Biden maintained the broad tenets of the maximum pressure strategy upon taking office in 2021. He continued to recognize Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader and left the aggressive sanctions regime in place. Despite growing calls for change from foreign policy officials, members of Congress and some members of the Venezuelan opposition, a strategic shift seemed unlikely to materialize before the 2022 elections, especially as Democrats fretted about further erosion of support among South Florida voters.

     But then, the Russian invasion of Ukraine shifted American priorities both domestically and internationally. Abroad, Biden’s efforts to thwart Putin have taken foreign policy precedence over hard-line tactics toward countries like Venezuela. At home, political concerns over modest engagement with Maduro have taken a backseat to a much bigger worry: that rising gas prices, which Biden desperately attempted to characterize as “Russia’s fault” on Tuesday, might crater Democrats in upcoming midterm elections that already seem likely to generate sizable Democratic losses.

     Engagement with Maduro still makes for a touchy political subject in Florida, but Latino voters there may be open to a course change as well.

     A majority of Venezuelan American voters in Florida said that foreign policy is somewhat or very important to their voting decisions in a recent poll conducted by the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University. Roughly 45% said they disapprove of Biden’s continuation of Trump’s maximum pressure approach to Maduro, compared to just 37% who support it, and nearly two-thirds said the sanctions had either fallen short of their expectations or “failed completely” to meet their expectations of change in Venezuela.

     Roughly 60% of Venezuelan American voters — and an even larger share of Cuban American voters — said they could support an easing of oil sanctions if Maduro didn’t manage new oil revenues and they were directed toward the country’s humanitarian crisis, the poll found.

     “The findings suggested that the diaspora would be open to lifting things like oil sanctions,” Fonseca said. “When you look at priorities, they don’t think the sanctions are having an effect, and they see the humanitarian crisis as more important than beating the [Maduro] government.”

     That atmosphere has provided a natural backdrop for a shift in relations.

     Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela have deepened ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin since the U.S. imposed heavy sanctions on the South American country, which have also benefited Russia’s oil industry.

     Venezuela likely can’t produce enough oil to fully offset Russian imports. But, like much of the oil the U.S. buys from Russia, Venezuelan oil is of the heavy crude variety, making it a natural replacement at U.S. refineries along the Gulf and East coasts that were specifically built to turn heavy crude into gasoline.

     It will likely take months for Venezuela to ramp up its oil production to previous capacities if sanctions are eased, but even an immediate injection could help dampen price spikes in the U.S. over the coming months.

     From a foreign policy standpoint, engaging Maduro now could have multiple benefits as the U.S. and Europe seek new ways to counter Putin’s aggression. U.S. sanctions on Venezuela increased U.S. dependence on Russia: American imports of Russian oil have doubled since the U.S. placed sanctions on Venezuelan oil in 2019.

     Easing the sanctions on Venezuela now could both weaken Russia’s oil industry and its overall ties with its strongest ally in the Americas.

     That could limit Russia’s power in the Western Hemisphere, a region the U.S. still paternalistically views as its own backyard. But it may also make it easier for Biden to place new and alternative sanctions on Putin and Rosneft — Russia’s largest oil company, a subsidiary of which the U.S. has already sanctioned in Venezuela — if he chooses to, Fonseca said, providing the U.S. with another potential way to combat Putin’s advances in Europe.

     Eased sanctions could also lead to renewed diplomatic negotiations with Maduro and advances toward a resolution to Venezuela’s democratic, economic and humanitarian crises.

     The U.S. and Venezuela appear to have made little progress during the initial round of discussions. But on Monday, Maduro signaled his openness to more talks with the U.S. — and pledged to restart negotiations with the Venezuelan opposition. Previous rounds of talks stalled in October when Maduro abruptly backed out.

     “Easing the sanctions on Venezuela now could both weaken Russia’s oil industry and its overall ties with its strongest ally in the Americas.”

    The path forward is difficult and full of caveats. The U.S. and the Venezuelan opposition still want a pledge for new rounds of “free and fair elections,” while Maduro wants the U.S. to lift sanctions completely. Maduro, Smilde said, has used past negotiations as a stall tactic to maintain or consolidate his domestic power, and the Venezuelan opposition has already expressed concerns that he’s preparing to do so again.

     But some progress does seem possible: On Tuesday night, Venezuela released two of the six former Citgo executives it had detained in October after the U.S. secured the extradition of a key Maduro ally in Colombia. Five of the six detainees, who had been serving house arrest sentences, are American citizens; the other is a U.S. permanent resident.

     The release of two prisoners may not yet mark a return to the pre-October status quo, but it’s at least a suggestion that further talks could achieve more if the U.S. presses Maduro for substantive democratic and human rights reforms.

     As part of the ongoing talks, the U.S. “needs to require a commitment that actual progress is made,” Smilde said. “They need to get some actual commitments from Maduro, and work on actual democratic issues.”

     “There’s a lot of space for improvement this year in terms of electoral institutions and electoral democracy, so it’d be great if they focus on that and not just on U.S. citizens that are prisoners in Venezuela,” Smilde added. “The ironing out or forging of some actual commitments on human rights is something that could make this go in the right direction.”

     The alternative is continuing a strategy that has paid little dividend. On Monday, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) opined that the only thing Biden should negotiate with Maduro is “the time of his resignation,” the sort of empty rhetoric U.S. officials have aimed south for three years with no real plan to back it up.

     “The bottom line,” Fonseca said, “is that our policy has done little to move the needle. And so this may be an opportunity for us to rethink and recalibrate our policy towards Venezuela.”

     As I wrote in my post of May 23 2021, Venezuela and Columbia: Partners in a Dance of Tyranny and Humanitarian Disaster; Vestigial remnants of a Cold War the world has long forgotten and casualties of American imperialism, like the shadows of an invisible reptilian tail which we drag behind us, the twin failed states of Venezuela and Columbia are partners in a dance of tyranny and humanitarian disaster.

     The monstrous oligarchic kleptocracy of state terror and proxy of American interests Álvaro Uribe and his successor Iván Duque of Columbia, an echo and reflection of our other puppet regimes and allies, among them Fulgencio Batista of Cuba and Augusto Pinochet of Chile, figures of darkness in a chiaroscuro with those of light as negatives spaces of each other; Hugo Chavez and his protégé Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Salvador Allende of Chile.

      Columbia and Venezuela share the historical legacies of the injustices and inequalities we Americans have visited upon them, but also the glorious legacy of liberation of the great and visionary Simon Bolivar; and which of these forces will prevail to be handed on to future generations as their inheritance remains to be determined. This is our darkest fear, but also our brightest hope.

      Defining the boundaries of civilization and the limits of what is human, the forces of conservatism and revolution struggle as always for the soul of humankind, the future possibilities of becoming human, and the terms of human being, meaning, and value.

     As I wrote in my post of May 6 2020, Always Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain: Failure of a Diversionary Coup in Venezuela; Yet another delusional and pathetic attempt by Trump to divert attention from his disastrous mishandling of the pandemic resulting in thousands of unnecessary American deaths has failed, having morphed into a witless plot to abduct Maduro and stage a coup in Venezuela, one of many such attempts to destabilize and seize Venezuela among other foreign states in plutocratic-imperialist conquest.

      Trump has long eyed Venezuela hungrily, and pursued a vendetta against Maduro; so also has America a history of blood and darkness in our military adventurism and Napoleonic certainty in our right to make others become like us through violence and control. But why has he chosen this moment to act on his years of threats of invasion and tirades of bluster and obfuscation?

      Having squandered America’s global hegemony of power and privilege, beginning with trading sanction for Russia’s conquest of and a blind eye in their conquest of Ukraine and struggle with Turkey for dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean for power in the Stolen Election of 2016, Trump then offered the same deal to China for help in 2020.

      It is this second deal he wishes to distract us from in this absurd fiasco; in which he openly promised a hands off policy regarding the democracy rebellion in Hong Kong, the ethnic cleansing of Xinjiang, and the construction of a network of artificial islands in preparation for the conquest of South Asia, the Pacific Rim, and the world, and handing control of America’s economy to the Chinese Communist Party through massive debt and the export of our manufacturing to create an enormous precariat and jobless underclass totally reliant on the state for survival, a usefully angry and desperate citizenry who can be shaped to the will of authority and a fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil, while the profits go to a few plutocrats who happen to be his paymasters.

      Until the pandemic, for now Trump wishes to shift blame for his complicity in our destruction. He wants to hide his partnership with Xi Jinping behind a curtain of lies and misdirections.

     As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post; “A Bay of Pigs-style fiasco in Venezuela: Trump administration officials this week — including President Trump on Tuesday — rejected any link to an apparent failed military operation over the weekend in Venezuela that involved a group of armed defectors and at least two American mercenaries who are now in Venezuelan detention.

     President Nicolás Maduro said Monday that his government had stopped a “terrorist” assault on the country, killing eight and capturing more than a dozen of the plotters over two days. Maduro said they sought to incite a rebellion and possibly kill him. Thousands of Venezuelan reservists were deployed to the country’s coasts in a show of force.

     For years, the embattled demagogue has warned of foreign plots against his rule, waving at the specter of treacherous coups and imperialist invasions. Such alarmism often served as a smokescreen for his government’s failures and the economic collapse that has taken place under his watch. But this time — as footage circulated by Venezuelan authorities on social media appeared to show a number of apprehended insurrectionists, including two former U.S. Special Operations soldiers — Maduro may have a point.

     A key figure behind the plot is Jordan Goudreau, a former U.S. Green Beret who runs Silvercorp USA, a Florida-based private security firm. From Florida, Goudreau announced the incursion alongside a former Venezuelan national guard officer in a video on Sunday and told reporters that the ongoing operation had the support and encouragement of the Venezuelan opposition, including opposition leader Juan Guaidó. (Guaidó’s office has denied any contact with Goudreau or signing any agreement with him, but various people familiar with the situation allege that there were direct contacts between Goudreau and other members of the opposition last year.)

     “The main mission was to liberate Venezuela, to capture Maduro, but the mission in Caracas failed,” Goudreau told Bloomberg News. “The secondary mission is to set up insurgency camps against Maduro. They are already in camps, they are recruiting and we are going to start attacking tactical targets.”

     That may be a fantasy. In an interview with my colleagues on Monday, Goudreau said the two captured Americans — identified as Airan Berry and Luke Denman — had been in a boat off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast late Sunday, hoping for extraction, before they were seized by Maduro’s forces. Now, he wants U.S. officials to “engage and try to get these guys back,” Goudreau told The Washington Post. “They are Americans. They are ex-Green Berets. Come on.”

     “They were playing Rambo,” said Maduro, on whom the United States has placed a $15 million bounty. “They were playing hero.”

     Reports of Goudreau’s operation paint a bizarre picture. Initial planning meetings a year ago in Colombia involved what one person described to the Associated Press as a “Star Wars summit of anti-Maduro goofballs,” replete with “military deserters accused of drug trafficking, shady financiers” and former regime officials. The AP identified Goudreau’s principal contact and the main ringleader as Clíver Alcalá, a retired Venezuelan major general who is in detention in the United States on narcotics charges.

     Observers weren’t impressed by the handful of clandestine training camps that sprang up in Colombia. “You’re not going to take out Maduro with 300 hungry, untrained men,” Ephraim Mattos, a former U.S. Navy SEAL who trained some of the would-be combatants in first aid, told the AP.

     The number of fighters involved in the botched invasion appears to be considerably less than that, and a far less real threat to Maduro’s hold on power than a quashed uprising a year ago that did have Guaidó’s direct involvement.

     The current episode smacks of “Keystone Cops” meets “Bay of Pigs,” Brett McGurk, a former Trump and Obama administration diplomat, suggested on Twitter. The latter incident is the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961 by a force of Cuban exiles secretly backed by the United States. Its memory was conspicuously harnessed by Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who delivered an address to the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association in Florida last year hailing the “twilight hour of socialism” in the hemisphere.

     “There’s a kind of tragedy meets farce element to this, in part because so many of the people Trump has surrounded himself with, or at least outsourced his policy to … are Cold Warriors repeating these well-worn scripts,” New York University academic Alejandro Velasco told the American Conservative.

     The Bay of Pigs is also an enduring, loaded metaphor for American meddling and overreach abroad. For that reason, analysts doubt the Trump administration played any serious role in encouraging this weekend’s quixotic raid. “There’s not one person at the State Department or the CIA who says let’s repeat the Bay of Pigs,” Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas and a former senior U.S. diplomat, told Today’s WorldView.

     The incident does expose some of the problems that ail Venezuela’s opposition: Although Guaidó is now a well-known figurehead, recognized by the United States and dozens of other countries as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, he presides over a decentralized mess of factions inside and outside the country. The opposition finds it both “tough to maintain message discipline,” Farnsworth said, and is “awfully easy for the regime to infiltrate.” In this case, regime officials boasted of knowing about the plot well in advance.

     For Maduro, the incident is a welcome distraction. Tanking oil prices and the coronavirus pandemic have put him under even greater pressure, with aid organizations and opposition officials warning of the risk of the country’s already enfeebled health system collapsing under new strains.

     It’s a “convenient narrative,” Farnsworth said. “What better way to rally a country that’s flat on its back than to expose an invasion from the empire?”

    As written in my post of October 24 2020, The Tide Turns Against American Imperialism in Venezuela;  In the wake of the failed American May 3 coup attempt against Maduro, the victory in a British court over access to Venezuela’s gold reserves in defiance of the American mandate to award the treasury to its puppet Juan Guaidó, the reversal of Spain’s support by its new Socialist government to Maduro, and now the abandonment of Venezuela by Guaido’s last major internal partner and leader of the April 2019 revolt against Maduro, Leopoldo López, it becomes clear that the tide has turned against American imperialism in Venezuela.

     As Trump’s presidency and fascist regime come apart at the seams in a spectacular meltdown during the final days of the election, both its allies and victims smell blood in the water and are emboldened to open defiance and challenge of the Fourth Reich he represents.

    The collapse of Trump’s plot to deliver the resources of Venezuela to his plutocratic corporate sycophants and paymasters is now final, and we celebrate the liberation of the people of Venezuela from those who would enslave them.

     So also do we herald and rejoice in the possibilities for the liberation of humankind from the global network of fascism and tyranny which has arisen in the shadow of Trump’s subversion of democracy, a negative space and reverse image of America’s values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and of our defining role as a Torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world.

     Let us unite in solidarity with the powerless and the dispossessed to seize ownership of our autonomy and self-determination, to resist our dehumanization and authoritarian force and control, and to forge a new future and a free society of equals in which we ourselves, and no government, own our possibilities of becoming human.

      As I wrote in my post of February 26 2020, Venezuela and Columbia: a Dynamism of Famine and Fear; It’s the most terrible humanitarian crisis on earth today; one million children abandoned in Venezuela amid a wasteland of famine and destitution, no healthcare and an inflation rate over ten thousand percent, real labor wages of fifty cents a week drawing a mass migration of four million starving and penniless job seekers to the brutal mining and logging camps beyond their borders in South America’s largest mass migration in history.

     Often their routes take them on foot through the Columbia-Venezuela border region, a wild west zone of warring rebel factions and gangs, of murders and kidnappings, rapes and human trafficking, child soldiers and the omnipresent lure of profits from the regions only viable industry, the narcotics trade.

     Society has collapsed absolutely in Venezuela, but for the glittering baroque palaces and skyscrapers of the semifeudal oligarchs and their Potemkin villages which give the lie to Maduro’s claims to socialism, the true savagery of inequality here masked with a legitimizing veneer of Cuban alliance by a government of nepotism and exploitation, and challenged for supremacy only by an American pawn of equally odious alliances and connections. Between Maduro and Guaido there is little to choose, but for the lies with which they obscure their plunder.

     Across the hell region of the border, Columbia is now entering its third month of a National Strike called The Paro, which has been met with brutal repression by the police, including summary executions.    

     As Sanoja Bhaumik writes in Hyperallergic: “The Paro began on November 21 when labor unions, students, indigenous groups, feminist organizations, and other sectors of Colombian society united in opposition to the current right-wing government. The main grievances include labor and pension reforms, widespread corruption, and lack of government compliance with both the 2016 FARC Peace Deal and public education funding agreements.”

     In The Guardian, Joe Parkin Daniels described the National Strike in this way; “Hundreds of thousands of people joined the first national strike on 21 November, and have turned out in daily demonstrations since then, initially sparked by proposed cuts to pensions.

     Though that reform was never formally announced, it became a lightning rod for widespread dissatisfaction with the government of Duque, whose approval rating has dropped to just 26% since he took office in August last year.

     Protesters are also angry at the lack of support for the historic 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), which formally ended five decades of civil war that killed 260,000 and forced more than 7 million to flee their homes.

     Others are protesting in defense of indigenous people and rural activists, who continue to be murdered at alarming rates. A recent airstrike against a camp of dissident rebel drug traffickers left at least eight minors dead, adding to protesters’ fury.”

     What is clear is that the failure of the peace with FARC in Columbia and the collapse of the economy in Venezuela have fed each other in a dynamism of famine and fear.

     We need a revolution of the poor and the oppressed as a unified front in both nations which organizes around issues of inequality, poverty, and freedom, which considers Venezuela and Columbia as interdependent partners in regional viability much as we do now in Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran.

    Above all any just government must answer the humanitarian needs of the people, for the primary right to life and its preconditions of sufficient food, safe drinking water, universal free health care, and of the universal human rights of actualization of potential which democracy is designed to secure, founded on the principles of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.”

    As I wrote in my post of August 11 2024, When Must Revolution Be Waged Against Revolution? The Case of Venezuela; In Venezuela a democracy revolution challenges the brutal regime of a dictator which has ruined the economy and made of its citizens a vast precariat in what was once envisioned as a socialist paradise.

      Tyranny and a carceral state of force and control are a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle under imposed conditions which require liberation by seizures of power through force, especially anticolonial revolutions.

     All states are constituted by violence and are themselves embodied violence; in the words of George Washington; “Government is about force, only force.”

     When must revolution be waged against the revolution? When it has become the tyranny it seized power from, as nationalism rather than as a colony, and this is exactly what has happened in Venezuela.

     Yes, America and her proxies have waged economic and political warfare against Venezuela for many long years, sometimes as terror, sometimes as farce; but no one compelled Maduro to begin random mass executions and imprisonments either. This revolution is all on him.

     And this time, it is the poor and desperate underclasses of Venezuelan peasants who have risen up to seize their power and claim that liberty which is the birthright of all human beings, without the strings of invisible American and global capitalist puppetmasters.

     Here is a true revolution of the people, and though I have long championed the Chavez revolutionary state and its legacies of anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist liberation versus America and called out and resisted the outrageous and terroristic policies of our government including those of both the Trump and Biden regimes toward Venezuela, we must recognize and rethink the meaning of the glorious and wholly legitimate democracy revolution against Maduro.

     And we must do everything we can to help the people of Venezuela liberate themselves from tyranny, and bring stability and freedom from want to the region. 

       As written by Tom Phillips in The Guardian, in an article entitled World must confront Maduro’s ‘campaign of terror’, Venezuelan opposition leader says; “Venezuela’s main opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has accused the country’s strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, of unleashing a horrific “campaign of terror” in an attempt to cling on to power.

     Two weeks after Maduro’s widely questioned claim to have won the 28 July election, human rights activists say he has launched a ferocious clampdown designed to silence those convinced his rival Edmundo González was the actual winner. More than 1,300 people have been detained, including 116 teenagers, according to the rights group Foro Penal. At least 24 people have reportedly been killed.

     Speaking from an undisclosed location where she is in hiding, Machado – a charismatic conservative who is González’s key backer – urged governments around the world to oppose Maduro’s intensifying crackdown.

    “What is going on in Venezuela is horrific. Innocent people are being detained or disappeared as we speak,” said the 56-year-old former congresswoman, who endorsed González after authorities barred her from running.

     Maduro’s regime has nicknamed part of its clampdown Operación Tun Tun – “Operation Knock Knock” – a chilling reference to the often late-night visits to perceived government opponents by heavily armed, black-clad captors from the intelligence services or police.

     Tun Tun’s targets have included activists, journalists and prominent opposition politicians – but most detainees appear to be the residents of working-class areas who rose up en masse against Maduro for the first time in the two days after his disputed claim to victory.

     One Tun Tun propaganda video published on the Instagram account of the military counterintelligence service, DGCIM, last week showed one of Machado’s campaign organisers, María Oropeza, being detained to the sound of the nursery rhyme from the 1984 horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which Freddy Krueger attacks children in their dreams. “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you! Three, four, better lock your door!” warn the song’s sinister lyrics.

     A second DGCIM video showing another arrest is soundtracked by a horror-film adaptation of Carol of the Bells, whose modified lyrics warn: “If you’ve done wrong, then he will come! … He’ll look for you! You’d better hide!”

     Asked if she feared she and González would soon receive a visit from Maduro’s security forces, Machado replied: “At this moment … in Venezuela, everybody is afraid that your door could be knocked [on] and your freedom could be taken away – even your life is threatened. Maduro has unleashed a campaign of terror against Venezuelans.”

     “Every single democratic government should raise their voices much more loudly,” said Machado, who believed the repression laid bare “the criminal nature” of a regime that knew it had lost by a landslide to González and was now seeking desperately to cling to power. “[Maduro’s government has] decided that their only option to stay in power is using violence, fear and terror against the population.”

     Campaigners for human rights and democracy say the speed and scale of the repression is virtually unprecedented in the region’s recent history. Maduro has claimed he is pursuing criminals and terrorists who are behind a fascist, foreign-backed conspiracy to topple him.

     “In Latin America, there hasn’t been a repressive crackdown of such magnitude as has happened in Venezuela since the days of [the Chilean dictator] Augusto Pinochet,” Marino Alvarado, an activist from the Venezuelan human rights group Provea, told El País last week.

     Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, the president of the Washington Office on Latin America advocacy group, told the New York Times: “I have been documenting human rights violations in Venezuela for many years and have seen patterns of repression before. I don’t think I have ever seen this ferocity.”

     Tamara Taraciuk Broner, the director of the rule of law programme at the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank, said the arbitrary arrests – and a social media crackdown that has temporarily blocked X and Signal – suggested Maduro wanted to take Venezuela in an even more despotic direction. “It looks as if they want to go towards [being] a full-fledged dictatorship,” she said. “You need to be very brave to take to the streets now in Venezuela … they are trying very hard to intimidate people so they don’t take to the streets.”

     The government’s attempt to create an atmosphere of fear was on show last Saturday as thousands of opposition supporters gathered in Caracas to hear Machado speak despite the risk of arrest.

     Unlike at other opposition marches in recent years, many protesters declined to give their names to journalists for fear of persecution, and some wore masks. After the march, at least one reporter was detained by security officials and accused of “stirring up hatred”. Machado came in disguise, wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up.

     “Before I came out today, my daughter threw herself on top of me and made me promise that I would come home,” said one 28-year-old demonstrator, describing how her best friend was captured hours before.

     Tellingly, the next major anti-Maduro mobilisations are set to be held predominantly outside Venezuela, where about 8 million of its estimated 29 million citizens live after fleeing abroad to escape economic chaos and political repression. Machado has called on supporters to gather across the globe on Saturday 17 August, for “a great worldwide protest … for the truth”.

     Machado urged Maduro – who has governed since being elected after the death of his mentor Hugo Chávez in 2013 – to “accept his defeat and understand that we are offering reasonable terms for a negotiated transition”. Those terms included “guarantees, safe passage and incentives”.

     Maduro has publicly dismissed talk of a negotiation but some believe one option for him could be exile in an allied country such as Cuba, Turkey or Iran. Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, last week offered him temporary asylum en route to such a destination, although Maduro quickly rejected his offer.

     Machado pledged not to seek “revenge” or to persecute members of Maduro’s administration, although her campaign-trail promises to “forever bury” socialism and her past calls for foreign military intervention make many Chavistas profoundly suspicious of the right-wing politician.

     Machado recognised the role the leftwing leaders of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico – who have not recognised Maduro’s claim to victory – could have in convincing him to enter “a serious negotiation for a democratic transition”.

     “But we have to stop [the] repression and the cost of repression has to be increased. These are red lines that the Maduro regime is crossing as we speak,” Machado added. “

     As written by Luke Taylor in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘A climate of terror’: Maduro cracks down on Venezuelans protesting contested election win

After apparent efforts to steal the election, the president sent forces to round people up in ‘Operation knock-knock’; “Cristina Ramírez was readying her sofa bed in Buenos Aires for the arrival of her friend visiting from Venezuela when she received a text message suggesting Edni López could be delayed. Officials in Caracas airport had stopped her, apparently over an issue with her passport.

     Four days later, López remains under the detention of the Venezuelan authorities and her family grows increasingly worried by the minute that the university professor could be caught up in a brutal crackdown on protests over Nicolás Maduro’s apparent efforts to steal the presidential election.

     “We know almost nothing. We have not been permitted to get Edni a lawyer and we still do not even know what she has been charged with,” said Ramírez, her voice cracking with anxiety. “The uncertainty is hard to describe. We just hope she can be freed soon.”

     After a wave of public unrest following the disputed election, Maduro promised to “pulverize” the popular movement against him, dispatching security forces to round up opposition activists in the so-called “Operation knock-knock”.

     More than 1,100 people so far have been rounded up since the election, according to Caracas-based rights watchdog, Foro Penal.

     Prominent political figures have been seized, including Freddy Superlano, the national coordinator of the opposition Voluntad Popular party, who was dragged from his home by masked men.

     Venezuela’s attorney general, a Maduro loyalist, announced on Tuesday that opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González would be investigated for “incitement to insurrection” after they called on security forces to “side with the people” instead of repressing protests.

     María Oropeza, a campaign co-ordinator for the opposition Vente party in the state of Portuguesa, livestreamed her own arrest late on Tuesday.

     “Help me,” she pleaded live on Instagram as intelligence officers battered the lock off her front door. “I did nothing wrong, I am not a criminal. I am just another citizen who wants a different country”.

     Oropeza had spoken out against the mass detentions just hours before she herself was detained.

     But others with no political affiliation have also been caught up in Maduro’s dragnet, said Rafael Uzcategui, co-director of rights NGO Laboratorio de Paz, who suggested the operation was intended to terrify Venezuelans into submission.

     “There were rumours that Maduro was targeting electoral observers but we investigated the arrests and they are too massive to see any real pattern. Many of those detained have no political affiliation and have not even participated in the protests. What we are seeing is simply an effort to sew a climate of terror,” he said.

     Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, condemned Maduro for committing “serious human rights violations” on Wednesday and joined the likes of Guatemala, Argentina and Peru in rejecting Maduro’s “self-proclaimed” victory.

     The US – as well as other governments more sympathetic to Maduro, including Brazil, Mexico and Colombia – have called on the Venezuelan leader to publish a breakdown of the vote count, which he has so far refused.

     “I have no doubt that the Maduro regime has tried to commit fraud,” Boric told reporters.

     In his appearance on state television, a defiant Maduro has decried an international “fascist” conspiracy to overthrow him and accused WhatsApp of “spying” on Venezuela.

     The former bus driver has shown clips of protesters in the mass demonstrations followed by their alleged confessions, promising he is “willing to do anything” to stay in power.

     Many ordinary Venezuelans have deleted messaging apps on their mobile phones for fear that security forces could use their chat history for proof of dissent.

     Edni López’s family say they have received information that the 33-year-old has been taken to another facility from her detention center three times, possibly for questioning, but they still have no idea what she is accused of.

     López teaches management classes at the Central university of Venezuela and consults humanitarian organisations, Ramírez said, adding she has no political affiliation and did not participate in the recent protests.

     “She is very empathetic, philosophic and competent, which is why she brought all these things together to help people through her work,” Ramirez said.

     “Edni’s case is emblematic of what’s new about the repression that we’re seeing in post-election Venezuela,” said Adam Isacson, a director at the Washington Office on Latin America. “Usually in the past, the regime was hiding its illegitimate detentions under a veneer of legality, going through legal proceedings and allowing access to defense attorneys, for example. Now, even basic habeas corpus rights are being routinely violated.”

     As written by Tom Phillips and Patricia Torres in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Maduro has lost the streets’: in Venezuela’s barrios, former loyal voters risk all in protests; “Thousands from the capital’s favelas, once strongholds for the ‘revolution’, have faced a brutal crackdown after challenging last month’s presidential election result

     Millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to vote their widely loathed authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro out of power last Sunday – but Tibisay Betancourt was not one of them.

     “I voted for him,” said the 60-year-old masseuse, a loyal supporter of the president’s Chavista movement who lives in a housing estate apartment given to her by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez.

     Within hours of casting her vote, Betancourt had cause to rue her choice. As turmoil gripped the streets of Caracas after Maduro’s disputed claim to have won the election, she sent her son, Alfredo Alejandro Rondón, to a nearby shop to buy a bottle of Sprite for his sick father. Minutes later his brother, Yorluis, said he had seen Alfredo being beaten and dragged away by members of the Bolivarian national police.

     By Thursday morning, the high school graduate was one of hundreds of prisoners languishing behind bars at a police base on the east side of town, facing possible terrorism charges that could land him in jail for up to 30 years.

     If she could speak to Maduro, Betancourt said, “I’d tell him to let the innocent people go and to order the police to stop hitting people in front of the children.” She was one of hundreds of mostly working-class citizens who had gathered under a ferocious Caribbean sun to seek news of their incarcerated loved ones.

     Venezuela’s embattled president – who has presided over a catastrophic economic collapse since inheriting Chávez’s socialist-inspired “revolution” in 2013 – says more than 1,200 people have been seized as part of a crackdown on the alleged “traitors” and terrorists who took to the streets to demonstrate against what they call a stolen election. “And we’re going to capture 1,000 more,” Maduro declared, vowing to imprison those detained in maximum security jails.

     Acts of violence and vandalism undoubtedly occurred during the explosion of dissent, fuelled by anger over economic hardship and a migration crisis that has shattered families and seen some 8 million Venezuelans flee abroad. The metro station at the heart of El Valle – the blue-collar district where Maduro was raised – has had its windows shattered, and the area’s main street is stained with black marks where tyres and trees have been burned. Maduro visited the area with police on Wednesday night and claimed vandals had tried to destroy a local hospital.

     But many of the families outside the Zone 7 police detention centre said their loved ones had been arrested for simply attending peaceful protests or speaking out against Maduro’s administration online.

     Friends of Carla Madelein López, 32, said members of a feared special forces unit called the DAET had arrested her at home on Wednesday after she supposedly posted a message on social media criticising the government. “It’s a [forced] disappearance,” said one close friend as he waited outside the jail for news. He suspected López had been arrested after a tip-off from a neighbour via a mobile phone app Maduro has encouraged citizens to use to snitch on government enemies.

     Nearby, a 46-year-old man who asked not to be named fell to his knees and let out a wail of despair as he described how his son had been taken during a protest in Catia, a working-class area in west Caracas that has long been a bastion of Chavismo. “He’s just turned 18,” the father said, as black police vehicles resembling cattle trucks rolled out of the prison compound packed with detainees on their way to court.

     A 27-year-old woman, who also asked not to be named, described how her boyfriend had been shot in the hand with a rubber bullet and arrested after the pair had attended a peaceful rally organised by the opposition politicians who claim to have beaten Maduro in the election – former diplomat Edmundo González and his ally María Corina Machado.

     “He’s not a terrorist – he’s an entrepreneur,” said the detainee’s father, who, like Maduro, hails from El Valle and grew up in one of its deprived hillside favelas.

     The father said most El Valle residents had turned against Maduro – who calls himself the “president of the people” – because of the economic meltdown that had unfolded on his watch, leaving jobless Venezuelans with empty fridges and broken homes. “Maduro has lost the streets. Nobody likes him,” the 63-year-old said as he waited for news of his son.

     “Edmundo won [the election] in El Valle just like he won all over the country,” the man said of González, whose victory has been recognised by countries including the US, Argentina, Uruguay and Costa Rica. “And all the young people were trying to do was express the impotence they feel.

     “It’s just like everywhere in Venezuela. People are tired. They are tired of the lies. They are tired of these people thinking they are the bosses of everything.”

     Observers say such feelings are a key part of what distinguishes the current push to remove Maduro from previous attempts, such as Juan Guaidó’s failed bid to spark an uprising in 2019 or 2017’s mass protests.

     For years after Chávez’s election in 1998, the barrios of Caracas were overwhelmingly loyal to the comandante’s “revolution” and its use of petrodollars from Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to bankroll social welfare programmes and empower the poor.

     “Our hardest supporters were there [in the barrios],” said Chávez’s former communications minister, Andrés Izarra. “If you look at the voting record in all these communities, they were all hardcore Chavismo. We were winning like 80 or 85% of the vote.”

     Maduro retains some support in such areas, which are adorned with propaganda murals saying things such as “I have faith in Maduro”.

      “María Corina is a terrorist and an arselicker,” said José Ángel Seijas, a 58-year-old Chavista, as he played chess in a plaza at the foot of one El Valle favela. Showing off an old picture of himself alongside a youthful Maduro on his phone, Seijas urged his president to take no prisoners in his clampdown on objectors: “We want an iron fist against these punks.”

     But Venezuela’s economic disintegration under Maduro over the past decade – which the president blames on US sanctions but critics attribute primarily to rampant corruption and economic mismanagement – has seen the mood in the barrios overwhelmingly shift.

     Izarra said Maduro’s worst fear was such communities rising up against him en masse, as began to happen for the first time in the hours after the president’s disputed claim to have won a third term. Enraged by that declaration – for which Maduro has yet to provide proof – thousands of residents from barrios such as Petare swept west towards the presidential palace on motorbike and by foot before being pushed back by security forces.

     “We’ve had enough! Enough!” shouted Rafael Cantillo, 45, who came down from a Petare favela called El Campito to demonstrate last Monday.

     “There are people here from Mariche, from Petare, from El Campito, from Valle-Coche, from Caucagüita, from everywhere,” he said, reeling off the names of Caracas’s sprawling low-income communities where hundreds of thousands live.

     Izarra said that the mass mobilisation of Venezuela’s poor explained Maduro’s clampdown, as authorities battled to nip the barrio mutiny in the bud. “That’s why this huge security operation is under way to try to stop this,” added Izarra, who lives in exile in Germany. He predicted that more repression lay ahead.

     Interviews with relatives of detainees outside the Zone 7 jail suggested the crackdown was overwhelmingly targeting residents of working-class areas, such as Antímano, Catia and Petare. Stefania Migliorini, a human rights lawyer who had come to offer legal support, said the prisoners included men, women and minors. “People who were simply going to a protest, or going back home, or going to work, were arrested,” she said. “This is an extremely harsh situation.” Migliorini’s group, Foro Penal, says at least 16 people have so far been killed, five of them in Caracas.

     Protesters have vanished from the streets in recent days as security forces and armed pro-government gangs called colectivos are reported to be trawling the barrios for targets. A relative of one prisoner told the BBC police had been chasing young people through one community and “shooting at them as if they were on a safari in Africa”.

     But the demonstrators have vowed to return from their redbrick hilltop homes, and Machado called fresh protests for Saturday morning.

     “This time it will be different – this time things are different, because they’ve lost everyone who lives in the poor areas,” said Cantillo, as marchers scattered for cover to avoid being detained or hurt.

     “Tell the world this government is no good,” he implored as his group sought shelter from security forces.

     As he spoke, the women who had accompanied Cantillo from their favela broke into song. “It’s going to fall! It’s going to fall!” they chanted. “This government is going to fall!”

     As I wrote in my post of November 27 2022, A Chance For Change in American-Venezuelan Relations; There are few things which reveal those truths power would keep hidden through silence and erasure, rewritten histories, lies, falsifications and propaganda, than the liminal spaces where no rules exist, the blank spaces on our maps of human being, meaning, and value marked with the legend Here Be Dragons to indicate unknowns; like the purgatorial realm between Venezuela and Colombia wherein nothing is Forbidden and angels and devils walk among the lost and the mad, the depraved and the illumined.

     Here the limitless possibilities of becoming human are a chiaroscuro of the bestial and the exalted; here is the place to forge a new humankind free from the legacies of the past and the authorized identities of systems of dehumanization and unequal power, and of the tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue; for here in such places of liberation nothing can seize us for its own purposes.

     With Chaos comes the new and the unforeseen; here is terror and abjection, but also that most fragile of our powers, hope. Be thou joyful in the embrace of our monstrosity, for the future is ours. 

           As written by Travis Waldron in Huffpost, in am article entitled Russia’s War Has Given Biden A Chance To Ditch Trump’s Failed Venezuela Policy; “Amid climbing gas prices that are likely to increase in the coming days, the Biden administration pushed to reengage one of the United States’ staunchest geopolitical foes this week: the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro, an authoritarian leader the United States has targeted with increasing rounds of sanctions for the last half-decade.

     The White House confirmed on Monday that Biden had sent a group of U.S. officials to Caracas for renewed talks last weekend. White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the “ongoing” discussions included dialogue about “energy security” — a suggestion that the U.S. had discussed potentially easing the de facto embargo it placed on Venezuela’s oil industry in 2019.

     The attempt to reengage Maduro is the latest sign that the U.S. is reassessing its foreign policy in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to mitigate the effects of isolating Russian President Vladimir Putin — including potential fuel shortages that have pushed domestic gas prices to record highs.

     U.S. overtures to Venezuela sparked bipartisan criticism, particularly from hawkish foreign policy voices that have egged on an aggressive approach to Maduro. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) criticized the White House on Monday for placating a human rights abuser who has overseen disputed elections and dismantled Venezuelan democracy in exchange for domestic political relief that may not materialize.

     But many others have welcomed the potential shift, and not just because Venezuelan oil may help reduce gas prices that reached $4.17 per gallon across the United States on Tuesday even before Biden announced a new ban on Russian oil imports.

    The United States’ approach to Venezuela, which has spent the last five years mired in economic, political and migration crises, has been disastrous: It has failed to mitigate the humanitarian damage of those crises, and perhaps even helped make it worse.

     Now, Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine may have provided just enough space for a much-needed reset to finally begin.

     “The puzzle we’ve all had for the past several months is: Why doesn’t the Biden administration do something to change course from the Trump policy?” said David Smilde, a University of Tulane professor and Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. “It took the conflict in Ukraine to provide the straw that broke the camel’s back, to get Biden to change things around a bit.”

     Biden administration officials met with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro over the weekend for discussions that could spark a reset in relations between the U.S. and Venezuela, which has been subject to heavy sanctions from the U.S. for the last five years.

     The U.S. and Venezuela have sparred for two decades, ever since socialist President Hugo Chávez won his first election in 1999. Maduro, who assumed the presidency upon Chávez’s 2013 death, has been a thorn in the side of Biden’s two immediate predecessors.

     In 2015, President Barack Obama sanctioned seven Venezuelan government officials amid concerns that Maduro’s government had engaged in widespread corruption, as well as crackdowns on political opponents. President Donald Trump followed with new sanctions in both 2017 and 2018, when Maduro emerged victorious from elections that his opponents, the United States and many international organizations alleged were rife with fraud.

    In 2019, the U.S. (along with dozens of other countries) recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate leader and launched a “maximum pressure” campaign meant to dislodge Maduro from power.

     Trump’s approach to Venezuela, while popular in some quarters, was quickly exposed as nakedly political and broadly impractical. He empowered hard-line appointees whose saber-rattling toward Maduro included repeated refusals to take implausible military actions off the table. This was primarily meant to shore up support among Venezuelan voters in South Florida, the fastest-growing Latino population in the swing state, and among large populations of Cuban American voters who see Maduro as an extension of Cuba’s Communist government.

     From that standpoint, Trump’s approach was successful: It helped him gain massive ground among Latino voters in the Miami area and easily win Florida in the 2020 election. But by nearly every other measure, the maximum pressure campaign toward Venezuela has been an abject, and sometimes tragicomic, failure.

     The U.S. pressure campaign further brutalized Venezuela’s economy, which had already experienced hyperinflation and severe energy, food and medicine shortages. But it largely failed to hit Maduro and top government officials.

     Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s weaponization of humanitarian assistance for political purposes, along with its decision to undermine negotiations between Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition, cratered any hope of real progress and did almost nothing to alleviate a humanitarian crisis that had driven millions of Venezuelans into extreme poverty or out of the country.

    By the time Trump left office, Guaidó was largely impotent at home and losing support abroad, and his opposition movement deeply splintered. Maduro, by contrast, was by most accounts stronger and more stable than he was when the campaign kicked off, free to continue to crack down on political opponents, dissenters and human rights.

     Ties between Caracas and Moscow had also deepened: As the U.S. ramped up pressure on Caracas, Russia expanded its oil holdings in Venezuela and helped Maduro and his government evade American sanctions.

     The policy was, in sum, the exact catastrophe many experts had warned it would become.

     “Sanctions without a more comprehensive strategy are an absolute waste of time,” said Brian Fonseca, a foreign affairs professor at Florida International University and former analyst at the United States Southern Command. “Sanctions are an instrument meant to encourage discussion, but there’s got to be discussion.”

     Still, Biden maintained the broad tenets of the maximum pressure strategy upon taking office in 2021. He continued to recognize Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader and left the aggressive sanctions regime in place. Despite growing calls for change from foreign policy officials, members of Congress and some members of the Venezuelan opposition, a strategic shift seemed unlikely to materialize before the 2022 elections, especially as Democrats fretted about further erosion of support among South Florida voters.

     But then, the Russian invasion of Ukraine shifted American priorities both domestically and internationally. Abroad, Biden’s efforts to thwart Putin have taken foreign policy precedence over hard-line tactics toward countries like Venezuela. At home, political concerns over modest engagement with Maduro have taken a backseat to a much bigger worry: that rising gas prices, which Biden desperately attempted to characterize as “Russia’s fault” on Tuesday, might crater Democrats in upcoming midterm elections that already seem likely to generate sizable Democratic losses.

     Engagement with Maduro still makes for a touchy political subject in Florida, but Latino voters there may be open to a course change as well.

     A majority of Venezuelan American voters in Florida said that foreign policy is somewhat or very important to their voting decisions in a recent poll conducted by the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University. Roughly 45% said they disapprove of Biden’s continuation of Trump’s maximum pressure approach to Maduro, compared to just 37% who support it, and nearly two-thirds said the sanctions had either fallen short of their expectations or “failed completely” to meet their expectations of change in Venezuela.

     Roughly 60% of Venezuelan American voters — and an even larger share of Cuban American voters — said they could support an easing of oil sanctions if Maduro didn’t manage new oil revenues and they were directed toward the country’s humanitarian crisis, the poll found.

     “The findings suggested that the diaspora would be open to lifting things like oil sanctions,” Fonseca said. “When you look at priorities, they don’t think the sanctions are having an effect, and they see the humanitarian crisis as more important than beating the [Maduro] government.”

     That atmosphere has provided a natural backdrop for a shift in relations.

     Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela have deepened ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin since the U.S. imposed heavy sanctions on the South American country, which have also benefited Russia’s oil industry.

     Venezuela likely can’t produce enough oil to fully offset Russian imports. But, like much of the oil the U.S. buys from Russia, Venezuelan oil is of the heavy crude variety, making it a natural replacement at U.S. refineries along the Gulf and East coasts that were specifically built to turn heavy crude into gasoline.

     It will likely take months for Venezuela to ramp up its oil production to previous capacities if sanctions are eased, but even an immediate injection could help dampen price spikes in the U.S. over the coming months.

     From a foreign policy standpoint, engaging Maduro now could have multiple benefits as the U.S. and Europe seek new ways to counter Putin’s aggression. U.S. sanctions on Venezuela increased U.S. dependence on Russia: American imports of Russian oil have doubled since the U.S. placed sanctions on Venezuelan oil in 2019.

     Easing the sanctions on Venezuela now could both weaken Russia’s oil industry and its overall ties with its strongest ally in the Americas.

     That could limit Russia’s power in the Western Hemisphere, a region the U.S. still paternalistically views as its own backyard. But it may also make it easier for Biden to place new and alternative sanctions on Putin and Rosneft — Russia’s largest oil company, a subsidiary of which the U.S. has already sanctioned in Venezuela — if he chooses to, Fonseca said, providing the U.S. with another potential way to combat Putin’s advances in Europe.

     Eased sanctions could also lead to renewed diplomatic negotiations with Maduro and advances toward a resolution to Venezuela’s democratic, economic and humanitarian crises.

     The U.S. and Venezuela appear to have made little progress during the initial round of discussions. But on Monday, Maduro signaled his openness to more talks with the U.S. — and pledged to restart negotiations with the Venezuelan opposition. Previous rounds of talks stalled in October when Maduro abruptly backed out.

     “Easing the sanctions on Venezuela now could both weaken Russia’s oil industry and its overall ties with its strongest ally in the Americas.”

    The path forward is difficult and full of caveats. The U.S. and the Venezuelan opposition still want a pledge for new rounds of “free and fair elections,” while Maduro wants the U.S. to lift sanctions completely. Maduro, Smilde said, has used past negotiations as a stall tactic to maintain or consolidate his domestic power, and the Venezuelan opposition has already expressed concerns that he’s preparing to do so again.

     But some progress does seem possible: On Tuesday night, Venezuela released two of the six former Citgo executives it had detained in October after the U.S. secured the extradition of a key Maduro ally in Colombia. Five of the six detainees, who had been serving house arrest sentences, are American citizens; the other is a U.S. permanent resident.

     The release of two prisoners may not yet mark a return to the pre-October status quo, but it’s at least a suggestion that further talks could achieve more if the U.S. presses Maduro for substantive democratic and human rights reforms.

     As part of the ongoing talks, the U.S. “needs to require a commitment that actual progress is made,” Smilde said. “They need to get some actual commitments from Maduro, and work on actual democratic issues.”

     “There’s a lot of space for improvement this year in terms of electoral institutions and electoral democracy, so it’d be great if they focus on that and not just on U.S. citizens that are prisoners in Venezuela,” Smilde added. “The ironing out or forging of some actual commitments on human rights is something that could make this go in the right direction.”

     The alternative is continuing a strategy that has paid little dividend. On Monday, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) opined that the only thing Biden should negotiate with Maduro is “the time of his resignation,” the sort of empty rhetoric U.S. officials have aimed south for three years with no real plan to back it up.

     “The bottom line,” Fonseca said, “is that our policy has done little to move the needle. And so this may be an opportunity for us to rethink and recalibrate our policy towards Venezuela.”

     As I wrote in my post of May 23 2021, Venezuela and Columbia: Partners in a Dance of Tyranny and Humanitarian Disaster; Vestigial remnants of a Cold War the world has long forgotten and casualties of American imperialism, like the shadows of an invisible reptilian tail which we drag behind us, the twin failed states of Venezuela and Columbia are partners in a dance of tyranny and humanitarian disaster.

     The monstrous oligarchic kleptocracy of state terror and proxy of American interests Álvaro Uribe and his successor Iván Duque of Columbia, an echo and reflection of our other puppet regimes and allies, among them Fulgencio Batista of Cuba and Augusto Pinochet of Chile, figures of darkness in a chiaroscuro with those of light as negatives spaces of each other; Hugo Chavez and his protégé Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Salvador Allende of Chile.

      Columbia and Venezuela share the historical legacies of the injustices and inequalities we Americans have visited upon them, but also the glorious legacy of liberation of the great and visionary Simon Bolivar; and which of these forces will prevail to be handed on to future generations as their inheritance remains to be determined. This is our darkest fear, but also our brightest hope.

      Defining the boundaries of civilization and the limits of what is human, the forces of conservatism and revolution struggle as always for the soul of humankind, the future possibilities of becoming human, and the terms of human being, meaning, and value.

     As I wrote in my post of May 6 2020, Always Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain: Failure of a Diversionary Coup in Venezuela; Yet another delusional and pathetic attempt by Trump to divert attention from his disastrous mishandling of the pandemic resulting in thousands of unnecessary American deaths has failed, having morphed into a witless plot to abduct Maduro and stage a coup in Venezuela, one of many such attempts to destabilize and seize Venezuela among other foreign states in plutocratic-imperialist conquest.

      Trump has long eyed Venezuela hungrily, and pursued a vendetta against Maduro; so also has America a history of blood and darkness in our military adventurism and Napoleonic certainty in our right to make others become like us through violence and control. But why has he chosen this moment to act on his years of threats of invasion and tirades of bluster and obfuscation?

      Having squandered America’s global hegemony of power and privilege, beginning with trading sanction for Russia’s conquest of and a blind eye in their conquest of Ukraine and struggle with Turkey for dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean for power in the Stolen Election of 2016, Trump then offered the same deal to China for help in 2020.

      It is this second deal he wishes to distract us from in this absurd fiasco; in which he openly promised a hands off policy regarding the democracy rebellion in Hong Kong, the ethnic cleansing of Xinjiang, and the construction of a network of artificial islands in preparation for the conquest of South Asia, the Pacific Rim, and the world, and handing control of America’s economy to the Chinese Communist Party through massive debt and the export of our manufacturing to create an enormous precariat and jobless underclass totally reliant on the state for survival, a usefully angry and desperate citizenry who can be shaped to the will of authority and a fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil, while the profits go to a few plutocrats who happen to be his paymasters.

      Until the pandemic, for now Trump wishes to shift blame for his complicity in our destruction. He wants to hide his partnership with Xi Jinping behind a curtain of lies and misdirections.

     As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post; “A Bay of Pigs-style fiasco in Venezuela: Trump administration officials this week — including President Trump on Tuesday — rejected any link to an apparent failed military operation over the weekend in Venezuela that involved a group of armed defectors and at least two American mercenaries who are now in Venezuelan detention.

     President Nicolás Maduro said Monday that his government had stopped a “terrorist” assault on the country, killing eight and capturing more than a dozen of the plotters over two days. Maduro said they sought to incite a rebellion and possibly kill him. Thousands of Venezuelan reservists were deployed to the country’s coasts in a show of force.

     For years, the embattled demagogue has warned of foreign plots against his rule, waving at the specter of treacherous coups and imperialist invasions. Such alarmism often served as a smokescreen for his government’s failures and the economic collapse that has taken place under his watch. But this time — as footage circulated by Venezuelan authorities on social media appeared to show a number of apprehended insurrectionists, including two former U.S. Special Operations soldiers — Maduro may have a point.

     A key figure behind the plot is Jordan Goudreau, a former U.S. Green Beret who runs Silvercorp USA, a Florida-based private security firm. From Florida, Goudreau announced the incursion alongside a former Venezuelan national guard officer in a video on Sunday and told reporters that the ongoing operation had the support and encouragement of the Venezuelan opposition, including opposition leader Juan Guaidó. (Guaidó’s office has denied any contact with Goudreau or signing any agreement with him, but various people familiar with the situation allege that there were direct contacts between Goudreau and other members of the opposition last year.)

     “The main mission was to liberate Venezuela, to capture Maduro, but the mission in Caracas failed,” Goudreau told Bloomberg News. “The secondary mission is to set up insurgency camps against Maduro. They are already in camps, they are recruiting and we are going to start attacking tactical targets.”

     That may be a fantasy. In an interview with my colleagues on Monday, Goudreau said the two captured Americans — identified as Airan Berry and Luke Denman — had been in a boat off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast late Sunday, hoping for extraction, before they were seized by Maduro’s forces. Now, he wants U.S. officials to “engage and try to get these guys back,” Goudreau told The Washington Post. “They are Americans. They are ex-Green Berets. Come on.”

     “They were playing Rambo,” said Maduro, on whom the United States has placed a $15 million bounty. “They were playing hero.”

     Reports of Goudreau’s operation paint a bizarre picture. Initial planning meetings a year ago in Colombia involved what one person described to the Associated Press as a “Star Wars summit of anti-Maduro goofballs,” replete with “military deserters accused of drug trafficking, shady financiers” and former regime officials. The AP identified Goudreau’s principal contact and the main ringleader as Clíver Alcalá, a retired Venezuelan major general who is in detention in the United States on narcotics charges.

     Observers weren’t impressed by the handful of clandestine training camps that sprang up in Colombia. “You’re not going to take out Maduro with 300 hungry, untrained men,” Ephraim Mattos, a former U.S. Navy SEAL who trained some of the would-be combatants in first aid, told the AP.

     The number of fighters involved in the botched invasion appears to be considerably less than that, and a far less real threat to Maduro’s hold on power than a quashed uprising a year ago that did have Guaidó’s direct involvement.

     The current episode smacks of “Keystone Cops” meets “Bay of Pigs,” Brett McGurk, a former Trump and Obama administration diplomat, suggested on Twitter. The latter incident is the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961 by a force of Cuban exiles secretly backed by the United States. Its memory was conspicuously harnessed by Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who delivered an address to the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association in Florida last year hailing the “twilight hour of socialism” in the hemisphere.

     “There’s a kind of tragedy meets farce element to this, in part because so many of the people Trump has surrounded himself with, or at least outsourced his policy to … are Cold Warriors repeating these well-worn scripts,” New York University academic Alejandro Velasco told the American Conservative.

     The Bay of Pigs is also an enduring, loaded metaphor for American meddling and overreach abroad. For that reason, analysts doubt the Trump administration played any serious role in encouraging this weekend’s quixotic raid. “There’s not one person at the State Department or the CIA who says let’s repeat the Bay of Pigs,” Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas and a former senior U.S. diplomat, told Today’s WorldView.

     The incident does expose some of the problems that ail Venezuela’s opposition: Although Guaidó is now a well-known figurehead, recognized by the United States and dozens of other countries as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, he presides over a decentralized mess of factions inside and outside the country. The opposition finds it both “tough to maintain message discipline,” Farnsworth said, and is “awfully easy for the regime to infiltrate.” In this case, regime officials boasted of knowing about the plot well in advance.

     For Maduro, the incident is a welcome distraction. Tanking oil prices and the coronavirus pandemic have put him under even greater pressure, with aid organizations and opposition officials warning of the risk of the country’s already enfeebled health system collapsing under new strains.

     It’s a “convenient narrative,” Farnsworth said. “What better way to rally a country that’s flat on its back than to expose an invasion from the empire?”

    As written in my post of October 24 2020, The Tide Turns Against American Imperialism in Venezuela;  In the wake of the failed American May 3 coup attempt against Maduro, the victory in a British court over access to Venezuela’s gold reserves in defiance of the American mandate to award the treasury to its puppet Juan Guaidó, the reversal of Spain’s support by its new Socialist government to Maduro, and now the abandonment of Venezuela by Guaido’s last major internal partner and leader of the April 2019 revolt against Maduro, Leopoldo López, it becomes clear that the tide has turned against American imperialism in Venezuela.

     As Trump’s presidency and fascist regime come apart at the seams in a spectacular meltdown during the final days of the election, both its allies and victims smell blood in the water and are emboldened to open defiance and challenge of the Fourth Reich he represents.

    The collapse of Trump’s plot to deliver the resources of Venezuela to his plutocratic corporate sycophants and paymasters is now final, and we celebrate the liberation of the people of Venezuela from those who would enslave them.

     So also do we herald and rejoice in the possibilities for the liberation of humankind from the global network of fascism and tyranny which has arisen in the shadow of Trump’s subversion of democracy, a negative space and reverse image of America’s values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and of our defining role as a Torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world.

     Let us unite in solidarity with the powerless and the dispossessed to seize ownership of our autonomy and self-determination, to resist our dehumanization and authoritarian force and control, and to forge a new future and a free society of equals in which we ourselves, and no government, own our possibilities of becoming human.

      As I wrote in my post of February 26 2020, Venezuela and Columbia: a Dynamism of Famine and Fear; It’s the most terrible humanitarian crisis on earth today; one million children abandoned in Venezuela amid a wasteland of famine and destitution, no healthcare and an inflation rate over ten thousand percent, real labor wages of fifty cents a week drawing a mass migration of four million starving and penniless job seekers to the brutal mining and logging camps beyond their borders in South America’s largest mass migration in history.

     Often their routes take them on foot through the Columbia-Venezuela border region, a wild west zone of warring rebel factions and gangs, of murders and kidnappings, rapes and human trafficking, child soldiers and the omnipresent lure of profits from the regions only viable industry, the narcotics trade.

     Society has collapsed absolutely in Venezuela, but for the glittering baroque palaces and skyscrapers of the semifeudal oligarchs and their Potemkin villages which give the lie to Maduro’s claims to socialism, the true savagery of inequality here masked with a legitimizing veneer of Cuban alliance by a government of nepotism and exploitation, and challenged for supremacy only by an American pawn of equally odious alliances and connections. Between Maduro and Guaido there is little to choose, but for the lies with which they obscure their plunder.

     Across the hell region of the border, Columbia is now entering its third month of a National Strike called The Paro, which has been met with brutal repression by the police, including summary executions.     

     As Sanoja Bhaumik writes in Hyperallergic: “The Paro began on November 21 when labor unions, students, indigenous groups, feminist organizations, and other sectors of Colombian society united in opposition to the current right-wing government. The main grievances include labor and pension reforms, widespread corruption, and lack of government compliance with both the 2016 FARC Peace Deal and public education funding agreements.”

     In The Guardian, Joe Parkin Daniels described the National Strike in this way; “Hundreds of thousands of people joined the first national strike on 21 November, and have turned out in daily demonstrations since then, initially sparked by proposed cuts to pensions.

     Though that reform was never formally announced, it became a lightning rod for widespread dissatisfaction with the government of Duque, whose approval rating has dropped to just 26% since he took office in August last year.

     Protesters are also angry at the lack of support for the historic 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), which formally ended five decades of civil war that killed 260,000 and forced more than 7 million to flee their homes.

     Others are protesting in defense of indigenous people and rural activists, who continue to be murdered at alarming rates. A recent airstrike against a camp of dissident rebel drug traffickers left at least eight minors dead, adding to protesters’ fury.”

     What is clear is that the failure of the peace with FARC in Columbia and the collapse of the economy in Venezuela have fed each other in a dynamism of famine and fear.

     We need a revolution of the poor and the oppressed as a unified front in both nations which organizes around issues of inequality, poverty, and freedom, which considers Venezuela and Columbia as interdependent partners in regional viability much as we do now in Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran.

    Above all any just government must answer the humanitarian needs of the people, for the primary right to life and its preconditions of sufficient food, safe drinking water, universal free health care, and of the universal human rights of actualization of potential which democracy is designed to secure, founded on the principles of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.”

Venezuela accuses US of using ‘narco-terrorism’ allegations to justify ‘regime change’

Venezuelan group known as Cartel of the Suns designated as terrorist organization despite doubts over its existence

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/24/venezuela-maduro-us-drug-cartel-terrorism?fbclid=IwY2xjawOSJu5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeeqwvlrPLxBS4veTsox4bhXeTgZ95zjLpTz3qYRIwugxvW3f3_ivoUs5Y5QQ_aem_ALtwyQLL-fmIR4EAD9lpjg

Trump’s military pressure on Maduro evokes Latin America’s coup-ridden past:

US forces and CIA actions target Venezuela’s leader, recalling coups and assassinations across the region

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/01/trump-maduro-venezuela-coups

The US ‘war on terror’ has killed millions. Now Trump is bringing it to Venezuela

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/24/war-on-terror-venezuela-donald-trump?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawOSMiZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeMaqdjLIL_YUi7PhT40TS0vPei9i_IDYHiuYFUa8D06MGZVUEUfz-d0uM9Bs_aem_xKJrKXoQ4bsJYS699sfH2Q

Brutish, bullying, imperialistic: the Ugly American is back

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/10/donald-trump-ugly-american

The US is now a rogue state – look at its extrajudicial killings off Venezuela’s coast

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/16/us-rogue-state-extrajudicial-killings-venezuela

Deadly airstrikes and a military buildup: how the US pressure campaign against Venezuela has unfolded in the Caribbean: US has used claims of a ‘war on drugs’ to justify its attacks, which have resulted in 83 deaths that the UN has called extrajudicial executions

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/24/visual-guide-us-military-presence-caribbean

US will label supposed Venezuelan drug cartel ‘headed by Maduro’ as terrorist organization

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/17/trump-venezuelan-drug-cartel

Why is Trump, the self-proclaimed ‘president of peace’, aiming to topple the Venezuelan regime?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/25/trump-venezuela-strikes-regime-change

US strikes another alleged drug boat bringing death toll from campaign in Latin America to 70: US strikes have destroyed at least 18 vessels, but Washington has yet to make public any concrete evidence that its targets posed a threat to America

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/07/us-strikes-another-alleged-drug-boat-latin-america

US military buildup off Venezuela coast stirs echoes of 1989 Panama invasion

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/06/venezuela-panama-invasion-trump

April 6 2025 How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border: Consequences of Operation Condor

April 6 2025 How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border: Consequences of Operation Condor

                  Venezuela, a reading list

Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela, William Neuman

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57693395-things-are-never-so-bad-that-they-can-t-get-worse?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jjmWTFs4sE&rank=1

We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution,

Geo Maher

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16033290-we-created-ch-vez?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jjmWTFs4sE&rank=8

Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Rory Carroll

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15811512-comandante?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jjmWTFs4sE&rank=5

The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela, Fernando Coronil

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/723988.The_Magical_State?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jjmWTFs4sE&rank=10

The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela: How the US Is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil,

Dan Kovalik, foreword by Oliver Stone

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44321361-the-plot-to-overthrow-venezuela?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jjmWTFs4sE&rank=14

Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire, Anya Parampil

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75595503-corporate-coup?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jjmWTFs4sE&rank=21

Spanish

24 de noviembre de 2025. Crisis fabricadas como hojas de parra de la tiranía y la conquista y el dominio imperial: el caso de la guerra de Trump contra Venezuela.

     El régimen de Trump, fascista, aberrante, cruel y cleptocrático como siempre, y un desierto de espejos hecho de mentiras, ilusiones, propaganda, teorías conspirativas lunáticas y realidades alternativas, falsificaciones que nos capturan, distorsionan, mercantilizan y deshumanizan a todos, ha desplegado una organización criminal inventada como espejismo y casus belli para la conquista y el dominio imperial de Venezuela, como cambio de régimen y robo colonial de sus vastos recursos petroleros, el único activo estratégico que otorga control y hegemonía sobre todo lo demás, en todo el mundo.

     En muchos sentidos, es una afirmación ideal, ya que una amenaza inexistente que no se puede probar ni refutar, al igual que su modelo, la afirmación nazi de una “conspiración judía”. Ya no podemos probar ninguna afirmación sin pruebas, por ser completamente engañosa, meras pesadillas de la razón y polvo de hadas, ni refutar un argumento negativo como “demuestra que no eres judío”, comunista o cualquier cosa que se interprete como enemigo del Estado; pero esto no significa que tales afirmaciones no sean peligrosas. Se puede ver la nueva película sobre Núremberg para ver con precisión adónde conducen estas cosas.

     Hasta ahora, el descabellado intento de Trump por centralizar toda la autoridad del Estado y robar la riqueza petrolera de Venezuela usando la guerra contra las drogas como pretexto ha tenido como víctimas a menos de cien pescadores sin dinero, pero con enormes fuerzas navales listas para sembrar muerte y destrucción sobre las ciudades del país, la escala de tales crímenes de guerra podría estar a punto de generalizarse de forma horrorosa.        Enfrentemos esta amenaza en su propio terreno de lucha, con una Estrategia Panamericana de Resistencia y solidaridad en la lucha de liberación por la independencia, la autodeterminación y la soberanía de todos los seres humanos, y por nuestros derechos humanos universales como garantes de la humanidad de cada uno, tanto aquí en el Estados Unidos colonialista-imperial, ahora capturado por un Cuarto Reich de terror supremacista blanco, terror sexual patriarcal teocrático y terror cleptocrático capitalista amoral, comprometido con la subversión de la democracia, como en toda la región de los continentes norteamericano y sudamericano que reclama como su dominio.

     La flota de la conquista, ahora lista para devorar el corazón de Venezuela, puede ser una fuerza imparable, pero la tiranía que la domina es vulnerable a la desobediencia, y como Jacob luchando contra el ángel, nuestra misión no es derrotarla, pues, como muchas cosas en la vida, es más poderosa que nosotros, pero no necesitamos hacerlo; solo necesitamos permanecer invictos ante ella. En esta gran lucha contra los sistemas de opresión y los estados carcelarios de fuerza y ​​control, nuestra victoria reside en permanecer invictos, negándonos a someternos o a abandonar nuestra humanidad y nuestro deber de cuidarnos los unos a los otros, y esta es una victoria que jamás nos podrán arrebatar.

     Como reza el grito de batalla de la Guerra Civil Española y sus gloriosas Brigadas Internacionales: «No pasaran, amigos».

             References of 2024

World must confront Maduro’s ‘campaign of terror’, Venezuelan opposition leader says: María Corina Machado in hiding as more than 1,300 people are detained in post-election clampdown

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/11/world-must-confront-maduro-campaign-of-terror-maria-corina-machado

‘Maduro has lost the streets’: in Venezuela’s barrios, former loyal voters risk all in protests

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/03/maduro-has-lost-the-streets-in-venezuelas-barrios-former-loyal-voters-risk-all-in-protests

‘Whose fault is it? The dictator’: the Venezuelan refugees on a knife-edge at the Colombian border – photo essay

Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country’s instability in the past decade, many hoping to return after July’s election. Now, as Nicolás Maduro clings to power, they fear for their families – and are braced for another exodus

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/aug/09/venezuelan-refugees-colombian-border-photo-essay?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawEmGIdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHd6yQmk0iA9ql9TYXOlcx_-reYWkUsgKeIemb7dmMFEHQoAHnIMBP2Y-ow_aem_K_8jX_z4k7wlCOl-1fs_jw

‘A climate of terror’: Maduro cracks down on Venezuelans protesting contested election win

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/aug/08/venezuela-nicolas-maduro-contested-election-protests-detention

Venezuela opposition leaders urge army and police to abandon Nicolás Maduro

Edmundo González and María Corina Machado call on officials to ‘join the side of the people’ after Maduro enforces post-election crackdown

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/05/venezuela-opposition-leaders-armed-forces-nicolas-maduro

Evidence shows Venezuela’s election was stolen – but will Maduro budge?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/06/venezuela-election-maduro-analysis

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/venezuela-coup-goudreau-trump-maduro_n_5ebb1024c5b6ca4db96b03b0?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-eases-sanctions-on-venezuela-as-opposition-talks-resume_n_63826c80e4b06ef4a544c6af?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-venezuela-maduro-putin-oil_n_6228d62ee4b0a7d5b8bf0744?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-63771107

Spanish

11 de agosto de 2024 ¿Cuándo se debe librar una revolución contra una revolución? El caso de Venezuela

En Venezuela, una revolución democrática desafía al régimen brutal de un dictador que ha arruinado la economía y ha convertido a sus ciudadanos en un vasto precariado en lo que una vez se imaginó como un paraíso socialista.

La tiranía y un estado carcelario de fuerza y control son una fase predecible de la lucha revolucionaria en condiciones impuestas que requieren la liberación mediante la toma del poder por la fuerza, especialmente las revoluciones anticoloniales.

Todos los estados están constituidos por la violencia y son en sí mismos violencia encarnada; en palabras de George Washington; “El gobierno se trata de fuerza, solo fuerza”.

¿Cuándo se debe librar una revolución contra la revolución? Cuando se ha convertido en la tiranía de la que tomó el poder, como nacionalismo en lugar de como colonia, y esto es exactamente lo que ha sucedido en Venezuela.

Sí, Estados Unidos y sus representantes han librado una guerra económica y política contra Venezuela durante muchos años, a veces como terror, a veces como farsa; Pero nadie obligó a Maduro a iniciar ejecuciones masivas y encarcelamientos aleatorios. Esta revolución es toda culpa suya.

Y esta vez, son las clases bajas pobres y desesperadas de los campesinos venezolanos quienes se han levantado para tomar su poder y reclamar esa libertad que es el derecho de nacimiento de todos los seres humanos, sin los hilos de los titiriteros invisibles estadounidenses y globales del capitalismo.

Esta es una verdadera revolución del pueblo, y aunque durante mucho tiempo he defendido el estado revolucionario de Chávez y sus legados de liberación anticolonial, antiimperialista y anticapitalista contra Estados Unidos y he denunciado y resistido las políticas escandalosas y terroristas de nuestro gobierno, incluidas las de los regímenes de Trump y Biden hacia Venezuela, debemos reconocer y repensar el significado de la gloriosa y totalmente legítima revolución democrática contra Maduro.

Y debemos hacer todo lo posible para ayudar al pueblo de Venezuela a liberarse de la tiranía y traer estabilidad y libertad de la miseria a la región.

27 de noviembre de 2022 Una oportunidad de cambio en las relaciones entre Estados Unidos y Venezuela

    Hay pocas cosas que revelan esas verdades que el poder mantendría ocultas mediante el silencio y el borrado, las historias reescritas, las mentiras, las falsificaciones y la propaganda, que los espacios liminales donde no existen reglas, los espacios en blanco en nuestros mapas del ser humano, el significado y el valor marcados. con la leyenda Here Be Dragons para indicar incógnitas; como el reino del purgatorio entre Venezuela y Colombia donde nada está Prohibido y ángeles y demonios caminan entre los perdidos y los locos, los depravados y los iluminados.

     Aquí las posibilidades ilimitadas de devenir humano son un claroscuro de lo bestial y lo exaltado; aquí está el lugar para forjar una nueva humanidad libre de los legados del pasado y de las identidades autorizadas de sistemas de deshumanización y poder desigual, y de la tiranía de la normalidad y de las ideas ajenas de virtud; porque aquí, en tales lugares de liberación, nada puede apoderarse de nosotros para sus propios fines.

     Con Caos llega lo nuevo y lo imprevisto; aquí hay terror y abyección, pero también la más frágil de nuestras fuerzas, la esperanza. Alégrate en el abrazo de nuestra monstruosidad, porque el futuro es nuestro.

     Como escribí en mi publicación del 23 de mayo de 2021, Venezuela y Colombia: socios en una danza de tiranía y desastre humanitario; Restos vestigiales de una Guerra Fría que el mundo ha olvidado hace mucho tiempo y víctimas del imperialismo estadounidense, como las sombras de una cola de reptil invisible que arrastramos detrás de nosotros, los estados gemelos fallidos de Venezuela y Colombia son socios en una danza de tiranía y desastre humanitario.

     La monstruosa cleptocracia oligárquica del terror de Estado y apoderada de los intereses norteamericanos Álvaro Uribe y su sucesor Iván Duque de Colombia, eco y reflejo de nuestros otros regímenes títeres y aliados, entre ellos Fulgencio Batista de Cuba y Augusto Pinochet de Chile, figuras de oscuridad en un claroscuro con los de la luz como espacios negativos unos de otros; Hugo Chávez y su protegido Nicolás Maduro de Venezuela, Fidel Castro de Cuba, Salvador Allende de Chile.

      Colombia y Venezuela comparten el legado histórico de las injusticias y desigualdades que les hemos infligido los norteamericanos, pero también el legado glorioso de liberación del grande y visionario Simón Bolívar; y cuál de estas fuerzas prevalecerá para ser transmitida a las generaciones futuras como su herencia queda por determinar. Este es nuestro miedo más oscuro, pero también nuestra esperanza más brillante.

      Definiendo los límites de la civilización y los límites de lo humano, las fuerzas del conservadurismo y la revolución luchan como siempre por el alma de la humanidad, las posibilidades futuras de convertirse en humano y los términos del ser humano, significado y valor.

     Como está escrito en mi publicación del 24 de octubre de 2020, La marea se vuelve contra el imperialismo estadounidense en Venezuela; Tras el fallido intento de golpe de estado estadounidense del 3 de mayo contra Maduro, la victoria en un tribunal británico sobre el acceso a las reservas de oro de Venezuela desafiando el mandato estadounidense de otorgar el tesoro a su títere Juan Guaidó, la revocación del apoyo de España por parte de su nuevo gobierno socialista a Maduro, y ahora el abandono de Venezuela por parte del último gran socio interno de Guaidó y líder de la revuelta de abril de 2019 contra Maduro, Leopoldo López, queda claro que la marea se ha vuelto contra el imperialismo estadounidense en Venezuela.

     A medida que la presidencia de Trump y el régimen fascista se desmoronan en un colapso espectacular durante los últimos días de las elecciones, tanto sus aliados como sus víctimas huelen sangre en el agua y se animan a desafiar abiertamente al Cuarto Reich que él representa.

    El colapso del complot de Trump para entregar los recursos de Venezuela a sus plutócratas corporaciones aduladoras y pagadoras es ahora definitivo, y celebramos la liberación del pueblo de Venezuela de quienes querían esclavizarlo.

     Así también anunciamos y nos regocijamos en las posibilidades para la liberación de la humanidad de la red global de fascismo y tiranía que ha surgido a la sombra de la subversión de la democracia de Trump, un espacio negativo y una imagen inversa de los valores estadounidenses de libertad, igualdad, verdad. , y la justicia, y de nuestro papel definitorio como Antorcha de la Libertad y faro de esperanza para el mundo.

     Unámonos en solidaridad con los que no tienen poder y los desposeídos para apoderarnos de nuestra autonomía y autodeterminación, para resistir nuestra deshumanización y fuerza y control autoritarios, y para forjar un nuevo futuro y una sociedad libre de iguales en la que nosotros mismos, y sin gobierno, dueños de nuestras posibilidades de hacernos humanos.

      Como escribí en mi post del 26 de febrero de 2020, Venezuela y Colombia: un dinamismo de hambre y miedo; Es la crisis humanitaria más terrible en la tierra hoy; un millón de niños abandonados en Venezuela en medio de un páramo de hambruna y miseria, sin atención médica y una tasa de inflación superior al diez mil por ciento, salarios laborales reales de cincuenta centavos a la semana que atraen una migración masiva de cuatro millones de personas hambrientas y sin dinero que buscan trabajo a la brutal minería y campamentos madereros más allá de sus fronteras en la migración masiva más grande de América del Sur en la historia.

     A menudo, sus rutas los llevan a pie a través de la región fronteriza entre Colombia y Venezuela, una zona del salvaje oeste de facciones y pandillas rebeldes en guerra, de asesinatos y secuestros, violaciones y trata de personas, niños soldados y el omnipresente atractivo de las ganancias de la única industria viable de la región. , el narcotráfico.

     La sociedad se ha derrumbado absolutamente en Venezuela, pero los palacios barrocos relucientes y los rascacielos de los oligarcas semifeudales y sus pueblos Potemkin que desmienten las afirmaciones de Maduro sobre el socialismo, el verdadero salvajismo de la desigualdad aquí enmascarado con una fachada legitimadora de alianza cubana por parte de un gobierno. de nepotismo y explotación, y desafiado por la supremacía solo por un peón estadounidense de alianzas y conexiones igualmente odiosas. Entre Maduro y Guaidó hay poco para elegir, salvo las mentiras con las que oscurecen su botín.

     Al otro lado de la región infernal de la frontera, Colombia ahora está entrando en su tercer mes de una huelga nacional llamada El Paro, que ha sido reprimida brutalmente por la policía, incluidas ejecuciones sumarias.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/06/venezuela-maduro-abduction-plot-luke-denman-americans-captured

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/mar/31/in-the-middle-of-a-war-zone-thousands-flee-as-venezuela-troops-and-colombia-rebels-clash

https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/andes/venezuela/venezuela-opportunity-should-be-seized

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/21/venezuela-colombia-border-region-human-rights-watch

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/25/leopoldo-lopez-flees-venezuela-vowing-to-continue-fighting-maduro-regime

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/05/uk-court-overturns-ruling-on-18bn-of-venezuelan-gold

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-guaido-venezuela-state-of-the-union_n_5e3b17d4c5b6b5fb438bb2c2?ncid=newsltushpmgnews

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/01/venezuela-crisis-maduro-claims-victory-over-deranged-us-backed-coup-attempt

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/sanctions-venezuela-maduro-guaido-trump/?fbclid=IwAR1VEbeMa_kHKTXWqLq_yK5nteX1kJCntlVkbEwoUhYluybDrrqx5YZlFpQ

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/venezuela-maduro-juan-guaido-intervention-sancti

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/21/venezuela-colombia-border-region-human-rights-watch

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/20/one-million-children-left-behind-those-who-stay-venezuela-amid-exodus

Trump is threatening Venezuela. But his own country looks a lot like it

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/21/trump-venezuela-hugo-chavez

Trump’s bullying of Latin America isn’t part of any plan – he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/05/donald-trump-interventions-latin-america-usa-venezuela

The Guardian view on the US and Venezuela: Trump’s ‘war on drugs’ ramps up military threats to Maduro

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/16/the-guardian-view-on-the-us-and-venezuela-trumps-war-on-drugs-ramps-up-military-threats-to-maduro

US military kills two people in strike on alleged drug-trafficking boat in Pacific

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/22/military-boat-strike-pacific-pete-hegseth

US ‘Night Stalkers’ seen in Caribbean as fears of regime change rise in Venezuela

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/22/us-night-stalkers-caribbean-fears-regime-change-venezuela-nicolas-maduro

 World must confront Maduro’s ‘campaign of terror’, Venezuelan opposition leader says: María Corina Machado in hiding as more than 1,300 people are detained in post-election clampdown

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/11/world-must-confront-maduro-campaign-of-terror-maria-corina-machado

‘Maduro has lost the streets’: in Venezuela’s barrios, former loyal voters risk all in protests

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/03/maduro-has-lost-the-streets-in-venezuelas-barrios-former-loyal-voters-risk-all-in-protests

‘Whose fault is it? The dictator’: the Venezuelan refugees on a knife-edge at the Colombian border – photo essay

Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country’s instability in the past decade, many hoping to return after July’s election. Now, as Nicolás Maduro clings to power, they fear for their families – and are braced for another exodus

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/aug/09/venezuelan-refugees-colombian-border-photo-essay?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawEmGIdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHd6yQmk0iA9ql9TYXOlcx_-reYWkUsgKeIemb7dmMFEHQoAHnIMBP2Y-ow_aem_K_8jX_z4k7wlCOl-1fs_jw

‘A climate of terror’: Maduro cracks down on Venezuelans protesting contested election win

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/aug/08/venezuela-nicolas-maduro-contested-election-protests-detention

Venezuela opposition leaders urge army and police to abandon Nicolás Maduro

Edmundo González and María Corina Machado call on officials to ‘join the side of the people’ after Maduro enforces post-election crackdown

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/05/venezuela-opposition-leaders-armed-forces-nicolas-maduro

Evidence shows Venezuela’s election was stolen – but will Maduro budge?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/06/venezuela-election-maduro-analysis

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/venezuela-coup-goudreau-trump-maduro_n_5ebb1024c5b6ca4db96b03b0?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-eases-sanctions-on-venezuela-as-opposition-talks-resume_n_63826c80e4b06ef4a544c6af?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-venezuela-maduro-putin-oil_n_6228d62ee4b0a7d5b8bf0744?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-63771107

Spanish

23 de octubre de 2025 La guerra no declarada de Trump contra Venezuela

     A la sombra de la Conquista de las Américas a manos de los pueblos indígenas y de la Doctrina Monroe que autorizó el imperialismo y el colonialismo estadounidenses en todo nuestro continente, el régimen de Trump está cometiendo crímenes de guerra contra civiles venezolanos en su guerra no declarada en dos frentes, los ataques falsos y performativos a barcos pesqueros con el pretexto de una guerra contra las drogas y la campaña de limpieza étnica y terror supremacista blanco emprendida por  ICE dentro de nuestra nación, que comenzó y se ha dirigido específicamente a ciudadanos venezolanos.

     Todos estos crímenes de guerra y crímenes de lesa humanidad están al servicio de la riqueza y el poder de las elites blancas que desean sacar provecho del robo de los enormes recursos petroleros de Venezuela, el saqueo capitalista nuevamente bajo el pretexto de un Terror Rojo que hace eco y refleja la Bahía de Cochinos y nuestra vendetta de décadas contra Cuba por tirar nuestros casinos mafiosos. Las acciones de Trump también recapitulan horriblemente tanto el Terror Rojo de la era McCarthy aquí en Estados Unidos como la represión de la disidencia y el Terror Rojo que dio origen a la Operación Cóndor y nuestro golpe en Chile que reemplazó al campeón del pueblo Allende por el tirano fascista y títere estadounidense Pinochet.

     Sí, el régimen de Maduro ha traicionado a la Revolución y se ha convertido en todo aquello contra lo que alguna vez se enfrentó el magnífico libertador Hugo Chávez, pero por esto; Ambos insisten en la independencia y soberanía de Venezuela y representan las fuerzas de la lucha de liberación anticolonial en las Américas. Y esto marca la diferencia.

     A continuación siguen algunos de mis escritos sobre el movimiento democrático en Venezuela, del cual la ganadora del Premio Nobel María Corina Machado es una figura, aunque muy problemática en cuanto a sus acciones como representante del régimen de Trump y el colonialismo estadounidense.

     ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre el intento de golpe planeado por Trump contra Maduro y el propio pueblo de Venezuela provocando un cambio de régimen?

     La conquista y el dominio imperialistas no se parecen en nada a la democracia que surge de la lucha de liberación del pueblo; y la prueba de desambiguación es ¿quién toma y posee el poder, el pueblo o algún amo extranjero?

     Y una cosa más; No me importa por qué alguien mata o esclaviza a otro, silencia o brutaliza a otros como represión de la disidencia o la imposición de identidades autorizadas, versiones de la historia o la realidad, o la virtud como sumisión a la autoridad; y sus víctimas tampoco.

     Las ideologías no significan nada comparadas con las simples pruebas de ¿Quién tiene el poder y quién sufre?

     Porque lo humano es lo más real.

11 de agosto de 2024 ¿Cuándo se debe librar una revolución contra una revolución? El caso de Venezuela

En Venezuela, una revolución democrática desafía al régimen brutal de un dictador que ha arruinado la economía y ha convertido a sus ciudadanos en un vasto precariado en lo que una vez se imaginó como un paraíso socialista.

La tiranía y un estado carcelario de fuerza y control son una fase predecible de la lucha revolucionaria en condiciones impuestas que requieren la liberación mediante la toma del poder por la fuerza, especialmente las revoluciones anticoloniales.

Todos los estados están constituidos por la violencia y son en sí mismos violencia encarnada; en palabras de George Washington; “El gobierno se trata de fuerza, solo fuerza”.

¿Cuándo se debe librar una revolución contra la revolución? Cuando se ha convertido en la tiranía de la que tomó el poder, como nacionalismo en lugar de como colonia, y esto es exactamente lo que ha sucedido en Venezuela.

Sí, Estados Unidos y sus representantes han librado una guerra económica y política contra Venezuela durante muchos años, a veces como terror, a veces como farsa; Pero nadie obligó a Maduro a iniciar ejecuciones masivas y encarcelamientos aleatorios. Esta revolución es toda culpa suya.

Y esta vez, son las clases bajas pobres y desesperadas de los campesinos venezolanos quienes se han levantado para tomar su poder y reclamar esa libertad que es el derecho de nacimiento de todos los seres humanos, sin los hilos de los titiriteros invisibles estadounidenses y globales del capitalismo.

Esta es una verdadera revolución del pueblo, y aunque durante mucho tiempo he defendido el estado revolucionario de Chávez y sus legados de liberación anticolonial, antiimperialista y anticapitalista contra Estados Unidos y he denunciado y resistido las políticas escandalosas y terroristas de nuestro gobierno, incluidas las de los regímenes de Trump y Biden hacia Venezuela, debemos reconocer y repensar el significado de la gloriosa y totalmente legítima revolución democrática contra Maduro.

Y debemos hacer todo lo posible para ayudar al pueblo de Venezuela a liberarse de la tiranía y traer estabilidad y libertad de la miseria a la región.

27 de noviembre de 2022 Una oportunidad de cambio en las relaciones entre Estados Unidos y Venezuela

    Hay pocas cosas que revelan esas verdades que el poder mantendría ocultas mediante el silencio y el borrado, las historias reescritas, las mentiras, las falsificaciones y la propaganda, que los espacios liminales donde no existen reglas, los espacios en blanco en nuestros mapas del ser humano, el significado y el valor marcados. con la leyenda Here Be Dragons para indicar incógnitas; como el reino del purgatorio entre Venezuela y Colombia donde nada está Prohibido y ángeles y demonios caminan entre los perdidos y los locos, los depravados y los iluminados.

     Aquí las posibilidades ilimitadas de devenir humano son un claroscuro de lo bestial y lo exaltado; aquí está el lugar para forjar una nueva humanidad libre de los legados del pasado y de las identidades autorizadas de sistemas de deshumanización y poder desigual, y de la tiranía de la normalidad y de las ideas ajenas de virtud; porque aquí, en tales lugares de liberación, nada puede apoderarse de nosotros para sus propios fines.

     Con Caos llega lo nuevo y lo imprevisto; aquí hay terror y abyección, pero también la más frágil de nuestras fuerzas, la esperanza. Alégrate en el abrazo de nuestra monstruosidad, porque el futuro es nuestro.

     Como escribí en mi publicación del 23 de mayo de 2021, Venezuela y Colombia: socios en una danza de tiranía y desastre humanitario; Restos vestigiales de una Guerra Fría que el mundo ha olvidado hace mucho tiempo y víctimas del imperialismo estadounidense, como las sombras de una cola de reptil invisible que arrastramos detrás de nosotros, los estados gemelos fallidos de Venezuela y Colombia son socios en una danza de tiranía y desastre humanitario.

     La monstruosa cleptocracia oligárquica del terror de Estado y apoderada de los intereses norteamericanos Álvaro Uribe y su sucesor Iván Duque de Colombia, eco y reflejo de nuestros otros regímenes títeres y aliados, entre ellos Fulgencio Batista de Cuba y Augusto Pinochet de Chile, figuras de oscuridad en un claroscuro con los de la luz como espacios negativos unos de otros; Hugo Chávez y su protegido Nicolás Maduro de Venezuela, Fidel Castro de Cuba, Salvador Allende de Chile.

      Colombia y Venezuela comparten el legado histórico de las injusticias y desigualdades que les hemos infligido los norteamericanos, pero también el legado glorioso de liberación del grande y visionario Simón Bolívar; y cuál de estas fuerzas prevalecerá para ser transmitida a las generaciones futuras como su herencia queda por determinar. Este es nuestro miedo más oscuro, pero también nuestra esperanza más brillante.

      Definiendo los límites de la civilización y los límites de lo humano, las fuerzas del conservadurismo y la revolución luchan como siempre por el alma de la humanidad, las posibilidades futuras de convertirse en humano y los términos del ser humano, significado y valor.

     Como está escrito en mi publicación del 24 de octubre de 2020, La marea se vuelve contra el imperialismo estadounidense en Venezuela; Tras el fallido intento de golpe de estado estadounidense del 3 de mayo contra Maduro, la victoria en un tribunal británico sobre el acceso a las reservas de oro de Venezuela desafiando el mandato estadounidense de otorgar el tesoro a su títere Juan Guaidó, la revocación del apoyo de España por parte de su nuevo gobierno socialista a Maduro, y ahora el abandono de Venezuela por parte del último gran socio interno de Guaidó y líder de la revuelta de abril de 2019 contra Maduro, Leopoldo López, queda claro que la marea se ha vuelto contra el imperialismo estadounidense en Venezuela.

     A medida que la presidencia de Trump y el régimen fascista se desmoronan en un colapso espectacular durante los últimos días de las elecciones, tanto sus aliados como sus víctimas huelen sangre en el agua y se animan a desafiar abiertamente al Cuarto Reich que él representa.

    El colapso del complot de Trump para entregar los recursos de Venezuela a sus plutócratas corporaciones aduladoras y pagadoras es ahora definitivo, y celebramos la liberación del pueblo de Venezuela de quienes querían esclavizarlo.

     Así también anunciamos y nos regocijamos en las posibilidades para la liberación de la humanidad de la red global de fascismo y tiranía que ha surgido a la sombra de la subversión de la democracia de Trump, un espacio negativo y una imagen inversa de los valores estadounidenses de libertad, igualdad, verdad. , y la justicia, y de nuestro papel definitorio como Antorcha de la Libertad y faro de esperanza para el mundo.

     Unámonos en solidaridad con los que no tienen poder y los desposeídos para apoderarnos de nuestra autonomía y autodeterminación, para resistir nuestra deshumanización y fuerza y control autoritarios, y para forjar un nuevo futuro y una sociedad libre de iguales en la que nosotros mismos, y sin gobierno, dueños de nuestras posibilidades de hacernos humanos.

      Como escribí en mi post del 26 de febrero de 2020, Venezuela y Colombia: un dinamismo de hambre y miedo; Es la crisis humanitaria más terrible en la tierra hoy; un millón de niños abandonados en Venezuela en medio de un páramo de hambruna y miseria, sin atención médica y una tasa de inflación superior al diez mil por ciento, salarios laborales reales de cincuenta centavos a la semana que atraen una migración masiva de cuatro millones de personas hambrientas y sin dinero que buscan trabajo a la brutal minería y campamentos madereros más allá de sus fronteras en la migración masiva más grande de América del Sur en la historia.

     A menudo, sus rutas los llevan a pie a través de la región fronteriza entre Colombia y Venezuela, una zona del salvaje oeste de facciones y pandillas rebeldes en guerra, de asesinatos y secuestros, violaciones y trata de personas, niños soldados y el omnipresente atractivo de las ganancias de la única industria viable de la región. , el narcotráfico.

     La sociedad se ha derrumbado absolutamente en Venezuela, pero los palacios barrocos relucientes y los rascacielos de los oligarcas semifeudales y sus pueblos Potemkin que desmienten las afirmaciones de Maduro sobre el socialismo, el verdadero salvajismo de la desigualdad aquí enmascarado con una fachada legitimadora de alianza cubana por parte de un gobierno. de nepotismo y explotación, y desafiado por la supremacía solo por un peón estadounidense de alianzas y conexiones igualmente odiosas. Entre Maduro y Guaidó hay poco para elegir, salvo las mentiras con las que oscurecen su botín.

     Al otro lado de la región infernal de la frontera, Colombia ahora está entrando en su tercer mes de una huelga nacional llamada El Paro, que ha sido reprimida brutalmente por la policía, incluidas ejecuciones sumarias.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/06/venezuela-maduro-abduction-plot-luke-denman-americans-captured

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/mar/31/in-the-middle-of-a-war-zone-thousands-flee-as-venezuela-troops-and-colombia-rebels-clash

https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/andes/venezuela/venezuela-opportunity-should-be-seized

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/21/venezuela-colombia-border-region-human-rights-watch

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/25/leopoldo-lopez-flees-venezuela-vowing-to-continue-fighting-maduro-regime

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/05/uk-court-overturns-ruling-on-18bn-of-venezuelan-gold

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-guaido-venezuela-state-of-the-union_n_5e3b17d4c5b6b5fb438bb2c2?ncid=newsltushpmgnews

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/01/venezuela-crisis-maduro-claims-victory-over-deranged-us-backed-coup-attempt

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/sanctions-venezuela-maduro-guaido-trump/?fbclid=IwAR1VEbeMa_kHKTXWqLq_yK5nteX1kJCntlVkbEwoUhYluybDrrqx5YZlFpQ

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/venezuela-maduro-juan-guaido-intervention-sancti

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/21/venezuela-colombia-border-region-human-rights-watch

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/20/one-million-children-left-behind-those-who-stay-venezuela-amid-exodus