Hands off Venezuela, no to Trump’s gangster plan for plunder
Hands off Venezuela, no to Trump’s gangster plan for plunder
By Tomáš Tengely-Evans
President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro Photo: flickr/ UN Geneva)
Donald Trump has declared that US will “run” Venezuela after its military kidnapped president Nicolas Maduro and launched airstrikes on the South American country.
It is a brazen and nakedly imperialist attack to overthrow the Venezuelan government, unleash violence and make South America a playground for US corporations.
At a press conference on Saturday, Trump said, “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
When asked who will run Venezuela, he gestured towards himself and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “It’s largely going to be for a period of time the people that are standing right behind me,” he said.
“Under the Trump administration, we are reasserting American power in a very powerful way. The future will be determined by the ability to protect commerce and territory and resources that are core to national security. These are the iron laws that have always determined global power—and we’re going to keep it that way.”
“We don’t forget about the Monroe Doctrine anymore. US dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again—it won’t happen. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in.”
He added that “we’re not afraid of boots on the ground”, pointing out that the US military had “boots on the ground last night at a very high level”.
Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves—and that’s no coincidence.
Trump made clear this is a plan for plunder. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in,” he said. And he warned, “We’re there now, we’re ready to go again if we have to.”
The US “carried out a large-scale strike against Venezuela” and “captured and flown out of the country” Maduro and his wife on Friday and Saturday. Rubio says Maduro, who had a £38 million bounty on his head, will stand trial.
The air strikes on the capital Caracas and kidnapping of Maduro are a significant escalation in Trump’s plan to reassert US control of Latin America. His administration has been building up US forces in the Caribbean under the guise of targeting “narco boats” and demanding “regime change” in Venezuela.
The US has tried to force regime change in Venezuela since Maduro’s predecessor, socialist Hugo Chavez, was elected in 1999. This included a notorious coup attempt in 2002 that was defeated through mass mobilisations in less than 48 hours.
The US has intervened elsewhere in Latin America, backing coup attempts and reactionary forces. But this is the first direct military intervention since George Bush Senior removed Manuel Noriega, once the US puppet dictator in Panama, in 1989.
What’s behind the escalation? It follows Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS) published in December. Here, the Whitehouse outlined a new strategy to combat the decline of US hegemony (its ability to dominate the world).
The document spoke about how “the United States rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself”. It said that it was “dropping America’s misguided experiment of hectoring” states in the Middle East “into abandoning their historic forms of government”. But it didn’t mark some end to US imperialism—far from it. It was a shift to more openly predatory imperialism and a renewed focus on dominating what’s known as the Western Hemisphere—the Americas and Greenland.
So the National Security Strategy spoke about a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. First declared in 1828, it said that Latin America was part of the US sphere of influence and warned European imperialist powers to stay out.
Today, the US warned, “We want a hemisphere that is free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets.”
That partly builds on previous US administrations. General Laura Richardson, who headed US Southern Command between 2021 and 2024, said, “Our competitors know that, our adversaries know that this region is so rich in resources it’s off the charts rich. 60 percent of the world’s lithium is in the region, you have heavy crude [oil], you have light sweet crude [oil], you have rare earth elements.
“You have the Amazon which is called the lungs of the world, you have 31 percent of the world’s fresh water here in this region. And there are adversaries that are taking advantage of this region every single day right in our neighbourhood.”
The main competitor of the US is China, which has built close economic ties with South American states including Venezuela. While the National Security Strategy massively played down the US focus on China, the inter-imperialist competition between them still shapes policy.
The US hopes that regime change in Venezuela would stamp its control across the continent and send a chill through all those who want to challenge it.
Venezuela was a beacon for the left, progressive movements and resistance to imperialism in the 2000s. Chavez came to power in 1999 amid a popular resistance to neoliberalism. In 1989, the Caracazo Uprising saw a wave of resistance among workers and the poor to a “structural adjustment package” demanded by the IMF loan shark.
The Venezuelan ruling class never accepted the legitimacy of Chavez or workers and the poor having a say in politics. But, even after Chavez was elected, there was a high degree of popular mobilisation and organisation. This defeated the US-backed coup and Venezuelan bosses’ attempts at sabotage, such as the oil bosses’ lockout that threatened to crash the economy in 2003.
Maduro has been a faint echo of Chavez, who died in 2013. An unaccountable bureaucracy and corruption grew around the ruling PSUV party, while ordinary Venezuelans faced a growing social crisis.
This demoralised and demobilised the PSUV’s working class base compared to the height of the “Bolivarian process” in the 2000s.
However, there can be no equivocation and hand-wringing on the left and in the labour movement. The overthrow of Maduro at the hands of the US will only hurl back the fight for liberation in Venezuela and across Latin America. The kidnapping of Maduro and his wife is a war crime and a prelude to vicious attacks on people in Venezuela.
Republished from socialistworker.uk, Saturday 03 January 2026.
What Can We Do?
We need to build solidarity with people in Venezuela who are resisting US imperialism. A statement issued by the SA government department, Dirco, condemned the US action, “History has repeatedly demonstrated that military invasions against sovereign states yield only instability and deepening crisis. Unlawful, unilateral force of this nature undermines … the principle of equality among nations.” But the statement concluded that “South Africa calls on the UN Security Council, the body mandated to maintain international peace and security, to urgently convene to address this situation.”
Expecting the security council to defend Venezuela’s sovereignty is a pretty dream. The attack on Venezuela is yet another demonstration that the US state respects no sovereignty except its own. This very same US state has a veto on the security council’s meaningful decisions, along with four other countries including France, whose president, Macron, quickly spoke up in support of the US attacks. If the SA government means business, they would start by expelling the US ambassador to SA, who should already have been refused because of their support for the genocide in Palestine. Then, they could threaten to choke supplies of platinum and diamonds to the USA unless it behaves.
But there is little reason to expect that the SA government will go that far, left to their own devices. Trump’s disrespect to the former SA ambassador and imposition of tough tariffs might persuade our government to bluster a little louder, but the tendency until now has been to try to balance economic and political ‘pragmatism’ against principle, as we already saw when South Africa brought the case to the ICJ case but did not cut coal supplies to the genocidal state, for example, and its complete lack of fire over the imposition of huge tariffs. It will be up to use to keep up the pressure from below.
