Venezuela: between crisis and invasion

Mau Baiocco takes an in depth look at the crisis in Venezuela as Trump ramps up US aggression

Venezuela is in the crosshairs of the United States. Over the past month, a series of US airstrikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean has left at least 37 dead. A large US fleet of eight warships and 10,000 troops has been installed off the coast of Venezuela. In late October, the Trump administration authorised covert CIA operations in Venezuela, and the most powerful aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, has been sent to support the operation.

This dramatic escalation is not primarily about drug smuggling but aims at toppling the government of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Over the past decade Maduro has  survived the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, waves of mass protests, a raft of sanctions by the US, determined efforts by the opposition to remove him from power and even an assassination attempt. He now faces the prospect of a fully-fledged US military operation. With Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller steering the Trump administration towards a maximum pressure approach to Venezuela, a significant military strike, if not invasion, seems inevitable.

The sudden change in direction — from rapprochement at the start of Trump’s second term to the brink of war — has baffled most commentators on the subject. There are daily articles speculating on Trump’s endgame for Venezuela and his potential reasons for launching what would in all likelihood be a prolonged, unpopular and bloody war. The left, too, finds this difficult to explain. Our stock explanation that Trump, representing US imperialist interest and ambitions, is after Venezuela’s vast oil and mineral resources does not take us far. We also need to ask: why now? Is this going to be the pattern of US imperialism for years to come?

For Venezuelans a US invasion leading to state collapse has the potential to be an unimaginable catastrophe. However, even with this threat hanging over our heads, it is speculation rather than rejection of the invasion that has largely taken hold. A return to the consensus where all sections of the left and their popular base support the state has to face the difficult terrain of rising authoritarianism, widespread grievance, economic crisis and the reality of what US intervention means for Venezuela. The prospective invasion will arrive at a nadir in Venezuelans’ popular mobilisation and support for the state. This may go some way to explaining why Trump is choosing to attempt to oust Maduro now. 

Between crisis and invasion

Venezuela is in the midst of a political crisis unlike any other in its recent history. The Bolivarian revolution, beginning in 1998 with the election of Hugo Chávez, was noted for having some of the world’s highest rates of political and democratic participation, with 14 national elections taking place between 1998 and Chávez’s death in 2013. Throughout the revolution, the state drew legitimacy from this near-constant mass democratic exercise. As Chávez saw it, the transition to socialism was to be built, steadily, through this mass democratic consent. However, after Maduro won a tighter than expected presidential election in 2013, the revolution has been unable to maintain this mass democratic support; in 2015 the right-wing opposition won a supermajority in the legislative elections. 

Riding this wave of momentum, the opposition quickly moved to hold a recall referendum against Maduro and seek the presidency for itself. This was quickly undone in 2017, when Venezuela’s supreme court ruled that the national assembly was in contempt and suspended all its legislative functions. Mass protests followed, leaving over 100 dead and thousands arrested. Over the next six years a disorganised opposition launched multiple initiatives to try to seek power, including supporting US sanctions and the proclamation of national assembly member Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s acting president, which was recognised by the Trump administration along with ten Latin American countries and most of the EU. 

A bigger threat to the revolution, however, had begun to take hold. As the opposition boycotted elections and the government ran unopposed, rates of democratic participation plummeted and the 2020 national assembly elections saw a record low turnout.  With the government suffering from the effects of the economic crisis and lacking grassroots mobilisation, a new political class, formed largely by the military their allies, took hold of increasing amounts of power. This compact between a rump left-wing government and a powerful military class with widespread private interests in Venezuela’s oil and mining sectors now controls Venezuela in an authoritarian manner.

Seeking to get out of sanctions on Venezuelan oil and the assets of key figures in the government, Maduro submitted to the internationally mediated 2023 Barbados Accords. In exchange for the removal of sanctions, Maduro and the opposition agreed to contest the 2024 presidential elections with international observation. With a background as a right-wing anti-Chavista hawk, opposition politician and recent Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado became the opposition’s candidate, reinventing herself as a centrist politician critical of the pro-sanction leaderships of the right. Her campaign picked up momentum from unlikely places, holding massive rallies in former Chavista strongholds such as Barinas state. Left-wing parties, such as the Venezuelan Communist Party and Fatherland for All (PPT), both formerly part of the Bolivarian revolution’s coalition, clustered instead around the alternative candidacy of former national electoral council member Enrique Márquez. 

Although she was ultimately banned from standing in the elections, Machado endorsed former diplomat Edmundo González as the opposition’s candidate. When the elections were finally held on July 28, the government and the opposition announced different results. The government claimed that Maduro had won a resounding victory, with 51 per cent of the vote against 40 per cent for González. However, the opposition claimed that González had won a landslide victory with over 67 per cent. Anticipating this situation, the opposition collected disaggregated tallies and proofs (actas) from each polling station (under Venezuelan electoral law, each contesting party is allowed to obtain a copy of this data), publishing them online. 

The opposition-collected actas appeared to bear out its claims for an González victory, and this was supported by the international observers invited by the government to oversee the process. The government’s failure to provide its own set of actas and to audit the results, on the other hand, led to the failure of the international community to recognise its alleged victory. Most importantly, historic left-wing allies of Chavismo and the Bolivarian revolution, such as the presidents of Colombia, Brazil and Chile withheld recognition of the results until the government provided its own proof. Alleging a hack on the electoral system, the government claims it has lost the actas, and still has not provided proof of its victory to this day.

Backlash and repression

Following the elections, a mass wave of protests arose across the country. In Caracas, the protests clustered around the working class areas that Chavismo had formerly called its strongholds. These seemed to escape the control of the official opposition, which had refused to call demonstrations until it could obtain and upload its actas. Seeing a popular challengeto its rule unlike any that had come before, the Maduro government swiftly moved to put down these protests, detaining thousands of people under terrorism charges. The independent left-backed candidate, Enrique Márquez was also jailed following a legal appeal to the Supreme Court to force the government to release disaggregated results. Unlike previous waves of protests and government reprisals, the government was now firmly focusing on critics to its left. Hundreds of union leaders, community activists and local electoral observers have been detained without trial or forced into exile, with this repression continuing to this day.

This story, however, isn’t complete without taking into account the main reason for the ebbing away of popular support for the government: the economic crisis. Between 2014 and 2019, Venezuela saw an unprecedented peacetime collapse of its economy. The 2014 collapse in the global price of oil began the crisis, leading to Venezuela defaulting on its debt and attempting to meet the shortfall by increasing the supply of money in its system, resulting in hyperinflation. The first Trump administration’s sanctions on Venezuela, beginning in 2017 and supported by the opposition, forbade the country from accessing international finance and restructuring its debt. 

The combined results were catastrophic, with inflation running at over one million per cent in 2018 and GDP collapsing by 50 per cent. Over 7 million Venezuelans, a quarter of the country’s population, emigrated. In recent years, the government has managed to somewhat arrest the crisis by implementing costly reforms that have empowered the domestic capitalist class, such as the dollarisation of the economy, privatisation of industries and the slashing of public sector salaries. These moves have undone a significant amount of the economic equality and social progress achieved under Chávez. An increasing number of strikes in the Venezuelan oil and energy sectors have been the result, but this has not yet yielded a working class political recomposition significant enough to put pressure on the government.

Faced with the combined consequences of the economic crisis and the lack of democracy in the latter years of the Bolivarian revolution, popular movements may now be weakened enough for the US to attempt to impose itself in the country. If it is successful, it will not be because this is the desire of Venezuelans but because of failures in the Bolivarian leadership to renew the revolution, break out of the failing oil extractivist model and hold to the practices of its mass democratic origins. But key questions remain — what are the US plans for Venezuela, and why has the Maduro government, now largely subordinate to an alliance of the military and the capitalist class, failed in its rapprochement with the US?

 More than just resources

Shortly after Trump came into office this year, the US made new overtures to Venezuela. In its last months in office, the Biden administration had passed two new sets of sanctions on Venezuelan officials and state companies, as a response to the contested 2024 Venezuelan presidential elections, and there was growing support among Republican and Democratic lawmakers to directly sanction the Venezuelan oil sector. The Trump administration quickly reversed course on this push. First, it sent presidential envoy Richard Grenell to Venezuela to negotiate the resumption of deportation flights from the US, as well as the release of American citizens imprisoned in Venezuela accused of plotting against the government. Secondly, it granted Chevron a license to directly produce and export Venezuelan oil to the US, thus significantly boostingVenezuelan oil sales to the US 

Venezuela, it seemed, was on the path to normalising relationships with the US That was until the mood in Washington seemingly changed overnight, catching the Venezuelan government by surprise. Their initial response to the airstrikes on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean was to state that they did not take place but were AI generated videos, arguing that the office of the hardline anti-Maduro US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had created them to scupper the rapprochement between the Trump administration and Venezuela. It has been reported that Maduro even pushed for greater concessions to the US oil and mining industries in an attempt to stave off the escalation, but it has become increasingly apparent that the US is not just after Venezuela’s resources.

From the standpoint of the Venezuelan government, the strikes were irrational and sudden. To this we might add that from the standpoint of international capital the strikes can hardly be considered productive. Despite having a nominally nationalised oil industry, Venezuela is heavily reliant on financing and arrangements with foreign and private oil companies for both the fixed capital required to extract its oil (drills, pumps, refining systems, etc.) as well as trained engineers. Foreign oil companies form over 50 ‘mixed enterprises’ with the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, and account for between 50 per cent and 70 per cent of its oil exports. 

The passage in 2020 of the Anti-Blockade law has hastened the creation of mixed-enterprise companies without democratic oversight, in effect privatising increasing swathes of the domestic oil sector in concessions lasting beyond the 2040s. In its current form, the Venezuelan state, rather than being a block to private access to its oil wealth, has instead become a willing partner and guarantor of this extraction. Indeed, the Venezuelan state has taken upon itself the task of disciplining the workforce in its oilfields, jailing over 100 oil industry union leaders in the last year alone.

The situation is much worse in Venezuela’s historically underdeveloped mining and minerals extraction sector. In 2016 the government created the Orinoco Mining Arc National Strategic Development Zone, covering 12 per cent of national territory, including the historic territories of the Warao, Pemón, Piaroa, Ye’kwana and Arawak indigenous tribes. The results have been ecologically and socially disastrous, with most of the mining operations led by small non-state actors and transnational organised gangs, leading to human trafficking, illegal mining, environmental devastation and a plethora of human rights abuses against the indigenous population including massacres, child exploitation, sexual abuse and slavery. Almost none of the mined wealth makes its way into Venezuelan coffers; instead it is laundered for direct export to world mineral markets. The Venezuelan Armed Forces oversee this area, either turning a blind eye to the widespread practices of exploitation and environmental destruction or benefiting from kickbacks and provision of resources such as fuel.

Over the last decade the Venezuelan government has proved itself pliant to the demands of fossil and extractive capital, whether represented in globalised private oil companies or in small illegal mining operations. While the US is interested in Venezuelan resources, the risks that come with an invasion would paradoxically make them harder to extract, at least for decades. Without the armed forces’ control over territory, disciplining function over the population and coordinating function over the transport of goods and capital, Venezuela is a less attractive prospect for exploitation. The US may believe it can achieve a quick victory and transition to a new regime with the state structure largely left intact, but the likelier result from a state collapse is that a situation characterised by chaotic and lawless extraction with low productivity will prevail. 

Maduro and the domestic capitalist class behind him have certainly not run out of road with the concessions they could make — but Trump is uninterested. We need to see not only Venezuelan resources as being a main driver here, but also Trump’s new style of foreign policy, where immediate economic concerns are equal to political and racial motivations and the administration’s attempts to project power and military might in a world where the US is steadily declining in influence.

 The new face of imperialism

On 3 October, the US Supreme Court approved the Trump administration’s move to remove Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from over 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants in the US, paving the way for their eventual deportation from the US. TPS covers the status of the majority of Venezuelan immigrants residing in the US. Although a small percentage of the over seven million Venezuelans who have fled the country in the past decade, Venezuelans in the US are at the forefront of a new campaign of racialisation and demonisation, being linked with gangs such as the Tren de Aragua and the international drug trade. This is echoed by right-wing politicians across Latin America, such as José Antonio Kast in Chile and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. The rise of global right politics furnishes imperialism with additional motives to attack and intervene in foreign states — ones founded on racial politics and the management of internal populations.

In this light, the current US escalation in Venezuela has two important goals. The first is that regime change can set the conditions for the forcible return of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans residing abroad to the country. The second is that the wielding of extraordinary force against Venezuelans whether as criminalised immigrants in the US or as criminalised individuals in their own territory, creates the rationale for further deployment of such force, embedding it as a core state function. The management and policing of internal immigrant populations merges with military action against those same populations in their home countries, a logic pioneered by the War on Terror and now being extended in Trump’s anti-migrant rhetoric and use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The turn in Trump’s administration, from rapprochement and normalisation with Venezuela to buildup of forces in the Caribbean and strikes against the country, can be explained by the sustained lobbying efforts of María Corina Machado in the months following Trump’s election. This lobbying has consisted of linking the international drug trade with Venezuela’s government, and highlighting claims that two Venezuelan criminal organisations — the Tren de Aragua gang and the Cartel de los Soles — operate in the U.S. The two organisations play a comparatively minimal role in drug trade in the U.S. (something understood by U.S. intelligence agencies), yet Machado has furnished the Trump administration with a casus belli and much of its rhetoric justifying attacks against Venezuelan immigrants in the U.S. and the Venezuelan state. It has even pushed the narrative of Iranian agents three hours away from Miami, a vision of the Venezuelan state as a fundamental enemy of the U.S. that warrants its destruction. Machado has created a powerful alignment between her political ambitions and Trump’s domestic policy, running roughshod over the lives of Venezuelans targeted by ICE and Venezuelans targeted by military action in the Caribbean.

However, the US lacks a strategic vision for Latin America. The days of forming a bloc subservient to the interests of global capital based on neoliberalism and free trade agreements are gone. Domestic capitalist classes in the continent increasingly look to China and other emerging economies for trade and development. The US is interested in seizing key resources for itself — be they the Panama Canal or Bolivian rare earths — but is no longer able to structure entire economies and polities around itself. The US could previously rely on a combination of aid, free trade agreements, control over the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the promise of integration with transnational organisations such as the Organisation of American States (OAS), but those days are gone. 

As a fading empire, the US now operates primarily on a transactional basis, hoping that the threat of military force is enough to get countries to fall in line. Latin American countries will be left to chase the phantasms of Trump’s domestic priorities — less emigration, more rare earths, less drug production, less engagement with China, etc — under the pain of military action. In the case of Venezuela, the use of force is the goal: to make a disciplining example to the entire region and its peoples, to drive home the point that you can collapse a state and not face consequences. It is an empty projection of power that is bound to backfire, but not before millions of Venezuelans suffer from it.

 Making solidarity count

Caught between state repression, attacks from the opposition right and the threat of US invasion, Venezuela’s poor and working classes find themselves in the incredibly difficult position of having to recompose political opposition from below. For a unionised oil worker in Paraguaná, a Pemón miner in Guasipati or a resident in the Cota 905 barrio in Caracas the prospect of a US attack is more distant and abstract than their day-to-day confrontations with the military and business classes that such forces back. It is necessary to support all working class struggles, highlight abuses committed by the state and make room for criticism of the Venezuelan government. Yet it would also be a grave error for the left to make its support of Venezuela, facing a US imperialist onslaught, conditional in any way.

The opposition led by María Corina Machado provides no answers to Venezuela’s suffering. Its policy of offering the entirety of Venezuela’s natural resources to private capital, its willingness to play along with Trump’s demonisation of Venezuelan migrants and its lobbying for military action against Maduro’s regime makes it obvious that far from a democratic, liberal and unitary formation, the opposition is still captive to its most reactionary wing. Unable to build on the momentum of July 28 2024, it now bets on risking a complete collapse of the Venezuelan state for ascending to power.

Fortunately, recent struggles furnish the international left with renewed answers to these dilemmas. As the Palestine solidarity movement has shown, imperialism is a project of the ruling class that begins at home. It has a material basis in the states and societies we live in. To be effective, anti-imperialism must expand from the old forms of stage-managed international visits, trade union delegations and carefully formulated political statements and distinctions. The current situation demands solidarity action. The weapons industry, fossil capital and regimes of racist oppression and border policing that dominate the lives of a good portion of the seven million Venezuelans living abroad must be directly challenged by mass, working-class mobilisation. A new array of strategies is called for.