Venezuela after 3 January

Mau Baiocco takes stock of the balance of forces in Venezuela as Trump revives the Monroe Doctrine for the twenty first century.

On 3 January, and after months of military escalation and extrajudicial murder off the coast of Venezuela, the US directly struck the Venezuelan government. By now, the images of the operation are all seared into the minds of Venezuelans and the watching world. Explosions and black helicopters hovering over Caracas, Maduro kidnapped and being transported blindfolded to New York, the press conference where Trump and Marco Rubio announced their intent to ‘run’ Venezuela from this point forward. Beyond the spectacle and the speculations that followed – was Maduro betrayed, how can the US run Venezuela, will Trump seek Greenland or Cuba next – it is worth taking stock of the balance of forces within Venezuela as well as beyond it. 

The US military operation that removed Maduro from power may well go down in history for its shallowness and bluster as much as its apparent success. It is evident that no actual regime change took place, either at the top echelon of power or at the base level of Venezuelan society. No rank-and-file soldiers or militias have had to dust off their rifles in defence of the nation against an imperialist ground attack. Within hours of Maduro’s kidnapping, the government had staged its own orderly transition of power as vice-president Delcy Rodríguez was confirmed the interim president by the Venezuelan Supreme Court and sworn in before the National Assembly. No purges, recriminations or noticeable splits have arisen so far within the government. Normal life seems to be gradually returning to Caracas and Venezuela’s major cities.

Following the operation, the rationale of taking Maduro to try him in the US over drug-trafficking charges has receded into the background, replaced by Rubio and Trump’s explicit messaging that this was, all along, just about seizing Venezuelan resources and getting the country to serve the US’s hemispheric interests. The Monroe (giddily renamed by the president as ‘Donroe’) Doctrine is revived. Made explicit through gunboat diplomacy, threats against presidents Petro and Sheinbaum and actions such as stepping in to save Milei’s far-right Argentinian government from an economic crisis, or the pardoning of Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernandez from drug-trafficking charges. It’s clear that the operation was aimed as much at the continent’s independent governments as it was at Venezuela’s. With the US willing to go as far as kidnapping and extraditing heads of state in defense of its interests, few options appear off the table going forwards. A confluence of factors made it possible to kidnap Maduro. His weakness both militarily and as a head of state with diminished popular backing among Venezuela’s population, his demonisation as a drug trafficker and the way the move would be received by anti-socialist Latin American voters in key electoral battleground states in the US made it the most expedient option in asserting a geopolitical strategy which the rest of Latin America must now labour under.

Whether this will be successful, over the long run, remains to be seen. Contrary to Trump and Rubio’s assertion that this is the dawn of a new golden era for US oil companies, with unrestricted access to the largest oil reserves in the world, US oil capital has not yet signalled a willingness to be recruited into Trump’s campaign. In order to extract Venezuelan oil on a scale that would be structurally advantageous to the US they would have to invest massively in reconstructing Venezuela’s collapsed oil industry. The numbers put forward by oil industry analysts are significant: over 100bn dollars in investment. More than twice what American oil companies invested globally last year just to get Venezuela back to what was (for its standards) historically low oil production fifteen years ago. The returns on capital investment, at a time when the world faces an oil glut and an energy transition, are simply not significant enough to incentivise the movement of private capital into Venezuela. Rare earths and mineral extraction may represent a superior prospect. But this sector is relatively new and under-explored in Venezuela, with what exists of it already well-integrated (through practices of labour hyperexploitation and illicit trafficking) into global commodity markets. As many others have written both on these pages and elsewhere, the current situation demands a rethinking of how the left frames imperialism. Away from military intervention being merely a pretext for increasing the accumulation of capital and towards a thinking of competing nationally-aligned factions of capital fencing off and depriving resources from one another. 

In the days since its attack, the US government seems to have realised as much: its strategy now seems to be to sit on existing oil production, rather than investing in seizing or expanding it, and using the US naval blockade to take over the sale and commercialisation of Venezuelan oil. The proceeds of the US sale of oil would then, according to Trump, get invested exclusively in the purchase of US goods and commodities by Venezuela. It is a strategy which reduces the Venezuelan government and the national oil company PDVSA to a state of vassalage. It is hard to see how any current or future Venezuelan government will justify Venezuelan citizens footing the bill for costly US commodities without experiencing colossal backlash and loss of legitimacy. This may well turn out to be the central question that Delcy Rodríguez’s government, or any opposition alternative, has to contend with. How much will Venezuelans be expected to pay for co-existence with the US in their everyday lives?

Interim president Delcy Rodríguez is no stranger to putting Venezuelans through significant economic adjustments. Under Maduro she held several roles, including finance minister, head of the Venezuelan Central Bank and oil minister. In these roles she oversaw economic liberalisation programmes such as the dollarisation of the economy, the 2020 anti-blockade law giving private oil companies an increased stake in oil production and the creation of special economic zones. As a result of her backing for the domestic capitalist class, the Venezuelan government has been able to return to sanctions-busting economic growth. However this has been at the cost of growing inequality and the fall of wages to historic lows, as well as the sidelining of the remaining elements of the Chavista left and repression of trade union activity. It is likely that this background made Rodríguez an acceptable alternative to Maduro for the US. It remains to be seen, however, whether she will be a pliant client – with real American threats hanging over her own life, as well as those of the rest of the government – or whether she will attempt to stake out an independent position that protects Venezuelan sovereignty. A more structural answer, as Venezuelan political economist Malfred Gerig highlights, is that the transformation of the Venezuelan state into a client state of capitalist interests already took place as a response to the economic crisis between 2016 and 2019. What we’re witnessing now is the emergence of public alignment, made complete by the US attack on 3 January.

The nature of the US action, as well as the authoritarian regime that Maduro led, means that analysis of what has happened in Venezuela takes the form of palace intrigue, reading into public statements and press conferences, and speculative analysis. Little has been said of class composition, popular power and who should ultimately determine the course of events: the Venezuelan people, exercising their free and sovereign democratic will. It is easy to forget that no actor, currently under discussion, bears any semblance of popular legitimacy. US intervention is broadly rejected among the Venezuelan population and, especially under the designs of Rubio and Trump, if it means a regime of permanent exploitation. The opposition is divided, having contradictory politics domestically and abroad, with María Corina Machado sidelined by the US as well as being seen as an existential threat by the Chavista base. Lastly, Rodríguez owes her position both to US intervention and the 2024 election for which there exists ample and independent evidence of fraudulence. Its results were legitimised by a wave of state repression rather than popular acknowledgment.

Classes have, to a significant extent, become detached from their traditional party affiliation, so much so that it can no longer be said that any individual party commands the leadership of the politicised working class as the PSUV did at the height of Chavismo. Furthermore, the mass emigration of Venezuelans and the collapse (and partial recovery) of the economy have had significant effects. There is the phenomenon of youth disaffiliation from Venezuelan political life, the enchufado bourgeoisie who attained their wealth while remaining in the country during the late-Maduro economic liberalisation, and a growing, working-class socially conservative evangelical constituency which has found a degree of accommodation with the government. The revolutionary grassroots of the Bolivarian Revolution – the communal and co-operative movements which Chávez attempted to institutionalise in the last years of his life – play an important yet often marginalised role in the current moment. They occupy a contradictory position of reliance on the state to survive while regularly coming into conflict with the state and its interests at the local level of municipal governance and policing. In the days since the attack, they have become the most visible opponents of US intervention, taking to the streets in protests across the country. As the government shifts priorities to its survival and accommodation with the US, it remains to be seen whether the comuneros will become an oppositional and independent force to the state, or whether they will form a bloc with the Rodríguez government to oppose the threat of the traditional, right-wing opposition coming to power. 

The prospects of the Bolivarian Revolution hang in the balance. If Venezuela is to avoid being run as a pact between local ruling-class clients and the United States, it is imperative that the field of democratic debate and contestation is reopened, allowing for local parties and leaders to explicitly position themselves with regards to the main question for the country going forwards: Who owns Venezuela’s resources? The legalisation of political parties, the freeing of political prisoners, community activists, trade unionists and dismantling of the state repressive apparatus is the only viable path towards renewing the conditions which triggered the Bolivarian Revolution as a mass popular movement in the first place. The deadened political life under Maduro’s rule, where a military-backed elite rose to prominence while absorbing the business class and repressing its critics, at the same time as the opposition fled and radicalised abroad, must be replaced by one of open contestation and explicit political programmes. With no mass democratic basis, anti-imperialist politics are reduced to slogans, become easily captured by ruling national elites and die in their cradle. This isn’t something to be said solely of Venezuela either: it is an experience which Venezuela shares with the majority of post-colonial states across the global south.

This democratic freedom to which all Venezuelans aspire, however, will never be fully realised so long as the US maintains its blockade and threats of intervention. It is crucial that states condemn the intervention and do not give Trump the diplomatic cover and material cooperation which makes US aggression possible. A thorough anti-imperialist politics must be front and centre of any political programme worthy of being called leftist. Opposition to NATO, nuclear proliferation, the exploitation of labour and natural resources from the global south are only the high-level correlates of militarisation, racism, border regimes and earth-destroying material consumption in our everyday lives. At every step, it is necessary to draw out the connection between each specific aspect of our struggles with the larger imperial structure that determines them. Every intervention the left makes in our public life must have, as its criterion of success, the weakening of imperialist and extractive structures as much as the betterment of our lives within our specific situations. We cannot afford to compromise on these questions at the time of violent imperial military action that divides the world into different spheres and generates countless victims abroad.

The international left must maintain a consistent line of solidarity with Venezuelans, rejection of US intervention and a critical, public opposition to the repression that Venezuelans have faced in their country. Though difficult, this position is not impossible: as the Latin American left has shown over the past decade, in the countries where the majority of Venezuelans who fled the catastrophic economic collapse of their country and are now predominantly proletarianised, exploited and at risk of deportation and xenophobic attacks seeking to divide the working class, it is possible to forge meaningful links of solidarity grounded on shared material circumstances. The most reflexive and dismissive forms of campism – too abundant in parts of the anglophone left – will soon prove inadequate to the conjuncture Venezuelans are facing. We must seize this opportunity for solidarity, political education and meaningful links towards the millions of Venezuelans who now live in our societies.

Mau Baiocco is a Venezuelan socialist living and writing in Leeds.