Venezuela: imperialism, post Chavismo, and resistance from below (part 1)

In part 1 of a two part article Mike Gonzalez discusses Trump’s motives for the attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president.

Donald Trump described the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan president, as ‘like a television programme’. But the bombs that were dropping on key points in and around Caracas, were very real. Fuerte Tiuna, for example, a military complex, and the La Carlota airfield are in the city centre; La Guaira is the major port. But the main objective was the presidential palace, Miraflores, also in the heart of the city in a busy residential area. From the hillside barrios they watched the helicopter gunships overhead, the armed might of the US deployed to kidnap a president. Just as significant was the bombing of El Cuartel de la Montaña, the tomb of Hugo Chávez. It was a symbolic strike, but a revealing one. 

Why have all recent US presidents been obsessed with Venezuela – Bush, Biden, and Obama as well as Trump? Trump claims Venezuela is centrally involved in drug trafficking, for which there is no evidence other than Washington’s insistence on the role of the so-called Cartel de los Soles, a shadowy group of military within the government involved with criminals and the drug cartels.The allegation has now been dropped, without explanation.The main drug routes into the US are in fact along the Pacific coast through Mexico and Central America. The over 100 people killed in the bombing of fishing boats in the Caribbean were minor figures in the local trade in marijuana. They certainly didn’t merit sending the world’s largest aircraft carrier to the Caribbean. But it provided cover for the attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro, which escaped any kind of oversight from Congress or Senate because it was defined as a policing operation, which, unlike an act of military aggression, needs no congressional approval.

Oil and politics

There are two main explanations for the Venezuelan incursion. One is oil. Venezuela’s reserves are 17% of the world’s oil. It is ‘heavy’, requiring refining which is complex and expensive. The shale oil that makes up the US’s main supply of oil is expensive and difficult to collect, but the cost of  refining Venezuelan oil, where the minimum wage is less than a dollar, was and will be a fraction of the cost in the U.S. That is one reason why all the main oil multinationals invested there. When it became necessary to update and modernise the technology in 1975, Venezuela’s oil was ‘nationalised’ – shifting the burden of re-investment onto Venezuela while the profits still flowed north. The second reason is political. Hugo Chávez, a military officer from a poor background, was elected president in 1998. His programme promised a genuine nationalisation of the country’s oil reserves, shifting the income from oil exports to the creation of social programmes to benefit the poor and working class of the country. These programmes, or Missions as they were called, created a national medical service, an educational system open to all and a housing programme. The new Bolivarian Constitution promised a participatory democracy, releasing a ‘pink tide’ inspired by Chávez’s programme, for example in Bolivia and Ecuador, aimed at controlling the extractive industries – oil, gas, copper, and water – and reclaiming their revenues.

Attacking Chavismo

For global capital this was intolerable; as soon as Chávez was elected, the bourgeoisie and its imperial allies set about sabotaging the Bolivarian process. But again and again they failed in the face of the massive popular support Chávez enjoyed. In 2002 the business sector and sections of the military kidnapped Chávez until tens of thousands of poor Venezuelans came down from their barrios in the hills, surrounded the presidential palace and freed their president. The event is recorded in a brilliant documentary made by two Irish film makers, The revolution will not be televised.

It was not a revolution but it did give the working class and poor a taste of what it was like to exercise their own collective power. The promise of participatory democracy in which the working classes would control their own destiny won the enthusiastic support of the majority of the population as they had so long been denied access to their own resources.The basis of Chávez’s Bolivarian programme was national independence and sovereignty, the creation of a progressive nation-state and an authentic participatory democracy which he called Socialism of the 21st Century. 

Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas as well as key minerals, like coltan, lithium and vanadium, not to mention gold. The promise of Chavismo, to break the stranglehold of global capital, seemed possible in Chávez’s early days, when oil prices hit an unprecedented high. It would have been a moment to open real possibilities of an alternative route to national independence, to develop new industries and investment strategies. But this would have meant breaking the dependence on the world market, producing for need rather than for the highest profit. The oil revenues could have funded the diversification of Venezuela’s economy and enabled it to escape the straitjacket of dependence on extractive economies and world commodity prices, over which the producing countries had no control.

Trump’s Agenda

Twenty five years later that reality is driven home by Trump’s invasion and his assertion that ‘we’re going to take back the oil stolen from us’, as if Venezuela’s resources were not the property of its people. Trump has exposed what imperialism means, as is set out in his National Security Strategy of November last year. This is openly declared as the pursuit of the American national interest whatever the cost, seizing monopoly control of the oil and of the minerals that drive industry and the new technology. In 2026 that means confronting his competitors, principally China, which has established its own imperialist project with investments on a massive scale in Africa and Latin America, including Venezuela and which could win the race for new technologies, challenging US domination.  

Trump quotes the Monroe Doctrine, the 19th century declaration that the western hemisphere belonged to America. As Monroe put it then, the old empires, Spain and Britain must now give way to the ‘manifest destiny’ of the United States to run and control half the planet. In Trump’s version, the seizure of assets and raw materials  will extend beyond the Americas, taking Latin America as its backyard and Greenland for its oil and rare earth minerals. 

The US has always been driven by its military power at the service of capital. Since the beginning of the 20th century it has repeatedly invaded the southern continent,  from supporting a military coup in Guatemala against the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz on behalf of the United Fruit Company, to the imposition of vicious military regimes in Argentina and Brazil in the sixties, to the destruction of the government of Allende in Chile in 1973. In Venezuela, Trump’s imperial ambitions have led him to assume direct control. But in every case the objective is the control of the raw materials that fuels industrial production and an expanding global capitalism. 

What began with the kidnapping of Maduro may prove to be the first step in the battle for monopoly control of these resources. The attack on Venezuela is global capital’s revenge on the programme of Chávez and the political current he represented; his socialism of the 21st century interfered with the free movement of capital across the globe.  

World leaders have called for a recognition of international law and negotiation through the United Nations. Trump and Netanyahu gave their answer in Gaza. The kidnapping of a sitting president is specifically forbidden in international  law but Maduro is in handcuffs in court faced with charges of drug and arms trafficking with no proof. Trump and his ideological backers, like the Heritage Foundation and the Foro de Madrid, have made it clear that, in his New American century, ruthless violence, naked self-interest and competition between capitals will be the forces that shape the world – and there will be no quarter given. Genocide has become a legitimate instrument of conquest and any notion of international law is powerless wherever there are profits to be carved out by extreme exploitation.

Read more of our coverage on Venezuela: ‘Venezuela after 3 January‘ and ‘Imperial machinations, oil and the rebirth of the Monroe Doctrine‘