Maduro’s seizure is intended to intimidate every Latin American government
Make no mistake—the United States’ pirate raid on Venezuela to seize and imprison president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores is huge.
Venezuela is a completely different proposition from Grenada and Panama, the last two states in the Americas invaded by the US.
Grenada is a small Caribbean island, and Panama is a narrow strip of land that the US carved out of Colombia at the beginning of the 20th century.
But Venezuela is a large Latin American country that won its independence from Spain in an epic transcontinental struggle led by Simon Bolivar “The Liberator” in the early 19th century.
After a long history of subordination first to British, then to US imperialism, Venezuela led the formation of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) in 1960.
Opec aimed to wrest control of oil production from the powerful cartel of Western firms known as the “Seven Sisters”.
Under Hugo Chavez, between 1999 and 2013, Venezuela defied Washington and sought “21st century socialism”.
Maduro buried Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution, but Donald Trump and his Cuban-American secretary of state Marco Rubio aim to wipe out Latin America’s history of resistance to imperialism.
Last Saturday’s raid shows that we need to take very seriously Trump’s National Security Strategy.
This document affirms the strategic priority that, as Trump put it last Saturday, “US dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again”.
“We want a hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion” and that “supports critical supply chains—and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations”.
The US has earmarked the region as a key source of raw materials and manufacturing goods in the global inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and China.
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. Trump has pledged to reverse Venezuela’s 1976 nationalisation of oil, saying, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in.”
As the analyst Anusar Farooqui tweeted, “Trump just trebled down on defending the fossil order.”
No doubt he also welcomes any distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Maduro’s seizure is intended to intimidate every Latin American government. Trump has explicitly threatened the presidents of Mexico and Colombia. If I were the Cuban president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, I would be particularly worried.
But Trump’s menaces extend more broadly. Never has the pathetic weakness of European imperialism been more clearly exposed than in the way its rulers fell over themselves to welcome Maduro’s removal.
But the bell tolls for Europe too. Who will now bet against a US seizure of Greenland?
None of this means that Trump’s pledge to “rule” Venezuela will be easy.
The US raid was technically well executed. But the heavily equipped Venezuelan armed forces seem to have put up very little resistance.
This no doubt says a lot about Maduro’s lack of popular support. There’s growing evidence that Trump cut a deal to remove Maduro with elements in the regime. This is now headed up by vice president Delcy Rodriguez. Trump and Rubio have both said they’re open to working with her.
Keeping the regime makes a certain amount of sense. The decision by the US in Iraq to dissolve Saddam Hussein’s army and sack all members of the ruling Ba’ath party was an step towards the country’s implosion.
Nevertheless, whatever deals that have been struck to get rid of Maduro can easily unravel under the pressure of Trump’s demands for Venezuela’s resources and of internal political and social conflicts.
All this, however, is for the future. We have been exposed to a particularly brutal lesson in the realities of power in a capitalist system grappling with multiple crises.
Liberal news outlets like Le Monde in France are now complaining in almost Marxist language about “the return of predatory US imperialism”.
But Trump’s turn to brute coercion is a response to the slipping away of US hegemony. It promises a further descent into chaos.
The only answer can come from below—from the further development of mass anti-imperialist movements like the huge movement for Palestine.
