CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Politics of Purity and the War on Venezuela

Oriana points through her living room window at the bombing site where President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores were abducted, January 2026. Photograph by Celina della Croce.

In mid-January, a young Venezuelan mother named Oriana invited me into her home in Ciudad Tiuna, a government-built housing project with thousands of apartments and roughly 20,000 residents. With her five- and twelve- year-old sons in the other room, she pointed through the window at the charred earth where the United States military had abducted President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores two weeks earlier. A few buildings down, Oriana’s neighbor showed me the path where a bullet had entered through the bedroom window, ricocheted off the wall, and pierced a dresser, a pair of shoes, and a towel next to her bed. The exterior and interior walls of the building, too, were pierced with bullets. So was the nearby primary school that Oriana’s son attends.

Children in a playground in Ciudad Tiuna, January 2026. Photograph by Celina della Croce.

Since the January 3 assault, rumors and accusations have spread like wildfire across the globe. On the evening of January 3, one of my neighbors in Queens, New York – who knew I was in Venezuela at the time – sent me a screenshot of a Tweet that had been seen by 4.3 million people alleging that “the so called ‘capture’ of Maduro was a negotiated deal between Maduro and US for an agreed exit strategy. …  Maduro likely already has purchased property in Dubai to retire to.” Last month, an attendee of an event in Brooklyn, New York – not far from where Maduro and Flores sit in prison – quipped, like many, that the country’s leadership has sold out since January 3 and asked somewhat rhetorically, why Venezuelans weren’t “fighting back”.

When I was invited to Venezuela for an assembly for peace in December, a friend of mine – a photographer – asked if I might have room in my suitcase to bring him a pair of combat pants. He, like many Venezuelans, had begun civic-military training exercises in the build-up to the bombing, in which Trump’s administration killed 150 fisherpeople, seized Venezuelan oil tankers, and repeatedly threatened and carried out acts aggression of against Venezuela. When I arrived in Caracas and caught up with a member of a commune in the neighborhood 23 de Enero (an economist by trade), he had a pistol tucked into his waistband: he was headed straight to his volunteer patrol shift after our conversation, preparing for the possibility of an invasion at any moment.

The idea that Venezuelans have given up or are not “real” revolutionaries is easy to profess from an armchair in the imperial core (as Vijay Prashad, Roxanne Dunbar Ortíz, and others reminded us in “A letter to intellectuals who deride revolutions in........

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