A mural of Hugo Chávez in Mérida city. Image Wikipedia.

On January 3rd, the United States invaded and bombed Venezuela and abducted President Maduro and First Lady Flores. This violent act of imperialist aggression by the Trump regime is a continuation of over two decades of hybrid warfare aimed at suppressing the Bolivarian Revolution. Over the past months, the US has been escalating aggression against Venezuela, but this abduction is the culmination of over two decades of imperialist war. In fact, it was predicted 20 years ago this year by Hugo Chávez, the first president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, at an address to the UN General Assembly.

In 2006, in what became one of his most iconic speeches, Hugo Chávez said:

“The government of the United States doesn’t want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. It wants peace. But what’s happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What’s happening? What’s happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela — new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?”

Chávez could have made this exact speech today, last year, or really any time in the past two decades. His words are so apt for today because US foreign policy has not changed. It is the same violent maintenance and exertion of its hegemony and deadly system of exploitation and hegemony, no matter if orchestrated in blue or red. This is what we have been seeing with Israel’s genocide in Gaza, attacks on Lebanon and Yemen, regime change in Syria, threats and attacks on Iran, suffocation of Cuba, provocations and war preparation against China, proxy war in Ukraine, and continued regime change attempts against Venezuela. Chávez’s words will remain timeless as long as US imperialism remains intact and the smell of sulfur remains.

Since 1998, with the election of the revolutionary leader Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution, the United States has been hellbent on overthrowing the government of Venezuela. Before Chávez, American companies ran wild in Venezuela, extracting and exploiting natural resources and labor. In the 1980s, Venezuela adopted US-backed neoliberal reforms, which emphasized an open oil market, deregulation, and privatization, which accumulated huge profits for US companies at the expense of the Venezuelan people. This is the Venezuela that the United States wants; in fact, this is the US’s modus operandi across Latin America.

Today, the media class is doubling down on its line of Venezuela’s fall from grace as the richest country in Latin America. This regime change propaganda has been plastered across media platforms, like CBS’s 60 Minutes, to manufacture consent for US regime change operations, impending invasion, and for continued US war crimes against small boats in the Caribbean.

Coincidentally erased from these media narratives are the impacts of suffocation with US-led sanctions, which have slashed Venezuela’s oil revenues by 213% between January 2017 and December 2024. This amounts to $77 million in losses every single day. These unilateral coercive measures are a form of warfare aimed at impoverishing the Venezuelan people, blaming the Bolivarian Revolution for hardships, and triggering regime change from utter suffering.

It is shameful, though unsurprising given these are the same media outlets justifying US-Israeli genocide, to peddle this lie, which purposefully erases the true history of neoliberal Venezuela. In this era, romanticized by these imperialist mouthpieces as a haven to which they want Venezuela to return, just 20% of the Venezuelan population was benefiting from oil wealth, while the other 80% suffered from poverty. Also erased from these narratives are the horrors of IMF austerity, which overnight locked out millions of people from basic necessities and essential services, leading to Caracazo, an uprising of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans opposing these neoliberal reforms. It is convenient for 60 Minutes and others to erase the deaths of over 3,000 people from the military crush of these protests, just as it is to remove all traces of the neoliberal crisis that the US enforced on the country. But despite attempts, they cannot redact how the horrific neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s brought about the popular uprising led by Commandante Hugo Chávez, which eventually led to his successful election as president in 1998.

While Chávez’s victory did not immediately alert Washington, and the Clinton administration adopted a “wait and see” policy, in the years following, alarms certainly began to ring. Chávez’s openly anti-imperialist politik, including selling oil to Cuba and supporting anti-imperialist resistance and governments, and the imposition of Venezuela’s sovereignty, quickly made US politicians, oil tycoons, and those with stakes in the US empire tremble.

Sabotage Made in the White House (2001-4)

With the arrival of Bush in the White House in 2001, US policy towards Venezuela became more overtly aggressive, with Chávez as the target fresh from re-election victory. This shift was deepened in response to Chávez’s opposition to Bush’s so-called “war on terror” and refusal to join the “coalition of the willing, as well as Venezuela’s escalating assertion of its oil sovereignty. As the US escalated attacks across Afghanistan and Iraq, Chávez criticized and called out the terror and violence the US imposed across the world and domestically. Chávez’s bold opposition to US terror was a substantial threat to the imperialist coalition that sought to impose its violent will on the peoples of West Asia. In response, the US accelerated its hybrid warfare from a campaign of pressure and isolation to regime change.

This came to a head in 2002, when the US backed and coordinated right-wing elites........

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