Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves in the world – a fact that alone explains the intensity of US attention toward it. Since the early 19th century, under the pretext of protecting Latin America trom European intervention, Washington has asserted a permanent claim of dominance over this continent, treating it as its strategic backyard.
Across two centuries, this approach has been updated but never abandoned: from coups and proxy wars to embargoes, sanctions, and covert destabilisation campaigns, the United States has repeatedly intervened to shape the region’s politics in line with its own economic interests.
Today, this approach finds its clearest expression in the deployment of a US fleet in the Caribbean. This escalation builds on an already vast network of military dominance: the Pentagon maintains dozens of bases and installations across Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Honduras, and Puerto Rico, alongside a renewed presence near the Panama Canal and ongoing efforts to extend cooperation to Brazil and Argentina. These are not defensive measures but the material geography of imperialist control: a cartography of intimidation designed to guarantee markets and resources, and ensure political obedience.
At the same time, the ideological front advances through the fabrication of heroes and villains. The recent Nobel nomination for Corina Machado, a right-wing figure openly aligned with US interests, illustrates how moral rhetoric is mobilised to give a human-rights gloss to the imperialist machinery of regime change.
The demonisation of Maduro as a narco-terrorist, capped by a $50 million bounty, is the same playbook in action. By criminalising the adversaries and rewarding their opponents, Washington manufactures a legal-moral framework to justify economic pressure and military escalation. It is a rehearsal perfected over decades, from Panama to Iraq, where criminal labels and headlines precede and ‘legitimate’ direct interference.
The core of this issue is obviously not ideological but economic. Latin America remains a key supplier of oil, lithium, copper, and other strategic resources essential to the global energy transition. The United States is determined to reconquer this central reservoir of raw materials and influence, countering both China’s investments and attempts by the Latin American national bourgeoisies to reduce their dependencies. As always, what is framed as defending democracy is, in truth, the struggle to re-establish imperialist control.
Yet those hailed as an alternative – first and foremost the BRICS bloc – are doing nothing to challenge this dynamic. Several left-leaning Latin American governments have proved equally complicit: Colombia’s Petro, on one hand, limits himself to calling Washington’s escalation ‘the worst mistake’, while Brazil’s Lula, while criticising the US, has gone as far as sending 10,000 troops to the Venezuelan border ‘for exercise’. In practice, trading, negotiating, and even collaborating with the US continue as if nothing were happening.
This is not accidental. As capitalist and therefore imperialist powers, these states act in accordance with the interests of their own bourgeoisie. The logic of accumulation recognises no borders: every state that reproduces capitalist relations ultimately works to secure protits for its ruling class, not liberation for its people – and even less for those beyond its frontiers.
It is precisely from this understanding that our position on Venezuela follows. Rejecting US imperialism does not mean endorsing Maduro or the current Venezuelan government. He, like his predecessor Chavez, embodies a form of radical social democracy that large parts of the international communist movement have mistakenly romanticised during the long period of disorientation following the counter-revolution in the USSR. These governments have not broken with capitalism or imperialism; they have simply managed them in the interests of their own national bourgeoisie, preserving exploitation under patriotic colours.
For this reason, our opposition to US escalation is not a defence of the Venezuelan state, but a stand rooted in a principled commitment to fight imperialism in all its forms, shapes, and colours. While a deeper and more honest reassessment of the entire Bolivarian cycle is more necessary than ever, we nonetheless categorically oppose the U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean – a blatant act of aggression aimed at tightening Washington’s imperialist grip over Latin America.