The US Is Acting Like a Rogue State in Venezuela

After a series of strikes in the last few days, and more than two decades of attempted coups (in 2002, 2019, and 2020), warfare, sanctions, and a “Maximum Pressure Campaign,” the United States has just toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Maduro and his wife are standing trial for “narco-terrorism” charges, a cover to extend the War on Terror without congressional authorization, in New York, with members of his security team, along with several civilians, dead.

Far-right hardliner María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition who has longstanding ties to the White House and even went on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast to justify a coup based on oil wealth, was expected to be put in power. She promised to implement a vision of deep privatization under “Popular Capitalism,” modeled on Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan. However, President Donald Trump has said she “doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country,” with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez assuming the presidency, governing alongside the cabinet members remaining alive. With a CIA-imposed power vacuum and so many lingering questions, it is unclear who will govern in the near future.

In a sweeping slash, the coup took the air out of the revolutionary fervor that had carried the spirit of the Venezuelan free people since Simón Bolívar’s stunning victory against the Spanish in New Granada in 1811.

The US is now a mafia state, where oligarchs and extremists run foreign policy.

This coup is also a nod to the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, named after Reagan’s United Nations Ambassador and close foreign policy adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who decreed that the US should support right-wing authoritarian or fascist regimes over democratically elected left-wing governments so long as they remain pro-capitalist and geopolitically aligned with Washington.

Meanwhile, Machado’s family were oligarchs, she helped briefly put an oligarch into power through a coup against Chávez in 2002, and she is still expected to govern following the edicts of the American oligarchical class.

The 48-hour 2002 coup, it is worth mentioning, produced the Carmona Decree, which dissolved the National Assembly, suspended the Constitution, purged democratic institutions, and appointed an oligarch-dictator, Pedro Carmona, openly revealing the anti-democratic nature of Venezuela’s far-right opposition when backed by Washington. It was never a fight for democracy and freedom, then or now.

The Trump administration just committed one of the greatest crimes in its history, in violation of democracy, sovereignty, and international laws, including Articles 1 and 2 of the Charter of the United Nations (which, by the way, was written primarily by the United States). This is a regime, not a democracy, led by a war president.

This is not about drugs; the US has created many of the very drug cartels it is fighting, while the president embraces and pardons drug traffickers like former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in a US court of helping traffic more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, killing more Americans than on 9/11.

This coup, and the preceding drone strikes, were likely directed by the same CIA that, during the Cold War, worked directly with drug traffickers to advance US geopolitical goals, most infamously facilitating the flow of narcotics through Los Angeles, devastating Black communities with heroin and crack, while the proceeds were used to arm the Contras in Nicaragua, who committed atrocious war crimes.

It was also the same CIA that helped prop up the brutal far-right paramilitaries in Colombia, borne out of a war against left-wing guerrillas, paramilitaries which are now among the largest cocaine traffickers on Earth and committed various crimes against humanity including the False Positives Scandal.

There is no evidence for any of the claims the administration has been making on its drug strikes, and all evidence points to the dead being fishermen, blown up in international waters, another war crime. Even if they were traffickers, Trump has cajoled traffickers who kiss the ring and add to his family's billions.

It would have taken the small motorboats at least 10 refuelings to get to US shores; they were never going to the US. And should pharmaceutical company CEOs, or street-drug peddlers, get killed by missiles in Manhattan? This is ridiculous on its face.

This coup is also the death blow to the liberal order the US helped create with the Allies after the Second World War.

The administration is claiming that everyone is celebrating this coup, but support for this war is nil, both among Americans and Venezuelans. Western media coverage has overwhelmingly elevated Venezuelans who support the US-backed coup not because they are representative, but because they are disproportionately wealthy, urban, English-speaking, and geographically accessible to foreign journalists—often living in elite neighborhoods or abroad—while Chavismo’s base is concentrated in marginalized urban peripheries, rural zones, factories, and barrios that Western reporters rarely enter or even attempt to understand. Highlighting their support also helps manufacture support for the coup in the name of “balance,” while serving the corporate interests that fund most of Western media.

Moreover, following Covid-19, Venezuela'a economy, thanks to the relaxation of sanctions, had been faring better, while most of the population, though, yes, governed by a brutal dictatorship, were given public healthcare, education, literacy, roads, transportation, medicine, and food baskets, thanks to left-wing reforms (called Misiones).

The US is about to put in another brutal dictatorship, but one that cuts all these programs, selling the country away to American capitalists while obnoxiously screaming about freedom and democracy. When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was arguing that countries in “our hemisphere” can’t be governed by "hostile regimes" or trade with US adversaries (a line that has been repeated by others in the administration), he was revealing that this isn’t actually about self-government or democracy.

Washington is refusing to acknowledge that it helped produce Venezuela’s highly authoritarian “Apertura” (Opening) era, following Venezuela’s discoveries of vast oil reserves, where the overwhelming majority of the resulting wealth was given to the very rich and Western energy companies. Those protesting were brutally repressed, jailed, tortured, or killed. It is against the backdrop of this inequality and repression that Hugo Chávez was elected. Chávez was a reaction, and the US, through this coup, is ensuring a repeat of those very conditions.

Toppling Maduro is about natural resources, of which Venezuela has trillions of dollars worth, and geopolitical dominance, in a region where US “adversaries” are increasingly popular. There is a strong indication that Cuba might be next, something that Marco Rubio has wanted for a very long time. Trump has already threatened Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and others.

This kind of arm-flexing destroys any kind of rules or credibility around sovereignty and democracy. Now, when the Western democracies claim to oppose Israel, Russia, or China’s wars of civilizational rejuvenation, whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or Taiwan, their moral and legal complaints will be utterly and completely indefensible.

I'm sure the military-industrial complex is elated at its added power and wealth, which will, just like in Iraq, win out on trillions of dollars of contracts and stock valuation. The chaos, suffering, and violence about to unfold will be a reminder of why coups are so destructive. Whoever celebrates this should own whatever is coming.

The US is now a mafia state, where oligarchs and extremists run foreign policy, much like Russia and Iran. Companies and billionaires, not the people, determine US foreign policy interests.

This coup is also the death blow to the liberal order the US helped create with the Allies after the Second World War. The US is handing a victory over to the very forces it claims to topple; it is just too short-sighted to know it yet.

There are hundreds of thousands of dissenting troops, guerrillas, cartels, colectivos, and Chavistas, whose wealth and power depended on this government. Expect blowback soon, and then inhumane repression by occupying forces.

Also expect goalpost-moving; make them own it, and never let them move it. The media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, New York Post, and all the right-wing imperial propaganda mills parading as journalists, have attempted to manufacture consent for this war. They have repeated the Trump regime’s propaganda, unchallenged, conflating neutrality for objectivity.

CNN’s Erin Burnett, whose husband’s Citigroup stock is up almost 5% since the coup, said that Venezuela’s 30 million people were now “owned by the United States.” That’s the quality of supposedly critical media in the United States at the moment.

Meanwhile, CBS News’ Maggie Brennan even pressed Marco Rubio on whether the socialist regime was really gone, given that they only took out Maduro (making Rubio seem like the dove, in that scenario). On far-right media, including Fox News, pundits have casually floated more US interventions for natural resources, claimed that Latin America “belongs to the United States,” argued for the US to have “subordinate vassals,” and mentioned using Venezuela as a prison and labor colony.

These outlets ran multiple stories running cover for the Trump administration's crimes, or platformed "experts" backed by oil and defense companies, and elevated “dissidents”—many of whom come from the old oligarchical families, the same whose wealth was redistributed to the poor under Chavismo, indistinguishable from the Cuban dissidents from the Batista era who helped launder support for the Bay of Pigs invasion—repeatedly supporting crimes against humanity.

The same can be said of supposedly nonpartisan think tanks that, backed by money from energy companies and defense contractors, have run favorable “analyses” of US coups in Latin America and platformed corrupt Latin American leaders whitewashing US crimes. They are, now and forever, stenographers of power.

They will attempt to spin the motives, intentions, and consequences of this horrific coup and conveniently throw them onto scapegoats. We should not let them. Whenever anyone tries to spin this war, remember this context.