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global south
Venezuela and the Return of Empire
The global rallying cry of the Global South should, by now, be unmistakable. Down with imperialism: not as a slogan of nostalgia, but as a political necessity.
Jan 08, 2026
The seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by the United States marks a dangerous moment in international politics. A sitting head of state was forcibly removed from his country, flown to the United States, and placed on trial under American law. Washington has described this as justice. Under international law, it is an abduction.
President Donald Trump openly justified the attack by invoking the Monroe Doctrine, a 19th-century policy that treats Latin America as the United States’ exclusive sphere of influence. Trump went further, saying the doctrine had been “updated” and renamed, declaring that the United States would “run” Venezuela until it approved a political transition. He also made clear that American oil companies would move in to control Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world.
This was not hidden. It was stated plainly.
What is happening in Venezuela is not new. It follows a long and well-documented pattern. Latin America has repeatedly been subjected to US-backed coups, regime change operations, and military interventions, all justified under shifting narratives of freedom, security, or democracy.
Without unified voices of resistance, the unshackled advance of empire will continue, reshaping borders, governments, and lives at will.
From the overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 to the CIA-backed coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973, the region carries the weight of this history. The United States supported military dictatorships across Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala, governments responsible for mass killings, torture, and disappearances. It trained and funded armed groups like the Contras in Nicaragua, whose violence devastated civilian populations. The Monroe Doctrine has always meant one thing in practice: Latin America’s sovereignty is conditional.
Trump’s actions in Venezuela are simply a continuation of this logic.
As expected, Venezuela has now faced the full might of imperial power. Maduro sits in a US courtroom, while American oil companies prepare to rake in profits from the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. And the Global South remains divided and fragmented, offering no unequivocal, unified defense of Venezuelan sovereignty.
We have seen this paralysis before. We have been watching it unfold in Gaza for the past three years. There, too, a neocolonial imperialist order operates with impunity—bombing hospitals, leveling neighborhoods, killing thousands of children while invoking the rhetoric of security and self-defense. And there, too, the response has been fractured. Murmurs of resistance emerge, fragile and disconnected: a statement here, a protest there. Meanwhile, the so-called civilized West offers apathy at best. Even the peoples of the Global South, themselves shaped by histories of colonization and plunder, often look on in exhausted silence.
But is there anything truly new about Venezuela? Have we forgotten Iraq and Afghanistan—empire’s forever wars, launched on lies? Have we forgotten Libya, Syria, or the endless cycle of coups and regime-change operations that have defined Washington’s relationship with Latin America, its so-called backyard? The method remains the same: Violence exercised without consequence, legality bent to power, sovereignty treated as conditional.
What has changed is not the Empire but the resistance. There are no Che Guevaras, no Castros, no Chávezes today with the moral gravity to name imperialism for what it is, without apology or ambiguity. There are no leaders alive who dare to raise, unfiltered, the cry of resistance against empire. Instead, what we increasingly see are local elites who serve as intermediaries of domination, eager to trade sovereignty for approval, legitimacy, or personal gain. Nations are bartered away for access, status, and survival within an imperial order they dare not challenge.
Those who still speak out are swiftly disciplined. The Empire’s media brands them radicals, extremists, pariahs unfit for polite conversation, unworthy of seats at the tables of “civilization” and “progress.” They are sanctioned, silenced, or erased. And the rest? Hollowed out by petty self-interest and political cowardice.
In my own country, we carry a long and inglorious tradition of Napoleonic generals and compliant elites serving foreign empires—a tradition that has not ended, only adapted.
Today it is Gaza and Venezuela. Tomorrow it may be Iran. And one day, inevitably, it will be someone else—perhaps even us. This is how empire advances. Each violation normalizes the next. Each kidnapping, bombing, or occupation becomes the justification for another.
The global rallying cry of the Global South should, by now, be unmistakable. Down with imperialism: not as a slogan of nostalgia, but as a political necessity. Without unified voices of resistance, the unshackled advance of empire will continue, reshaping borders, governments, and lives at will.
The question is no longer whether the imperial order is collapsing. It is whether, in a fractured and conflict-ridden multipolar world, the victims of empire can overcome their divisions long enough to build something better.
And that question remains unanswered.
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US Starts 2026 by Bombing Venezuela and Kidnapping Its President
The intervention machine is rigging the world for US big business interests, at the price of Global South dignity and agency.
Jan 04, 2026
With its violent military intervention into Venezuela—a country where I once lived—the US has begun this year with entitled and undisguised imperialism. The unapologetic kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and of Celia Flores (not just a wife as the media refers to her, but also former head of the National Assembly) and killing of at least 40 Venezuelans aims to cement and normalize the US standard operating procedure for international relations as violence and control. It will take Venezuela's oil and other crucial minerals, and to hell with Global South self-determination, agency, and ownership.
I remember when I lived in Venezuela, and we talked about what we would do if the US attacked. We were already facing other kinds of attacks, including basic food shortages orchestrated by private companies, destabilization attempts, right-wing violence, and English-language mainstream media lies. The conversation particularly came up around elections, when the shortages and destabilization typically increased, and US attacks felt less hypothetical.
Even then, though, we would balance the very real and long history of violent US interventions in Latin America with skepticism. How could they kill innocent people and bomb what felt like to me the closest thing to paradise? Venezuela was never a utopia; there were mistakes and much work to do, but the Andean mountains were intensely green, the coastal waters a peaceful turquoise, the nights full of fairy fog that you could see drifting down the streets. The days were full of the laughter of the tiny children I taught through our participatory education project. We solved our own local problems as an organized community, turned empty lots into community gardens, and there was always political debate and high levels of political literacy. People knew their constitution, often by heart, knew the laws, and the news. Venezuelans had an infinite urge to dance, even on moving buses or after two-day long meetings. How could anyone consider destroying that world? It felt inconceivable. It didn't make sense, and it still doesn't.
Yet we all know that beautiful Gaza, with its beaches, shops, delicious zaatar bread, hospitals, books, and resilient people, has been turned into rubble and whole families wiped out. The US-led destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq ruined people, communities and saw key cultural and archaeological sites irreparably damaged, and artifacts looted. I live in Mexico now, and here alone, the US has used NAFTA and the so-called "War on Drugs" to militarize this beautiful country and systematically turn it into a vast grave (with 131,000 forced disappearances) and into an obedient neoliberal production line for nearshoring US companies. So, in Venezuela, I guess we should have been less skeptical. Friends there messaged me on Saturday in shock, their ears ringing from the sounds of bombs. New Year's weekend wasn't meant to be this.
However, throughout 2025, the US had asserted itself more openly as global police chief at the service of big business. It "negotiated" (aka pressured) a "ceasefire" in the Democratic Republic of Congo which would give it access to the country's highly sought-after tech minerals and metals. It has supported Israel's genocide in Gaza, bombed Nigeria, and killed Venezuelans with complete impunity. It closed its borders to refugees in violation of international law, and breached migrant and human rights within its own borders. It also bombed Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia. It carried out or was partner to 622 overseas bombings in total, and also intervened in manipulative ways, such as Trump's comments days before the Honduran election in November that led to the victory of the right-wing candidate he backed, or the US role in the international "Gang Suppression Force" in Haiti.
While global institutions like the International Criminal Court and the United Nations have demonstrated their ineffectiveness at doing anything at all about the illegal US sanctions against Cuba, the genocide in Gaza, or climate destruction, Trump has been able to fortify the US as a force that actually decides international affairs.
In his press conference Saturday, Trump said the US would be selling Venezuelan oil. Though he laid the groundwork for the military intervention into Venezuela with evidence-free talk of drug cartels and "narcoterrorists"—murdering more than 100 people in cold blood on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific—most people knew this was always about regaining control over the country with the largest known oil reserves. However, Venezuela also represents defiance. The US has sanctioned the country for such behavior for over a decade, killing or contributing to the deaths of over 40,000 people in 2017–18 alone.
The US doesn't just treat the Global South as a resource buffet. In order to secure its access to natural resources, it wants the governments of less powerful nations at its beck and call. Venezuela, especially during the 2010s and through initiatives like CELAC, was playing a role of uniting Latin America against such dominance and towards independence and social and economic alternatives.
The bombing of Venezuela, beyond the oil itself, is about US control over Latin America and part of a right-wing pushback against social movements, grassroots empowerment, and alternatives to violent capitalism. Beyond Bukele in El Salvador and Milei in Argentina, in 2025 the right wing also won in Bolivia, Honduras, and Chile. With Trump's backing, these "leaders" are furthering racist, homophobic, sexist, and privatization agendas.
Normalizing empire and global human rights violations
Beyond the horrific event itself, the events of January 3 are part of a move towards normalizing a global state of danger, insecurity, human rights abuses, and disregard for international law. It does not matter what anyone thinks of Maduro; whether he won the 2025 election is an important discussion for another place and time. The US has no right to determine the heads of other countries. It wants to be, but is not the world boss, and beyond that, has no moral standing to decide or control anything.
But Saturday's move, as a continuation of US policy in 2025, upholds military intervention as a solution to problems. It is a signal to wayward countries to obey. Such imperialism not only kills people, in the long term it perpetuates racist tropes of Global South countries that can't run themselves, while legitimizing US- and Euro-centrisim that stipulates their monopoly on wisdom and democracy. Imperialism scares its victims into silence and submission and cements a global apartheid dynamic where some regions are politically and financially controlled, subjected to unlivable wages and to resource robbery. Through debt systems and trade and income inequalities, rich countries have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960.
The intervention machine is rigging the world for US big business interests, at the price of Global South dignity and agency. For invaded and intervened countries, there are hidden impacts as well; lower self-worth and an unsubstantiated belief that one's education, art, and inventions are inferior, disillusion with organizing and movements, and often, a need to migrate that is then met with rejection by those forces causing that need—as of course is the case with the US and Venezuela.
The Venezuelan people are not a threat. The country doesn't even produce or traffic significant amounts of illicit drugs. In reality, much of the cruelty and harm globally is coming from the US. The Trump government and the US elites are the ones committing human rights violations, shirking democracy by orchestrating coups like the one on Saturday morning, violating international law and destroying moral decency with the extrajudicial killing of people in Venezuelan boats under the pretext of opposing drug trafficking. With Saturday's attack, the US furthers its and Israel's impunity for war crimes, abuses, and violations.Keep ReadingShow Less
Western Hypocrisy and the Gaza Death Toll
The West serves as the simultaneous judge and executioner, the honest researcher and the weapons manufacturer, the violator and the self-appointed defender of human rights.
Dec 06, 2025
First, let’s dissect this puzzle.
On February 29, 2024, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent shockwaves when he informed lawmakers in the House Armed Services Committee that over 25,000 Palestinian women and children had been killed by Israel in Gaza up to that date. Austin, the military chief of the Biden administration, delivered a fact that immediately subverted his own government’s rhetoric.
The announcement was shocking for two main reasons. First, Austin himself had orchestrated the relentless flow of US arms to Israel, directly enabling the very campaign that liquidated those innocent people. Second, the figure provided was noticeably higher than the casualty tally reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza for the same period—22,000 women and children in the first 146 days of the war.
The crux of the contradiction, however, is that Austin’s detailed account of the US-funded Israeli atrocities in Gaza directly subverted the official narrative regularly disseminated by the White House.
The rest of us in the Global South must not simply yield to the role of the victim, whose lives are taken but precisely counted.
In fact, as early as October 25, 2023—barely two weeks into the war—President Joe Biden himself began doubting the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s death toll estimates. "(I have) no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using," he flatly declared.
Naturally, Austin's declaration neither eroded his unwavering endorsement of Israel nor softened Biden’s patronizing attitude toward the Palestinians. To the contrary, US military and political backing for Israel surged exponentially after that congressional hearing. US military and financial support for the Israeli genocide during the Biden administration in the first year of the war is estimated to be at least $17.9 billion.
These apparent contradictions, however, are not inconsistencies at all, but a perfectly calibrated, deliberate policy. Historically, this approach grants the US license to consistently flout its own declared principles. Iraq was invaded, at a horrific cost of life and societal destruction, under the banner of "good intentions": democracy, human rights, and the like. Afghanistan's protracted agony of war and instability endured for two decades in the name of fighting terror, exporting democracy, and women's rights.
The operational part of the equation satisfies military and political strategists. Meanwhile, the hollow rhetoric of democracy and human rights keeps intellectuals, both on the right and the left, mired in a protracted, perpetually unproductive debate that serves to conceal rather than influence policy.
While the US government may have perfected the craft of deliberate contradictions, it is not the original architect. In modern history, this phenomenon has been owned almost entirely by the West: Colonialism was advanced as a solution to slavery, and forced conversions were brazenly justified as civilizing missions.
The West's stance on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, however, offers the most blatant and current example of this deliberate contradiction. A concise examination of Germany's conduct in the last two years suffices to illustrate the point.
Germany is the world's second-largest supplier of weapons to Israel, after the US. Not only did it refuse to accept the genocide definition recognized by many countries, and eventually by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but it also fought ferociously to shield Israel from the mere accusation.
Domestically, it brutally suppressed pro-Palestinian protests, detained countless activists, and outlawed the use of the Palestinian flag, among numerous other draconian measures. Yet, in the same breath, Germany continued to champion freedom of speech and democracy, and criticize Global South nations that allegedly curtailed these same values.
Predictably, Germany continued to arm Israel, concocting every conceivable justification for its support of Tel Aviv, even after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders for the crime of extermination in Gaza. Only under immense pressure did Berlin finally yield and agree to stop approving weapons exports to Israel.
Fast forward to recent days. The BBC, among other outlets, reported on November 17 that Germany would reinstate its weapons exports to Israel, rationalizing the decision with the October 10 announcement of a Gaza ceasefire—one that Israel has flagrantly violated hundreds of times.
“Germany’s decision to lift its partial suspension of weapons shipments to Israel is reckless, unlawful, and sends entirely the wrong message to Israel,” Amnesty International declared in a press release—a condemnation that, naturally, was utterly ignored.
A week later, new research conducted by two top, highly regarded academic institutions showed that the number of Palestinians killed as a result of the Israeli genocide is substantially higher than the Gaza Ministry of Health figures. Worse, life expectancy in Gaza has plummeted by nearly half because of the Israeli war.
Of the two institutions, the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is German. The globally leading research organization is largely funded by public money coming directly from the federal government—the very entity that ships the weapons that, along with US support, have fueled Gaza's escalating death toll.
In all these scenarios, the West serves as the simultaneous judge and executioner, the honest researcher and the weapons manufacturer, the violator and the self-appointed defender of human rights.
But the rest of us in the Global South must not simply yield to the role of the victim, whose lives are taken but precisely counted. To reclaim our collective agency, however, we must begin with a unified realization that the West’s calculated contradictions are specifically engineered to perpetuate the iniquitous relationship between Western powers and the rest of us for as long as possible.
Only by rigorously exposing and forcefully rejecting this hypocrisy can we finally liberate ourselves from the historic delusion that the solution to our problem is a Western one.
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