“No War on Venezuela!”

Update: Since publication, at least 21 civilians have been murdered by US bombings on peaceful vessels off the coast of Venezuela. US stealth fighter jets regularly breach Venezuelan-controlled airspace in the Caribbean, with the US gathering additional military forces every day including at least eight warships with thousands of troops. The US has now publicly cancelled diplomatic overtures with Venezuela, paving the way for a military confrontation.

We unequivocally condemn the escalation of US military aggression against Venezuela, and call on all progressive forces to stand against US intervention and the emboldened Monroe Doctrine behind it.

US naval forces are gathering in the southern Caribbean. Under the guise of “countering threats from narco-terrorist organizations,” the Trump administration has ordered the USS Lake Erie, a guided-missile cruiser, and the USS Newport News, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, to join an amphibious assault group that already includes warships carrying 4,500 troops off Venezuela’s coast. It is nothing less than a return to imperial “gunboat diplomacy.”

This is a dramatic escalation in the ongoing hybrid war against the Bolivarian Revolution. Since Hugo Chávez took power in 1999, declaring that Venezuela would embark on a “profound transformation” that would uplift the poor and challenge imperial aggression, the country has never left the US’s crosshairs.

Washington has deployed a familiar toolkit against the Bolivarian process: clandestine operations, assaults by mercenary groups, assassination attempts, attempted coups, diplomatic isolation, open threats of military intervention, and suffocating economic sanctions. The troop movements come just weeks after the US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced a doubling of the bounty for the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro — for alleged drug smuggling — to USD $50 million.

Between 2012 and 2020, coercive sanctions saw Venezuela’s oil revenues fall by 93 percent. Over a similar time period, living standards plummeted by 74 percent — figures comparable to Iraq during the US invasion. According to the Center for Economic Policy Research, the deprivations caused by US sanctions killed 40,000 Venezuelans in a single year between 2017 and 2018, an outcome that “fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions”.

The renewed War on Drugs has nothing to do with the real motivations for this longstanding assault against Venezuela: control over its resources and hemispheric domination.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of petroleum, along with significant quantities of natural gas, bauxite, and gold, among others. As Elliott Abrams, Trump’s former special envoy for Venezuela and Iran, said, "One of the reasons we have… given a license to Chevron and a number of service companies is precisely to make it easier for them to help in the recovery of oil production after the regime is replaced.”

Uninhibited exploitation of these resources carries immense strategic value for the US, while losing that access threatens its control over the continent — the mainstay of over 200 years of the Monroe Doctrine.

A sovereign South America stands in the way of the Monroe Doctrine’s full realization. Decades of aggression by the United States against countries like Venezuela serve to set an example for other states aspiring to a more united, independent Latin America. From Allende’s Chile to revolutionary Cuba, the US has intervened by military force time and time again against sovereign governments that charted a future beyond submission to US hegemony.

Indeed, the deployment of US destroyers off Latin American coasts in peacetime evokes a direct and ominous historical precedent: Operation Brother Sam. In 1964, US warships arrived near Brazil to spark the military overthrow of left-wing Brazilian president João Goulart. While US forces were not required to physically assist in the ultimately swift coup d’état, the operation provided the critical guarantee of US military support for coup plotters within the Brazilian army. The result was two bloody decades of far-right military dictatorship in Brazil.

Like his predecessors, Trump sees Latin America and the Caribbean as the United States’ “backyard”. From Panama's strategic canal to Mexico's Fourth Transformation, from Colombia’s outspoken defense of Palestine to Honduras’ sovereign resistance to international corporate tribunals — the entire continent now faces US intimidation, interference, or even threats of invasion.

That is why we condemn the military escalation against Venezuela, and call on progressive forces to stand against US intervention across the hemisphere. A direct attack on Venezuela would only pave the way for a new campaign to dominate Latin America under the banner of a new Monroe Doctrine. We cannot allow that dark chapter of history to repeat itself today.

Photo courtesy DVIDS/AFP/Getty Images.