President Donald Trump implemented his National Security Strategy’s Donroe Doctrine by carrying out a coup in Venezuela. His aim is to carve out an exclusive sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, impose imperial rule over its countries, and push out rivals, especially China. In the first move of this strategy, Trump concocted false allegations of drug trafficking against Nicolás Maduro’s regime, used those to justify a wave of state terrorist attacks on boats off Venezuela’s coast, then sent his special forces in to kidnap Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and imprisoned them in New York to stand trial. In their press briefing about the coup, Trump and his cabinet members openly declared their real imperial aims—seizing control of Venezuela’s oil.
But, instead of installing the right wing opposition led by María Corina Machado in office, the administration left Maduro’s regime intact. It is now led by Delcy Rodríguez. Despite her anti-imperialist rhetoric, she is collaborating with the Trump administration. Now Trump has his sights set on further interventions and regime changes from Colombia to Nicaragua, Cuba, and Greenland to bring the Western Hemisphere under Washington’s thumb. In this interview, Tempest’s Ashley Smith speaks with Federico Fuentes about the coup, Maduro’s regime, and the urgency of building anti-imperialist resistance against Trump’s vicious new imperialism. Fuentes is a longtime Venezuela solidarity activist who lived in Caracas for several years during the Hugo Chávez government as a correspondent for Green Left and investigator at the Centro Internacional Miranda. He is editor of LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Read interview here ( https://tempestmag.org/2026/02/venezuela-after-the-coup/ ) Excerpt: AS: What was the nature of Maduro’s regime before he was abducted? What class interests did it represent? How repressive and dictatorial had it become? FF: Unlike the Chávez government, the Maduro government was undeniably a pro-capitalist government. It represented both the interests of the new capitalist class, which had enriched itself through its connections to the “Bolivarian” state (the so-called Bolivarian bourgeoisie that Chávez denounced), but also the traditional capitalist class. The Maduro government ultimately won over the support of Fedecamaras, while the head of the Caracas Stock Exchange said after the 2024 presidential elections that the government, not the opposition, best represented economic stability. The Maduro government was also decidedly anti-worker. Often sections of the Left excuse the government, saying its policy decisions were due to the sanctions. But this ignores that government policies led to a dramatic upward redistribution of wealth even before the sanctions, Moreover, even under the sanctions, it is not the case that the Maduro government had no other options. From 2018 onwards, it deliberately chose to shift the burden of the crisis onto the working class. The pro-Maduro Left counters this with claims that the government has not privatized public services, provides subsidies, and supports the building of communes, therefore meaning it is still progressive. This ignores the privatizations (full and partial) that have occurred in various sectors, most importantly agriculture, but even in the strategic oil industry, where privatization-by-stealth has been enacted under the guise of the Anti-Blockade Law. At the same time, while state companies have been established under Maduro, particularly in the minerals sector, these were set up as vehicles for incorporating the military into circuits of capital accumulation, and have been responsible for environmental destruction and dispossession of indigenous lands, not wealth redistribution. History is replete with examples of state companies benefitting capitalists—starting with PDVSA, which was state-owned right through the neoliberal period that preceded Chavez. The same is true for policies such as food, transport and fuel subsidies, which even reactionary governments such as those in Egypt and Indonesia maintain. More often than not they serve as clientilistic means for maintaining some level of social support (as the Maduro government has done with its food packages distributed by local governing party officials). In other cases, they are too difficult to roll back without facing substantive resistance. Overall, the impact of these subsidies have been far outweighed by the deliberate policy of pulverising workers’ wages as a means for dealing with hyperinflation. As for the promotion of communal councils and communes as evidence of the Maduro government’s progressive nature, these leftists ignore the government’s own data, which show that far from having promoted “thousands of communes” as vehicles for self-government, the government presided over their cooptation and decline. The Minister of Communes’ figures shows a sharp, consistent decline over the past four years in the number of communal councils re-electing their authorities (down from about 19,000 in 2022 to just over 2000 last year). Meanwhile, of the almost 4000 communes that have been registered over the past more than a decade, less than 20 percent have been able to maintain at least one functioning body, such as a communal government or communal bank. A big factor for this has been government attempts to subordinate them by placing them under the control of local party officials. Unlike the Chávez government, the Maduro government was undeniably a pro-capitalist government. The reality is that the policies the pro-Maduro Left point to are largely legacies of the Chavez era, which have since been transformed into channels for corruption, clientelism, and capital accumulation; been completely nullified by the depression of workers’ wages; or remain in place because the political cost of reversing would be too high—though, as the proposed oil industry reform indicates, even measures considered taboos yesterday may no longer be considered sacred tomorrow. Of course, such a turn in economic policy had to be accompanied by a ramping up of repression. Outside Venezuela, we hear about repression against the right-wing opposition—though never about their anti-democratic, violent and illegal actions. But the Left and working class forces in Venezuela have arguably faced greater repression. In terms of workers’ rights, there are hundreds of trade unionists in jail for protesting, new trade unions cannot be registered, strikes are illegal, and collective bargaining is essentially banned. As for the left, every single left-wing party in the country has either been stripped of its electoral registration or denied the right to register for elections. The last presidential election was the first since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1958 in which the left was completely barred from standing a candidate. When we add to this that the Venezuelan people were denied their right to have their votes counted and verified (arguably one of the most basic democratic right, but which some on the Left seem to want to deny to the Venezuelan people, claiming nothing untoward happened in those elections), we get a sense of just how far democracy had been wound back. Not just in terms of the Chávez era (when the left rightly pointed to Venezuela as a world leader in transparent elections) but even in terms of minimum bourgeois democratic rights. There is a further component that needs to be considered; namely the use of security forces to terrorize working class and poor communities. As discontent with the government rose among traditional Chávez-voting sectors, the Maduro government stepped up its policing of these neighborhoods through its “Operation Liberate the People” and creation of the elite death squad, FAES (Special Action Forces). The result was a dramatic rise in police killings of predominately young Black men in those neighborhoods: from about 1500-2500 a year in 2014-15 to 5000-5500 a year between 2016-18, making Venezuela’s security forces the deadliest in the region on a per capita basis. Though not strictly a political operation, this repressive policing had the effect of terrorizing communities which had begun to step out of line. Given all this, it is hardly surprising that even strong Chávez voting areas eventually turned against Maduro and did not rush onto the streets to defend him after his kidnapping. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40509): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40509 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117643413/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
