Rather than launching a military invasion that would provoke public backlash and congressional scrutiny, Trump is doubling down on something more insidious.

The loudest question in Washington right now is whether Donald Trump is going to invade Venezuela. The quieter, and far more dangerous, reality is this: he probably won’t. Not because he cares about Venezuelan lives, but because he has found a strategy that is cheaper, less politically risky at home, and infinitely more devastating: economic warfare.

Venezuela has already survived years of economic warfare. Despite two decades of sweeping US sanctions designed to strangle its economy, the country has found ways to adapt: oil has moved through alternative markets; communities have developed survival strategies; people have endured shortages and hardship with creativity and resilience. This endurance is precisely what the Trump administration is trying to break.

Rather than launching a military invasion that would provoke public backlash and congressional scrutiny, Trump is doubling down on something more insidious: total economic asphyxiation. By tightening restrictions on Venezuelan oil exports, its primary source of revenue, Trump’s administration is deliberately pushing the country toward a full-scale humanitarian collapse.

In recent months, US actions in the Caribbean Sea, including the harassment and interdiction of oil tankers linked to Venezuela, signal a shift from financial pressure to illegal maritime force. These operations have increasingly targeted Venezuela’s ability to move its own resources through international waters. Oil tankers have been delayed, seized, threatened with secondary sanctions, or forced to reroute under coercion. The objective is strangulation.
This is illegal under international law.

The freedom of navigation on the high seas is a cornerstone of international maritime law, enshrined in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Unilateral interdiction of civilian commercial vessels, absent a UN Security Council mandate, violates the principle of sovereign equality and non-intervention. The extraterritorial enforcement of US sanctions, punishing third countries and private actors for engaging in lawful trade with Venezuela, has no legal basis. It is coercion, plain and simple. More importantly, the intent is collective punishment.

By preventing Venezuela from exporting oil, which is the revenue that funds food imports, medicine, electricity, and public services, the Trump administration is knowingly engineering conditions of mass deprivation. Under international humanitarian law, collective punishment is prohibited precisely because it targets civilians as a means to achieve political ends. And if this continues, we will see horrific images: empty shelves, malnourished children, overwhelmed hospitals, people scavenging for food. Scenes that echo those coming out of Gaza, where siege and starvation have been normalized as weapons of war.

US actions will undoubtedly cause millions of Venezuelans to flee the country, likely seeking to travel to the United States, which they are told is safe for their families, full of economic opportunities, and security. . But Trump is sealing the US border, cutting off asylum pathways, and criminalizing migration. When people are starved, when economies are crushed, when daily life becomes unlivable, people move. Blocking Venezuelans from entering the United States while systematically destroying the conditions that allow them to survive at home means that neighboring countries like Colombia, Brazil, and Chile will be asked to absorb the human cost of Washington’s decisions. This is how empire outsources the damage. But these countries have their own economic woes, and mass displacement of Venezuelans will destabilize the entire region.

Venezuela is a test case. What is being refined now—economic siege without formal war, maritime coercion without declared blockade, starvation without bombs—is a blueprint. Any country that refuses compliance with Washington’s political and economic demands should be paying attention. This will be the map for 21st century regime change.

And this is how Trump can reassure the United States Congress that he is not “going to war” with Venezuela. He doesn’t need to. Economic strangulation carries none of the immediate political costs of a military intervention, even as it inflicts slow, widespread devastation. There are no body bags returning to US soil, no draft, no televised bombing campaigns. Just a steady erosion of life elsewhere.

Trump’s calculation is brutally simple: make Venezuelans so miserable that they will rise up and overthrow Maduro. That has been the same calculation behind US policy toward Cuba for six decades—and it has failed. Economic strangulation doesn’t bring democracy; it brings suffering. And even if, by some grim chance, it did succeed in toppling the government, the likely result would not be freedom but chaos—possibly a protracted civil war that could devastate the country, and the region, for decades.

Tomorrow, people in Venezuela will celebrate Christmas. Families will gather around the table to eat hallacas wrapped with care, slices of pan de jamón, and dulce de lechoza. They will share stories, dance to gaitas, and make a toast with Ponche Crema.

But if this economic siege continues, if Venezuelan oil is fully cut off, if the country is denied the means to feed itself, if hunger is allowed to finish what bombs are no longer politically useful to accomplish, then this Christmas may be remembered as one of the last Venezuelans were able to celebrate in anything resembling normal life, at least in the near future.

Polls consistently show that nearly 70 percent of people in the United States oppose a military intervention in Venezuela. War is recognized for what it is: violent, destructive, unacceptable. But sanctions are treated differently. Many people believe they are a harmless alternative, a way to apply “pressure” without bloodshed.

That assumption is dangerously wrong. According to a comprehensive study in medical journal The Lancet, sanctions increase mortality at levels comparable to armed conflict, hitting children and the elderly first. Sanctions do not avoid civilian harm—they systematically produce it.

If we oppose war because it kills, we must also oppose sanctions that do the same, more quietly, more slowly, and with far less accountability. If we don’t act against economic warfare with the same urgency we reserve for bombs and invasions, then sanctions will remain the preferred weapon: politically convenient but equally deadly.

Author
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Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. She was born in Venezuela and holds a bachelor’s degree in languages and international affairs from the University La Sorbonne Paris IV, in Paris. After graduating, she worked for an international scholarship program out of offices in Caracas and Paris and was sent to Haiti, Cuba, The Gambia, and other countries for the purpose of evaluating and selecting applicants. 

A prominent global Marxist scholar recently went viral quote-tweeting a post cheering on the US’s imperial war against Venezuela, saying that “you are violating international law… you are on notice.”

While factually, of course, this commentator is correct, I think it is much more interesting to philosophically investigate the presumptions behind such a statement.

It is clear to anyone capable of seeing two fingers in front of them that the bellicosity the criminal US regime is demonstrating with Venezuela has nothing to do with narco-trafficking, and everything to do with Venezuela having the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Few people could be genuinely stupid enough to actually believe the formal reasons given for US foreign policy initiatives.

Geopolitical and economic motives lie behind any and all policies carried out by the United States. The neoconservative moral crusades to defend ‘American values’ are, of course, escapades to defend and expand the dominance of American finance capital.

My reader, I presume, knows this well, so I shall not labor on this point here.

What is, instead, much more ambivalent is how many of those critical of the US imperial regime come to relate to and treat international law.

In the last two years, the world has witnessed, chronicled on all of our phones, the brutal genocide of the Palestinian people. There could not be a greater surplus of images from Gaza which ought to chill the spines of anyone with an ounce of humanity.

In this time, ‘international law’ and its various institutions have condemned these actions, to greater or lesser degrees. From the South African-led International Court of Justice genocide case, to the International Criminal Court investigation of "Israel" for a slew of violations, from extermination to starvation and collective punishment, to UN General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council investigations and condemnations, there were hardly any stones of international law left unturned.

But what, my friends, was the result? Is Palestine saved? If so, was it ‘international law’ that did it? Considering the slew of Zionist violations of the ceasefire, I think it is not irrational to say that the answer to both is ‘No’.

And so, we must restate the question Fidel Castro made in his famous 1979 speech in front of the United Nations: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Or, even further, what is the purpose of international law?
What good is international law and the institutions that claim to uphold it when one country and its lackeys can regularly violate it with impunity? When has the United States, "Israel", or — if I may be bold — the whole of the Western colonial-imperialist world, ever respected international law?

Is not the very system this 14% of the world, which foolishly considers itself to be the world as such, one premised on the violation of any sense of sovereignty? On the violation of any sense of ‘basic rights’ other than those of the capital-owning class which personify the system? Are the rights and freedoms here defended not precisely of the kind which have as a constitutive component the absence of any real rights, freedoms, or sovereignty for the bulk of humanity?

And so, let’s return to the prominent global Marxist scholar, which I would like to intentionally retain unnamed since my goal is not to mock them as an individual, but to ask some critical questions about a framework of thought he and so many critics of US imperialism share. My questions are the following: what is at stake in continuously invoking an ‘international law’ broken at will by the ‘usual suspects,’ to borrow an expression from Casablanca? Do you not feel the almost cartoonish naïveté of such invocation in the face of its continued irrelevance in shaping world affairs?

Is international law here not treated precisely as a fetish object? That is, as a reified entity that is ascribed mystical powers onto it, all the while ignoring the real global relations which shape its function? What weight, in the real world, does ‘international law’ have over the US empire’s constant violation of it?

It isn’t simply the case that international law isn’t working. That is too simplistic an understanding of the gap between the formally enumerated law and reality. We must, instead, see this distance, this gap, as constitutive of reality itself. International law under conditions of US hegemonism and super-imperialism is the global judicature that formalizes this system at the level of law, functioning as an integral mechanism of its reproduction. This is, frankly, emblematic of the Marxist understanding of how judicature is related to political economy. Bourgeois international law will always have a ‘gap’ between the enunciated ideals it formally upholds and the actual workings of an international order still dominated by capitalist-imperialism. This gap is not a mistake that can be fixed through reforms, it is constitutive of the system itself. It is a symptom, to put it in Lacanian terms, that cannot be removed without at the same time removing the system for which it is a symptom.

As within the nation, the struggle for rights, and the appeal to existing legal frameworks to defend their exercise, is an integral component of the class struggle. However, for Marxists, there should be no naïveté and infantilism involved in our analysis of the ultimate nature of these institutions, of what interests they serve to reproduce in the last instance. Central to the importance of waging the fight at this level is showing the mass of people its fundamental impotence in providing true, concrete freedom and sovereignty for the working and oppressed peoples of the world.

This is not accomplished when one naively finger-wags at the US, listing the slew of violations they’re actively committing to international law, and stating that ‘you are on notice.’ On notice, from whom? Who will hold the US accountable? This fetish-object of ‘international law?’ Will an army of the United Nations halt the US’s war efforts on the coast of Venezuela? Will international law be used to unite countries against this belligerent actor, pressuring it with global economic ostracization? If international law has failed to do any of this since its emergence, what good is it to make calls upon it today?

As a state, I can understand having to keep up the pretense of legal formalism, but for individual scholars, journalists, and critical thinkers, is this finger-wagging appeal to the hollow authority of a fetish-object really the correct way to proceed? Is it not as if one is appealing to the authority of a paper that the US has cleaned itself with, and left with all its filth on the floor?

International law will not save us. Treating international law fetishistically only buys into the ideological illusions constitutive of the system and its judicature.

Friends and comrades, it is foolish to expect a victory when showing up with a pen to a gunfight.

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of uninterrupted diplomatic relations between Canada and Cuba.

Address by Arnold August, along with the presentation of his book Fidel Castro: la visión de un canadiense, delivered at the Parliament of Canada in Ottawa on December 3, 2025, at a meeting hosted by the Canada–Cuba Parliamentary Friendship Group

Paragraph delivered in French:
A sincere thank you to the co-chairs of the Canada–Cuba Parliamentary Friendship Group: Bloc Québécois MP Gabriel Ste-Marie from the riding of Joliette, and the Honourable Senator Judy A. White from Newfoundland and Labrador, for inviting me. It is always an honour to sit beside His Excellency, the Cuban Ambassador to Canada, Rodrígo Malmierca Díaz. Today, we gather to celebrate 2025 as the 80th Anniversary of diplomatic relations between Canada and Cuba – an uninterrupted milestone in our hemisphere, matched only by Mexico.

Paragraphs delivered in English:
On this occasion, allow me to highlight one central theme from my fourth book on Cuba and Latin America. This volume examines two prominent figures, Fidel Castro and Pierre Trudeau, and explores the dynamics of the Canada–Cuba–United States triangle from 1959 to 1976. It also outlines how both the conservative and the liberal parties, which have governed Canada since 1959, played key roles in shaping this unique relationship. Other political formations have also contributed – and continue to contribute – to this history, as I will address later.
Conservative Party leader and then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, at the time of the January 1959 Cuban Revolution, defended the continuation of diplomatic relations between Canada and Cuba. He did so despite pressure from the United States under President John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy tried to force Diefenbaker to join the US-led effort to impose the anti-Cuba blockade and other coercive measures, Diefenbaker, the Prairie farmer, responded sharply to the wealthy urban intellectual from Massachusetts. He reminded Kennedy that “Canada is not a Boston in the state of Massachusetts.” This political tendency also plays a vital role in Canada–Cuba relations.

Paragraphs delivered in French:
Who invited Fidel Castro to Montreal only months after January 1959? To understand the complexity of the moment, one must remember that, although Fidel was widely admired internationally, a massive US-led media campaign was spreading disinformation – including in mainstream Canadian media. This campaign targeted the Revolution’s legal proceedings, including the trials and the executions of Batista’s known torturers and murderers – measures that had been demanded by the victims’ families. Yet the person who invited Fidel – and hosted him during his 24-hour visit to Montreal – was not a “leftist” or even a liberal. His name was Claude Dupras, a conservative at both the federal and municipal levels.

Why was he drawn to Fidel Castro? At the time of the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s and 1959, Quebec was evolving in the budding atmosphere of its own multipartisan “Quiet Revolution,” which was initiated in 1960, challenging US-Anglo control over its vast electricity resources. Its goal was to become “maîtres chez nous” – masters of our own house. Dupras could relate to Fidel as a leader standing up to the United States on behalf of a small nation. It was therefore natural to invite him to Montreal. The spontaneous street scenes in April 1959, and the photos of TV interviews that I include in the book, show the broad support for Fidel in Quebec despite the disinformation campaign. People were clearly shrugging off the slanders.

At Fidel’s April 1959 press conference in Montreal, who do we see leaning in to interview him? None other than René Lévesque, the best-known journalist in Quebec at the time, an emerging sovereigntist, and a political precursor of today’s Bloc Québécois and MPs such as Gabriel Ste-Marie. The book shows that, in addition to conservatives and liberals, this political tendency also plays a vital role in Canada–Cuba relations.

Author

Arnold August is an award-winning journalist and author of three acclaimed books. His three books on Cuba-US-Latin America have been acclaimed by experts in the field. In 2013, he was awarded the Félix Elmuza Award by the Association of Cuban Journalists and contributes to outlets in English, Spanish and French in many parts of the world. He serves as a Contributing Editor for The Canada Files.

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most popular critics of political correctness (PC) from the ‘left.’ It is a topic he addresses in numerous books and popular articles. While the general spirit of critiquing PC culture or wokeism from the left is certainly one I am sympathetic to, he fundamentally misunderstands the level at which political correctness operates, placing it within an archaic sincerity paradigm, and not within its proper profilic context.
In Absolute Recoil, he writes that “under the discursive regime of political correctness, it is not enough to follow external rules of politeness, one is expected to be ‘sincerely’ respectful of others, and continually examined on the sincerity of one’s innermost convictions.”

This, frankly, completely misses the logic through which political correctness operates. The regime of PC culture (which is today almost wholly overcome) is intimately tied to profilicity. It does not concern itself with sincere role enactment — akin to how Lionel Trilling would describe the dominant identity technology in the pre-capitalist, pre-authenticity world. Neither is PC culture operative at the level of authenticity. Politically correct culture does not concern itself with whether one is dutifully enacting a role (sincerity), nor whether one is authentic about one’s pronouncements.

PC culture operates purely at the level of the surface — what matters is not what one actually believes (authenticity), nor the duties one fulfills (sincerity), but what one says (profilicity). Here the work of Hans Georg-Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio in You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity remains the best description of the shifts that have occurred at the basic levels of digital human sociality and identity construction.

Under the regime of PC, it is what appears on your profile which comes to matter most. One could actively fulfill one’s duty as an activist against racism, one can be authentically committed to fighting against racists, but neither your practices nor your subjective beliefs matter for PC culture — if you say a politically incorrect racial joke, or use a politically incorrect racial term (even in a non-racist or even anti-racist context) you will still be cancelled. It will leave (when PC was dominant) a seemingly eternal scarlet letter A on your profile.
Is the point, for instance, of all the DEI trainings universities have staff do really to inspire a certain set of practices or ideas on their staff? Or, is the role such trainings play in curating the profile of the institution as ‘woke’ and ‘progressive’ a greater motivating factor?

Is the point of the CIA ‘woke’ ad to inspire a sincere role enactment, or an authentic subjective belief about upholding disabled, trans, lesbian, Hispanic women? Or, is it about shaping the profile of how the institution is seen — or better yet, how it is seen as being seen, how it looks from the standpoint of second order observation?
Here is what Žižek gets most egregiously wrong about political correctness — what comes to matter most for it is the surface, not practice nor so-called subjective belief. In some ways, it operates at the level of form, in a manner reminiscent, but thoroughly distorted, of the way that Marxism and psychoanalysis treat form and content. If we recall, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek correctly identifies the ways in which both Marxism and Freud understand that the key operation is not piercing through the form to get at the content (traditional western philosophical cannon approach to ‘truth’), but understanding the secret of the form itself — why the ‘content’ needs to take on a distorted form. The distortion of form is not an external filter blurring a ‘truth’ which lies deeper in the content, it is a constitutive moment of the content itself, such that — as an apparent obstacle — removing it entails also the elimination of that which it is an obstacle for.

This dialectical treatment of form and content is not, of course, what we get with PC. However, it also isn’t the traditional paradigm of piercing through form to get at content, which is what is implied in Žižek’s treatment of it within the mode of sincerity. His treatment suggests that for PC there is a deeper belief (content) that must be sincere, that is, that must be consistent with the form. But this is not at all what PC culture was about — it was wholly concerned with the surface, with form. Not with the secret of the form itself (Marxism), but with the form as devoid of secrets, the form as a source of authority akin to the ‘content’ in the previous, traditional paradigm.

​As such, PC must be understood within the context of the emergence of profilicity and second order observation, a development arising out of the development of the productive forces that comes with the technological revolution.
For PC culture what always mattered was the words you said, not the context in which you said them, nor the spirit in which you did it. What mattered is the formal letter of the law, not its spirit. Therefore, Žižek’s understanding of it within the mode of sincerity is wholly inadequate. PC culture can be understood only within the logic of profilicity and second order observation.

Author 

Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido

The Wall Street Journal, founded in 1889, is the largest newspaper in the United States with respect to print circulation, and the second largest (after The New York Times) in digital circulation, with 4.15 million digital subscribers. It is considered a “newspaper of record,” defined in Wikipedia as “a major national newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative and independent.”

In “The High Stakes in Venezuela: Trump chose this showdown with Maduro, and only one will win,” published by The Editorial Board on December 1, 2025, the newspaper of record reveals a win-lose mentality in international relations which is out of sync with the demands of the current historic moment. It begins with the assertion, “President Trump is in a high-stakes showdown with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. . .. One of the two presidents is going to lose, and it will be Mr. Trump if Mr. Maduro isn’t ousted one way or another.” Warming to the task at hand, the editorial further asserts, “If Mr. Trump withdraws his Caribbean flotilla with Mr. Maduro still in power, the Venezuelan strongman will have won. The world will see that he was able to stand up to American power in the Yankee’s backyard.”

The editorial acknowledges that the Trump administration has maintained that its assembling of naval forces in the Caribbean has the purpose of fighting drug cartels, but the editorial considers this claim to be nothing more than “political cover.” It maintains that you do not need a large military mobilization “to blow up drug boats,” thus not anticipating the national security strategy released by the administration on December 3, which emphasized a reorientation of US national security policy toward the Western Hemisphere.

The editorial notes that if Maduro refuses to step down and find refuge in another country, “The President may have to take direct military action to oust the dictator” [sic]. It argues that, despite domestic political risks, “deposing Mr. Maduro is in the U.S. national interest given how he has spread refugees and mayhem in the region” [sic]. It maintains that deposing Maduro should not be considered an American coup, because “Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly to elect the opposition in the 2024 presidential race, but Mr. Maduro refused to cede power. Deposing him in favor of the elected president would restore democracy” [double sic].

For the esteemed members of The Editorial Board of the newspaper of record, the US government must not let Maduro win. “If Mr. Maduro refuses to leave, and Mr. Trump shrinks from acting to depose him, Mr. Trump and the credibility of the U.S. will be the losers. Mr. Trump chose this showdown, and it will cost America and the region dearly if Mr. Maduro emerges triumphant.”

§
Considerations on democracy in Venezuela
As the reader will discern, the premise of the WSJ Editorial is that Maduro is a dictator maintained in power through fraudulent means. Let us look at the facts.
​
Nicolás Maduro was re-elected President of Venezuela on July 28, 2024, receiving 51.2% of the vote, defeating the far-right candidate Edmundo González, who received 44.2%. Maduro was the candidate of a coalition of thirteen political organizations known as the Simón Bolívar Great Patriotic Pole as well as the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Eight other candidates—including candidates of the right, center-right, and center-left—received 4.6% of the votes cast. A total of 21,620,705 citizens voted—a voter participation rate of 59%—in more than fifteen thousand voting districts distributed throughout the country. In total, ten presidential candidates, thirty political parties, and 1300 international and national observers participated in the 2024 presidential elections, according to the president of the National Electoral Council.

Maduro was born on November 23, 1962, in Caracas, Venezuela, and he was politically active in the 1980s in the Socialist League. From 1991 to 1998, he worked as a bus driver, and he founded the Caracas Metro Union. During that period, he met and became a fervent supporter of Hugo Chávez, and he became active in the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement. He was among the new deputies elected in the electoral triumph of the Bolivarian Revolution in 1998. He held various positions in the National Assembly between 2000 and 2006. In 2006, he was named Minister of Foreign Affairs, and in that capacity, he became known in the international arena for his excellent discourses in defense of the Bolivarian Revolution. He was named Vice-President in 2012, and he was publicly named by Chávez to be his successor shortly prior to his death in 2013. Maduro subsequently won presidential elections in 2013, with 50.61% of the vote; and in 2018, with 78.84%.
Elections in Venezuela are managed by the National Electoral Council, an independent branch of government established by the Bolivarian Revolution. The electoral system is characterized by a high-level of citizen access to voting booths and clear identification of voters, in which voters cast both an electronic vote and a printed paper ballot, enabling cross-checking of the vote count. Verification of the electoral total is conducted automatically in 54% of the voting locations, which are chosen at random.

The latest of several US plans for the destabilization of the Venezuelan political system came to light two days before the 2024 elections, when suggestions were put forth of alleged fraud, preparing the terrain for the non-recognition of the results and for violence by fascist gangs, financed by Venezuelans from Miami and Spain, according to Granma journalist Francisco Arias Fernández. The plan included the non-recognition of the electoral results following the announcement of Maduro’s victory, with the complicity of the US-controlled Organization of American States and US allies in the region. The far-right leader, María Corina Machado, who benefits from foreign media coverage and foreign financial support, planned to relocate to Argentina, where she was to set up a command post as the coup d’état was unfolding, seeking political-diplomatic support with telephone calls to different countries. The plan anticipated the support of the major media, and Arias Fernández specifically mentions The New York Times, CNN, AP, Voice of America, Euronews, BBC, the German DW and the Spanish newspapers El País and El Mundo.

True to the plan, the opposition claimed electoral fraud on July 29. Marina Corina Machado announced that she had in her possession electoral records that showed that González had received 70% of the vote, but she did not release the information she claimed to have. In this unsubstantiated claim of electoral fraud, the opposition in Venezuela had the backing of the Western media, as the plan anticipated. The Washington Post, for example, published on July 30 a one-sided article giving credence to the opposition claims of fraud, citing protestors on the streets on July 29. It made no mention of the reports of international observers. Similarly, an article in The New York Times, “Venezuela’s Election Was Deeply Flawed,” was written with the prevailing Western ethnocentric narrative which assumes that nations seeking independence from US direction are authoritarian, ignoring the historical struggles of said nations against US imperialism and US control of the natural resources and the economies of their countries.

On Monday, July 29, protests expressing dissatisfaction with the results were held. The opposition claimed that they were spontaneous demonstrations by the people in protest of supposed electoral fraud. However, the Venezuelan news outlet Telesur reported that some demonstrators, many with criminal antecedents, had been paid $150. There were reports of violence, including setting fire to hospitals, pharmacies and radio stations, blocking roads, and derailing buses carrying international election observers.

Telesur reported, with videos provided by on-the-scene reporters, that the streets where the demonstrations had been held were calm and normal by midnight. Beginning on Tuesday, July 30, crowds began to appear in support of Maduro and the electoral process.

Venezuelan analyst Luigino Bracci explained that elections in Venezuela are automated. When a citizen casts a vote in a voting machine, the machine prints a receipt, which the voter places in a box. Thus, there is a double system of counting, in which the machine keeps track of each vote and prints a tally of the votes, and at the same time, polling station members and political party observers verify that the machine report of the vote tally is consistent with the tally of the printed receipts. The machine reports the results to one of two tallying centers of the National Electoral Council (CNE for its initials in Spanish).

Bracci noted that for the last twenty years, CNE has been publishing the results of each polling station on its website, making the votes transparent, and enabling observers representing the political parties to verify the results with their polling station observations. This publication of results usually occurs a few hours after the first electoral bulletin is released. However, the results could not be verified in this way with respect to the July 28 presidential elections, because there had been a cyberattack against the data transmission system of CNE, a fact that was announced by the president of CNE, Elvis Amoroso, when he announced the election results at 12:13 a.m. on July 29. He noted that the cyberattack was slowing down the transfer of information to the tallying centers.

After the CNE announcement, President Maduro went to the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice to request an investigation and to request that all candidates and the National Electoral Council be summoned and be requested to submit all necessary records and documents. Maduro also promised that the tally sheets of his party’s witnesses would be presented. Maduro declared that he was seeking the protection of the Supreme Court from false accusations of electoral fraud by the extreme Right opposition, which had contracted fascist and criminal gangs to engage in violent actions in a destabilization strategy supported by the US government.
In accordance with the request of the President, the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court, authorized by the Constitution to rule on such questions, summoned the ten candidates to appear, and nine of them did so on August 2. Edmundo González, on whose behalf accusations of fraud had been made beginning on July 29, was the only one of the ten candidates who did not appear before the Court.

The opposition claim of fraud raised the possibility of someone secretly manipulating the machines to reprint tally sheets with numbers favorable to the government. Víctor Theoktisto, a computer science professor at Simón Bolívar University who had served as an advisor in the development of the nation’s automated electoral system, noted that the automated electoral system is designed with numerous security checks, such that any manipulated or modified tally sheet would have a QR code or “hash” different from the unique code of the original, which could be discerned through investigation. For this reason, the question of fraud ought to be resolved through the Supreme Court, with all parties presenting what they have, as the CNE was doing in accordance with Maduro’s request. The opposition ought to present their evidence and their case to the Court, Theoktisto asserted. “The fact that González did not appear before the Electoral Chamber last Friday raises many questions. If they have the evidence, why not challenge the elections before the appropriate body? Are they willing to have their election evidence verified? . . . The opposition must challenge the results before the [Supreme Court], not in public opinion or international media.”

Theoktisto further noted that hacking technologies exist that could slow down the CNE process by disrupting connections, although they could not change the actual tallies. He further observed that the attacks on the CNE Website were so numerous that they likely involved hacking sources outside the country, with some level of support from local actors. He noted that “a governmental actor is indispensable” for an attack of this scale, and he believed that a hostile government was involved. But all such questions need to be investigated, he stressed.
After July 30, the Western media withdrew from the terrain, posting few articles after that date. And the Biden administration began making contradictory statements, retreating from recognition of the opposition candidate as the winner of the elections and as the true head of state in Venezuela. Meanwhile, the Maduro government was in full control in Venezuela, with the National Electoral Commission proceeding with a full review of the ballots, in accordance with the Venezuelan constitution and the request of the Maduro government; with successful and peaceful public events in support of the government; and with the attorney general’s office proceeding with legal action against those who violated laws in seeking to promote destabilization, some of whom are in hiding.

On August 22, 2024, the Electoral Chamber of the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice, designed by the Constitution to adjudicate electoral questions, ratified Nicolas Maduro as the winner of the July 28 presidential elections. In a press conference attended by government officials, diplomatic representatives, and members of the press, Supreme Court magistrate Caryslia Rodríguez began by reaffirming the jurisdiction of the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court on the question, noting that recent electoral processes in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States were ultimately settled by judicial rulings. Rodríguez proceeded at the press conference to read the verdict of the Court. It stated that a team of national and international experts had conducted a review, with the highest technical standards, of the voting records that had been submitted by the electoral parties and candidates.

​The verdict asserted that the investigation found that the voting records fully coincided with the data of the tallying centers of the National Electoral Council, which had declared Maduro the winner with fifty-two percent of the vote, as against forty-three percent for Edmundo González. The verdict further mandated the National Electoral Council to publish the final results in the National Gazette before the August 28 deadline established by Venezuelan electoral procedures. Magistrate Rodríguez also asserted that opposition candidate Edmundo González was in contempt of court for not appearing in response to the Court’s summons and for not submitting requested evidence. She also called upon Attorney General Tarek William Saab to launch investigations for possible criminal conduct, including the usurpation of state functions, forging documents, and instigating violence.

The Bolivarian Revolution was convoked by Hugo Chávez on February 4, 1992, when he led approximately 100 military officers in an attempted coup d´état, with the intention of overthrowing the government and convening a constituent assembly. The coup failed, and he was imprisoned. Upon his release in 1994, he resigned from the military and formed the Bolivarian Fifth Republic Movement, again with the intention of convening a constitutional assembly, but now seeking to attain power through the electoral process. Traveling throughout the country and meeting with the people during the presidential electoral campaign, he was elected President of Venezuela in 1998, and he assumed the presidency on February 2, 1999. He immediately issued a decree convoking a Constitutional Assembly. Elections for a new constitution were held, and a new Constitution was approved, establishing the Fifth Republic. Chávez was elected to two six-year terms as president under the new Constitution. He died of cancer in 2013, before completing his second term.

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was born in Sabaneta, a rural village of Venezuela, on July 28, 1954. His father was a schoolteacher who earned his teaching diploma by studying part-time. Although his mother and father lived nearby, he was principally reared by his grandmother, a peasant woman who was half indigenous. In 1971, at the age of 17, Chávez entered the Military Academy of Venezuela, and he earned a commission as a Second Lieutenant in 1975. His study during his years in the military academy established the foundation for his revolutionary formation. He read the writings of Simón Bolívar, Mao Zedong, and Che Guevara, and he developed a perspective that he described as a synthesis of Bolivarianism and Maoism. He investigated these themes further in a master´s program in political science at Simón Bolívar University. He continuously read books of historical, political, social, and literary significance during his military and political careers.

Central to Chávez’s political rise was his call for effective state control of the state-owned petroleum company (Petróleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Anónima, or PDVSA). The company had been nationalized in 1976 during the era of “petroleum nationalism” in Venezuela, but the nationalization did not have the results that its advocates had hoped. Prior to the nationalization, foreign companies had appointed Venezuelans as managers, seeking to ensure political stability. Since the Venezuelan managers previously had been socialized into the norms and values of the international petroleum companies, the transition to Venezuelan state ownership had little effect on the dynamics of the nation’s petroleum industry. PDVSA adapted to the neocolonial world-system, exploiting petroleum in accordance with the norms and interests of the international petroleum industry. Like the foreign-owned oil companies in other neocolonized countries, PDVSA sought to reduce payments to the Venezuelan state. Accordingly, PDVSA adopted a strategy of channeling surpluses to investments in production and sales, including the purchase of refineries and distributorships in other countries. By transferring surpluses out of the country, the PDVSA evaded payments to the Venezuelan state.

The government of Hugo Chávez sought to reduce the autonomy of PDVSA and to incorporate its resources into a project of national development. The Chávez government appointed new directors of PDVSA, replacing the directors appointed by previous governments, provoking a great conflict with the established order.

But the conflict had favorable results for Venezuela. With the new leadership of PDVSA, the state income from petroleum increased significantly, and the new funds were directed toward various social projects in education, health, and housing as well as to wage increases, financial assistance to those in need, and the elimination of foreign debt.

The governments of Chávez and Maduro have conducted more than thirty national elections, either nationwide referendums, presidential elections, or elections to the national legislature, and the Chavistas have won all but two of them. This impressive process prompted former President Jimmy Carter to declare that Venezuela has one of the best elections in the world.

However, the numerous elections have been conducted in accordance with the rules and procedures of representative democracy, in which success depends on the mobilization of resources, especially financial resources. Therefore, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela has sought to supplement elections developed according to the norms of representative democracy with the creation of Communal Councils throughout the country. Communal Councils are formed by the people through open assemblies, encompassing approximately 100 families in urban areas and thirty families in rural areas. The communal councils seek to identify and implement local priorities and projects with respect to housing, health, water, or electricity, with the full and equal participation of all citizens over the age of fifteen, and with the support of a financial unit and an oversight unit. The long-term goal is the integration of the Communal Councils with the structures of representative democracy, thus establishing “true participatory democracy” based on the concept of people’s power from the grassroots.
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Further considerations on The Wall Street Journal
As is evident, the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal accepts as Truth what is merely one side of a political conflict in Venezuela. If that side had any validity, we would have seen beginning in August the taking of the streets by the people in opposition to the Maduro government, providing internal support to the aggressive actions of the USA toward the government of Venezuela. But exactly the opposite has occurred. The government of Maduro since August has been able to mobilize the people in a great national exercise of self-defense, preparing the nation and the people for what is perceived as a pending military invasion.
The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal appears to know little of political processes in Venezuela. If it does know, it chooses not to report. So, the esteemed members of the Editorial Board are guilty of either ethnocentrism or corruption.
In addition, in taking as given a paradigm of win-lose competition in international affairs, the members of the Editorial Board either do not know of, or decide not to report on, the alternative paradigm of win-win cooperation, which has emerged from the Global South during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, and which points to a possible resolution of the structural contradictions of the world-system. This constitutes a profound failure in moral duty, unworthy of the high office which they hold and the sacred duty to the people which it implies.

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Further considerations on Venezuela and Cuba
Venezuela and Cuba have both committed the crime of breaking with the structures of the neocolonial world order, Cuba with its agrarian reform of 1959 and nationalizations of 1960, and Venezuela with its effective control under Chávez of the state-owned petroleum company. As punishment, Cuba and Venezuela are accused of being authoritarian, when in fact they have developed structures of people’s democracy that are more advanced than the structures of representative democracy.

Neither Cuba nor Venezuela should be sanctioned for seeking transformations of the national manifestations of the structures of the neocolonial world-system, because it is their right as sovereign nations to choose their own road to economic development.

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No to regime-change war in Venezuela

It can be argued that the United Sates of America, as the regional power of the Western Hemisphere, has the right to control the seas of the region, in order to fight back against criminal cartels invading its national territory; and it has the right to impose tariffs or refuse trade with any nations in the region that align with a non-Hemispheric power, enabling its control of strategic assets that are vital to US national security, such as key sea lanes. But the United States does not have the right to decide who the leaders of Venezuela will be. Only the people of Venezuela have that right.

This principle of the sovereignty of the people was proclaimed by the American Declaration of Independence. And the people of the United Sates, through an anti-establishment people’s movement called into being by Donald Trump in 2016, has risen—in response to the betrayal of the nation by the elite and the political establishment and the post-modern confusion of the professional class—to reaffirm the principles of the American Republic and to declare the rejection by the people of regime-change wars.

The first U.S. missiles that struck the boats in the Caribbean in early September 2025 were described by Washington as a “counter-narcotics operation,” a sterile phrase meant to dull the violence of incinerating human beings in an instant. Then came the second strike, this time on survivors already struggling to stay afloat. Once the details emerged, however, the official story began to fall apart. 

Local fishermen contradicted U.S. claims. Relatives of those killed have said the men were not cartel operatives at all, but fishermen, divers, and small-scale couriers. Relatives in Trinidad and Venezuela told regional reporters their loved ones were unarmed and had no connection to Tren de Aragua, describing them instead as fathers and sons who worked the sea to support their families. Some called the U.S. narrative “impossible” and “a lie,” insisting the men were being demonized after their deaths. U.N. experts called the killings “extrajudicial.” Maritime workers noted what everyone in the region already knows: the route near Venezuela’s waters is not a fentanyl corridor into the United States. Yet the administration clung to its story, insisting these men were “narcoterrorists,” long after the facts had unraveled. Because in Washington’s post 9/11 playbook, fear is a tool. Fear is the architecture of modern American war.

The U.S. did not emerge from the Iraq War into peace or reflection. It emerged into normalization. The legal theories invented and abused after 9/11 – elastic self-defense, limitless definitions of terrorism, enemy combatants, global strike authority – did not fade. They became the backbone of a permanent war machine. These justifications supported drone wars in Pakistan, airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia, the destruction of Libya, special operations in Syria, and yet another military return to Iraq. And behind every expansion of this global battlefield was a U.S. weapons industry that grew richer with each intervention, lobbying for policies that kept the country in a constant state of conflict. What we are seeing today in the Caribbean is not an isolated action, it is the extension of a militarized imperial model that treats entire regions as expendable. 

The next wars were always there because we never confronted the political and economic system that made endless wars a profitable cornerstone of U.S. power.

A Post-9/11 Legal Framework Built for Endless War

The Trump administration has advanced several overlapping legal arguments to justify the strikes, and together they reveal a post-9/11 framework that stretches executive power far beyond its intended limits.

According to detailed reporting in The Washington Post, a classified Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo argues that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with so-called narcoterrorist organizations. Under this theory, the strikes qualify as part of an ongoing armed conflict rather than a new “war” requiring congressional authorization. This framing alone is unprecedented: drug-trafficking groups are criminal networks, not organized armed groups targeting the U.S.

A second pillar of the memo, described by lawmakers to the Wall Street Journal, claims that once the president designates a cartel as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, it becomes a lawful military target. But terrorism designations have never created war powers. They are financial and sanctions tools, not authorizations for lethal force. As Sen. Andy Kim put it, using an FTO label as a “kinetic justification” is something “that has never been done before.”

The OLC memo also invokes Article II, claiming the president can order strikes as part of his commander-in-chief authority. Yet this argument depends on a second unsupported premise: that the boats posed a threat significant enough to justify self-defense. Even internal government lawyers questioned this. As one person familiar with the deliberations told The Washington Post, “There is no actual threat justifying self defense — there are not organized armed groups seeking to kill Americans.” 

At the same time, the administration has publicly insisted that these operations do not rise to the level of “hostilities”  that would trigger the War Powers Resolution because U.S. military personnel were never placed at risk. By the administration’s own logic, that means the people on the boats were not engaged in hostilities and therefore were not combatants under any accepted legal standard, making the claim of a wartime self-defense strike impossible to reconcile with U.S. or international law.

Under international law, executing people outside a genuine armed conflict is an extrajudicial killing.  Nothing about these strikes meets the legal threshold for war. Because the people on the boats were not lawful combatants, the operation risks violating both international law and U.S. criminal law, including statutes on murder at sea, a concern reportedlyunderscored by Admiral Alvin Holsey’s early resignation.

The memo goes further still, invoking “collective self-defense” on behalf of regional partners. But key regional partners, including Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, have publicly criticized the strikes and said they were not consulted, undermining the very premise of “collective” defense.

This internal contradiction is one reason lawmakers across both parties have called the reasoning incoherent. As Sen. Chris Van Hollen put it, “This is a memo where the decision was made, and someone was told to come up with a justification for the decision.”

And beneath all of this lies the most dangerous element: the memo’s logic has no geographic limits. If the administration claims it is in an armed conflict with a designated “narcoterrorist” group, then, by its own theory, lethal force could be used wherever members of that group are found. The same framework that justifies strikes near Venezuela could, in principle, be invoked in a U.S. city if the administration claimed a cartel “cell” existed there. 

If Trump truly believes he leads “the most transparent administration in history,” then releasing the memo should be automatic. The American people have the right to know what legal theory is being used to justify killing people in their name.

For decades, OLC memos have been used not simply as legal advice but as the internal architecture that allows presidents to expand their war-making power. The Bush torture memos treated torture as lawful by redefining the word “torture” itself, calling it “enhanced interrogation,” thereby enabling years of CIA black-site operations and abusive interrogations. The Libya War Powers memo argued that bombing Libya did not constitute “hostilities,” allowing the administration to continue military action without congressional approval. Targeted-killing memos, including those related to drone strikes on U.S. citizens abroad, constructed a legal theory that lethal force could be used outside traditional battlefields, without trial, based on executive determinations alone. In each case, the memo did not merely interpret the law, it reshaped the boundaries of presidential war powers, often without public debate or congressional authorization.

The American people have the right to know what “legal theory” is being used to justify killing people in their name. Congress needs it to conduct oversight. Service members need it to understand the legality of the orders they receive. And the international community needs clarity on the standards the U.S. claims to follow. There is no legitimate reason for a president to hide the legal basis for lethal force, unless the argument collapses under scrutiny. A secret opinion cannot serve as the foundation for an open-ended military campaign in the Western Hemisphere.

The Older Foundation: A 200-Year Old Doctrine of Control

If the legal foundation comes from the post-9/11 era, the geopolitical foundation is older. Almost ancestral. For 200 years, the Monroe Doctrine has served as the permission slip for U.S. domination in Latin America.

The Trump administration went even further by openly reviving and expanding it through what officials called a “Trump Corollary,” which reframed the entire Western Hemisphere as a U.S. “defense perimeter” and justified increased military operations under the language of counter-narcotics, migration control, and regional stability. In this framework, Latin America is no longer treated as a diplomatic neighbor but as a security zone where Washington can act unilaterally. 

Venezuela, with its vast oil reserves, sovereign political project, and refusal to submit to U.S. pressure, has long been marked as a target. Sanctions softened the terrain. Disinformation hardened public opinion. And now, military strikes near its waters test how far Washington can push without triggering public revolt at home. The term “narcoterrorism” is simply the newest mask on a very old doctrine.

The strikes in the Caribbean are not isolated. They are the predictable intersection of two forces: a post-9/11 legal regime that allows war to expand without congressional approval, and a 200-year-old imperial doctrine that treats Latin America as a zone of control rather than a community of sovereign nations. Together, they form the logic that justifies today’s violence near Venezuela.

The Label that Opened the Door

After 9/11, every administration learned the same lesson: if you label something “terrorism,” the public will let you do almost anything. Now, this logic is being used everywhere. The cruel, decades-long blockade on Cuba is justified by claiming that the island is a “state sponsor of terrorism.” Mass surveillance, border militarization, endless sanctions, all wrapped in the language of “counterterrorism.” And now, to authorize military action in the Caribbean, they simply take the word “narco” and attach it to the word “terrorism.” The label does all the work. The danger is not confined to foreign policy: after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the same elastic definition of “terrorism” is now being used domestically to justify crackdowns on NGOs the administration claims are inciting “anti-American” political violence.

The only reason Trump has not launched a full-scale attack on Venezuela is because he is still testing the ground, testing resistance inside Venezuela, testing Congress, testing the media, and testing us. He knows nearly 70% of people in the United States oppose a war with Venezuela. He knows he cannot sell another Iraq. So he is probing, pushing, looking for the line we will not let him cross.

We are that line.

If we do not challenge the lie now, if we do not demand release of the memo, if we stay silent, “narcoterrorism” becomes the new “weapons of mass destruction.” If we allow this test case to go unanswered, the next strike will be a war. We are the only ones who can stop him. And history is watching to see whether we learned anything from the last twenty years of fear, deception, and violence.
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Because the next wars were always here, looming. We just need the clarity to see them and the force to stop them before they begin.