In August 2025, the US Trump administration placed a $50m bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s head and mobilised 4,000 sailors and marines, P-8 spy planes and ‘special operations’ units to Venezuela’s waters. The pretext is a renewed ‘War on Drugs’, with the Trump administration designating several Latin American drug trafficking gangs as ‘foreign terrorist organisations’, signing an executive order authorising the use of force in Latin America. Facing down this threat, Venezuela is standing steadfast, mobilising four million volunteers of the Bolivarian people’s militias, the communes and the National Army to ‘defend every inch’ of Venezuela’s sovereignty.
In 2020, under his first administration, Trump declared without a scrap of evidence that Maduro was the head of the ‘Cartel of the Suns’, supposedly linked to the infamous Sinaloa cartel, and offered $15m for the capture of Maduro. This ludicrous claim followed the failure of a protracted attempt to overthrow Maduro using the guise of an ‘interim government’. Rejecting the results of 2024’s Presidential election in Venezuela, the Biden administration then upped this bounty to $25m. Now Trump’s US attorney general, Pam Bondi, has doubled the sum to $50m, combining the ‘war on drugs’ with the ‘war on terror’ to foment support for US military intervention ‘south of the border’. Sanctions on Venezuela were imposed in 2019, and consequently the US refining operations of its oil corporation (PDVSA) were seized. The ‘Gold Reserve Inc’ company made a bid for them of $7.38bn in July 2025, but another bid is being considered. This is a huge loss for Venezuela, dismaying even many of the country’s reactionary opposition groups and a sign of US imperialism’s absolute contempt for the interests of all Venezuelans.
What is Venezuela’s crime? To have dared to seize control of its own natural resources and channel its oil wealth into social programmes for its population; worse still, to have dared to declare its intention to build socialism, forging alliances with socialist Cuba and other Latin American neighbours standing against imperialism. For these crimes, Venezuela has been the target of repeated coup attempts, asphyxiating sanctions and a ruthless propaganda blitz.
The ‘Cartel of the Suns’ is a myth perpetuated to justify imperialist intervention, just like Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in 2003 and claims of concern for US medical students in Grenada in 1983. As Venezuelan commentator Clodovaldo Hernandez remarks, ‘Maduro is presented to the world as a mix of Ivan the Terrible, Al Capone, Osama bin Laden, and Pablo Escobar. A higher bounty is offered for information leading to his capture, in a kind of Western scenario where Bondi plays the sheriff looking for a Clint Eastwood 2.0, willing “for a fistful of dollars” (well… not a fistful, but 50 million) to take on the adventure of capturing or assassinating a head of state’. This is the stuff of Netflix adventure-drama programmes with never-ending cliffhangers and ever more far-fetched plot twists.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that only 5% of narcotics produced in Colombia go through Venezuela, and has declared Venezuela free of both drug crop cultivation and drug labs. Venezuela kicked out the US Drug Enforcement Agency in 2005 amidst claims of espionage, and has since carried out successful anti-drug trafficking operations, reducing the transit of drugs through the country. Venezuelan security forces report seizing over 47 tonnes of drugs in 2025 alone. Professor Fernando Casado, a Spanish lawyer and journalist, published his investigations into the accusations, describing the existence of the Cartel of the Suns as ‘a fantasy that makes Narnia look real’. A similar attempt to designate 252 Venezuelans deported from the US and illegally held in El Salvador as foreign terrorists of the ‘Tren de Aragua’ gang fell apart following the revelation that 87% of the deportees did not even have a criminal record and the fact that Venezuela dismantled the gang in 2023. Now the debunked narrative of the Cartel of the Suns is being resurrected and recycled to ratchet up the pressure.
This is not the only narrative being recycled. In June, Venezuelan far-right opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado alleged that Caracas was manufacturing Iranian missiles and drones in order to target Florida. Incapable of winning any democratic election for years, the reactionary bourgeoisie in Venezuela continue desperately to lie to excuse US intervention, to crush the construction of socialism. Machado further alleged that Venezuela was supplying uranium to Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah. In an interview days after Israel began bombing Tehran, she stated ‘Venezuela is a real threat to the hemisphere and the United States. It is the only country in the hemisphere, besides the US, with the capacity to build combat drones of Iranian origin’. Notwithstanding that Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico also manufacture drones, Machado’s comments highlighted a sinister plot that sought to bring US airstrikes to the South American continent. Days later, the former vice president of control at PDVSA, scientist Armando Garcia Miragaya, was arrested in Zulia state. He had been attempting to cross the border to Colombia. Reportedly, Miragaya had made direct contact with the FBI, sending them coordinates of strategic locations including Venezuela’s Guri dam and Amuay refinery as alleged Iranian missile sites. Simultaneously, Venezuelan intelligence forces foiled a plot to launch a false flag terrorist attack against a prominent synagogue in Caracas, intercepting explosives earmarked to target Venezuela’s Jewish population. Although this attempt to generate direct US intervention has so far stalled, imperialist think tanks and war hawks continue to churn out dangerous allegations for beating the drums of war.
Covert attempts to overthrow Maduro and the socialist party government have so far been defeated, despite huge amounts of US funds being thrown at Venezuela’s opposition, with the US Congress approving over $40m annually since 2022 for them, as well as enabling opposition politicians to access over £300m in frozen Venezuelan assets. US backed opposition forces were reportedly behind an assassination attempt on President Maduro in 2018 when two drones exploded overhead as he was addressing crowds. In September 2024, Erik Prince, former Navy SEAL and founder of notorious US mercenary company Blackwater launched a fundraising campaign ‘Ya Casi Venezuela’ (Almost Venezuela) seeking to raise $100m to fund a mercenary invasion to depose Maduro. Though the campaign fell apart due to fraud and infighting, the funds appear to be surfacing in the discovery of multiple caches of weapons intercepted on route from Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago in recent months. The $50m US reward will undoubtedly attract a degenerate crew of prospectors, paramilitaries and bounty hunters.
This escalation has generated a regional response, galvanising anti-imperialist sentiment in the continent. Venezuela is not alone; Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico and Colombia alongside regional forums including the Bolivarian Alliance for Peoples of our America (ALBA) have issued statements defending Venezuela with Colombian President Petro calling an emergency meeting of Latin American heads of state. Cuban President, Miguel Diaz-Canal declared ‘The grave threats emanating from that rebellious and brutal North that despises us, as José Martí called it, are part of a vile scheme of domination, determined to revive the Monroe Doctrine, the key to US interventionism in our hemisphere. Therefore, we have no alternative but to confront the empire that seeks to subordinate us to its interests, and we must do so firmly united in convictions and action.’
The scars of US domination in Latin America over the past 200 years run deep.
The real threat in the Americas is constant imperialist intervention. The US runs 72 military bases in the region and has declared its wish to annex territory from Greenland to Panama. By 2022, Monthly Review had counted 27 incidents of US involvement in coups and coup attempts in Latin America since the turn of the century, including six in Venezuela. Since then, the US backed a coup against Pedro Castillo of Peru and backed attempted coups in Colombia and Honduras. Imperialist Britain has been complicit in this destabilisation, manipulating the 1964 media war against Brazil’s Goulart, providing weapons for the 1973 coup against Chile’s Allende, sequestering $1.4bn of Venezuela’s gold in the Bank of England since 2018, supporting the coup government of Bolivia’s Jeanine Anez in 2019, backing the phoney ‘interim presidency’ of Juan Guaido in Venezuela that same year and setting up a secretive ‘Venezuela reconstruction unit’ in a bid to secure post-coup contracts. This is what state terrorism really looks like.
We unequivocally stand with the Bolivarian Revolution and the Venezuelan working class, who despite incessant coup plots and propaganda, have continued to defend their revolutionary process, their struggle for political and economic sovereignty. The ‘Chavistas’ defiantly painted the cities red on 11 August in anti-imperialist marches nationwide. Despite every attempt to make the Venezuelan working class and grass-roots social forces invisible in the international media, they keep taking to the streets in their hundreds of thousands. The communes and communal councils – Venezuela’s building blocks for socialism with their parallel system of communal participatory democracy and production – stand ready and mobilised. Four million volunteers organised in the Bolivarian people’s, peasant and workers militias are integrating with the communal movement to ensure all 5,300+ communal circuits are prepared to defend their territory from foreign invaders. It is these class forces that have defeated every coup attempt since late revolutionary president Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998, heralding the Bolivarian ‘Chavista’ revolution. They defeated the 2002 failed coup, the 2003/4 oil lock out, the ‘guarimba’ street violence of 2014 and 2017, the ‘interim presidency’ of Juan Guaido, the 2020 mercenary invasion of Operation Gideon and the most recent attempts to block the 2025 inauguration of Maduro. These class forces will defeat any invasion, mercenary or military, that may be on Venezuela’s horizon. They demand our solidarity here in Britain.
Imperialist hands off Venezuela! No war for oil! Solidarity with the Bolivarian revolution!
