On 16 November 2025, the nuclear-powered USS Gerald R Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, entered the Caribbean. Venezuela is in its sights. Since September, the US has been firebombing fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela and in the Pacific, killing 79 people so far. US President Donald Trump claims, without a scrap of proof, that the victims are ‘narco-terrorists’. Escalating the aggression, the US military department SOUTHCOM launched Operation Southern Spear, mobilising guided-missile destroyer warships, a submarine, an amphibious assault ship and some 15,000 soldiers. In addition, the US has stationed F-35 fighter jets at the Roosevelt Roads military base in Puerto Rico; US SOUTHCOM head, Admiral John Holsey, visited neighbouring Guyana, whilst Trinidad and Tobago conducted a week of joint military drills with the US Military’s 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit just seven miles from Venezuela’s shores. Flights to Caracas have been virtually grounded following a US Federal Aviation Administration ‘Notice to airmen’ warning whilst US B52 bombers have conducted sorties skirting the coastline. The US is launching a war in what Trump refers to as his ‘neighbourhood’, preparing to bomb South America for the first time since the 1989 invasion of Panama. SAM McGILL reports.
The US alleges that Venezuela’s democratically elected President Nicolas Maduro is the kingpin of the fictional ‘Cartel of the Suns’ and is directing the criminal gang Tren de Aragua to commit narco-terrorism in the US. They have placed a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head. Tren de Aragua, a domestic criminal gang, was largely dismantled in a raid by the Venezuelan state in 2023, and even US intelligence admits that Cartel of the Suns simply does not exist. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, just 5% of the region’s cocaine transits through Venezuela, declaring the nation free of both drug crop cultivation and drug labs. Just as fictitious claims of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were peddled to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, today’s lie is that Venezuela is sponsoring ‘narco-terrorists’ to flood the US economy with drugs.
Despite labelling the boat strikes ‘extra-judicial’, the spokesman for the UN Secretary-General expressed only tepid concern over ‘tensions in the region between the US and Venezuela’. This drew sharp criticism from Venezuela’s ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada, who denounced this ‘immoral equation of the aggressor and the victim’, a ‘false parity that ends up endorsing…the illegal and coercive actions of the United States government as part of an exercise intended to destroy our republican form of government and impose a puppet regime’.
Imperialism steps up the pressure
US military aggression is an intensification of its unending war on the Bolivarian revolution through crippling sanctions. Since 2017, the US has imposed over 1,000 unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela; UN special rapporteur Alfred De Zayas estimates that 100,000 people have died as a result of shortages of medicine and other vital products. Trump has repeatedly stated that if he’d remained in office in 2020, Venezuela would have already collapsed and he’d have ‘all that oil’. As Vanessa Neumann, the opposition’s phoney ‘interim ambassador to the UK’, boasted in the Financial Times, ‘The plan now is a capture of Nicolas Maduro. Capture-kill or capture-arrest and take him out, one way or another.’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio made this clear when he tweeted Maduro pictures of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu in 2019.
Britain is complicit, refusing to recognise Maduro as head of state. Over 31 tonnes of Venezuela’s gold remain frozen in the Bank of England; in 2020, a secretive ‘Venezuela reconstruction unit’ operating within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was exposed. Britain is vying for a piece of the pie should Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution be overthrown.
The imperialists want to impose a regime headed by far-right opposition figures like Maria Corina Machado. Machado has spearheaded coups and far right violence in Venezuela for over 20 years. In a video message to Riyadh’s Fortune Global Forum in October, she promised: ‘Venezuela will be the single biggest economic opportunity for decades to come… worth more than $1.7 trillion.’ Machado has openly aligned herself with Israel and fascist groups across Europe, signing a cooperation agreement with Netanyahu’s Likud party and addressing the ‘Patriots of Europe’ conference in Madrid, calling for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims alongside Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban. Clearly a worthy recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize!
AlthoughVenezuela is the primary target, imperialism has broader aims in the region. In recent weeks the US has imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil, and slapped sanctions on Colombia’s left-wing President Gustavo Petro, revoking his US visa and declaring him an ‘illegal drug dealer’, after he described the US attacks on fishing vessels ‘an act of tyranny’. The US has been attempting to unseat Petro ever since he took power in 2022. After broadening airstrikes to Mexico’s Pacific coast, the US and Israel have claimed that Iran is operating in Mexico and Venezuela, making preposterous claims that Venezuelan-trained Iranian operatives attempted to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Mexico. Venezuelan opposition leaders falsely claim that Iran is manufacturing missiles in Venezuela to target Florida. In recent years, the right wing has reclaimed power in Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and, most recently, Bolivia. Former allies of Venezuela, these states are now loyal lackeys of US imperialism. At a summit in November of the European Union and the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States, Argentina, Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama and Paraguay refused to sign a statement in favour of maintaining Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace, whilst El Salvador, Panama and the Dominican Republic have granted the US authorisation to use their airbases.
‘War on drugs’ – a lethal masquerade
US imperialism has always used the ‘war on drugs’ as a cover for its own crimes against the working class. In the 1970s Richard Nixon used it as a pretext to crush black communities and the anti-Vietnam War movement.In the 1980s the Reagan administration backed Contra death squads in Nicaragua against the revolutionary Sandinista government. Whilst the CIA looked the other way, top-ranking Contras funded their activities by trafficking cocaine. In the early 2000s, ‘Plan Colombia’ crushed armed revolutionary forces in Colombia’s 50-year civil war. US ally President Alvaro Uribe cheered on the Colombian army and right-wing paramilitaries as they indiscriminately killed peasant farmers, dressing their corpses as left-wing guerillas to dupe the media. The narco-trade boomed as 200,000 were killed. Uribe has since been implicated for his connections with the Medellín cartel. Meanwhile it is big pharma in the US that produces and profits from fentanyl.
The US, Britain and the EU have no interest in stopping the lucrative narcotics trade. The 2021 leaked Pandora Papers illustrated, in the words of Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell, that London is‘the money laundering capital of the world.’* The British ruling class are key facilitators. In 2021 British banks NatWest and HSBC were fined $265m and £63.9m respectively for money laundering. Notoriously, in 2012, British bank HSBC was found guilty of laundering millions of dollars for Mexican drug-lord El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel. These banks simply pay their fines and continue pumping billions of narco-profits into the global economy. Meanwhile Britain operates a network of offshore tax havens; in 2018, shell companies registered in British Overseas Territories were implicated in corruption cases worth £250bn across 79 different countries.
Meanwhile real ‘narco-presidents’ are supported by the US, from Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe to Honduras’s Juan Orlando Hernandez. Ecuador is a key port for cocaine exports. Current President Daniel Noboa is the billionaire heir to the Bonita banana family business and a vast narco-trafficking network. 700kg of cocaine from Noboa Trading boats was seized in Guayaquil between 2020 and 2022. Yet Noboa remains a staunch US ally.
As Henry Kissinger said, the US ‘has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests’. In Panama, the US spent decades moulding narco-president General Manuel Noriega; from his early days on the CIA’s payroll to guaranteeing US control of the Panama Canal. Yet in 1989 Noriega stepped out of line. The subsequent US invasion and bombing campaign killed an estimated 7,000 people.
The threat of a good example
Venezuela represents the threat of a good example. For 26 years it has sought to control its oil resources and plough them into social programmes for the poor, building five million units of social housing, creating the ‘Barrio Adentro’ free healthcare system, delivering three million cataract surgeries, eradicating illiteracy in 2005 and creating 52 new free universities. Internationally, Venezuela is a threat because it is a beacon of resistance in Latin America, a direct block to imperialist control in the region – supporting the anti-imperialist struggle in Cuba, in Nicaragua, in Palestine, in the Sahel, in Yemen. Venezuela is a threat because it has declared its commitment to building socialism, creating space for direct, participatory democracy and social production through a network of neighbourhood communes.
It is the communes which are now mobilising alongside eight million volunteers who have enlisted in Bolivarian people’s, peasant and workers militias, founded in 2009 defy the threat from the US. This reinforces 350,000 in the standing army that has remained loyal to the Bolivarian revolution throughout decades of coup attempts. The Bolivarian militias are integrating with the communal movement to ensure all 5,300+ com-munal circuits are prepared. The people are organised, armed and determined to defend their revolutionary project. President Maduro has been marching on the streets with them; in October he issued an order for weapons to be distributed to the people to defend the country – once again exposing bourgeois lies about him being a hated ‘dictator’: what kind of dictator arms the working class? The war hawks have not reckoned with the deter-mination of the Venezuelan people to defend their revolutionary process at all costs.
Venezuela is on the front lines of the anti-imperialist struggle and it is our duty to defend and build solidarity from Britain, the oldest imperialist country in the world.
No war! No sanctions! Imperialist hands off Venezuela!
* ‘Cocaine Capitalism reloaded’, FRFI 286, February/March 2022
‘The Bolivarian revolution vs the Monroe Doctrine’ – A voice from Venezuela
Today, the Venezuelan people continue to face threats from the US empire, which has stationed a powerful naval fleet off our Caribbean coast under the false narrative that we are a country of drug traffickers, because that is what they mean when they label our constitutional president, Nicolás Maduro, the head of a narco-state.
Faced with this threat, our leader and president is mobilising the people into community militias, strengthening the fusion of the popular, military, and police forces to defend our most precious asset: national in-dependence.
The call to enlist for the love of country was a success, and now more than 8 million people have signed up to be a part of the Bolivarian militia. This shows that we are a people with a patriotic spirit, with the blood of liberators running through our veins, and that we are ready to lay down our lives for our love of our land.
Venezuela is a country of peaceful people, as our history shows and our diplomacy confirms. In this sense, the country is in a state of total internal normality because it is aware that it is also facing a psychological war that can only be defeated through the constant ideological-revolutionary training taught to us by our commander Chávez.
Another task in defeating the threat is to strengthen and consolidate popular power in the territory in order to establish the communal state and guarantee the greatest possible social security and happiness for our people. In continuing this struggle, we carry forward the fight of Bolívar, defending the sovereignty, independence, and dignity of our homeland against all imperialist attacks.
¡Viva Chávez! ¡Viva Maduro! ¡Comuna o Nada!
JOSÉ GREGORIO ORTEGA
Golpe de Timón Commune, Venezuela
Member of Somos Los de a Pie
