ATTACKING VENEZUELA
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on Earth — roughly 300 billion barrels, more than Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Russia. It also sits just over two thousand miles from the Gulf of Mexico, close enough for Houston refineries to smell the profits.
When Trump officials say the operations are about “narcotics” or “human rights,” it’s theater for the cameras. You don’t send B-52s—each capable of carrying 70,000 pounds of ordnance—to sink drug boats. You send them to show ownership, to remind the hemisphere that the oil under Venezuela’s soil still glows like a beacon for American energy interests.
From Reagan’s Contra escapades to Bush’s Iraq invasion, the justification always mutates—freedom, democracy, anti-terrorism, anti-drugs—but the extraction pipeline remains the spinal cord.
Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt contains heavy crude, perfectly suited for U.S. Gulf refineries that once thrived on similar blends. When sanctions cut off imports, it wasn’t morality that hurt—it was Chevron’s quarterly reports.
Now, with Trump openly authorizing CIA operations and drawing up strike options, this looks like Iraq with palm trees, a regime-change fantasy wrapped in anti-Maduro rhetoric. It’s not that Maduro isn’t a tyrant—he is—but tyrants with oil always seem to get the extra attention.
Trump’s political calculus is just as oily. Facing economic stagnation and the stench of corruption scandals, nothing refuels a flagging presidency like the sight of bombers on the horizon. Venezuela becomes both a distraction and a drill—a test of how far he can go before someone says “enough.”
Every Pentagon denial of “operational matters” just confirms what’s really operational:
Power projection for resource control.
It isn’t about democracy, or cocaine routes, or even Nicolás Maduro’s mustache.
It’s about the black bloodstream of capitalism, pulsing under
Venezuelan soil, and a president who’s never seen a barrel of oil he didn’t want to slap his name on.
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Trump is every bit as much of a lowlife piece of shit as Maduro. The US might want to cool it with the “dictator” shit until something is done to rectify that situation.
A great piece and worthy of close attention. The US has a grim legacy of covert and overt military intervention in Latin America, as well as regime change and (as you say) it's all about capitalist class interests including (in this instance) oil - and plenty of it. It's also about neutralizing any threat posed by the working class or Left as well as more ambiguous threats to the geo-political hegemony of a US Imperialism in terminal decline. If you support Project2025, like Honduras and El Salvador, you are a friend. If you challenge it in any way you are a foe, a narco-terrorist and target for removal.
The process began in the modern era in Honduras, following the failed revolution in Bolivia in 1952 - a revolution that has all but been erased from history. It developed by way of the Bay of Pigs and training of future coup leaders at Fort Bragg, initially under the pretext of the war on terror. Significant high points were of course the military coup in Chile (where the working class itself posed the greatest threat) and the sub-contraction of CIA support via Rafi Eitan and MOSSAD, to Latin American death squads such as the AUC. This led in turn to Iran-Contra and culminated in the invasion of Panama under the rubric of Operation Just Cause. Known as "Little Hiroshima" in the capital's slum districts this left 70 000 Panamanians dead.
The war on drugs was always a sham given that America's dirty war in Nicaragua was financed by drugs, under the rubric of Operation Black Eagle. Later, Escobar was targeted because he wouldn't play ball with the US and worked with the FARC. The Cali Cartel continued to be supported as they always have been. Everyone has heard of Escobar. Few have heard of his arch rival, Monzer al Kasser, an ally of Cali who was once a protected CIA asset and masterminded the Lockerbie bombing.
More recently threats against Venezuela preceded the plans to invade Iraq and were resurrected following a 2006 trade agreement with Libya to restrict oil production. They've also been linked to threats against Panama over the canal. Make no mistake, a coup or US military intervention (or both) are being planned for Venezuela but the fact that Trump has gone public is instructive. As well as playing to his domestic base and praying for a "Falklands moment" in US politics he is sending a warning to the whole continent. And the continent should respond accordingly.
Despite his virtual deification by much of the Left as a romantic figure, Che Guevara didn't know the first damned thing about Marxism and working class politics. His tragic death, at the hands of George HW Bush, of Frank A. Sturgiss, Rodriguez, Oswald Le Winter and others bears testimony to this fact. And I say this as someone who has met Guevara's brother and daughter - the latter at Trinity College Dublin.
Rodriguez used Guevara's Rolex as a paperweight and played tapes of his tortured screams to amuse guests, including British mercenary John Banks, at his pad in Miami as they plotted the murder of a DEA agent in Mexico. Le Winter kept Guevara's bloodstained poncho as a grim trophy in the hotel he owned on the Franco-German border.
On one thing, however, Guevara was 100% correct in that the future of resistance and socialism in Latin America rests on the building of a Socialist United States of the Americas to enhance its protection and independence not only from a fascist US but from fair-weather allies like Russia and China who will only support them the way that a rope supports a hanged man.