When Do We String Him Up?

“Everyday I become more convinced … that it is necessary to transcend capitalism. But capitalism can not be transcended through capitalism itself; it must be done through socialism, true socialism, with equality and justice. I’m also convinced that it is possible to do it under democracy, but not in the type of democracy being imposed by Washington.” —Hugo Chávez It snowed where I live yesterday. Sadly that has become an increasingly rare occurrence; every winter I find myself hoping for just one day of snow. This year I got my wish. I remember thinking: “At least 2026 if off to a good start.” Later that night I was reminded of why I’m often such a cynic when the United States invaded Venezuela. They bombed several cities, including the capital, Caracas, and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro. Shortly thereafter Trump announced that the US would run Venezuela for the foreseeable future. To the extend that a Casus Belli was even articulated, the American government has claimed throughout last year that Maduro is the head of a drug cartel, Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), that this cartel is responsible for shipping drugs into the United States, and has thus charged Maduro with terrorism for all the lives lost in the US to drug overdoses. Not only is this contemptibly idiotic from a legal or any other point of view, the Trump administration was so uninterested in promoting this canard that a lot of people likely never heard this justification. At least Bush sent Colin Powell to lie to the United Nations. Firstly, the Cartel de los Soles doesn’t exist. In the 1990s, when Venezuelan journalists reported on a handful of corrupt generals in the National Guard, they called them the Cartel de los Soles because they have sun-shaped insignias on their epaulets. It was meant as a slightly amusing, disparaging term for these corrupt officers; there was not an organized crime syndicate operating under that banner and there never has been. But the US government has seized on the name, insisting, without evidence, that it’s a real cartel operated by the Venezuelan government. That’s nothing but ridiculous propaganda. To the extent that government corruption has increased under Maduro, it’s mainly due to the suffocating US sanctions strangling Venezuela’s economy that have forced Caracas to permit drug traffickers greater autonomy in certain regions in exchange for badly-needed revenue. Still, nothing on the scale of organized corruption alleged by the US government. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that the US is itself deeply involved in the illicit drug trade, as documented chiefly by the historian Alfred McCoy, as are many of its client states (e.g. Honduras, US-occupied Afghanistan, etc.). Not to mention that US banks launder drug money for the cartels. Secondly, Venezuela ships virtually no drugs to the US. Most drugs in the US are manufactured by US companies. Purdue Pharma is almost single-handedly responsible for the US opioid crisis, by knowingly getting doctors to overprescribe highly addictive opioids. It’s as if the tobacco industry got doctors to prescribe cigarettes to help manage anxiety. South American narco traffickers are not to blame for creating the demand. And even if they were, most of the gangs that supply the US market are in Colombia and Mexico. Venezuelan drug traffickers mostly produce cocaine for European markets, not fentanyl for the US. Lastly, to charge an entire foreign government or drug cartel for all overdose deaths in the US, and then somehow leap to charges of terrorism from there, is legally and logically preposterous. The real motive for this invasion, as always, requires very little digging to find. In 2019, during his first term, Trump applied brutal sanctions to Venezuela’s economy. The Washington Post reported that the sanctions caused “an economic contraction roughly three times as large as that caused by the Great Depression in the United States.” Then amidst this serious economic warfare, Trump tried to orchestrate a coup to unseat Maduro. This was confirmed by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who criticized Trump for being too incompetent to pull it off successfully. “We tried to organize a kind of coup,” Murphy wrote, but Trump turned it into “a debacle.” What was the motive for this attempted coup? In 2023, after learning that Joe Biden was buying Venezuelan oil, Trump told a rally: “We’re buying oil from Venezuela? When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would’ve taken it over, we would’ve gotten all that oil, it would’ve been right next door.” Last year, as Trump began his bombing spree of civilian vessels in the Caribbean, Florida Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar told Fox Business: For those Americans who do not understand why we need to go in, [it’s] for three—basically for three reasons. You’re [watching] Fox Business, Venezuela for the American oil companies will be a field day, because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity. American companies can go in and fix all oil pipe—the whole oil rigs and everything that has to do with the petroleum companies, or anything that has to do with oil and the derivatives. … And I’m telling you, these people, the Venezuelans, have the largest reserves of oil in the world, more than Saudi Arabia. We’re talking about—this is going to be a windfall for us when it comes to fossil fuel. For good measure she added a bizarre claim straight out of George Bush’s playbook: This guy [Maduro] is a thug and he’s good friends with Hezbollah. They are giving uranium to Hamas and to Iran and to North Korea and to Cuba and to Nicaragua. Come on, it's time for the United States to do what we need to do, and thank God Trump is doing it. Now that the US has kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, Trump held a boastful press conference in Mar-a-Lago’s tea room, where he announced that the US would run Venezuela for now. “You said that the US is going to run Venezuela, so who’s in power right now?” one reporter asked him. “Well, we’re going to be running it with a group,” Trump replied, “and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly. We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure which will cost billions of dollars. It’ll be paid for by the oil companies directly. They will be reimbursed for what they’re doing, but it’s gonna be paid to get the oil … flowing the way it should be.” Trump was also asked how much it would cost “if the US ends up administrating Venezuela for years?” “Well, you know, it won’t cost us anything because the money coming out of the ground is very substantial,” Trump responded. “So it’s not gonna cost us anything.” When Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke, he told everyone that Maduro “is not the legitimate president of Venezuela.” “That’s not just us saying it,” he added reassuringly, “the first Trump administration, the Biden administration, the second Trump administration, none of those three recognized him.” Tom Lehrer was right, political satire is obsolete. This is a comedy. One might even call it a Divine Comedy. Another interesting comment from Trump at this press conference concerned María Corina Machado, a far-right Venezuelan politician who’s been begging Trump to invade Venezuela and install her as puppet leader. Last year, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by Oslo’s Comedy Committee. I wrote at the time about how laughable this was considering she’s too unpopular to win an election, and therefore her only plan to attain power is by having the US install her. Yet the Nobel Committee gave this woman—who was at the same time cheerleading Trump’s assassination campaign against innocent civilians in the Caribbean—a Nobel Peace Prize, which she immediately dedicated to Trump “for his decisive support for our cause.” Immediately, the entire Free World™ unanimously insisted that she was a popular “democratic” opposition figure fighting with the Venezuelan people against the Maduro dictatorship. Yesterday, however, when Trump was asked if he wanted Machado to lead Venezuela, he had to admit reality: “I think it’d be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman but she doesn’t have the respect.” Trump and the US military are, of course, also not respected by the Venezuelan people. And why should they be? Besides the economic warfare, the murderous strikes on their fishing vessels, and now the abduction of their president, the US military came in with their usual array of bombs and firepower, targeting not just Caracas but also the states of Aragua, Miranda, and La Guardia. Adding insult to injury, according to preliminary reports, the US also bombed the Cuartel de la Montaña where Hugo Chávez’s remains are interred—a symbolic attack on his legacy. To understand why the US attacked Venezuela and harbors such animosity for the already-dead Chávez, it’s necessary to understand the history of US imperialism in Venezuela. The United States is a capitalist empire. Therefore its dual purpose is to expand both state and corporate power. Controlling the supply of natural resources is crucial for both purposes. One of President Franklin Roosevelt’s advisors, Adolf A. Berle, wrote in 1951 that …control of the Middle East has usually meant substantial control of the world. This is not merely sentimental: cutting of the oil supply from the Persian Gulf cripples … naval forces in the Indian Ocean and isolates India. It also gives an absolute free run to the east coast of Africa and, of course, make it possible to close the Strait of Aden. A State Department memo prepared for President Truman echoed that sentiment, calling “Saudi Arabia, where the oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power,” “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” It added that friendly relations with the Saudi dictatorship would “give a reasonable security to American interest in the vast Arabian oil fields.” When the US rebuild Europe and Japan after WWII, they consciously made them oil-dependent. The important State Department planner George Kennan explained this would give the US “veto power” over its allies. These types of considerations are typical of empires, and are always included in the calculus by someone in the State Department. In Vietnam, for example, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told an audience at the Overseas Press Club in New York that South East Asia was the “rice bowl” of the region “which helps feed the densely populated region that extends from India to Japan.” If the US controlled the supply of food in a region infamous for rice famine, it would achieve significant leverage over Japan and China. Furthermore, Dulles added, that the region was “rich in many raw materials, such as tin, rubber, and iron ore. It offers industrial Japan potentially important markets and sources of raw material. The area has great strategic value.” What brought the US to Venezuela was oil. Venezuela has the largest reserves of crude oil in the world. As historian Vijay Prashad writes in his excellent book The Darker Nations: Oil promised salvation. The few countries that had enough oil for both domestic consumption and export earned significant amounts of foreign exchange. Oil had much more muscle than cocoa and coffee, than bauxite and iron ore. The lifeblood of postwar industrial capitalism, oil earned well for those who controlled it. The issue, from the first, was not so much the oil itself but control. Who controlled the oil? … By 1950, the main energy corporations organized themselves into seven conglomerates known as the Seven Sisters: Exxon (or Esso), Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Socal (or Chevron). … They came to the oil lands in the early years and … operated as a cartel and dominated the supply of crude oil. …The regimes that ruled over the oil lands could have used the rent paid by the oil companies to increase the social wage—to expand public education, health, transport, and other such important avenues for the overall advancement of the people. Instead, the oil rent went toward the expansion of luxury consumption for the bureaucratic-managerial or monarchal elite—the oligarchy in Venezuela or the Ibn Saud clan in Saudi Arabia—and to oil the military machine. …In 1957 alone the Seven Sisters made $828 million in Venezuela, whose regime allowed them to remit all their profits without restrictions. As one US banker noted, “You have the freedom here to do what you want to do with your money, and to me, that is worth all the political freedom in the world.” For years, several Venezuelan governments promised to nationalize the nation’s oil and redirect the profits from US corporations to the Venezuelan people; they did this in 1943 and again in 1975. But the oil industry remained privatized under pressure from the US oil companies and the International Monetary Fund, which secured “all the political freedom in the world” for American bankers at the expense of the Venezuelan people. Throughout the 1990s, the people elected social democrats and conservatives but all of them ended up cooperating with the United States. The man who would change that was Hugo Chávez. In 1998, he won a decisive victory, particularly with the support of the working-class and the peasantry. When he assumed office the following year, he asserted state-control over the oil fields and used the profits to provide Venezuelans with healthcare, literacy and secondary education for peasant farmers and working people, and affordable housing. This left-wing government also established comunas (communes): local democratic structures that allowed communities to democratically control public funds, decide on local development projects, use communal banks, and to establish cooperative enterprises (democratically-structured corporations as opposed to hierarchical). The comunas remain one of the most successful and popular projects of the Chávez government. In 2025, the number of votes in the Popular Consultation broke records. The Popular Consultation is a way for comunas to vote for infrastructure projects for their neighborhoods. Each commune votes on projects—i.e., fixing the roof on a neighborhood school, or revitalizing the houses of poor people who can’t afford to upkeep their homes themselves. The two most voted projects are provided a minimum of $10,000. Ever since these left-wing reforms, the capital-owning class in the United States have decried the loss of freedom in Venezuela. Having lost their “freedom” to exploit the Venezuela’s resources. Accordingly, Chávez was labeled a dictator despite having been elected by the people. Returning “democracy” to Venezuela thus became a policy goal for the United States. In 2002, the US organized a coup against Chávez. In the months leading up to the coup, US officials met with officers in the Venezuelan military and right-wing politicians, including Pedro Carmona. In April, the Venezuelan business elite organized anti-Chávez protests (where the US flag was promptly displayed), and the wealthy owners of a Venezuelan oil company initiated their own strike to damage their country’s economy. Working-class people took to the streets en masse to support the government in counter-protests. In the chaos, the Venezuelan military suddenly announced that Chávez had resigned and was arrested for supposedly ordering the killing of protesters outside the presidential palace. Pedro Carmona, a businessman, declared himself president and vowed to undo Chávez’s left-wing reforms. He moved quickly to disband the National Assembly and the Supreme Court; he suspended the attorney general and all elected left-wing mayors and governors. The Chicago Tribune described Carmona as “a buttoned- down businessman and economist who … has an international reputation, having represented Venezuelan commercial and diplomatic missions abroad.” A perfect representative of the bourgeoisie. (Incidentally, another participant of this coup was María Corina Machado.) The Carmona government, however, would not last a full 48 hours. Organized workers banded together to oust Carmona and return Chávez to power. On a wave of popular support, Chávez’s Presidential Guard swept him back into office. The workers also broke the strike of the corrupt oil executives. The coup was thwarted. Chávez died in 2013 at the young age of 58. Nicolás Maduro, a former bus-driver handpicked by Chávez, was his replacement. Maduro inherited the Venezuelan revolution. Early in Maduro’s term, oil prices fell dramatically. And, in part due to US sanctions, the Venezuelan economy was still reliant on crude-oil exports, which it used to subsidize their social reform programs. The US seized on the opportunity. They used their usual bag of tricks, perfected during the Cold War: economic warfare, propaganda campaigns, diplomatic isolation, occasional military attacks, and judicial harassment. But, as in Cuba, they succeeded only in lowering living standards. In 2019, the US attempted another coup d’état, pretending that Juan Guaido had somehow won the election. This time around, with two failed coups, Washington took a more direct approach by simply invading Venezuela and abducting President Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. They were flown to New York where they’ll face a courtroom theatre. US Attorney General Pam Bondi said that Maduro and Flores “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.” Not just wrath—the “full wrath.” See? Theatre. The fall of Venezuela, if it indeed falls, also strengthens the Empire geopolitically. Israel has been pushing the US to invade Iran for decades, but now with renewed urgency by Netanyahu since the genocide in Palestine began (which is still continuing). The US has so far refused to do so because Iran will almost certainly firebomb Saudi Arabian oil refineries. That would be a significant blow to the US Empire. To somewhat absorb that shock, they would need another, non-Middle Eastern, source of oil. Furthermore, Cuba, another country on America’s shit-list ever since they overthrew their US-backed dictator in 1959, has been able to survive the illegal US embargo by purchasing Venezuelan oil. A loss of their biggest energy import would make Havana more vulnerable to US pressure. Lastly, in the new Cold War with China the US has been unable to compete economically. They tried to use sanctions on Chinese industry but it failed rather spectacularly when Beijing threatened to cut off rare-earth mineral shipments to the US. Those minerals are crucial not only for US industry and Silicon Valley’s AI tech- firms (just about the only competitive industry they have left) but also to the US military. Trump quickly had to back down since China currently has a monopoly on the refinement of these minerals. The Trump administration has therefore been looking for other sources of minerals. Trump tried to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to hand over all of Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals in return for continuing the flow of US arms. There are also big deposits in Greenland, which Trump keeps reiterating the US needs to annex for “national security.” And I’m sure purely coincidentally, Venezuela is also rich in rare-earth mineral deposits. This invasion is at least partly designed to give the US Empire more freedom to pursue its enemies; it’s an act of war to enable more war. There must still be some delusional people out there that believe in the concept of law, just as there are people that still believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, so I’ll note that all of this is technically illegal. The UN Charter forbids invading another country; the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS), to which the US and Venezuela are both signatories, guarantees the inviolability of a state’s territory and forbids the use of military action against members; the US Constitution forbids the executive branch of the government to invade another country without Congressional approval; and Trump even violated the Geneva Conventions when he posted a picture of Maduro shackled and blindfolded on board of a US warship on social media. Sharing pictures of POWs intending to mock them or boast about their capture is against the Conventions, to which the US is a signatory (in fact, the US is a high contracting party, meaning they must uphold the Conventions even when others don’t, and prosecute violators). Furthermore, in the picture Maduro is bound, wearing earmuffs and a blindfold, holding a water bottle. The water bottle is partly propaganda for us, to see Maduro is treated somewhat humanely, but it’s also to make him feel dependent on his captors. The blindfold and earmuffs, however, is a form of sensory deprivation to make him feel helpless. The same tactics were used by US soldiers during the so- called war on terror—when transporting their victims to Guantánamo Bay, for instance. Sensory deprivation is explicitly mentioned in the UN’s Istanbul Protocol as a form of psychological torture, making it illegal under the Convention Against Torture. So that, too, is a war crime. But who cares? Law is fake. We all know this by now. Here’s my ultimate question: when will we make these bastards pay the consequences? From Truman dropping two atom bombs on civilian cities, Eisenhower’s war in Korea and coups in Latin America, Kennedy and Johnson’s invasion of Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger’s bombing of Laos and Cambodia, Ford’s complicity in Indonesia’s genocide in East Timor, Carter’s support for Afghan jihadists, Reagan’s invasion of Panama and terrorist campaign against Nicaragua, Bush’s war in Iraq, Clinton’s bombing sprees in Africa and Yugoslavia, Bush’s war in Iraq, Obama’s war in Afghanistan and drone assassination campaign across the Middle East and Africa, Trump’s bloodbaths in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, and Biden’s genocide in Gaza, to Trump’s genocide in Gaza, bombing of Iran, and now invading Venezuela. All of these acts technically violated various domestic and international laws, and obviously disgraced humanity. It’s also a short, incomplete list. Yet precisely none of these presidents were punished; no one in their administrations were punished; and none of the soldiers who were “just following orders” were punished. When exactly do we string up Trump from a bridge like we did to Mussolini? When do we hold Nuremberg-style tribunals for the American stormtroopers destroying the world? If there are no consequences, like there haven’t been, they will continue unabated. There are many guilty people in the US government—the biggest criminal organization on the planet—but Trump is the current Pooh-Bah in charge. We should make an example out of him. It’s unlikely to happen, though. Nowhere in the world do we find as many Good Germans as in the United States.