On 3 January 2026, the US committed one of its most brazen acts of international law-breaking to date. Its special ops forces captured, abducted and imprisoned socialist Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro.
Maduro’s supposedly interim ‘acting’ president, Delcy Rodriguez, appears mostly to have been acting in the US empire’s favour. Still, popular communes across Venezuela remain resistant to capitulation. National Assembly deputy Mario Silva called for Chavistas to mobilise, arguing that since 2026
executive power is in the hands of the US.
Certainly, the US-led regime change and piracy operation in Venezuela is yielding great dividends for certain interests. Among these are the US state coffers, oil sector and an increasingly hegemonic Zionist axis.
Those same powers, led by the US State Department, military and corporations alike are striving for similar levels of control all across South America. But on the ground, dogged popular resistance persists.
US is exploiting Venezuela’s disaster to cement its colonial stranglehold
US plunders Venezuela’s resources
For all Donald Trump’s obvious crimes, at home and abroad, he has at least made quite clear to the world the nature of US imperialism. It’s become far easier for the left to point and say, “See? We were right.”
As my colleague Ed Sykes wrote late last year:
Trump has never hidden his interest in stealing oil. He has long insisted that the US should have paid for its destruction of places like Iraq and Libya with the oil it took from them.
For many years, elites have been trying to re-establish US control in Venezuela. And corrupt international institutions like the Nobel Peace Prize have done their best to help.
Sure enough, Ed was able to say “I was right” within weeks after Maduro’s illegal abduction. The US took control over Venezuela’s oil production. It seized all revenue and cut off essential flows to Cuba. Trump was perfectly candid about his intentions, which were the US empire’s aims all along, within days:
I am pleased to announce that the Interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America.
This is by all accounts a neoliberal coup. Critical news outlet Venezuelanalysis wrote earlier this month:
Trump officials have been closely involved in an overhaul of the country’s Hydrocarbon Law and have brokered negotiations with Western corporations under the revised pro-business framework
The imperialist British state has played its part in this robbery too. After seizing around €2bn worth of the developing country’s gold in the 2019 Juan Guidó coup, the Bank of England holds now almost €4bn in gold value. It’s now threatening to release the gold, but only under US control. Naturally.
Rodríguez bows to Zionist relations
As early as February 2026, the deposed Venezuelan regime under US “administration” began sending its oil flows to Israel. This broke with over two decades of cancelled relations with the apartheid state.
Zionists revelled as Rodríguez decided to pull Venezuela out of the ICC, which wants Israeli leaders for war crimes. The US State Department praised its “partnership.” By July, Rodríguez met with an Israeli ‘mission’.
By August 2026, Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodríguez officially reinstated the country’s ties to settler-colonial state Israel. The apartheid state opportunistically used the cover of two devastating earthquakes, which killed over 6,300 Venezuelans and injured countless, to introduce its so-called ‘Project for the Reconstruction of the Future’. We’ve all seen the apocalyptic future ‘Israel’ is bringing us.
Brigadier General Elad Edri gave a presentation to Venezuelan president Delcy Rodriguez about the project. Edri was involved in the Zionist Operation Cast Lead 2009 war against the Palestinians. That operation led President Hugo Chávez to break ties with Israel and call its policy genocidal. Chávez told Le Figaro:
What was it, if not genocide? … The Israelis were looking for an excuse to exterminate the Palestinians.
Sending Edri to Caracas was likely a deliberate move by the Zionist regime to “rub the Chavistas’ faces with the dirt of its genocide“. Unfortunately, Venezuela is not alone in facing the regional Zionist campaign.
Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez makes big moves to please Trump regime
Zionists revel in regional consolidation
Across Latin America, influence campaigns have been run from the US and further afield to meddle in the region. They’ve interfered in elections, propagandised populations and swung votes rightward.
Notably among these interference campaigns is Honduras, whose corporate-owned politicians were found to have collaborated with Zionists in election subterfuge. The ‘Hondurasgate’ Tapes revealed that Trump administration officials joined Israeli spies to upend political processes regionally.
US Republican networks and Zionists engaged in sustained campaigns to overturn democratic mandates in Honduras, Colombia and Mexico especially. In the former two, they’ve succeeded by all accounts.
In Honduras, a right-wing Trump ally Nasry ‘Tito’ Asfura won 2025’s election after blatant interference from the US administration. He’s an avowed Christian Zionist, albeit of Palestinian descent, who quickly sought to deepen the Central American state’s relations with Israel.
Colombia recently saw socialist, pro-Palestinian ally and Gaza genocide accuser Gustavo Petro deposed, following credible allegations of election fraud. He was replaced by a far-right Zionist, US-aligned neoliberal fanatic, formerly Florida-based drug cartel lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella.
Within days of taking power, Esrpiella reinstated his country’s ties to Israel and promised to kowtow to the apartheid state’s interests. His twerking for Israel was made all the more absurd and horrifying following his country suffering a devastating earthquake within his first weeks in power.
This pattern is far from a new phenomenon. Chile’s inaugurated president José Antonio Kast, son of a Nazi officer, takes inspiration from Israel in his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim beliefs. Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa has reinstated the country’s ties to Israel and allowed US military bombing campaigns to go unchecked. President Rodrigo Paz considered Bolivia-Israel relations a first priority when he took power. And so on.
Luckily, many grassroots movements which still hold a resistance line, despite capture from above.
Colombia’s new far-right, drug cartel-linked US puppet president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has only been in power for 5 days, but he has already given the US and Israeli militaries permission to enter Colombian territory.
The cynical reason he gave for inviting US/Israeli… pic.twitter.com/fkkIUYrYlj
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 13, 2026
Grassroots movements hold hope in Venezuela
Despite clear capitulation by Delcy Rodríguez to US and Zionist interests, it’s important that the left not give up immediately on the Bolivarian project. All revolutionary projects are confronted with crises, big and small.
It just so happens that this one is massive, and has set back what Chávez started by many years. All the same, we must resist what writer Kimberley D. Miller calls the ‘Delcyfication of analysis’.
As anti-imperialist Venezuelanalysis outlet reported in July, the movement from below persists:
Hundreds of Venezuelan activists took to the streets on Friday, July 24, to denounce the US and Israeli presence in the Caribbean nation.
The rally “against imperialism and Zionism” took place in Caracas’ Plaza Bolívar and was organized by the Anti-Imperialist Front, a newly-formed coalition of grassroots movements that reject Washington’s growing influence over Venezuelan affairs.
Likewise, Venezuela’s communes continue to denounce top-down capitulation, from their grassroots position. In the same article Miller wrote, despite apparent executive capture, of Venezuelan communes:
On International Working Women’s Day, I observed Venezuela’s National Popular Consultation, a nationwide electoral process through which communities developed proposals, deliberated through communal structures, and voted on projects to receive public funding. At voting sites in Caracas, residents were deciding among projects addressing water access, infrastructure, transportation, food production and local enterprise. At El Panal in 23 de Enero and Santa Rosa Commune, I encountered communal organization operating food distribution, maternal health, political education and the everyday work of social reproduction. …
What persisted after January 3 was communal governance, women’s organization, Afro-Venezuelan political formation and internationalist consciousness whose histories preceded the Rodríguez government’s choices and whose political horizons could not be reduced to those decisions.
This distinction also became visible around Iran. Following the February 28 U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, former Foreign Minister Yván Gil issued a communiqué that, while condemning the initial aggression, also characterized Iran’s military response as “improper and condemnable.” The communiqué was subsequently withdrawn after grassroots criticism.
That same movement which fought Espriella at the polls and on the streets in Colombia will fight its Zionist capture now. The movement that defends Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico will be a bulwark against inevitable US meddling. Those strikes and demonstrations which brought Paz’s Bolivia to a halt won’t die easily.
Wherever US capture or Zionist sabotage plants its ugly boot, it’ll be met with the spiky determination of the Americas’ working peoples. And as history has shown us, someday, they’ll just limp away.
The Popular Anti-Imperialist Front took to the streets again yesterday, this time in El Juquito, on the western rural outskirts of Caracas. Demonstrators rejected US plundering and control over the country, as well as the acting Rodríguez gov’t normalizing ties w/ Israel https://t.co/1g3FhVxVvY
— Venezuelanalysis (@venanalysis) August 17, 2026
Bolivian puppet regime and US Pentagon target leftist strike leaders
Featured image via the Canary
