1. The US raids on Venezuela on the night of 2-3 January and the kidnapping and imprisonment of President Nicolás Maduro are naked acts of imperialist aggression. Donald Trump’s declaration that ‘we are going to run Venezuela’ sums up the arrogance of US power. His justifications – that Maduro is the boss of a drug cartel, that his regime is undemocratic, etc – are, to use one of his favourite words, fake. This about removing a regime that, especially under Hugo Chávez, has long been a thorn in Washington’s side and seizing the largest oil reserves in the world. Trump gloats: ‘We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in.’ He has exposed the hollowness of his denunciations of previous US administrations’ ‘forever wars’ and attempts at regime change.

2. The assault on Venezuela must be seen against the background of Trump’s reaffirmation of the Monroe doctrine in his new National Security Strategy. This policy warning European powers to stay away from the Americas expressed the early United States’ aim to dominate the Western Hemisphere. Only in the late 19th century did Washington become strong enough to start displacing Britain, hitherto the dominant imperialist power in Latin America. This process was accompanied by war with Spain and numerous military interventions in Central America.

3. After the Second World War, the US responded to the advance of the left in Latin America by helping to engineer numerous military coups (Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Argentina), invading the Dominic Republic and Grenada, and underwriting bloody counter-revolutionary wars (Bolivia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua). In 1989 a US invasion removed and imprisoned the former CIA asset Manuel Noriega, President of Panama.

4. Now, however, the global dominance of US imperialism is under growing pressure. China has emerged as its greatest military and technological rival and the biggest market for Latin America’s raw materials and agricultural exports. The Trump administration has made reinforcing US domination of the Western Hemisphere and its resources its most important strategic priority. Hence the threats to Panama, Greenland, and Canada. Hence also the financial support for Javier Milei’s ultra-neoliberal government in Argentina. And hence now the attack on Venezuela.

5. By overthrowing Maduro Trump is pointing a gun at the head of every other Latin American president. If the US succeeds in imposing regime change on Venezuela, Cuba may be the next target. Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles, want to eradicate all remnants of revolutionary challenges to US imperialism in the Americas. Most governments will probably confine themselves to verbal protests and seek to ingratiate themselves with Trump. We demand that every state that claims to support democracy should unequivocally condemn the US intervention and take steps to isolate the aggressor.

6. The only effective response to the US attack will come from below, above all from the working masses of Venezuela and the rest of the region. To oppose these attacks has nothing to do with supporting Maduro’s corrupt authoritarian regime. It is the sole right of the Venezuelan masses, with their long revolutionary history, to remove him. They must be backed by a global movement of solidarity with the Venezuelan people. We urge all those supporting the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israel’s genocidal occupation to join this movement. Hands off Venezuela! Down with Trump’s pirate empire!

The Coordination of the International Socialist Tendency
3 January 2026