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From the first US strikes against small boats in Caribbean waters in September 2025, military intervention in Venezuela was not a matter of if, but when and how. Those questions have now been answered.
In all this, the world’s surprise at the bombing of Venezuela and kidnapping of president Nicolás Maduro seems, well, surprising.
The lead-up occurred over decades of attempts to control Venezuela’s resources and government, and numerous indicators of all kinds—from think tank, policy, and security documents, failed attempts at installing puppet leaders and seizure of oil tankers to state officials’ statements and warnings.
Additionally, Latin America and the Caribbean have long seen US-supported dictatorships, assassinations, invasions, covert operations, sanctions, blockades, and endless forms of intervention and destabilization.
Dates and countries are strewn like dominoes being shuffled across the board of the hemisphere: Guatemala (1954); Cuba (1961); British Guiana/Guyana (1961–1964); Brazil (1964); the Dominican Republic (1965); Bolivia (1971); Chile (1973); Argentina (1976); El Salvador (1979–1992); Nicaragua (1981–1990); Grenada (1983); Honduras (1988); Panama (1989); and Haiti (1994).
Indeed, the 20th century began with US occupation of Haiti in 1915 leading to 19 years of rule by US Marines. In 1918, Charlemagne Peralte, the Haitian resistance leader, issued a formal declaration of war against the US for its military occupation, violent dispossession of peasants, and atrocities.
In his words, the “cruel and unjust Yankees brought ruin and hopelessness to our territory. Now […] before the whole world, the civilized nations took an oath to respect the rights and sovereignty of small nations.
“We demand the liberation of our territory and all the advantages given to free and independent states by international law.”
Photo: AP.
Finding ourselves here again, demanding respect for multilateralism and sovereignty, it is as if we had not seen sign after sign of US rejection of a rules-based global order. This is no friend, no ally, no brother’s keeper.
Commentators are making much of a line crossed and the death of a post-WW2 international order, but wasn’t there always a velvet glove around an iron fist?
Interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, is in a hard-to-win situation navigating US demands, Maduro supporters, generals, political factions, and colectivos.
“If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price”, threatened Trump—but eventually Venezuelan pride will chaff against Washington running the country and siphoning wealth.
Our Venezuelan neighbours are hungry for bread and democracy, but where in the world have celebrations over regime change not eventually turned to protests?
The US has also been obsessed with crushing communist and socialist popular movements alongside making the region open for US capital, and Marco Rubio is gunning for Cuba, which includes cutting oil shipments to accelerate its people’s socio-economic demise.
In the Caribbean, besides Venezuela, Cuba is the last living inheritor of the renegade fight for freedom that began with Haiti—all are punished today for wanting to determine their own fate.
Mexico is walking a fine line by cooperating on narcotrafficking, migration, and border security, which are framed as hemispheric threats to the US ‘homeland’ even as president Claudia Sheinbaum continues to emphasise “respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, shared but differentiated responsibility, mutual respect and trust, and cooperation without subordination”.
Caricom is being careful. It is committing to “the fundamental principles of international law and multilateralism enshrined in the UN Charter, including sovereignty and territorial integrity of States and respect for human dignity”, even as individual Caribbean countries affirm relations with both the US and Venezuela—for their survival.
The Trinidad and Tobago Government is still talking about transnational drug trafficking and strengthening regional security reinforced by rule of law (which law is unclear) even though Trump is talking oil.
We sounded like the CIA wrote our statement to the UN Security Council. Or we have no clue what is happening geopolitically. Or we believe we have no possibility of independent voice without retribution and are engaged in desperate self-protection.
Or we are worryingly ideologically aligned to a right-wing ‘Donroe’ Doctrine. Or we are over-enthusiastically complicit in the hope that Dragon Gas Field reserves come our way if we behave.
All fraught options that betray our region’s Haitian, Bolivarian, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Grenadian revolutions’ historical dream.
Photo: UNC.
The US economy is in decline and military force is its route to supremacy. Its strategy is to use this force to secure beneficial trade deals, enrich its military industry, undermine China’s economic relationships, contain Russia, maintain the petrodollar’s centrality, and bring Europe and Japan in line.
What we witnessed is the crushing of a Latin American attempt to route around US colonisation.
Our regional movements, as they always have, must rise again and again to build a world in which collective people’s power can confront one ruled only by self-interest, violence, and greed.
Trump declared that the western hemisphere is now under the Donroe Doctrine, which is his spin on the Monroe Doctrine: the US foreign policy position, first articulated by then president James Monroe on 2 December 1823, which authorises USA to intervene anywhere in the Western Hemisphere in its own interest.
My condolences to the people of Venezuela and Cuba as the death toll approaches 80 killed with numerous wounded.
Condolences too to the family of 45-year-old Colombian Yohana Rodríguez Sierra, a self-employed trader and single mother, whose unconscionable killing—reportedly by a US missile—left three children orphaned.
We are in the shadow of a power that wants all. Our own history of revolution after revolution already tells us where this must lead.
(via Elucabista.)
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Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is a Caribbean feminist writer and activist and senior lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine.
Her blog, Diary of a Mothering Worker, has been published in the Trinidad Newsday since 2012.
Perhaps our PM never had her mind, or perhaps she lost it…whatever it is, this is not the way to handle the situation and it is not going to protect us, either. Hang on tight. Say your prayers. Let’s hope God really is a Trini as we luv to say.