U.S. Murder Inc.: Hands off Maduro!

Defend Venezuela Against
Yankee Imperialism!

Build a Leninist-Trotskyist Communist Party!

The following article is translated from a leaflet issued by the Grupo Internacionalista, Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International.

NOVEMBER 26 – For a quarter of a century, US imperialism has waged an increasingly brutal political, military and economic pressure campaign against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, both under President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro. Partly because of its nationalist rhetoric and measures that challenged Yankee domination, but also because Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, Washington’s rulers have repeatedly attempted to impose “regime change” in Caracas. In 2002, local henchmen of the northern behemoth orchestrated a coup that failed in less than 48 hours. Since then, all kinds of diplomatic blackmail, trade sanctions and the expensive creation of a “democratic opposition” on the CIA payroll have been put in motion, without succeeding in overthrowing the regime that claims the legacy of independence leader Simón Bolívar.

After years of economic sanctions that have impoverished the once-rich oil republic, the suffocating siege is giving way to imminent direct military intervention by the United States. The U.S. fleet in the Caribbean is the largest since the October 1962 crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba. This armada consists of at least 13 warships, five support ships, and a nuclear submarine, including three missile destroyers and the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest and most advanced aircraft carrier. In addition to the 75 fighter jets aboard the Ford, the Pentagon has deployed ten F-35 stealth fighter-bombers to Puerto Rico and provocatively sent B-52 and B-1 bombers on simulated bombing runs off the coast of Venezuela. In addition, some 15,000 U.S. troops are on standby on warships and at land bases in Puerto Rico.

This is not just a return to the intimidating tactics of “gunboat diplomacy” from the early 20th century. First of all, that would be seen as a sign of weakness on the part of the authoritarian U.S. President Donald Trump, who cultivates a strongman image. And secondly, it would not succeed in getting rid of the adversary that has been a thorn in the side of Trump since his first term in office. Having accumulated all that military power, he will have to use it. But how? While the forces are not sufficient for a large-scale invasion, other scenarios are circulating, including an attempt to seize the oil-producing areas (difficult) or bomb some military bases, declaring them drug traffickers’ dens and declaring victory, as was done with the nuclear sites in Iran. But there is also talk of a surgical operation to “capture or kill” Maduro (New York Times, 19 November). Bloodthirsty Yankee imperialism is capable of anything.

The attack on Maduro is not limited to Republican Trump. Democrat President Joe Biden attempted to bleed the Venezuelan economy dry with his Cold War immigration policy, which brought a million Venezuelans into the U.S. during his four years in the White House (in addition to 500,000 Cubans, more than 200,000 Nicaraguans, and 271,000 Ukrainians). What’s more, nearly 8 million Venezuelans have emigrated since 2017, largely due to the economic crisis caused by U.S. financial sanctions and the oil embargo. (Today 90% of Venezuelan oil sales go to China.) A few days before the end of his term, Biden announced that the reward for the capture of Nicolás Maduro was being raised from $15 million to $25 million. And in August, with Marco Rubio at the helm of the State Department, the price on the Venezuelan president’s head was doubled to $50 million.

If previously the battle cry of the economic war against Bolivarian Venezuela was condemnation of “human rights violations” – an accusation coming from the country that has supplied all the planes and bombs for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza – now the pretext is that it is a “war on drug trafficking,” from the country that is the world’s largest importer of narcotics, and whose spy agency is notorious for trafficking narcotics. Under this claim, the U.S. military has killed more than 80 people on the high seas in the last three months. According to Trump, Maduro runs a “Cartel de los Soles" (Cartel of the Suns), which is pure fiction. Leaving aside the fact that no such cartel exists, and that only a tiny fraction of drugs entering the U.S. pass through Venezuela, the sheer firepower of the ships and warplanes involved in the so-called “Operation Southern Spear” is not suitable for sinking a few speedboats carrying drugs.

In any case, the “war on drugs” is really a war against black ghettos and Latino barrios in the U.S. and against the semi-colonial countries of what U.S. war secretary. Pete Hegseth arrogantly calls “our hemisphere” and “our neighborhood” – that is, the “backyard” of the U.S. empire. This also applies to Mexico, which Trump blames for the production of fentanyl. Recently, when some U.S. “contractors” arrived by boat at Playa Bagdad (!) near Matamoros. Mexico, and put up signs proclaiming the area a “restricted area” and “property of the U.S. Department of Defense,” President Claudia Sheinbaum angrily declared, “We do not accept intervention by any foreign government.” Yet it has been confirmed many times over that Mexico has authorized the U.S. to fly over its national territory on surveillance missions against drug trafficking.

In the corridors of the White House and the Pentagon, some are comparing the current attempt to overthrow Nicolás Maduro with the U.S. Marines’ invasion of Panama in 1989, when President Manuel Antonio Noriega was arrested. Former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana, godfather of the death squads, speaks of an “extraction” of Nicolás Maduro. However, the circumstances surrounding the outrageous attack on the population of the isthmus, which left more than 500 Panamanians dead, are very different from the current situation in Venezuela. Among other things, Donald Trump has no interest in bringing Maduro before a court where he could reveal the falsity of the accusations against his regime of participating in drug trafficking. The “capture” of the Venezuelan president would be an assassination at the hands of criminal hitmen in U.S. uniforms. Without giving him any political support, we warn: U.S. Murder, Inc. Hands off Maduro!

The proxy government that the imperialists want to install would be that of María Corina Machado, who has explicitly supported the sanctions against Venezuela that have caused so much misery, as well as the deportations of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States by the Trump administration and the current military deployment, calling for US pirates to invade her country. As a result, somewhat independent journalists have reported that Machado, who is promoted abroad as the leading figure of the “democratic opposition,” is highly contested within Venezuela. For more than a decade, Machado repeatedly called for “guarimbas,” which are essentially armed barricades, such as when guarimberos attacked the Caracas Metro and public buses carrying passengers in 2014.

Today, the newly minted “Nobel Peace Prize winner” Machado is once again agitating for civil war, which, combined with a U.S. military attack, would unleash a bloodbath in the neighborhoods and hills surrounding Caracas and other Venezuelan cities, where the Bolivarian movement maintains significant bases of support. There is no denying the weariness and exhaustion that years upon years of imperialist pressure seeking to strangle the Venezuelan economy have caused among the impoverished population. Nor should we harbor any illusions about the Venezuelan armed forces’ ability to defeat the world’s greatest military power in strictly military terms. Even so, with their Russian military hardware and Cuban counterintelligence, Venezuelan forces could strike blows against the arrogant invaders from the empire. And the entry into action of the Bolivarian Militias could lay a trap for them. But the struggle against the imperialists and their puppets will not be purely military. Victory will depend on the revolutionary mobilization of the working people.

Even as they have triggered the imperialists’ hatred for their solidarity with Cuba, the Chávez and Maduro governments have never been socialist or revolutionary. Chavez’ “21st century socialism” has always been a call to implement nationalist policies in alliance with the army, the backbone of the bourgeois state. Despite some winks and nods, Chavez and Maduro have kept the working class at bay and preserved capitalist private property without the slightest dent. In fact, a Bolivarian bourgeoisie (the famous “boliburguesía”) has arisen under the protection of these governments. It is crucial that the exploited and oppressed of Venezuela wage the struggle against imperialism with complete class independence from bourgeois Chavismo. Only armed with the program of socialist revolution in Venezuela and its international extension can it be possible to defeat and sink the imperialist pirates for good.

The threat against Venezuela also portends a counterrevolutionary assault against the bresieged bureaucratically deformed Cuban workers state. This is acknowledged by perceptive imperialist spokesmen, such as the British newspaper The Telegraph (18 November), which explains “Why the Real Target of Trump’s Venezuela Campaign Is Cuba.” It emphasizes that both Republicans like Trump and the gusano (“worm,” nickname for Cuban counterrevolutionaries) Marco Rubio, and Democrats such as John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, have tried to destroy the Cuban Revolution since its inception 65 years ago. In recent years, Venezuela has reduced its oil exports to Cuba from 100,000 barrels per day in the early 2010s to an average of 45,000 per day in 2025. But even so, a defeat of its Venezuelan ally would deal a severe blow to the beleaguered island and tighten the screws on all Latin American regimes that have any semblance of autonomy from Uncle Sam.

Venezuelan workers and poor people know well their white racist and arrogant ruling class, those “escuálidos” (“squalids,” nickname for Venezuelan counterrevolutionaries) so proud of their world record of beauty queens and so quick to denigrate Hugo Chávez with the colonialist label of “zambo” because of his black and indigenous roots. To defeat this ruling class, it will be necessary to fight for a social revolution that the Bolivarian capitalist governments would oppose. This socialist revolution must be the work of the working class, at the head of all the oppressed, led by a genuinely communist, Leninist-Trotskyist party.

The last few decades provide ample examples of what it means for the U.S .to “export” its democracy of the dollar, Marines and bloodthirsty local coup leaders, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. The League for the Fourth International calls on class-conscious workers and defenders of democratic rights across the continent to mobilize the social power of the exploited and oppressed to defeat the imperialist attack on Venezuela. As the U.S. section of the LFI declared at a Novembere 22 demonstration in New York City, the center of global finance capital:

Defend Venezuela Against Yankee imperialism!

Defense of Cuba Begins in Venezuela!

Defend Venezuela – Build a Trotskyist Workers Party! For a Workers and Peasants Government!

Yankee Imperialists Out of the Gulf of Mexico!

Expel All U.S. agencies (DEA, CIA, FBI, Pentagon, etc.) from Mexico and All of Latin America!

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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