October 2025
Mobilize
Against Yankee
Imperialist Threat to Venezuela!
A unit of the Bolivarian Militia, a volunteer military auxiliary force of over a million members, many of them public sector workers and retirees, during a mobilization on September 20 in response to U.S. military threats. Workers brigades should be formed to combat any attempt to seize power in Venezuela by the imperialists and their agents. (Photo: Adriana Loureiro Fernández / New York Times)
On September 2, Donald Trump announced that he had
personally ordered a U.S. military strike on a boat in the
Caribbean, killing eleven people on board, claiming that
they were “narcoterrorists." Over the next several weeks, as
the U.S. moved warships and warplanes into the region, three
more boats were struck, doubling the number people it
murdered on the high seas. Meanwhile, U.S. imperialism’s
murderer-in-chief put a $50 million bounty on the head of
Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. And on October 1, Trump
notified the U.S. Congress that the U.S. was in “armed
conflict” with drug cartels. In reality, the terrorists
roaming the Caribbean are the United States Navy and Air
Force, and they threaten all of Latin America.
Even before Trump took office on January 20, it was clear that Venezuela would be in the crosshairs of the new administration, as it was under Democrats Biden and Obama as well. This has zero to do with Trump’s ostensible pretext, the absurd claim that the United States is supposedly under military invasion by Venezuela via the Tren de Aragua gang, which even the U.S. National Intelligence Council declared is not connected to the Venezuelan government (that in fact combats it). When that fiction didn’t fly, Trump resuscitated a mythical Cartel de los Soles, a right-wing invention used to brand the Venezuelan military as “narcotraffickers.”
For decades, U.S. imperialism has been attempting the overthrow the populist nationalist regime in Venezuela and install puppets who will be unconditional lackeys of whoever is in office in Washington. One reason, of course, is that Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Going back to the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, U.S. rulers have repeatedly gone to war to keep their hand on the oil spigot, even when – as in the case of Iraq – very little of that oil is imported to the U.S. They want to control the flow in order to keep their imperialist “allies” in line.
More importantly, U.S. rulers want to go after Venezuela as a stepping stone to overthrowing the workers state in Cuba, which although it is bureaucratically deformed is a thorn in the side of Yankee imperialism. Washington has been attempting (unsuccessfully) to destroy the Cuban Revolution ever since 1960. In July 2021 protests over shortages in Cuba were instigated, manipulated and exploited by gusano (Cuban exile counterrevolutionary) agents of the U.S. The League for the Fourth International called then, as we have since our inception, to unconditionally defend Cuba against imperialist threats, blackmail and attack, and domestic counterrevolution.
We also call to defend Venezuela against imperialist attacks and threats, and against the U.S.-sponsored domestic opposition. We do so without giving any political support to the government of Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, and their “Bolivarian” regime. Despite their popularity among many on the left, and their sometime “socialist” rhetoric, they are bourgeois nationalists. Venezuela is a capitalist state, which has spawned a domestic bourgeois layer connected with the regime – what many former supporters of Chávez who are disappointed in Maduro call the “Boli-bourgeoisie.” But with the gusano U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio as point man, Washington is hell-bent on installing a puppet regime in Caracas.
The U.S. has repeatedly staged coup attempts against the populist regime in Venezuela, from 2002 on. The 2003 Irish documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised depicts this quite powerfully. Now even the New York Times, house organ of U.S. imperialism, admits the aim of the current military build-up in the Caribbean is to carry out so-called “regime change” in Venezuela, just as the U.S. did in Iraq in 2003. The U.S. has an armada of four guided-missile carriers off the coast Puerto Rico, and ten F-35 “stealth” fighters deployed to Puerto Rico, the kind of warplanes Israel used to strike Iran in June. And the Air Force Special Operations Command just carried out a training exercise in the U.S. Virgin Islands of paratroopers seizing an airport.
U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command practices parachute takeover of an airport during August 2025 military exercises in the U.S. Virgin Islands. (Photo: Phil Speck / Air National Guard)
That kind of hardware and that kind of training is useless to attack alleged drug-running speedboats. It’s for directly attacking Venezuela. At this time, working people must prepare to throw back any imperialist attack or provocation by their local puppets. Holding a small protest by leftist groups in Venezuela to verbally distance themselves from Trump & Co. is not enough. Trade unions and all workers organizations in Venezuela must prepare to militarily defend the semicolonial country against the imperialists or they would be rightly considered traitors to the cause of the proletariat. There can be no neutrality against imperialist attack. There should be a call to form workers brigades and arm them to defeat any attempt at a coup d’état, invasion or U.S.-backed “uprising.”
To be clear, the so-called “democratic opposition” in Venezuela is nothing but imperialist marionettes. María Corina Machado, who was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, has been on the U.S. payroll going back to 2002, with her election monitoring outfits directly financed by the CIA conduit National Endowment for Democracy. The candidate that she ran in the elections last year, Edmundo González Urrutia, served as a bagman funneling Yankee dollars to the Salvadoran death squads and other Central American reactionary paramilitary groups in the 1980s when he was a diplomat in El Salvador, as revealed in declassified CIA cables.
Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro during 4 August 2018 military ceremony where there was an attempt to assassinate him with a drone attack. (Photo: Juan Barreto / Agence France-Presse)
While militantly denouncing the imperialist threat, revolutionary Marxists oppose Maduro’s current effort to replace trade unions with a “new movement of workers” directly controlled by the state. We similarly opposed an attempt by Hugo Chávez in 2000 to end the supposed “union dictatorship.” But we do so in fighting for a revolutionary proletarian leadership of the unions and the workers movement as a whole against all wings of the capitalist rulers and those pseudo-leftists who hobnob off and on with the local agents of imperialism. It is necessary to forge a genuinely Leninist-Trotskyist communist party in Venezuela, to fight for a workers and peasants government and international socialist revolution.
The current administration in Washington is asserting with a vengeance the Monroe Doctrine, Marco Rubio style, of unrestrained Yankee plundering throughout Latin America. In Mexico, leftists and class-conscious workers must defend Venezuela, and demand that all agents of U.S. imperialism (DEA, CIA, ICE, military, etc.) be expelled from the country – especially in view of the threats to use U.S. military force in the so-called “war against drugs,” which in reality is a war against the poor and to maintain U.S. semicolonial domination in its “backyard.”
Internationalists at “No U.S. War on Venezuela” demonstration in San Francisco, California, October 10. (Internationalist photo)
In the United States, workers should mobilize to defeat Trump's terror war against the peoples of Latin America, and against working people “at home.” We seek to build a revolutionary workers party against all wings of the imperialist ruling class, denouncing the Democrats who have repeatedly paved the way for Trump with their antiworker polices and Cold War imperialist warmongering. We defend Gaza against the joint U.S./Israeli genocide, and call for the workers movement to use its power to defend immigrants and defeat the mass deportations of the Trump regime which are being used as the spearhead in the imposition of bonapartist police-state rule.
The “Big Stick” regime in Washington wants to turn the Caribbean into an “American lake,” criminally murdering people on the high seas and riding rough-shod over Latin American nations, from Mexico to the Southern Cone, in the guise of fighting “narcoterrorism.” The ultimate aim of the imperialist war drive, which leads straight to World War III, is to carry out counterrevolution in China and dismember Russia. Defend Venezuela against imperialist attack and by its agents rightly known as escuálidos (scum)! Defend Cuba against imperialism, its gusano agents and counterrevolution in any form. For world socialist revolution! ■