Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, escorted by DEA agents upon their arrival in New York. Photo: XNY/Star Max via Getty Images.
By Anthony Ballas and Sudip Bhattacharya – Mar 9, 2026
If U.S. progressives are serious about combating the expansion of fascism domestically, demanding both the release of Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and first lady Celia Flores, as well as the immediate cessation of any further U.S. military incursion into Latin America, must be a top priority. In an interview on Black Liberation Media’s morning show, Chris Gilbert, a political economist in Venezuela who experienced the U.S.’s January bombardment of Caracas firsthand, stated that Donald J. Trump and his allies, “don’t recognize nations. They don’t recognize peoples. They think the world is a bunch of guys like them. And they think by bending these guys, they can make them do whatever they want.” Maduro himself has refused the devil’s bargain with the Trump regime, proclaiming defiantly in his arraignment before a U.S. judge on the spurious charges of drug trafficking and weapons possession, “I am a prisoner of war!”
Progressive forces internationally have bore witness to these acts of desperation on the part of the Trump regime and their attempt to stem the tide of a weakening U.S. imperialism in the hemisphere. Oil and defense—two of the most vile capitalist industries—are the direct benefactors of this latest imperialist incursion. While oil executives rebuffed Trump’s $100 billion plan to invest in Venezuela’s oil sector, with the ExxonMobil executive labeling the country “uninvestible” due to security and legal risks, the energy sector reaped historic gains as a result of the so-called “Venezuelan shock.” Companies like Chevron, for instance, which was, until recently, the only major oil venture legally sanctioned to drill and trade in Venezuela, closed at an all-time high in early February.
According to the Brennan Center, the oil industry itself spent “lavishly to elect Trump, giving at least $75 million to his campaign and affiliated PACs, thereby making them a top corporate backer of his reelection bid…Several oil tycoons gave millions on their own and hosted fundraisers with Trump and his associates.” While both industries have directly funded Donald Trump’s campaigns for president, this is hardly an aberration from the norm of U.S. politics, which draws sustenance from the sale, manufacture, and dropping of bombs around the globe while “corporate giants like Chevron enjoy… lavish [single-digit] tax breaks” which are “lower than what many nurses or firefighters pay.”
Immediately after Maduro and Flores were snatched from their beds and humiliated before the U.S. press, Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that their goal in Venezuela was “to take between thirty and fifty million barrels of oil,” promising, “to sell it in the marketplace at market rates, not at the discounts Venezuela was getting.” At the White House, during an open press conference featuring major oil executives, Trump, stated that U.S. oil should make “tons of money” in Venezuela. In much the same way that companies knee-deep in death have had an intimate relationship with the worst of the worst in American politics, among Democrat and Republican alike, those who will not stand in the way of the constantly expanding military budget, which far outstrips the military budget for the next top ten countries, including that of Russia and China— the “bogeymen” of our present era.
As reported in Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, “of the top 40 companies that have given the most to the Sedition Caucus—the 147 members of Congress who voted,” at Trump’s behest, “against certifying the 2020 election… as well as those who have since been elected to Congress” who have promoted the so-called Big Lie, ”ten belong to the defense industry.” “Collectively,” the report added, “Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Honeywell, RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, L3Harris Technologies, BAE Systems, General Atomics, and Leidos have given more than $6 million to seditionist lawmakers since January 6th.” These are the same lawmakers whose knee-jerk impulse is to vehemently defend any criticism of Trump in support of the false reality his administration pushes forward. Indeed, these are many of the same lawmakers who forward xenophobic rhetoric directed at Somali immigrants as though they were part of an Islamic army invading the U.S.—the same lawmakers currently endorsing each and every lie to protect and preserve vicious thugs in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) running rampant in Minnesota.
From a historical point of view, none of this ought to be that surprising. In his 1932 classic, Social Revolution and Fascism, the British Marxist R. Palme Dutt exposed the way capitalists generously granted largesse to fascists in order to suppress socialists, communists, labor unions, and anticolonial forces. “Unlimited funds,” he wrote, “not only from German bourgeois, but also from foreign bourgeois sources, were poured into the National Socialist coffers.” Such a dangerous pattern repeats itself through the plunder and extortion of Venezuela, as well as Iran, Haiti, Cuba, and numerous other countries that have been under attack from U.S.-led sanctions and coupmongering.
With the abduction of Maduro and Flores, as well as the recent seizures of sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers, some of which were sailing under the Russian Flag, and the U.S. Dept of War’s extrajudicial and extraterritorial slayings of Trinidadian fishermen in the Caribbean basin, the fears that Venezuela might be invaded are not at all irrational or unwarranted. Keeping in mind as well that the Trump regime supported Juan Guaidó’s illegitimate and ignominious claim to the Venezuelan presidency in 2019—an event which witnessed bipartisan support in the halls of the U.S. Capitol building in 2020, with U.S. politicians collaborating across the aisle in a gushing display of servile support giving Guaidó a standing ovation during Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address. 2020 was also the year of the ill-fated “Operation Gideon,” or, as some commentators now refer to it, the “Bay of Piglets,” which saw U.S. privateers and ex-Green Berets in collaboration with Colombian mercenaries and other anti-Maduro forces unsuccessfully launch a coup against Caracas (the plans for which Maduro had seemingly been aware since at least 2019). Not even one year later, the very same halls of the Capitol building which rang out maniacally in support of Guaidó became the site of the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 fomented by Trump and carried out by his supporters, including right wing extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers—whose members, it should be recalled, were pardoned by Trump in 2025.
Brooklyn March To Free Cilia Flores: Solidarity With Venezuelan Women!
While it is evident that the bipartisan support for U.S. coups abroad has not resulted in anything positive for the Democrats or anti-Trump Republicans, it should be equally obvious that the forces of capital are aligned in support of agents of extremism with little shame or regard for the consequences. Support for the dismantlement of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela in a bid to weaken Venezuela’s nationalized oil industry recalls the echoes of CIA-backed Operation Condor in Chile and the violent installation of Augusto Pinochet in September 1973. Lest we are wilfully committed to political naivete in the face of this current mayhem in 2026, progressive forces must keep these lessons from history close at hand and remain ever-vigilant of the various tactics used to suppress and deny freedom of speech and dissent when challenging the Trump regime’s illegal invasion of Venezuela or any other sovereign nation for that matter. As the U.S. lashes out against the specter of its retreat from the position of global hegemon as though afraid of its own shadow, we would also be wise also to keep the lessons in mind with regard to the U.S.-Israeli aligned forces which have collaborated to defame, attack, dox, and deport anti-genocide activists domestically, many of whom have suffered significant economic backlash as well as physical and psychological harm as a result.
If Venezuela were to fall under further U.S. neo-colonial schemes, one could expect oil and defense, especially as it sells armaments and military contracts to its fascist allies in Caracas, to accrue evermore political power and clout. The same forces that would stand against even now moderate demands to preserve some inkling of humanity within our own domestic system of governance, whether that’s getting rid of ICE or simply raising taxes on major corporations
Hugo Chavez, the founder of the modern Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, had said once at the UN following NATO’s invasion of Libya: “The future of a multi-polar world, in peace, resides in us, in the organization of the majority of the people on earth to defend ourselves against the new colonialism, in order to achieve a balance in the universe that is capable of neutralizing imperialism and arrogance.”
He had faith in his people as well as the people of the world, including the U.S., to do what is right. In this case, that is for the American people as a united force, assuring the safe return of Maduro and Flores to Venezuela. It means progressive people inside the U.S. joining sides with Venezuelans, Cubans, and Palestinians vying for the right to thrive and for self-determination in what is a global struggle against the U.S. empire, the bedrock of fascism.
Either we recognize the strategic linkages between our own situation and the situation in places like Venezuela and Cuba, or we restrict ourselves to a concept of politics that is purely domestic and politically naive. Much like Chavez and heroes before him, we have faith that progressives will peer through the smog of domestic propaganda and realize that so long as Maduro and Flores remain behind bars, we all risk the same fate.
