Spanish politician scientist Juan Carlos Monedero. Photo: Telesur.
In a video released with Multimedia Del Sur, Spanish political scientist Juan Carlos Monedero analyzed the discourse of various forces shaping our understanding of events in Venezuela. One side shapes it in favor of Venezuela’s national interests and the other in favor of imperialist and Venezuelan far-right interests.
One of the actors Monedero considers central to that narrative is US President Donald Trump, whose positions he assessed as follows: “Trump is presenting Venezuela as his great foreign policy victory. Venezuela is serving him to say: we can go back to being the outlaws of the West, we can raid a neighboring country, we can take its oil, and everything is in order—without losing, according to his narrative, though it isn’t true, a single [US] American life.”
He added that “in that same vein, Trump has recently suggested that Chris Wright, the [US] energy secretary, is the one calling the shots. Marco Rubio, meanwhile, is projecting Venezuela as the beginning of absolute control without any rules—in the style of the most archetypal Far West of the Latin American continent, something already outlined in the national security strategy, and which, with the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores and the killing of more than 100 people, showed its most raw and its darkest face. Venezuela, I repeat, is being used as Donald Trump’s victory narrative inside the United States.”
The meaning put forward by Acting President Delcy Rodríguez
In counterpoint to Trump’s narrative, among others, Monedero sets out the framework advanced by the Venezuelan government through its acting president, Delcy Rodríguez: “The Venezuelan government presents the current situation as an attempt to salvage what it can of the Chavista project.”
A second element Monedero emphasizes in the government’s framing concerns the decision to avoid military confrontation with the United States and civil war: “There is a very clear idea, repeated consistently by Delcy Rodríguez and members of the government—that had they chosen to resist the country that accounts for half the world’s military spending, the result would have been something like Libya, which today, following the US incursion, remains a dismantled state controlled by warlords in different regions, with little prospect, at least in the short term, of rebuilding anything at all.”
He added that “this idea of avoiding military confrontation, of preventing a civil war in which sectors like the one represented by María Corina Machado would have sided entirely with the United States and would have had no qualms about igniting one—a war that would have helped them eliminate those despised Chavistas, whom they have been unable to defeat at the ballot box, and who, as demonstrated by their calls for invasion, blockades and sanctions, they would not have minded seeing physically eliminated.”
Monedero also highlights the framework sustained by acting president Rodríguez regarding the continuation of the commune-building process: “There is a discourse in the mouth of acting president Delcy Rodríguez about maintaining the communal state, about not dismantling public services, about preserving sovereignty and pursuing participatory democracy—but one that is simultaneously constrained insofar as the United States sets the parameters and therefore determines how far that rhetoric and that practice can actually go.”
The international right
The third actor Monedero identifies, and to whom he attributes a degree of disorientation, is the international right: “In this battle over meaning, the international right reads what is happening in Venezuela with bewilderment—above all because, prior to the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the working assumption was that María Corina Machado would be the person to lead the right-wing reconstruction of Venezuela.
“But Trump’s own self-interested calculation—that relying on María Corina Machado would have triggered civil war, produced [US] American casualties and complicated the extraction of oil, gold and lithium—led him ultimately to maintain continuity of the Bolivarian government, while of course anchoring it with very heavy constraints and sidelining Machado entirely.”
The global left
The fourth actor that Monedero places in the dispute over the narrative is the global left: “The global left is in a very peculiar position. It is not for them to hand out membership cards certifying who is a good leftist in the Venezuelan case—but how readily they embraced an anti-imperialist rhetoric, accepted that Venezuela was leading a space opposed to capitalist imperial logic, that it had stood up to the United States.
“And now, suddenly, that narrative runs dry, and they are confronted with developments that can only be understood through a deep dialectical lens and a very clear head—because in many cases those developments are the polar opposite of what Bolivarian and Chavista rhetoric has stood for over the past two decades.”
The analysis cannot be complete without noting the bewilderment felt by part of the global left at the government’s acceptance of Israeli assistance for reconstruction work following the double earthquake.
Monedero closed his remarks by analyzing Venezuela’s withdrawal from the International Criminal Court. On that point, he noted: “The withdrawal from the International Criminal Court had already been approved by the National Assembly in 2025, at a moment when it did seem that the ICC was only prosecuting people from the Global South, and was incapable of punishing crimes committed by Western countries—let alone by the United States.”
(Telesur)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/CB/SL
Cameron Baillie is an award-winning journalist, editor, and researcher. He won and was shortlisted for awards across Britain and Ireland. He is Editor-in-Chief of New Sociological Perspectives graduate journal and Commissioning Editor at The Student Intifada newsletter. He spent the first half of 2025 living, working, and writing in Ecuador. He does news translation and proofreading work with The Orinoco Tribune.
