Colombian President Gustavo Petro (left) and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (right) at Miraflores Palace, Caracas, November 2, 2022. Photo: Pedro Rances Mattey/DPA/Legion-Media.
By Carmen Parejo RendĂłn – Dec 17, 2025
While the major international media outlets insist on portraying a so-called increase in “tensions” between the US and Venezuela as if it were a bilateral conflict, what we are seeing—once again—is a unilateral offensive by US imperialism against Venezuela and, by extension, against all of Latin America.
There are no “tensions” between equals when a global power deploys naval ships, sanctions, financial blackmail, covert operations, and media campaigns against a country that has been resisting for more than two decades. Calling structural and habitual aggression “tension” is a new perversion of language that dilutes the real hierarchy of power, conceals the aggressor, and turns the victim into a “pole of the conflict.”
In this framework, the recent security doctrine presented by Donald Trump functions as a brutal—and now unmasked—update of the Monroe Doctrine. The Caribbean and Latin America are once again being designated as a “natural zone” of control for the US, a space where any intervention is normalized if the goal is to halt popular projects or contain the presence of international powers such as China or Russia. It is a full-fledged declaration of intent that is, in fact, already being implemented on the ground. The killings of fishers in Caribbean waters by branding them as drug traffickers—without any evidence, trial, or legal basis—carried out by US forces are part of this increasingly crude logic of regional recolonization.
It is in this renewed climate of aggression that Gustavo Petro had positioned himself as one of the most lucid voices of continental progressivism. His address at the United Nations, firmly denouncing the genocide in Gaza and the impunity for crimes in the Caribbean, opened a symbolic crack: for a moment, Colombia seemed to break free from its historical role as a disciplined satellite of Washington. It was not just a rhetorical gesture; it was a rupture in political positioning: speaking from a position of Latin American dignity in a forum designed to domesticate it.
However, that clarity has been eroded precisely as threats against Venezuela intensify. And here the contradiction emerges: an experienced political leader acts as if imperialism could be contained through concessions. Petro is trying out a narrative of “fuzzy bridges” toward the US administration, as if the problem were one of diplomatic tone rather than of strategic interests.
This shift is reflected in his social media posts, where he projects from Bogotá a tutelary narrative of what a “democratic transition” in Venezuela should be, also suggesting formulas for “amnesty” or reintegration for sectors that for years have promoted coup d’états, political terrorism, and class violence against the Venezuelan people. The political significance of that proposal is clear: it shifts the focus from external aggression to an alleged symmetrical “internal conflict,” and, in doing so, it equates the Bolivarian process—collective, popular, and constituent, with those who have tried to destroy it: its traditional oligarchy and US and European imperialism.
The implication is serious: it introduces the idea that Latin American “peace” depends on restoring legitimacy and power quotas to the historical agents of dispossession. Here the question is not moral, but structural: would Petro apply that same logic in Colombia? Would he accept a “political amnesty” for Uribismo as a condition for stability, despite its history of paramilitary ties, crimes, and dispossession? If the answer is no, then the double standard is exposed: Venezuela is being asked to accept what no people would accept for themselves. The Venezuelan experience has already left the lesson written in blood: a real democratic revolution is not negotiated with those who want you dead.
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While Bogotá seeks to reduce the contradiction to manageable terrain, Venezuela understands the true nature of the conflict: a systematic siege—blockades, sabotage, coup attempts, economic warfare, financial asphyxiation—faced by an organized people who, under constant fire, have developed forms of popular democracy from below. That is why, amid the threat, what is growing is not the rhetoric of resignation, but the capacity to defend the process itself: organization, cohesion, and the willingness to sustain the project, even with arms.
As was to be expected, Washington has not rewarded Petro’s prudence but has instead tightened the noose around him: public hostility from Trumpism, legislative pressure, institutional disciplining, and a judicial war aimed at paralyzing both his government and the political horizon surrounding it. The sequence is well known in Latin America: concessions do not guaranty security. It is not a communication error, but a reading of power: imperialism does not respond to goodwill, but to the balance of forces. Every conciliatory gesture is interpreted as a sign of vulnerability and as practical evidence that there is “room for maneuver” to tighten the screws even further.
What happened in Chile is a brutal warning to any government that believes it can “moderate” its commitments to the people in the name of “governability.” The electoral triumph of Pinochetismo—in a country that just a few years ago experienced one of the continent’s most powerful social uprisings—cannot be understood as a mere “cultural shift” among the electorate. It is, above all, a political consequence. And in that consequence there is a direct responsibility on the part of the government led by Gabriel Boric.
Boric arrived as a promise of rupture and ended up operating as a guaranty of continuity. Prioritizing dialogue with traditional elites and alignment with Washington over the social force that brought him to power was a strategic decision that shifted the center of gravity from the mobilized populace to the Chilean state and its pacts. Instead of deepening the constituent momentum unleashed by the uprising, Boric’s government contained it; instead of expanding popular organization, it dismantled it; instead of dismantling the inherited repressive apparatus, it normalized it. The result was the recomposition of the oligarchic bloc and the restoration of the common-sense notion of order.
Thus, Chile demonstrates a political law that is repeated with precision throughout Latin America: fascism does not enter solely through propaganda; it also enters through the open door of demobilization. The setback does not stem solely from the enemy’s strength; above all, it stems from the weakening of the popular subject. And that weakening occurs when governments born of a social wave begin to manage that wave as if it were foreign to them.
Therefore, what is at stake in Bogotá is not merely the survival of a government, but the continuity, or the defeat of the transformation processes that the people have pushed forward with sacrifice. There are no shortcuts or third ways when the adversary is an imperial system in decline and in an especially violent phase. Imperialism does not negotiate with those who give in; it interprets concession as an exploitable weakness and turns that “margin” into an opportunity to attack.
Thus, Latin American history teaches something else: the only processes that have withstood sustained onslaughts from capitalism—and especially from Washington—have been those that deepened their social base, such as Cuba and Venezuela, which shifted the center of gravity from the palace to the organized people and understood that the struggle is not merely electoral but, above all, structural. Because, in the end, the dilemma is neither moral nor discursive. It is political and strategic: either change has to be deepened with the people as the central subject, or the door gets opened for the enemies of the people to regain control by any means to unleash their revenge.
(RT)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/DZ
Carmen Parejo RendĂłn
Carmen Parejo RendĂłn is a writer and analyst for various audiovisual and written media. She is the director of the digital media Revista La Comuna. She collaborates with Hispan TV and Telesur. Her work is focused on the study and analysis of the Latin American and West Asian reality.
