The Lima Group and 'Peaceful Transition': The Neocolonial Role in US/Canadian Sanctions and Militarism Against Venezuelan Sovereignty

By Clau O’Brien Moscoso – Nov 26, 2025

While the U.S. justifies its new war on Venezuela as a counter-narcotics operation, the real target remains the Bolivarian Revolution and the alternative model of sovereignty it represents to the region.

The US escalates its war against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela by encircling it rom the Caribbean and Pacific waters, killing over 80 fishermen in extrajudicial killings, restricting airspace in Venezuela and Puerto Rico, officially designating an entity they call the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, labeling the Bolivarian president Nicolas Maduro the leader and declaring a $50 million bounty for his arrest. Secretary of War Peter Hegseth announced Operation Southern Spear to “combat narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, led by U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) and a new joint task force established last month” (emphasis by reporter). The current US administration is only escalating what was already in motion, starting from the Bush administration after the Bolivarian Revolution triumphed, to the Biden administration that increased the bounty on Maduro from $10 to $25 million and increased sanctions, to Obama declaring Venezuela a “national security threat” and the duopoly’s love of criminal opposition leader Juan Guaido, Leopoldo Lopez and Nobel Peace prize winner Maria Corina Machado.

These bellicose moves against Venezuela, the Caribbean and the region at large are the latest in failed attempts at regime change, now led by fervent anti-communist Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose brother-in-law is in fact a convicted cocaine trafficker. Though the rhetoric may be about narcotrafficking (this time around, last time it was about the migration crisis), if that were truly the case, they would be going to Guayaquil, Ecuador to intercept the tons of cocaine being smuggled through the Noboa trading company. But president Daniel Noboa is a US puppet, a gringo himself, who serves US interests in the region, particularly for increased militarization in the Pacific. As Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez raised at the World Symposium of Neighborhoods, it is the alternative model that Venezuela represents to the region and the world that makes it so onerous to the US/western ruling class.

When thinking about the decades-long counterinsurgent moves against the Bolivarian revolution, we must also analyze the role of regional bodies lending credibility to US dictates. One such formation is the Lima Group, which from 2017 to 2021 sought to be a regional bloc against Venezuela, tightening sanctions on the country and rubber stamping US/western-backed coup attempts when the Organization of American States (OAS) wouldn’t. As Nino Pagliccia writes in Venezuela Analysis, “for the record it has to be emphasized that the ‘Lima Group’ is not an international organization. It’s just an ad hoc group of governments with no other purpose than to promote the overthrow of the legitimate Maduro government.” Ironically enough, Maduro called the Lima Group a “cartel” back in 2019 after the group called for the democratically elected president to resign. The split between the Lima Group and the OAS, particularly when members of the former ruled out military intervention in Venezuela in 2018, going against OAS coup monger Luis Almagro, was only on the strategy for achieving the same objective – through “peaceful transition” (i.e. – economic warfare, with deaths contributed to US sanctions numbering 40,000) that the Lima Group championed or through outright military intervention as suggested by Almagro. One is the liberal approach and the other the outright fascist approach, both with the same objective.

President Maduro: ‘No Foreign Threat Will Intimidate Venezuela’ (+US Secretary of War)

The Lima Group would have a home base until the newly elected president of Perú, Pedro Castillo, and his Foreign Minister at the time, Hector Bejar, reestablished relations with the Venezuelan government in August 2021, calling the foreign policy towards Venezuela the “most disastrous” of Peru’s history. Though Lima served as its “home,” the destabilizing ad hoc group was largely Canadian-driven, with Core Group-controlled Haiti joining in 2017 after the destruction of the PetroCaribe program.

Castillo’s election meant the loss of one of the most loyal neocolonial puppets in the region for a government that asserted its own sovereignty, Venezuela’s sovereignty, and by extension, regional sovereignty, and was a blow for the US/Canadian-led war against Venezuela. However, that victory was short-lived with the forced resignation of Hector Bejar after normalizing relations with Venezuela and the eventual coup against president Castillo himself in 2022. What appeared to be the end of the Lima Group would lead to a shift in strategy – from “peaceful transition” to outright war in “defense of the homeland against narcoterrorists,” effectively combining the failed War on Drugs with the failed War on Terror.

The disastrous and murderous sanctions that the Lima Group championed against the Bolivarian people of Venezuela failed to enact the desired regime change, but did contribute to the migration crisis. Instead, the second Trump administration has militarized the region to its highest point in recent history, with plans for years to come. What is certain is that whether by “covert” or overt means, US/western imperialism continues in its war against the Bolivarian Revolution and the peoples of the region. But the Venezuelan people remain defiant, joining civilian militias in the millions to defend their homeland and revolution from any Yankee incursion, potentially being the hegemon’s next Vietnam.

(Black Agenda Report)

Clau O'Brien Moscoso

+ posts

Clau O’Brien Moscoso is an organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace in the Haiti/Americas Team. Originally from Barrios Altos, Lima, Peru, she grew up in New Jersey, USA, and now lives between both countries.