The Trump administration is accelerating plans for a military attack on Venezuela. The government and people of Venezuela are now fortifying their defenses against an increasingly likely U.S. assault.
On Monday, Sept. 29, President Nicolás Maduro began a national consultation for a State of Emergency Decree to give him additional executive powers in case of war. They include mobilizing the military throughout the country, and assigning the military over public services and the oil industry, the most strategic branch of the economy.
On Tuesday, Sept. 30, Maduro spoke to hundreds of high-ranking officers and soldiers as he received an honorary doctorate from the country’s military university, “Let me assure you with my life and the life of the entire country, that we will NEVER be a backyard, a colony or slave to any supremacist empire… not today, not tomorrow!”
The country’s armed forces are at the ready, and more than 8.2 million civilians have joined the people’s militias.
Trump’s declared target is President Maduro, justifying his threat to assassinate him by falsely claiming he heads a drug trafficking cartel, “Cartel de los Soles” (Cartel of the Suns). And at other times, Trump asserts he heads the “Tren de Aragua.”
This is the same TDA myth that Trump and Homeland Security falsely accused hundreds of Venezuelans and other immigrants of belonging to, before their brutal arrest and deportation to the CECOT dungeon in El Salvador. The Cartel de los Soles is a complete fiction which serves as a convenient target on Maduro’s back.
Venezuela’s real drug history of the past
There was a time when Venezuela was a producer and conduit for cocaine to the U.S. market, including transit from Colombia. But that was in the 1970s to the 1990s, when the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Agency operated freely in Venezuela, supervising regular cocaine shipments to the United States.
The U.S. agencies collaborated with the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, notoriously connected with major narco-traffickers who also financed his presidential campaign. When CAP became president the first time in 1974, he signed an agreement that allowed the DEA to establish their regional headquarters that same year in Caracas. And a major cocaine operation took off in Venezuela. U.S. banks such as Chase Manhattan and the Ponzi-scheme Bank of Credit and Commerce International played a principal role, laundering vast sums of the drug money.
One of these nefarious DEA-CIA drug trafficking operations was exposed in a 1993 “60 Minutes” segment.
Hugo Chávez launched an intense anti-drug campaign soon after being coming president. He expelled the DEA from Venezuela in 2005. Today a United Nations report states there is no discernable drug cultivation or production in Venezuela.
The real objective of Trump’s drug trafficking accusation is to create a pretext and to try to destroy the Bolivarian revolutionary process that began 26 years ago, with historic leader Chavez’s election in 1998.
An extensive article by Venezuelanalysis.com refutes Trump’s and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s lies. In fact, Venezuela is identified by the primary institutions tasked with international monitoring as not engaged in drug trafficking.
The real reason Venezuela is under attack
Chávez took the reins as president in 1999 and began to forge a path toward socialism with a new constitution and the nationalization of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves to fuel an economic transformation for 80% of the population that lived in poverty. Venezuela’s known oil reserves exceed 300 billion barrels, the largest by far in the world.
Among the many social gains in the revolutionary process, the oil wealth has been directed to building a total of 5.5 million homes for the people, a remarkable number unmatched anywhere in the world. This is what the empire fears.
U.S. imperialism has never allowed Venezuela a moment of peace since then, using every means to try to destroy the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, as it is known.
From the April 2002 failed overthrow of Chávez, to the total oil industry shutdown — by sabotage — in October 2002, to massive unilateral, coercive sanctions over the years that crippled the economy, or the imposition of a puppet “president” named Juan Guaidó in 2019, or the four attempts on the life of President Maduro, the list goes on.
U.S. military threatens Venezuela and all Latin America
For several months now, the Pentagon has dispatched a massive military presence in the Caribbean. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a meeting on Tuesday in Quantico, Virgina with hundreds of high-ranking U.S. military officers.
The newly dispatched U.S naval group in the Caribbean consists of seven warships, a nuclear submarine and F-35 aircraft near Venezuela and an additional 4,500 troops in Puerto Rico. In recent weeks U.S. drone strikes killed 17 fishermen in three small fishing boats. With the men and boats obliterated and no proof or evidence available, Trump immediately declared Maduro a drug trafficker and deserving of the same fate.
On Sept. 24 at the UN General Assembly, President Donald Trump boasted that he would continue to “blow them out of existence.” A $50 million bounty on the Venezuelan head of state announced by Trump and Marco Rubio on Aug. 7 leaves no doubt of U.S. imperialism’s plans.
The Sept. 30 issue of the New York Times carried a major article ominously headlined, “Top Trump Aides Push for Removing Maduro from Power in Venezuela.”
Plots over the years have failed in the face of a people and government determined to defend their sovereignty and independence. The cost has been high. Years of economic blockade have limited the people’s ability to more fully develop.
Maduro: The U.S. banks are the real traffickers
In a new RT interview with former Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa, President Maduro said,
Eighty-five percent of the billions from international drug trafficking each year is in the banks of the United States. That is where the cartel is. Let them investigate it and uncover it. Money laundering. I was reviewing the data the vice president [Delcy Rodríguez] shared, and I believe it is over $500 billion annually that is in the U.S. banking system, in legal banks. If they want to investigate a cartel, let them investigate the cartel up north. It’s from the United States that all drug trafficking is directed from South America and from the rest of the world.
Cuba’s unshakeable solidarity with Venezuela
Cuba’s leadership has consistently defended the Bolivarian Republic’s right to be free of interference and threats. President Miguel Díaz-Canel publicly signed a petition to launch a national gathering of support among the Cuban people. Cubans have long stood side-by-side with the besieged people of Venezuela, sending doctors and teachers, and coordinating together through ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.
The people in the United States have the greatest responsibility to stop U.S. imperialism, from Gaza to Cuba to Venezuela. Tens of millions of U.S. people who are victims of Trump’s billionaire agenda, of deportations, racism, hunger and of a growing military presence at home, have nothing to gain and much to lose if Washington is able to carry out its aggression.
War against Venezuela may be imminent. For the lives of the peoples of Venezuela and all of Latin America, the progressive movement in the U.S. must demand: No war, no coup, no sanctions on Venezuela!
Feature image: A demonstration against U.S. sanctions on Venezuela in Aug. 2024. Credit: Wyatt Souers
