On July 28, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry summoned Iranian Ambassador Ali Chegini to deliver a formal note of protest against a comment made by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in a video circulating online, in which he said Iran was “not Venezuela” when referring to negotiations with the United States. How are we to interpret these comments on the Left in the United States? The political lessons arising from Venezuela are contentious, but increasingly clear and relevant to anti-imperialists. I will take up my dictum from a previous article as a starting point: in no way are Latinos allowed to determine their own destiny.
The Bolivarian Revolution
Alan McLeod’s Bad News from Venezuela provides a clear framework for interpreting Venezuela news in the mainstream media: “[I] found a pronounced to overwhelming tendency for all newspapers to present the country, its economics, and politics in an extremely negative light, presenting minority opinions on highly contested and controversial issues as undisputed facts . . . and displaying an overwhelming aversion to the Venezuelan government and its project.” What project? To the reader whose starting point is this article, that’s the Bolivarian revolution, led by firebrand President Hugo Chávez, which aimed to take oil revenues from the world’s largest proven oil reserves to fund social benefits like education, food sovereignty, community health care, low-income housing, the return of indigenous land, and land reform in the service of agricultural and rural development. In short, Chávez wanted to use Venezuelan money to benefit Venezuelans, instead of Americans.
Earthquakes and Kidnappings
Araghchi’s comments come despite a terrible tragedy on June 24, when severe earthquakes killed 5,000 Venezuelans and injured 17,000 more. To be clear, Venezuela has suffered setbacks to the embattled Bolivarian revolution after the United States kidnapped its democratically elected president, Nicolas Maduro, in January. Venezuela has been a longtime friend to Iran, and both are founding members of OPEC. However, it remains to be seen how Delcy Rodriguez’s interim government will respond to international pressure like Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s, who said on CBS’s Face the Nation that Venezuela could “no longer cozy up to Hezbollah and Iran.”
Pressure against Venezuela’s government has been a bipartisan project since Obama’s executive order “declaring a national emergency with respect to the situation in Venezuela”; specifically, “the Government of Venezuela’s erosion of human rights guarantees.” To be clear, the state of emergency from 2015 continues to this day; it was renewed by Trump in February of this year. This state of emergency grants the Department of Defense broad special powers, including military actions that would be considered acts of war, without the express direction of Congress, as laid out in the US Constitution. Venezuela’s commitment to internationalism had even previously led to sanctions, in the form of foreign export controls for all commercial weapons sales imposed in 2006, due to allegations of financial support for Hezbollah.
More recently, however, Maduro’s legitimacy has also been called into question. There has been no respite for Venezuelans since Chávez’s election in 1998. In 2017, Trump ordered additional sanctions, which were later rolled back under Joe Biden. Now, during Trump’s second term, the Yankee imperialists seem to have a bone to pick. The Congress.gov overview of sanctions policy against Venezuela states plainly that “Maduro claimed victory in the 2024 election even after results indicated he lost. In January 2025, Maduro took office for a third term after a period of post-election repression.” Let’s examine this claim. McLeod helps here by outlining the actual on-the-ground conditions. In 1998, fearing foreign intervention, Chávez’s reforms included voting measures that were tamper-proof; and indeed, Venezuelan elections are some of the most closely monitored in the world. The Carter Center is an American watchdog agency, then headed by Jimmy Carter himself, which in 1998 “found no significant problems.” The Venezuelan system itself requires voters to show ID and have their fingerprints scanned, and only if they match are citizens able to vote. Venezuelans vote electronically and on paper, in a process which is overseen by all political parties. The electronic vote is counted automatically, but there is also a random audit of 53 percent of the paper votes from the ballot boxes. In October, 2012, out of 15 million votes, there was a discrepancy of only 22—this comes out to .00015 percent! If the election system has been so secure and it’s the same system being used in 2024, could Maduro’s election really have been rigged?
How to Claim an Election is Rigged
The 2013 election between Maduro and Henrique Capriles is instructive in evaluating the discourse surrounding the 2024 election. Venezuela’s electoral body, the CNE, declared Maduro the winner 51 to 49 percent. Capriles wasn’t satisfied and accused the CNE of fraud, demanding a 100 percent recount. He then mobilized his supporters, who attacked health clinics and doctors. The CNE acceded to the demands, but four days later Capriles added conditions: he wanted to check all 15 million thumbprints and signatures individually. When the CNE explained that doing so would essentially break the voter’s right to privacy, Capriles boycotted the audit he had requested.
The 2014 Guarimbas
Within this milieu we get the erosion of legitimacy that strengthens opposition movements. The very next year, Venezuela suffered incredibly violent opposition demonstrations: street barricades known locally as guarimbas. These protesters shot at police and even beheaded passersby. One student leader, Yon Goicoechea, had ties to Washington, having received a half million dollars from the Cato Institute “for advancing liberty for his role in organizing previous anti-government demonstrations.” Despite all the confusion and chaos of these political movements, one thing becomes clear: the attacks always have a definite, objective class character, because their targets are always the networks of social services that serve the interests of the working class. They shot journalists; attacked food stores and ambulances, burning doctors alive; and even set a kindergarten on fire with children in it. So if the victims were definitely working-class, how do we characterize the attackers? They must be understood as the largest class with the most to gain from neoliberal policies: the reactionary small-capitalist business owners, and the well-to-do reactionaries in the student bodies, who cannot imagine a better life where they are also stripped of their wealth and ability to exploit working-class precarity. It is impossible to drown out the noise of this kind of disinformation in the Western media when the events are actually taking place. And yet, later leaked cables showed US government funding for the student leaders that mobilized the violence, and that “funding for Venezuelan anti-government activists increased by 80 percent from 2012 to 2014.”
It is certainly difficult to synthesize the major events of Venezuelan struggle over the past 20 years. The reality is that every struggle against imperialism has to contend with not only the internal opposition of the courts, the banks, the armed forces, and the media, but also the economic forces of unequal exchange that determine a society’s level of development; and the imperial control of the global courts, banks, armies, and media. Though the opposition may be stiff, the side of progress is always with the toiling masses. If we fight, we will win.