cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/73633
[Editorial note: Orinoco Tribune is not necessarily aligned with all the opinions expressed by the author in this article. However, Orinoco Tribune considers it important for publication in order to present various positions on complex issues.]
By Joe Emersberger – Aug 21, 2026
Since January, the US has imposed a level of subordination in Latin America that has not been seen since the early twentieth century when it directly occupied Haiti and Nicaragua. Today, only Cuba and Nicaragua deserve to be called sovereign states in the region. Trump has succeeded because the Holocaust in Gaza made western imperialists realize that they can get away with far more than they ever thought they could.
We who live in the imperial core should, at the very least, legitimize armed resistance to western imperialism at home and abroad, not make excuses for cowardly governments.
The despicable abandonment of Cuba
Cuba is hanging on by a thread as Trump has imposed a Naziesque fuel embargo on the island this year. Mexico and Brazil, two large oil-rich countries, have refused to sell oil to Cuba because Trump threatened them with tariffs. And Trump has actually threatened worse than that through his recent actions. In December of 2025, the US military stole a Venezuelan oil shipment to Cuba, and, soon after that, bombed Caracas and kidnapped President Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Venezuela has been run as a U.S. colony ever since.Oil-rich Canada, one of the USA’s top vassals, also hasn’t defied Trump’s fuel blockade on Cuba despite having diplomatic relations and a long-standing trade relationship with Cuba. Canada’s government is probably happy to see Cuba starved by the fuel blockade. Prime Minister Mark Carney is a shameless western imperialist. He applauded the US bombing of Caracas, supported Trump’s war of aggression on Iran, sanctioned Iran for defending itself against US aggression, and demanded that Palestinians adopt the ideology of the state that is genociding them.
China has sent solar panels to Cuba which, unlike other shipments of non-fuel humanitarian aid, directly undermine the fuel blockade. Russia made a huge one-time oil shipment that brought some relief. Iran has not sent any oil but it has its hands full expelling the US from West Asia with stunning success so far, and is making tremendous sacrifices to do so. Russia is fighting a proxy war against NATO.
One could still reasonably criticize powerful China and Russia for not doing more for Cuba, but the inaction of nearby oil-rich Latin American states cries out for the harshest condemnation.
Venezuela made into a US puppet
By now it is clear, despite some initial hopes I had, that Delcy’s government in Venezuela is a US puppet. Its actions, such as handing over Alex Saab to the US, and seeking rapprochement with “Israel” are so cynical that I now believe Delcy and her clique masterminded the overthrow of Chavismo and a gradual transition to fascist rule under Maria Corina Machado or some close equivalent. I believe Delcy sold this plan to the US. Her clique was likely motivated by a desire to save their own skin by sacrificing millions of Chavistas.High level betrayals are not new to Chavismo. Hugo Chavez was plagued by them as was Maduro. But Chavez and Maduro maneuvered around US-instigated betrayals before the Holocaust in Gaza changed western imperialism into something far more bold. In 2019, the US under Trump bluffed that it might invade Venezuela from neighbouring Colombia. The bluff failed, but in 2026 the U.S. dispensed with bluffs. The US military took a direct role in overthrowing Maduro because it failed to do so through devastating sanctions and by using proxies to attempt coups on its behalf.
However, the US military is also very casualty averse. Despite not being a match for the US militarily, Venezuela could have imposed significant US casualties had it fought back.
Surrender by exploiting Chavista discipline
Apologists for Delcy assume she made a good faith calculation that the costs of fighting back would have been higher than surrendering. But it is no longer reasonable to believe that she made a good faith calculation. I stopped believing that when Alex Saab, a minister under Maduro, was handed over to the US by Delcy’s government. The US is now certainly torturing Saab to try to use him against Maduro in a show trial. In June, Delcy’s government allowed the US to carry out assassinations on Venezuelan soil. The steps Delcy has now taken to normalize with “Israel” have further exposed her as a traitor.A Venezuelan friend I trust, who has been a dedicated Chavista activist for decades, says that government workers who are long-time loyalists to Maduro and Chavez are now forced to take orders from known enemies of Chavismo or else lose their jobs. In my friend’s assessment, Delcy has also exploited the disciplined manner in which the Chavista base has rallied behind Chavez and Maduro to survive decades of US efforts to destroy them.
That discipline made it important for Delcy and the US to keep in place a facade of Chavista governance through a constitutional transfer of power to Delcy, the rejection of snap elections, and a perfunctory defence of Maduro. Delcy’s government is still paying for Maduro’s legal defence while he and his wife remain hostages in the US. All of that has contributed to keeping a lot of the Chavista base relatively quiet (notwithstanding the dissenting voices of Chavistas like Luis Britto Garcia and Mario Silva) but that relative quiet probably won’t last.
Trump’s theft of Venezuela’s oil revenues has prevented Delcy from delivering any major economic benefits to Venezuelans since she replaced Maduro. Economic growth slowed after Maduro’s kidnapping. And Trump maintains sanctions to ensure that a transition to full unabashed fascism in Venezuela is not interrupted.
My Chavista friend believes a mass uprising against Delcy by the Chavista base is coming as she inevitably rolls back rights for peasants and workers in the name of rejecting “polarization”. My friend is probably right, but with Venezuela security forces surely being purged of Chavistas I fear revolt will come too late, and will be viciously repressed. Regardless, Venezuela will certainly not be selling oil to Cuba any time soon.
The fake sovereignty of Lula and Sheinbaum
Often lauded as ‘progressives’ who stand up to Trump, the reality is that Lula and Sheinbaum feign independence from Washington, and not even very well, while cowering before it.Lula won’t dare defy the US fuel blockade by selling oil to Cuba. He vetoed Maduro’s efforts to enter BRICS. He echoed the US rejection of Maduro’s election win in 2024 but immediately welcomed the fraudulent election victory of Ecuador’s rightwing dictator (Daniel Noboa) in 2025. Lula also glad-handed the US-installed former Al-Qaeda and ISIS operative who is now the dictator of Syria.
Lula’s idea of showing independence from Washington is echoing its vilification of Maduro but adding procedural quibbles: like saying Maduro should have been tried in Venezuela. Lula has also added that he does not consider getting Maduro and his wife released from the U.S. dictatorship’s clutches a top priority.
In 2004, Lula sent over a thousand troops to Haiti where they murderously consolidated a coup that was directly perpetrated by the US. Despite Lula’s service to US imperialism, the US helped railroad him into prison because Washington prefers far right vassals like Jair Bolsonaro. That didn’t make Lula less servile towards Washington. It seems to have made him worse.
As for Sheinbaum, her pitiful response to Maduro’s kidnapping was to ask the war criminals in Washington to give him a fair trial. Sheinbaum has stopped Mexico from selling oil to Cuba, and she happily handed out medals at the World Cup final standing next to genocidal Trump, whose bigotry towards Mexicans has been one of the defining features of his presidency.
The sophistries of surrender advocates
Every government has to make some concessions to western imperialism. It’s the inevitable result of living in a capitalist-run world, so one way to defend US vassals is to say they are doing the same as Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Chavez and Maduro all did.But it is absurd to deny the truth about the USA’s ‘left’ vassals – and repulsive to invoke heroic leftist leaders of the past to do it. Today, former allies of Chavez who participated with him in armed insurrection in 1992 now debase themselves saying that fighting the US is “counterproductive” and that normalizing with “Israel” while it perpetrates genocide is very important.
Contrast that with Maduro wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh at his birthday celebration about a month before he was kidnapped. The keffiyeh he wore had words on it praising armed resistance against Zionism.
Iran, whose government is valiantly resisting the US, has stated the obvious about Delcy’s cowardice. Her government responded with a formal protest. Of course there are no protests from Delcy when Trump or his officials repeatedly say that they now run Venezuela.
Attacking gringo activists to defend US vassals
Apologists for Delcy, Lula and Sheinbaum often attack anti-imperialists who live in the imperial core. One piece made a very common line of attack as follows: “You gringos tell us how to make our revolution when our problem is you have failed to make yours.”There is a big category error in this rebuke. Activists in the imperial core don’t command militaries. Delcy, Lula and Sheinbaum all do. If they aren’t willing to ever use their militaries to inflict casualties on the US then they are colonies, not sovereign governments, and certainly not revolutionary governments. Their militaries may as well be disbanded. Also, is it ok to call Javier Milei a US puppet or should we say nothing because Argentina’s plight is actually our fault for not overthrowing western imperialism?
As Justin Podur has noted, history shows that the imperial core is much more efficiently controlled than the periphery. Control has involved a mix of tactics that include bribery, propaganda and censorship, but also financial ruin, incarceration and murder. The characterization of imperial core activists as very free but too incompetent to overthrow their governments has been pushed by prominent non-violence advocates like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. That characterization is false, and to promote it for any reason—including to shout down criticism of Delcy, Sheinbaum or Lula—makes revolution within the imperial core even more difficult to the extent it is believed. There is no non-violent path to liberation anywhere in the world, including the imperial core.
Podur correctly observed “while the global north is unequivocally more materially comfortable because of all the stolen wealth, it is not an easier location to ‘go and make a Revolution’ “.
Another attack line is that it is easy to advocate armed resistance from the relative comfort of the imperial core. Again, it is literally the job of militaries in Latin America to prevent their countries from becoming colonies. Those militaries have no valid reason to exist otherwise. There is nothing wrong with anyone saying that. And it is also easy—in fact, easier—to advocate surrender while living in the imperial core. Surrender advocacy is what imperialists want.
Unbreakable Cuba: Why Washington Still Fears a Defiant Island
Never ignore the costs of surrender
Selling defeatism is easy. The assassinated Hezbollah leader Seyyid Hassan Nasrallah constantly did the exact opposite of that. He reminded people that the costs of surrender tend to be forgotten – and that liberation requires sacrifice.Underdevelopment imposed on Latin America and much of the world by the leading capitalist states has killed hundreds of millions people since 1990 alone. That’s the cost of surrender to western imperialism. Whether you live in the imperial core or not, you must never forget it.
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The brazilian military has enough ammunition for about 24 hours of small arms warfare.
I will say that your heart is in the right place my guy, but latin america is not Iran and there’s no straight of hormuz to block here. The actual struggle in LatAm is decolonial. Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela are not fighting to liberate the continent, they are fighting to find some footing as semi-independent states with compromised territories.
People will say a ton about operation condor and the cold war. But the LatAm elites are derived from something even older - the interwar period when the US definitively displaced the british empire from the continent in full. A political renewal on that scale is not going to happen again without a collapse of the US and/or a rise of China.
Mexico is, in effect, an economic annex of the US. Brazil has comically fewer resources to work with than its territorial extent suggests. And Venezuela already fought decades of hybrid warfare against the US. To demand any more of them is, with all due respect, canadian.
Yeah this is a huge problem, we cannot afford open confrontation with the empire. In fact, it’s election year and there is a genuine fear of the US interfering in one way or another. Not only that but there is also the fact that our military is very far-right and so anyone that is a leftist is worried of what would happen if the US decides to invades us.
I understand not liking Lula, I don’t like him, his government has been more and more liberal over time. I’m not
for him in the first turn (sorry I forgot how that is called in english), only on the second one when it’s him against Flávio Bolsonaro because I sure as hell am not voting for that fascist and imperialist dog.
I could be wrong because there are gaps in my knowledge, but as far as I’ve seen talked about, the issue is not the amount of natural resources we have, but rather that we are a deindustrialized country that is subservient to foreign capital. We have the natural resources and capacity to have our own industry and to be self-reliable and self-sustainable even, the issue is the lack of a national project that is truly sovereign.
Which is not to say we couldn’t and shouldn’t be doing more to help Cuba, we can and should. That being said MST has sent 7.6 tons of medication to Cuba which should be more than enough to make the current government ashamed, yet here we are.
When we needed medics Cuba didn’t bat an eye and helped us as best as they could, and now we aren’t doing nearly enough to help them out in their time of need.
Yet, you’ll probably agree with me that this doesn’t even matter to the article at all? Would they care if our Congress went from 50% Carlos Hitler to 80% Carlos Hitler on the basis of Lula being less media savyy and making pointless comments about saving Maduro? Because a Lula that signals to a foreign, first world audience is, simply, a very stupid politician with his head on the clouds and pretending as though this country is not infiltrated by megachurches, USIsraeli spies and under US media monopolies.
Yes and no, right? Because, of course, the greatest issue at hand is that Brazil was defeated after the Volcker Shock and subjected to deindustrialization as a policy. But there is also a massive disconnect between the natural resources actually available to Brazil and Brazilians’ sense of ‘destiny’. Brazilians believe that Brazil, if well administered, would necessarily be a wealthy and powerful country. That has never been the case.
In reality, Brazil spent the second industrial revolution with poor demographics, poor geographic distribution and no real mineral coal reserves with which to make steel. It spent the third industrial revolution looking for oil everywhere and failing to make real headways until the 21st century because the continental shelf of Brazil has nothing like the american Permian. Petrobrás was more of a refining company than an actual oil company for most of its history for a reason. Brazil was a historically agricultural country that wasn’t self sufficient in actual food stuffs due to climate and the disparate nature of its islands of natural fertility. That Brazil is even a net food exporter today is a matter of state policy and subsidies, not, as nationalist romanticism might term it, ‘destiny’.
Brazil is not the United States. It doesn’t a network of dozens of natural harbours everywhere, navigable rivers connecting the entire country and mineral resources ready for industrial exploitation. What we have in Brazil today was built up with a great deal of stubborn effort and labour, and only held onto because in spite of the Washington Consensus Brazil happened to niche itself well into supporting China’s industrialization with primary products.
The same industrial impetus that created Brazilian agribusiness is capable of creating the future of Brazilian industry. But neither of them rely entirely on natural resources available, neither of them are natural occurences and, as it turns out, Brazil never played this game with the kind of resources that were available to the historical industrial powers. That the monarchy could not industrialize and that the republic could only industrialize in part due to a very specific window in global geopolitics are facts that send ripples across to today.
Yeah I agree with that, that’s something that the author of the article does need to take into consideration. It’s not some minor thing that can be an afterthought.
Because the issue is not it being well administered, but rather of having an actual industrial and national policy for development. We weren’t “well administered” under the brutal military dictatorship, yet we had a national industry.
Okay so this is where a huge gap in my knowledge comes in so I can’t properly comment on any of that. My only issue here is that you are not presenting the reason for each of these things, making it seem like the issue is with Brazil itself. I could very well be misinterpreting your point here, so please call me out on that if that’s the case. It’s important to understand these things historically, but if those things are not issues anymore, because like you said, there was a great deal of effort, labor and state policy, than there’s is no excuse to keep us deindustrialized and subservient to the imperial core if not by an imposed policy by said core.
I’m not trying to say that we need to rely on any natural resources being readily available, just that if needed it could be not that huge of an issue for us and that the lack of such resources cannot be used as an excuse to not be industrialized. We can be a properly industrialized and developed country with our own strengths in the global stage.
They are historical issues that are both behind us but that send ripples to our time period nonetheless, yes?
Easy scenario that any brazilian can envision. During the Monarchy, Brazil was a slaver country with an extensive territory and a relatively small population. The state was aware of its coal reserves in the south and its iron reserves in the southeast. You needed that mineral coal to make steel. There was a brief moment in time when harvesting that coal was considered useful to the state. But it fizzled out. Not just because the Monarchy was dominated by aristocrats. But because the material conditions were not there. Brazil’s geography, market demands and population distribution just weren’t there during the early to mid monarchical period. The population of Brazil was nowhere near those Santa Catarina coal reserves, which aren’t even that good anyways and, besides, the river networks and the mountaineous nature of the great escarpment even make transportation a nightmare.
So, ultimately, Brazil entered the oil and hydropower age of Latin America by making Steel with American technology and using American coal. Understand? And even then, Brazil refined oil for most of the 1900s. Our oil production only stops plateauing low in the mid 1980s, and only becomes really significant in the 21st century.
Today we can and should invest in the ongoing electrification revolution that China’s made possible. But, on the one hand, we have to deal with a former developmentist state that maintained protectionist policies as a means to finance itself (to tax people, not as a tool for industrial policy). And, on the other, we are still a nation that could not industrialize itself in the 1800s, industrialized itself halfway through the 1900s and then deindustrialized itself.
You know the saying about how it is easy to complain about the SUS without realizing that it is being built in Brazil and not Denmark? I think that, ultimately, even when Brazil turns into a new form of developmental state, the results will not be China tier. Which of course they won’t be. But I do believe Brazilians expect that level of success from any government they perceive as ‘non corrupt and well administered’.
Ok, so I did misinterpret your point, sorry for that.
Yeah I can mostly agree with everything you said. The only thing I’m not sure is that we couldn’t be “China tier” of development. I need to study this much more, but what I have seen from people that is many times more knowledgeable than me, it should technically be possible. Just not under capitalism, specially this dependent capitalism we have.
Who would you recommend in the first turn? I’m not familiar with all the candidates. Feel free to DM me if you prefer. Thanks.
I’ll be voting for Samara Martins from UP. I have issues with UP, from their amateurism when it comes to elections, to their very sectarian position online, the countless issues I’ve seen their members talking about online and their line on China where they call China imperialist somehow, but she looks like the best actual radical leftist candidate there. Another valid one I think is Hertz Dias from PSTU, I haven’t searched much about him yet and I don’t like that PSTU is a Trot organization, but it’s not exactly the time to care about that and neither of them is gonna be elected anyway, the first turn is a vote for ideological affirmation, and showing that there’s is a demand for more radical change is paramount as propaganda for us.
For everything else I’m voting for everyone I can from the Bancada da Esquerda Radical, but in my state they haven’t announced people for all the positions yet.
Thank you!
first of all, brazil got tariffed anyway so lmao on that front. second of all, one can send non oil shipments which will actually help (electric trucks, batteries for residential refrigerators, solar panels), instead of aurafarming and sending food which they can’t distribute or preserve. you aren’t cynical enough about these people.
the less said about delcy, the better.
I don’t think this game is winnable, frankly. Just as Brazil is not redeemed in your eyes for donating food, I assume China is similarly sinful for merely helping Cuba electrify.
Nothing short of the impoverished, destroyed and massacred peoples of the world mobilizing militarily to save the wealthy and powerful from their own governments is enough for the worldview expressed in the article.
I don’t know. I feel like there’s a difference between declaring total war on the global hegemon and letting Trump decide your trade policy.
I just think there’s a spectrum between openly handing over politicians to the US for imprisonment and shooting every gringo in the face.
The primary concern of the article is assuaging the moral conscience of first world residents*. And it does so by hiding behind Iran’s success while condemning Venezuela’s defeat. As though Venezuela did not fight and suffer at all! Both countries have struggled, one of them lost after decades of hybrid warfare.
All countries in Latin America are, at all times, under hybrid warfare of various kinds and are all in that spectrum of ambiguous resistance and defeat you have described.
And yet the OP lumps all governments together under the monicker of ‘surrender’ and ‘vassalhood’, regardless of actual policy. Why?
Because they don’t care about the spectrum you have conceptualized.
This is what they advocate for. Nothing short of the total mobilization of the massacred peoples of the world to save canadians and americans from their own governments will ever be enough for them.
*White or non white, but moreso motivated by a romanticized revolutionary struggle than personal solidarity in their communities and with communities abroad. I don’t think people here are like that and, if they act that way, I think they are just momentarily misguided but ultimately good-headed.
china sends nowhere near enough considering its capacity, they could solve half cuba problems with 0.1% of their annual solar output in a year (which would be around 10-20% of cuba needs). i also sent solar panels to one cuban, but i’m not manufacturing super power, am i.
the biggest historical disgrace is south africa anyway in this shit, but for china this is very cheap way to needle/distract usa and aurafarm, instead of just sending letters.
(as for military mobilization, one has to wait a decade for demographics of venezuela to arrive to see how many lives they have saved, after all farmer bankruptcies, deaths of despair and things of that nature)
I have editted my original response to be less glib, but I’ll reiterate:
This is the kind of bullshit the OP is about. Latin America is riddled with drug cartels armed and funded by the US, spyworks and sabotage commanded from Israel, asssassinations and hybrid warfare galore. We are the colonies. I will not entertain the delusions of some canadian moron who believes they are less empowered to effect change than colonized peoples because there are flock cameras in american neighborhoods now.
You know what being ‘less efficiently’ controlled means? It means human life in the peripheries is not politically valuable enough to be that controlled. That’s the colonized reality.
The article in the OP is calling for the military mobilization of Mexico and Brazil against the United States. That’s the actual discussion here. Not how many solar panels China donated to Cuba or how much food Brazil donated to Venezuela. And, yes, had China fully electrified Cuba in three months it still wouldn’t matter to people like in the OP.
Because the goalposts are always moving and there’s no winning this argument.
This is disproven by the explicit stance of the article itself, which says China should have done more but praises it and especially Russia for their action:
He is clearly giving them credit for engaging in some level of resistance and solidarity.
The argument is not winnable because the goal posts can and will be moved at will. If this article wished to dogpile on China, it would, in fact ‘resonably criticize China and Russia’ more harshly.
You keep talking about moving goalposts, but I’m struggling to understand a consistent criterion from you. So does goving credit not count because, in a hypothetical article that the author didn’t write, he could have said something else? So he’s unfair here because hypothetically he could have been unfair? When is it justified for him to offer criticism or even acknowledge that criticism could correctly be made?
I think you’re just psychologizing the author instead of addressing the actual claims. Let’s say they’re a demon acting in total bad faith, that doesn’t make it necessarily true that he’s presenting an incorrect or inconsistent position, we still need some ability to evaluate the actual claims that isn’t predicated on enlightened knowledge of whatever spiritual disease the author has that in an alternate timeline causes them to make an argument not here made that we can blame them for.
I understand that you’re appealing in effect to the idea that his claim can’t be falsified, but I don’t see how he could falsify your claim either except by saying that China is perfect as regards this issue, i.e. any position opposed to yours is ipso facto false because the goalposts could be hypothetically change to something unreasonable.
The article is calling for the military mobilization of Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil against the United States. To, and I quote, wield their militaries to inflict casualties on the United States.
That’s the fundamental unfairness at play.
This is a level of delusion that ignores all of the material reality at hand. But it is also at a level of callousness that is, frankly, difficult for me to apprehend: the article will finish itself by claiming that hundreds of millions have been killed across the Global South due to imperial policy.
And yet it cannot countenance why, in God’s holy name, the massacred might fail to organize politically to throw themselves at the meatgrinder a little bit more efficiently.
This is the reality of things before China was ever cited as a good example. Venezuela fought a hybrid war for decades. The full power of the West was utilized to destroy it. None of that matters because, in the end, Venezuela was defeated.
And it is at this juncture that I add my personal take on things: if you are from the global south then there is no appeasing a certain demographic in the imperial core. The goalposts will be moved. Not because the writer of the article is, as you termed it, a demon and malicious: but because the article has already termed the real price for a good image in his eyes. To fight the United States to the last of us, if necessary.
That’s the thing. At the end, we don’t even have the dignity to survive in defeat. We don’t get to regroup or to find our footing. We can only be lectured to as we falter.
If the Iranian War ends today or in 10 years with the Iranian people defeated and scrambling to survive, they too will be considered an amazing topic for an article like this.
Just as there were so many articles about how Iran betrayed Syria and Lebanon and Hezbollah and Palestine only a few years ago.
not it’s not actual discussion, or the thrust is at venezuela as i see it. why did they have military after all?
as for the rest, usa already shown they can kill 200 fishermen with no reaction from the “colonies”, next they’ll show they can kill 200 indigenous people inside latam proper stopping some gold mine development or cattle ranching, at what point does the military existence start making sense in such a ladder? just admit you are a colony and stop wasting resources then and disband the military, all they do is usa sponsored coup anyways.
global north is in complete treatlerite nirvana, they don’t even need police, the workers will march to the discussion room of 5% col raise by their own volition after they made 50% more bombs filled with phosphorous, so that part of op i also disagree with.
You started this discussion laughing at the fact that my country is under hybrid warfare. I feel like you are just being callous for its own sake, at this point.
what’s it for in non-colonized country?
I believe the reasonable take is to recognize the power of the imperial state and the fact that opportunity to resist the imperial state ebbs and flows, not just with the organizational potential of communities across the world but also material and environmental factors.
The OP rejects all of that because it operates on a double standard. People in the imperial core cannot seize control of their states, but social democrats in Latin America absolutely should. It is nonsensical. Not because it rejects the material reality of colonized peoples. But because it is simply not interested in people at all. It is interested in making a point about who has the power to change the world - and how important it is to point out that the powerful are not the OP but peoples south of the Rio Grande.
The brazilian military would be the US’s first invading force again.