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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yes actually, at least for Venezuela, declaring war should be the expected response to a foreign power invading and kidnapping your head of state. it is humiliating to watch PSUV roll over for the imperialists like this. Independence and freedom carries a heavy cost, but it is worth any price. Vietnam didn’t win their sovereignty by begging, it took millions of martyrs. Iran and Gazans understand this too.
What would the military strategy have been?
defensive asymmetric, like Vietnam, like Iran. They wouldn’t be able to get maduro and flores back, they would certainly have their cities and infrastructure heavily bombed, but would the US dare to invade? I don’t know, but Venezuela has the geography and popular support to make it a daunting task for the imperialists. They seem unwilling to do so for Iran, but Venezuela would be logistically easier and thus more likely. But even then, an invasion would give the resistance the opportunity to inflict casualties on the imperialists and an sustaining an occupation is not cheap, even for an empire. All PSUV would have to achieve is survival, while the US has the impossible task of extinguishing all resistance and establishing a “legitimate” puppet government that everyone will see as a sham. A stronger US miltiary in the past has repeatedly failed to do this, and they are failing again in Iran. They can’t even seem to achieve this in tiny, isolated Gaza, despite the extreme violence and brutality. Victory is not impossible, just very difficult and very costly.
Such a war would have also destabilize the politics of the entire region, would we have seen the social democratic governments in Columbia, Peru, Bolivia fall like they did if the Venezuelan government refused to submit? again, I can’t say for sure, but such a blatant war of aggression would have galvanized leftist resistance. There would be significant pressure on Latin American governments through refugees and popular outcry at Americans atrocities. It would have severely complicated USA’s relationships with the rest of Latin America and beyond, complications the US would rather not have.
infrastructure can be rebuilt, martyrs can be memorialized, a nation’s history cannot be rewritten. Whatever the future holds, Gaza’s sacrifice has made the Zionist Entity’s name synonymous with genocide and Palestine with resistance. Iran’s sacrifices have allowed them to hold a knife to one of the world’s economic arteries and has force every nation to reckon with that fact that unprovoked, imperialist wars of aggression still have consequences. We see the alternative in Venezuela: they have sacrificed their gold reserves, their natural resources, their own people to the ravenous beast and what they get in return is humiliation and enriching the empire that wages war in their former allies. Is peace worth that price?
Venezuelans get to make that decision, and I don’t necessarily condemn them for what they’ve done in the face of aggression, but I cringe with every shameful act of submission they are forced to do. Resistance is victory in itself, and creates new opportunities that wouldn’t have existed before. And I know and believe the words of Uncle Ho: "Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom”
What would the “defensive asymmetric” strategy actually be? What would they do? Guerrilla resistance in the face of an invasion? They were quite obviously prepared for that, but the US didn’t invade. So every single Venezuelan could take to the jungles with guns, but there’s no one to fight.
Vietnam was invaded after years of trying very hard not to be, of taking covert and overt military attacks from the US while their country was literally split in two. They did everything they possibly could to avoid a US invasion because they saw what happened in Korea.
This is enormously callous and shortsighted. You’re basically just saying any number of dead third worlders is worth it. And infrastructure actually can’t just ‘be rebuilt’. The US in wartime is extremely effective at destroying countries just like Venezuela top to bottom. They did it in Libya and Iraq. Would that be better than Delcy? A true war against the US would mean millions of dead Venezuelans. Actually think about inviting that.
Iran, too, avoided war as long as it could. It never directly attacked the US or its vassals unprovoked, let devastating assassinations to unanswered over and over again, compromised its economic system to attempt to appease the empire, repeatedly entered into fake-ass negotiations, anything it could possibly do not to have a war with America. Now that they have, an extremely particular set of circumstances totally unlike anything available to Venezuela has enabled them to win decisively. What is Venezuela’s equivalent to the Iranian missile program, drone production, or Strait of Hormuz? Iran is also FUCKING HUGE and ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET. No aircraft carriers needed that you can strain. They’ll just fly from Puerto Rico.
I too would like to see Venezuela more effectively resist, but sometimes the option simply doesn’t exist.
Not if you lose.
It’s vastly logistically easier. The US can just use Puerto Rico along with other Caribbean states as staging grounds instead of straining their logistics with the case of Iran. Read up about what the US had to do to transport troops from the US to Vietnam. It involved hopping multiple Pacific islands before stopping at a puppet regime in South Vietnam. Fortunately for Iran, US logistics have atrophied since then.
But we are not talking about Iran or Vietnam. Outside of Cuba, the US has a pretty good record in crushing leftist governments or otherwise toppling non-leftist governments in Latin America and the Caribbean. Examples include Grenada, Panama, Chile, and Haiti. Why has the US been so successful? To paraphrase a Mexican president, “Poor Latin America, so far from God, so close to the United States of America.”
There was a moment in history where the close distance between the US and Latin America/the Caribbean could’ve been exploited as a weakness, where a few well-placed IRBMs, ideally with nuclear warheads, could’ve acted as deterrence against the Yanqui menace. Too bad Khrushchev had to do a Khrushchev and fuck things up.
lie to usa (instead of going through) and shoot down the helicopter,
execute survivors during “escape attempt”trade the survivors away for removal of blockade. you imagine political shitstorm inside usa if jan 3rd gone that way? completely voluntary mission with dead troops around?What are you saying? Lie to the USA about what? They tried to shoot down the helicopters and failed because the US is actually astoundingly effective at black ops work and has a gargantuan naval support system backing it up with very advanced specialty technology. I guess you’re saying that Delcy orchestrated the whole thing?
ah, we’ve argued about that already together. why does that black ops not work in sanaa? i think there were stand down orders, yes. not delcy alone of course, the military, it may look like “tonight folks, we are rotating units or repositioning manpads to hide them from cowardly yankees”, there are lots of ways, if you don’t see full picture to sabotage extraction route that soldiers on the ground won’t notice. there was 2 manpad launches and one machine gun firing, pardon me if i believe that not their full strength.
Ok so if you’re right (and I don’t think you are), you’re strategy is… Don’t get betrayed? Very meaningful criticism.
distribute manpads to militias, give televised speech (not orders to some generals, speech) that they can shoot any helicopter at will at night, bypassing chains of command, that at the day if they see helicopters shaped like this they are free to shoot. done. professional military will inevitably betray you in latam it’s law of nature
(preferably, not be inside caracas tbh) (meaningful part is never trust the army, same as cops, least of all the generals, the professional army class interests, such as they are, are completely unrelated to working class, they want not to die and get money, therefore if threatened enough they’ll just twist their thumbs unless their grandma is killed, so in surgical operation they just as likely to say fuck it, nothing gonna change for me, so usa excellence in those operations as you say it, is directly connected to that simple fact and nice cia communications)
So enter a permanent state of a self-imposed no-fly zone to prevent one extremely specific tactic you weren’t expecting. The US didn’t say “we’re going to do a helicopter kidnapping of the president tonight!”; it forced all of Venezuela into a standing state of readiness for months. Then the US used the option it saw could best penetrate that. If your whole strategy is “shoot down all helicopters” the US will just do something different! Venezuela anticipated traditional military conflict, prepared for it, and got juked by a strategy the US rarely deploys. Now, post-facto, you say Venezuela should have gone all out preparing for exactly that strategy that they only could have specifically anticipated if they were in on it, in which case your strategy is again just “don’t get betrayed”!
Take out the Burger Town, for a start. Second, literally just keep selling oil to Cuba.
The US Navy was stealing the oil ships bound for Cuba, remember? How would you prevent that in Venezuela’s position? Keep throwing tankers at the US Navy?
Keep ‘em flowin’. Instead of just letting every other country get pinched off by the imperialists. If we look at how the Trump regime operates they do the same thing no matter what the other countries do. Name 1 country that’s benefited by acquiescing to Trump right now.
Ok so yes, your solution is to feed tankers to the US and also still get none to Cuba
That’s literally what they’re doing now but via the market.
Tell me, what exactly do you think is the limit to America’s power and what’s stopping them from taking all of South America right now. Because all you do on this site is go “nothing good is possible”, never revealing an exact outline of your incredibly fed-adjacent, american imperialist-friendly thinking.
Edit: is any resistance allowed at all by you? What are the limits of this resistance if so?
Resistance depends on an effective strategy that can move closer towards victory by weakening your foes and strengthening yourself. Everything starts from the question of how a specific tactic or strategy advances that. Can you come up with a halfway coherent strategy for what else Venezuela should have done? Or what they should do now?
Right now you’re just saying “they should fight” but you have no idea of how they should fight, what factions would be involved where, what effect it would have on the empire. Before Maduro was kidnapped, I was anticipating the same thing the PSUV was - some kind of lengthy military engagement. I supported any and all means to win that battle, but it didn’t come. I don’t have any fucking clue what effective path for resistance the Venezuelan state has in an immediate sense. The best it can do right now is deepen socialism via continued expansion if the communal system, which is the heart of the bolivarian revolution. Delcy appears to be maintaining that while compromising - willingly or not literally doesn’t matter - on national level state economic policy and foreign diplomacy. Every time she does that fucking sucks and I do not support it. I do not excuse or support that and it will not work out well in the long run. She should be standing firm on key positions but isn’t. That doesn’t mean there’s a military path to resistance at the moment.
US power in Latin America is extremely strong in some areas and extremely weak in others. It is capable of targeted military action that can only be resisted by a state of the scale of Mexico or Brazil OR by organized mass power as in Bolivia, when workers prevented the US from kidnapping Morales. That mass power in Latin America is actually, by my analysis, very strong right now. US power is having a dead cat bounce. The wave of compradors will fall and the mass movements across the continent are well positioned to win revolutionary victories, especially in the Andes.
Sometimes the US just pulls off a clever and effective victory and it is clearly best positioned to do that with its small and isolated neighbors. Read America América or Empire’s Workshop by Greg Grandin to actually understand the history of the US’s relationship with and imperial strategy regarding its southern neighbors. It utilizes every single possible tool to supress and divide the Latin American republics. Latin America is vulnerable right now because the republics are disunited and the US is refocusing its global power there to recoup from its defeats in Asia.
I think the revolution in Venezuela is the most important, instructive, and lively socialist construction in the world. Its loss would be devastating far beyond its borders. It has been badly wounded, but it was never a top down imposition. If the masses can continue to build, revolution can outlast this period of imposed compromise and withdrawal by the state and emerge ready to lead a revolutionary Latin America when the Comprador wave breaks on the rocks off the workers and peasants of América.
You are one of the users who most support protests and revolutionary action in LatAm. Venezuela/PSUV did what they could to their own survival, now if that was a good thing or bad thing only time will tell, in the short term it doesn’t seem like a good thing. As for Mexico and Brazil, they literally do not control their own military, people, specially thoses who are not from LatAm do not understand that there are no left-wing people inside the army, just Constitucionalist and Oportunists. The Mexican and Brazilian armies are their own state within state, they don’t even fully depend on the US, they existed since the 1930s.
I still think a new socialist movement will rise in the Andes, I know we talked about that in the past, but it’s the region with most confrontation right now, and it’s the biggest powder keg in LatAm besides Colombia.
Do you think the ongoing naval blockade of Cuba is beyond America’s power?
It might be if it was actually resisted by more than just Russia. Things tend to break when there’s force applied to them rather than being left to stand freely.