Caracas Chronicles

On September 5, 2025, Nicolás Maduro presided over a ceremony at the Venezuelan Military Academy dressed in camouflage.

“We are facing extremist currents from the north, Nazi-extremist,” he declared, “seeking to threaten the peace of South America and the Caribbean.”

Surrounded by the military high command, Maduro spoke three days after a Venezuelan vessel—carrying 11 crew members and a shipment of cocaine bound for Trinidad and Tobago—was destroyed in international waters by a U.S. missile. Addressing the American president directly, he warned that he was ready to move to an “armed phase,” claiming he had a base of 12.7 million people linked to the Bolivarian Militia (MNB). That figure adds together the 8.2 million who allegedly enlisted recently with the 4.5 million the government had previously claimed.

But those numbers are inflated, and the MNB’s actual firepower remains unknown. The activation of the armed forces’ fifth component seems to have more to do with politics and social control than with military strategy.

The old anti-imperialist playbook

Maduro is trying to use the U.S. naval deployment to patch up his wounded authority—both domestically and before international allies—after the July 2024 electoral fraud, placing himself at the center of the epic narrative missing in Bolivarian historiography.

Unlike other revolutionary processes in the region, chavismo lacks a heroic founding myth to rally its base whenever poor results erode loyalty. When Hugo Chávez won the 1998 election, he took power without major resistance from the old establishment. In 2002, a coup removed him for 72 hours, but he returned to power without a single shot fired.

If the U.S. counternarcotics offensive fails to weaken the chavista elite, the regime could find new life after “heroically resisting.”

In 2007, his proposed constitutional reform was defeated at the ballot box—challenged precisely by the man who had facilitated his return to power years earlier, Raúl Isaías Baduel. And none of the later violent attempts to topple chavismo—such as the Operacion Gedeón or the 2018 drone attack on Maduro—offered proof of foreign involvement beyond official propaganda, which for a quarter century has blamed every crime in Venezuela on Colombia and the United States.

Moreover, despite the anti-American rhetoric, renewed business with U.S.-based Chevron has in recent years provided the cash flow needed to keep the Bolivarian revolution afloat. Now, with U.S. ships and aircraft patrolling the southern Caribbean, for the first time there seems to be a real antagonism between Washington and “21st Century Socialism.”

Maduro is seizing the opportunity.
If the Trump administration’s counternarcotics offensive fails to fracture the ruling coalition in Miraflores, chavismo could find a second wind by “heroically resisting” the siege of a foreign power. The first step, it seems, is activating the militia.

A militia for a Communal State

Article 328 of the Constitution lists four branches of the Armed Forces: the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the National Guard. In 2005, the government began talking about a “national reserve,” and in 2009 it was renamed the “Bolivarian National Militia.” Eleven years later, a reform of the Organic Law of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (LOFANB) granted it formal recognition as the armed forces’ fifth branch.

Its official narrative portrays it as the “people in arms,” organized into territorial militias and “combat units” embedded in state institutions and companies.

Until 2024, the MNB did not operate as a conventional military force but as a massive civil-military structure with mixed roles: military support, territorial control, political mobilization, and social tasks. It was more a tool of internal power and propaganda than an effective body for confronting real military threats.

It’s no coincidence that, unlike the other branches of the armed forces, the Militia reports directly to the president.

The MNB’s prominence grew with the push for the so-called “Communal State,” announced on January 10, 2025, as the central axis of Maduro’s third term. After the fraudulent July 28 election confirmed chavismo’s minority status, the regime urgently needed to build an institutional framework that could guarantee long-term survival despite lacking majority representation. Hence the rush to weaken universal, direct, and secret suffrage; impose second-degree electoral mechanisms; and erase governors and mayors from Venezuela’s institutional map.

Unlike the other branches of the military, which answer to the high command, the MNB is directly subordinated to the commander-in-chief—that is, the president.

Although Miraflores has frozen its proposed constitutional reform—which would have given the communes constitutional status—the Communal State is being imposed de facto. And the anti-imperialist spectacle has offered the chance to speed up. On September 5, Maduro announced the creation of 5,336 Communal Militia Units, grouped under a structure the regime calls the “Popular Integral Defense Base.”

In reaction to the U.S. naval presence, chavismo launched the nationwide “I enlist” conscription campaign, after which Maduro claimed 8.2 million new militiamen had signed up, supposedly adding to the 4.5 million already in place.

According to reports gathered by the NGO Laboratorio de Paz, public employees were coerced into registering with the MNB and even recording videos in support of the enlistment drive. While registration centers looked largely empty, Bolivarian mythmaking insists that one in three Venezuelans is now a militiaman. The numbers may be delusional, but the underlying reality is the same: the emergence of a territorial control mechanism over the population.

Turning the opponent’s move to your advantage

Why does the government lean on the MNB rather than mobilizing the other branches of the military? Because the logic is political. Projecting “millions” of mobilized militiamen raises the perceived cost of external intervention and reframes the narcotrafficking issue as one of sovereignty: shifting the discourse from investigating complicity to waging a “people’s war.”

Internally, the militia helps remap loyalties and reconfigure power networks: if chavismo’s social base cracks at the ballot box, armed territorial and clientelist structures offer an alternative geography of governance.

The question is how much this militarized mobilization scheme will deepen Venezuela’s conflict. Turning politics into a defense spectacle and communal life into another rung of armed control does not address the underlying problems: legitimacy, representation, and well-being. If the MNB consolidates as a pillar of the Communal State, Venezuela risks a profound normalization of social militarization—with lasting consequences for democracy and civil rights.