Caracas Chronicles

On September 11, chavismo showed that it decided to stop denying that the US Navy destroyed a boat with 11 Venezuelans on board, who were apparently carrying drugs to Trinidad, and to try to use to its favor the intimidating naval deployment in the South Caribbean. Loyal to the Soviet and Cuban method of disseminating unreliable numbers, of saturating the public arena with absurd enumerations that are illegal to contradict, Maduro broadcasted a nighttime visit to Ciudad Caribia, the suburb built during the Chávez government between Caracas and the coast, and said that he had set up 284 “battlefronts” across the national territory, thanking the millions of people that supposedly enlisted to fight the soldiers of the planet’s biggest military power.

But, as it tends to happen with the chavista leadership, he left the feeling that he hates Venezuelans more than the marines. Along with his wife, “the First Combatant,” the speaker of the National Assembly and the Defense minister who stood by his side during the worst administration of Venezuela’s history, Chavez’s heir said that “those who call to bomb or invade the country are traitors to the fatherland.” 

The regime also circulated images of military training in Casa Guipuzcoana, an 18th-century architectural jewel in La Guaira, and troops were deployed in Maracay and Valencia, two large cities just an hour away from Caracas. All this is part of an effort to recover the mobilization capacity lost by what was once a party of the masses that became unable to win elections when facing real competition, as was clearly demonstrated on July 28, 2024, when Maduro and his alliance perpetrated an electoral fraud with no comparison in the Americas this century.

The government is seizing this moment to consolidate authority over a society that has grown increasingly defiant. Its recruitment campaign offers limited benefits from a deteriorating petrostate, while binding more citizens to the Chinese-tech-driven Patria System, which integrates welfare distribution with population monitoring.

Those bullets that probably won’t touch a single marine have been raining for years over unarmed Venezuelans. 

However, there’s more at stake than mere clientelism. What the U.S. has called an anti drug and anti terror operation against the Cartel de los Soles and Tren de Aragua is the ideal pretext for the Maduro regime to increase state terror within chavista ranks and the entire nation. History provides plenty of examples of how the possibility of war is enough to make autocracies, and even democratic regimes, reinforce their power by discriminating between patriots and traitors, two categories that apply according to the convenience of those who have the guns.

That same day, “peace minister” Diosdado Cabello, in a conference with PSUV members, said that there was a “transition”—and made a pause to mock the meaning the word has for most Venezuelans—from a peaceful revolution to an armed one. “Does anyone have any doubt about this?”, he said with the attitude of someone whose influence hasn’t stopped growing since Maduro gave him the green light to do whatever he needs to protect him after the 2024 electoral fraud. 

For foreign media, which in so many cases are showing a terrible incapacity to distinguish propaganda from information and are running the headlines that Maduro wants, this transition Cabello is talking about means that chavismo is preparing to repel the marines. However, for this story’s real protagonists, the people living in Venezuela, Cabello is saying nothing new: such transition started a long time ago. 

Those bullets that probably won’t touch a single marine have been raining for years over unarmed Venezuelans. 

That invasion of our country by the US that chavismo is crying about was already accomplished, but by the Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana, and against the population that, according to the Constitution, they are sworn to defend.

The invasion from within

In theory, the return of the men in uniform to the main stage of Venezuelan politics, which so many people supported by applauding the coup attempts of 1992 and voting for the MVR party of Hugo Chávez in the following years, meant that the military would stop the rise of crime, protect our land from Colombian guerrillas and Brazilian illegal miners, and avoid the repetition of the atrocities of the 1989 Caracazo, when police and soldiers killed hundreds of civilians that they saw as enemies.

In practice, the opposite has happened. For us, chavismo has been an occupation army. Even if it didn’t arrive to power by guns but by votes. Even if it didn’t come from abroad, but from within.

First, chavismo sees Venezuelan territory through a colonial lens: Land to be conquered and stripped for maximum profit, with no concern for environmental damage, social costs, or even the regime’s own legal frameworks. The movement dismantled the advanced—if imperfect—environmental protections it inherited from democracy, and doubled down on an extractivist model built around PDVSA, the state oil giant it hollowed out through corruption and loyalty-buying. When oil revenues collapsed and spills and fires revealed the decay of what was once a global energy powerhouse, Maduro launched the Orinoco Mining Arc, effectively granting the armed forces a new stream of income and power.

This militarized gold rush has devastated thousands of square kilometers, upending the lives of indigenous and criollo communities, while fueling human trafficking and environmental ruin in partnership with Venezuelan and Colombian armed groups. Ironically, it mirrors the very scenario many on the global left—often blind to the facts—claim the United States intends to impose on Venezuela.

The state ceased to be public once it was occupied by the political, economic and military force that privatized it. It’s an apartheid that translates into abuse at a much deeper degree than in other countries ridden with political polarization.

Second, the chavista state divided the population. Those who collaborate have access to some privileges. Those who oppose are always under suspicion. The loyalists are called patriots, revolutionaries, true Venezuelans; the others are traitors, counterrevolutionaries and people with no nation, besides fascists, guarimberos (chavismo’s slur for demonstrators) and terrorists. Chavismo has not discriminated against us with the efficiency of more organized European states occupied by the III Reich during WW2, of course, but it has used a similar logic. And for example, those who currently collaborate with the state by denouncing other people are called patriotas cooperantes (cooperating patriots). It’s true that, during the years of oil bonanza, stimulus to consumption (with the devastating economic consequences they would show later) like cheap credit to buy homes or cars, or even the currency control regime, reached a great deal of the population, no matter their political preferences. But it’s also true that since the Chávez era, and a lot more during the miserable Maduro years, you have to demonstrate loyalty to get something from the state, or pay for it. The state ceased to be public once it was occupied by the political, economic and military force that privatized it. It’s an apartheid that translates into abuse at a much deeper degree than in other countries ridden with political polarization and the instrumentalization of the us-versus-them dichotomy, like the United States, Mexico or Brazil.

Just like chavismo has used the territory as a mine and the state as a weapon to demand submission in exchange for privilege, it invaded the symbolic field to justify its arrival to our History—with guns on February 4th, 1992—but mostly, its permanence in power. It imposed its mark, like a victor planting a flag on the battlefield, in the country’s name, our coat of arms, our flag, our holiday calendar, our landscape. The chavista governments painted in red everything they could;  renamed places; declared as “liberated territory” the municipalities or states that it won in elections or appointed “protectors” in those where people voted for the opposition. Far from being satisfied with occupying the present, it invaded the past: rewrote History by opening the tomb and reinventing the face of the national hero, by remaking school textbooks, by spreading with its unending, ubiquitous propaganda a narrative that reinterprets five centuries and a quarter as a saga where the stars are the leaders of the occupying army.

Chavismo transformed Venezuela’s cultural institutions (inherited from the democratic era) into an echo chamber for its own discourse, just as it did with the foreign service, while wielding both brute force and legislation to silence dissent and foster self-censorship. Quite similar to what the Russian bolsheviks did when they  occupied and remade Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus after winning the civil war of the 1920s.

The same movement that so often quoted Bolívar’s curse against the soldier who fires on his own people has shown repeatedly its willingness to do exactly that. When faced with protests against its abuses, it has turned its weapons on unarmed citizens—its own compatriots—acting with a cruelty, lack of restraint, and absence of humanity one would expect only in a war against a foreign enemy. By 2002 it was common to hear people in newschannel Globovisión saying that the national guards who repressed protests had a Cuban accent. The control that Cuba has over the Venezuelan military has been overestimated for years, while it’s precisely our own military, along with its civilian comrades, who have perpetrated, or at least allowed, the massacres in demonstrations, the mass killings in poor communities, the kidnapping and torture of thousands of people, the industry of repression that is leaving entire families destroyed and a few officers with full pockets. All those patterns of atrocities reported by many NGOs from Venezuela and the world, and by international agencies such as the UN Human Rights Office.

It’s Venezuelan soldiers and police agents commanded by the chavista clique in Miraflores, not U.S. personnel, who have attacked indigenous communities, committed mass killings in slums, and made alliances with Colombian non-state actors and gangs like Tren de Aragua.

We know that not every police and military officer in Venezuela has shot at unarmed civilians. We know that a good deal of the violence has been unleashed by irregular armed actors. We know that surveillance and punishment on dissident military officers, from Raúl Baduel—a close friend of Chávez and former Defense Minister who died in prison—to Ronald Ojeda—a soldier who escaped custody and was murdered in Chile—is unforgiving. But the people in uniform have contributed, in one way or another, to the existence of the power pyramid. Truth is that most of the military personnel have opted, to this day, to preserve the chavista hegemony, and to intensify the behavior of an invading army on every possible occasion, when they could have chosen another path: in the political crises in 2002 and 2003, the protest cycles in 2014 and 2017, the non-competitive election in 2018, the illegitimate inauguration in 2019, the election fraud in 2024, and the second illegitimate inauguration in 2025. 

Venezuela’s reality versus anti imperialist slogans

Chavismo follows the logic of an invading army: it builds nothing except its own power, and treats the occupied nation as material to be used for its survival. That is why it bled PDVSA—the golden goose of the economy—nearly to death, unleashed the worst economic collapse in modern history, and drove a quarter of the population into exile. This relationship with Venezuela and its people, defined by limitless extractivism and systematic hostility, is central to understanding what has happened to our country.

Besides how reactionary, abusive and authoritarian Trumpism might look, or how questionable is the case the White House is building against Maduro, or how bad the idea of the U.S. attacking a sovereign country might sound, we can’t ignore that the population of Venezuela is already suffering an invasion at the hands of its own army. 

We all know the United States’ history with interventionism in the region. However, in the specific case of Venezuela, the Americans never bombed a palace, or set a neighborhood on fire, or supported a dictatorship. Only in the last few months have hundreds of Venezuelans experienced abuse from U.S. migration agents or jailers in Guantánamo or El Salvador’s CECOT. In fact, since Trump returned to the White House, the long history of the U.S.-Venezuela relations, which go back to the foundation of both nations, have taken a different course. 

When it comes to sharing an opinion of what is happening to us, the past and present of Venezuelans weigh more than any anti-imperialist cliché.

However, those who abused, tortured, raped or killed thousands of Venezuelans in the last years are Venezuelan, not American. It’s Venezuelan soldiers and police agents commanded by the chavista clique in Miraflores, not U.S. personnel, who have attacked indigenous communities, stormed slums with their Operaciones de Liberación del Pueblo (OLP), and made alliances with Colombian non-state actors and gangs like Tren de Aragua. 

This is why one can read people in Caracas tweeting that no American invasion will be worse than Maduro. An invasion that we consider highly unlikely, by the way—if not impossible. Venezuela is not Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Not Panama or Grenada either. It’s still a country where hundreds of thousands have paid an unbearable price to escape the Maduro regime to try to survive in North America. 

When it comes to sharing an opinion of what is happening to us, the past and present of Venezuelans weigh more than any anti-imperialist cliché. In this situation there are no pure heroes, but for most Venezuelans, as shown by mass migration and the July 28, 2024 voting results, it is clear who the worst villain is.