How Venezuela poses an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ to the US agenda

Celina della Croce

US President Donald Trump has not shied away from admitting his thirst for Venezuelan oil.

On 16 December 2025, in the lead-up to the 3 January bombing of Caracas and kidnapping of the country’s president and first lady, Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, he claimed ownership over Venezuela resources. 

Trump stated: “America will not… allow a hostile regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY.”

In his previous administration, he echoed the same obsession with resource-driven regime change, decrying in June 2023 that “When I left [office], Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door.”

Yet Venezuela is not only home to the world’s largest known oil reserve, but also the continent’s largest gold reserves and an ample supply of bauxite, diamonds, iron ore, nickel and coal… And, not least of all, hope.

Trouble at home

Within his own borders, Trump faces heightened civil unrest, with over 100,000 people in Minneapolis alone taking to the streets (roughly a quarter of the city’s population) during a 23 January general strike – an action that has not been seen on this scale for decades – and again during a 30 January nationwide shutdown.

Similar uprisings have spread across the country, from Los Angeles to New York, following the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s murder of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. This massive outpouring follows a year of discontent and marches decrying Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-poor policies.

The escalation of ICE’s tactics under the Trump administration has cost US taxpayers, reaching an all-time high of $85bn in allocated funds (compared to annual spending that has hovered around $10bn or less for the past decade).

Much of these funds benefit private companies.

For instance, 86% of detainees are held in private, for-profit prisons (whose stocks skyrocketed as a result of Trump’s election and subsequent policies).

And the cost of deportation flights, also run by private companies, is astronomically higher than commercial flights (the per-person cost of a deportation flight from El Paso to Guatemala, for example, is $4,675 – five times higher than a commercial first-class ticket for the same route).

At the same time, Trump’s administration has slashed social spending, with a $186bn reduction to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) benefits alone (a programme that, up to that point, helped one in eight people in the US with the basic provision of food).

In the US and the West in general, there is a deep-seated narrative that this is just the way things are. Perhaps we can tone back the violence – swap out a Donald Trump for a Joe Biden who is more cautious with his tactics and open to mild concessions but no less interested in protecting capitalist profits at all costs.

Even key figures in Trump’s own party, from Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Todd Young (R-IN) to Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, have sought to distance themselves from his extreme tactics and distaste for liberal democracy (a general audacity that risks backfiring lest it create sufficient dissent and turmoil to provoke a mass uprising and turn to the left).

Yet neither party is willing to allow anything further than a meek liberal democracy beholden to the interest of a small but powerful elite, at most with enough provisions to keep the general population at bay.

Venezuela’s break with the end of history

The US population, like much of the world, has been told, time and time again, that History has ended.

We may be able to eke out higher wages, and certainly demand that the heightened assault on liberal democracy through ICE and the openly fascistic declarations by Trump be brought under control.

But anything beyond that is painted as impractical at best, and perilous at worst. Just look at the Soviet Union, we are told – it just doesn’t work. Socialism sounds nice, but look at the suffering in Venezuela and Cuba. You don’t want that, do you?

Yet this way of understanding the past, present and future not only seeks to protect the interests of capital, tricking many working-class people into betraying their own interests. But it is wildly inaccurate both by omission and by outright lies.

And it seeks to cover up another extraordinary resource that Venezuela represents: a living example of hope, of unmovable dignity, of the success of a revolution that has not only brought a population out of extreme poverty but has lifted its confidence and consciousness.

In a country under extreme siege by over 1,000 US-led unilateral coercive measures, there are nonetheless a fraction as many homeless people as in the US (where there are roughly 28 vacant homes to every one homeless person and 60 people froze to death in the streets during the most recent winter storm alone).

Even at the height of the crisis in Venezuela, as Trump ramped up his maximum pressure campaign and 40,000 Venezuelans died in a single year (2017–18) due to the lack of medicines and healthcare that had previously been provided freely to the population, the vast majority of Venezuelans have continued to fight to defend not only their right to self-determination, but also to revolution and transformation.

What exactly are the Venezuelan people fighting for that the US government tries so hard to cover up? What is the source of resilience and loyalty to the Bolivarian Revolution, despite the tremendous human cost of US-led efforts to overthrow it?

And, what is the “unusual and extraordinary threat” that Venezuela poses to the US – as then President Barack Obama decreed in a 2015 executive order that paved the way for the economic siege?

When President Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, a revolutionary process began that would set out to repay the ‘social debt’ owed to the Venezuelan people, beginning by dedicating 75% of national spending to social investment – funds, importantly, generated by the country’s historically predominant oil sector.

Through missions that began the year Chávez was elected, the country:

• elevated its population out of poverty and illiteracy, reaching a 100% literacy rate, with more than three million people learning how to read and write (Mission Robinson)
• trained 6,000 professionals in universities and graduated one million high school students (Mission Sucre)
• granted nearly five million homes to families across the country (Mission Vivienda)
• built health clinics in 320 of Venezuela’s 355 municipalities (Mission Barrio Adentro)
• restored the eyesight of some 300,000 Venezuelans while providing eye surgery to one million (Mission Milagro)

President Nicolás Maduro has continued this legacy, despite the duress imposed by the US-led unilateral coercive measures imposed in the years following Chávez’s death. This ensures not only that the country’s resources benefit the wellbeing of the majority, but also that power is given back to the people through a model of direct democracy.

Weeks before he was kidnapped, for instance, Maduro convened the Constitutional Congress of the Working Class.

This was the culmination of 22,110 assemblies in workplaces across the country in which delegates debated and made proposals to the president about the future of the country’s labour sector and productive processes, such as strengthening domestic production of machinery components to reduce external technological dependency.

“Aprobada” (approved), Maduro told delegate María Alejandra Grimán Rondón as she presented him with the conclusions of the congress in front of a packed auditorium.

For another proposal, “the method still needs to be refined,” he replied, outlining next steps for further debate.

Furthermore, communes (grassroots organisations at the heart of Venezuela’s direct democracy through which communities exercise self-governance) have engaged in quarterly national consultations since 2024. Millions voted on the allocation of government funding for thousands of projects that most need attention in their communities, from updating medical equipment in their local health clinics to investing in water filtration supplies to ensure access to potable water.

Both of these processes are part of a model of direct democracy that, in the 27 years of the Bolivarian Revolution, has held 31 elections, carried out constitutional reform, and created structures for everyday people to make direct decisions about the path of the country.

In short, while the accomplishments of the revolution are far too numerous to list here, at their core is a people who have reclaimed their dignity, taken control of their future, and made the irreversible decision to stand upright.

Unlike social democratic projects in the West, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has set out to fundamentally transform society and build a socialist project rooted in class struggle and run by its people.

That means that the social advances are also tied to a process of raising consciousness among the population. People become the protagonists of their own struggle in a process that ultimately seeks to give them the power and tools to run the country, replacing the bourgeois state with a communal one.

In this system, decisions are made by the population, which is organised into communes and various social and political movements across the country.

Through these processes, people learn how to:

• run productive processes, from coffee to construction materials, and be effective owners of their own means of production
• engage in popular decision-making processes across thousands of households
• run communications teams
• carry out education programmes
• identify, prioritise and fix issues in their communities; and other elements that are necessary for a productive society that prioritises the wellbeing of its people

All of this is done in line with core principles such as protecting the planet (with some communes collecting recyclable plastics and turning them into playgrounds, benches and chairs for older people and schoolchildren, and other needs expressed by the community) and centring the leadership and rights of women and marginalised sectors.

What does the future hold for the nobodies?

This dynamic process is a continuation of the path set out by Chávez, one that called upon the ‘nobodies’ to be the makers of their own destiny.

These nobodies – today the protagonists of one of the world’s most resilient and equitable democracies – have shown, time and time again, they will not sacrifice their dignity nor sovereignty at any cost, no matter how severe the threat.

This example is no less valuable a resource than the country’s oil, nor any less of a threat to the Trump regime and US agenda at large.

The example set by the Bolivarian Revolution and its people creates a fissure in the narrative that the US – and the world – population must make the best of what we have, go to work every day with our heads down and spirits crushed, and forfeit our dreams of a better world.

It opens a window for the nobodies of the world – and especially of the US – to see that on the other side of events like the mass uprisings sweeping the country, they, too, can live in a society where the wealth that they themselves generate is reinvested into the common good rather than paying for bombs and lining the pockets of the few. – Globetrotter

Celina della Croce is a writer, editor and publications director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. She has been an organiser and leader in internationalist, anti-imperialist and working-class struggles in the US for over a decade.

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