Recolonization

Between smiles and a handshake, Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez thanked US President Donald Trump for “supporting the country’s return to multilateral forums,” following a face-to-face meeting on September 22 that she called “historic.”

In her address before the UN General Assembly one day later, Rodríguez reiterated her gratitude to Trump while promising a “democratic transformation” of her country. The acting leader’s trip to New York, a mere nine months after the January 3 US bombings and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, perfectly encapsulated the Venezuelan government’s international and domestic realignment with US imperialism in general and its MAGA faction in particular.

In her speech, she euphemistically called the January 3 military strikes “the outcome of the exhaustion of domestic politics and heightened confrontation with the US,” basically holding Venezuela partially responsible for the imperialist attack it suffered.

The abandonment of Maduro

Rodríguez’s trip was as symbolic for what was said as for what was left unsaid. The acting leader and her entourage heaped praise on Trump and took turns posing for pictures. Rodríguez also maintained an undignified silence when Trump, addressing the UN, gloated about the January 3 military operation and abduction of Maduro, whom he called an “outlaw dictator,” while shamelessly boasting that “to the victor belong the spoils.”

Maduro and Flores – currently detained in Brooklyn just 10 miles from UN headquarters and facing a show trial on ludicrous “narcoterrorism” charges – were not worth a single mention by Rodríguez. This stance has been backed by pro-government pundits who are increasingly dropping the “acting” label when referring to Rodríguez.

Her government has effectively undermined Maduro and Flores’ sovereign immunity argument to get their charges dismissed. US Justice Department prosecutors told the court that Caracas, via its embassy in the US, had advocated to the State Department for Rodríguez to receive head-of-state immunity in an unrelated civil lawsuit in Florida. But, Venezuelan authorities have declined to do the same vis-à-vis Maduro and Flores in what the US Justice Department called “devastating silence.”

The official indifference is even more remarkable given Flores’ documented health issues, heavily aggravated by the brutal kidnapping, which led defense attorneys to request that she be moved to house arrest during the trial. This silence contrasts with the Maduro government’s loud defense of Alex Saab, which repeatedly brought up his health issues under incarceration during the international campaign for his release.

Saab is another prime example of the Rodríguez administration’s pragmatic rapprochement with Washington. He was irregularly handed over to US agencies in May and recently pleaded guilty in a US federal court in Miami, promising to cooperate against unnamed Venezuelan officials.

An imperial satellite

The Venezuelan leadership’s diplomatic activity in New York more broadly showcased a new foreign policy direction that is now unmistakably marching to Washington’s drum.

Rodríguez held talks with International Monetary Fund and World Bank representatives, deepening reengagement with the Washington-based financial institutions that former President Hugo Chávez denounced as instruments of US imperialism and booted them out of the country. The specter of another IMF loan-and-adjustment package returns as the Rodríguez administration begins negotiations to restructure the country’s enormous and illegitimate debt.

In addition, Rodríguez held sideline meetings with US allies only, such as Netherlands PM Rob Jetten, Trinidad and Tobago PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Chilean President José Antonio Kast. Rodríguez also hosted Paraguayan President Santiago Peña in Caracas before flying to the US. 

The right-wing Chilean and Paraguayan administrations had firmly backed US regime change efforts in Venezuela, leading the Maduro government to sever ties. Trinidad and Tobago’s case was even more egregious, with Caracas suspending all cooperation, including in key cross-border natural gas projects, after Port of Spain endorsed Washington’s military buildup and extrajudicial boat bombings on Venezuela’s doorstep in late 2025.

Rodríguez and her team also broke with the Chavista tradition of holding meetings with global majority countries similarly under Washington’s gun, especially allies and strategic partners like Cuba, Iran, China and Russia. A customary event in Harlem, alongside Cuban officials and international solidarity movements, was scrapped as well.

The acting president’s UN address exposed how anti-imperialism and the defense of multipolarity have vanished from the official discourse. Absent was the hitherto denunciation of Washington’s criminal wars across the globe, replaced by a vague expression of solidarity with “peoples who suffer war.” Nor was there any condemnation of US economic sanctions, which remain in place against Venezuela and its former allies.

Rodríguez offered no words of support for Cuba as it faces a US blockade that gets more murderous by the day. There was no mention of Palestine either. Before January 3, Venezuelan representatives had never wasted an opportunity to reiterate support for the Palestinian cause and to expose the international community’s failure to rein in the genocidal, Western-sponsored settler colony.

In contrast, Venezuela joined the US, Israel, Ukraine, Western European countries and Latin American right-wing governments in boycotting the UN’s commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Durban Declaration. The 2001 World Conference Against Racism marked a milestone in the ongoing struggle to end racism and colonialism, provoking the ire of the US and Israel, which have led boycotts of every one of its commemorations.

Fuel for a sputtering empire

Along with the 180-degree foreign policy shift, the Rodríguez administration has moved to restructure the economy to the benefit of a declining US hegemon reeling from its strategic defeat in the war against Iran.

With US officials’ input and supervision, Venezuelan authorities have overhauled energy and mining laws in the interest of multinational corporations, slashing taxes and royalties as well as ceding operational and commercial control. Corporate executives, often shepherded by Trump aides, have paraded through the presidential palace to sign agreements carving up Venezuela’s immense subsoil resources.

A recent oil deal with the Trump administration, which Rodríguez also hailed as “historic,” will turn over 17 prime oilfields holding more than a fifth of Venezuela’s crude reserves to a private petroleum company, NABEP, controlled by the Pentagon. Furthermore, the US State Department will be able to buy 20 percent of NABEP’s output at cost, while having a right of first refusal for the remaining 80 percent, for which a Venezuelan oil official promised a major “sales discount.” In other words, Venezuela is going to supply energy below market price to the imperial war machine.

Whatever revenue is ultimately left for Caracas is still going to be controlled by the US Treasury Department, under what Venezuelan state oil company (PDVSA) chief defended as a “state-to-state agreement.” A recent Financial Times report revealed that the White House is presently barring Venezuela from paying dividends to Russian and Chinese joint venture partners in a flagrant attempt to drive them out.

Washington’s semi-colonial control extends beyond privileged access to natural resources, including strategic minerals. A looming privatization drive and debt restructuring process are likely to further entrench Venezuelan dependence on Western monopoly capital. At the same time, the US is also looking to turn the South American country into a captive market for its heavily subsidized agricultural output. Venezuela’s imports of staples such as rice and corn have skyrocketed this year, seriously threatening national production, especially small and mid-size campesino farms supplying much of the country’s food.

(Ab)uses of history

The speed and scope of Caracas’ realignment with Washington has made it an uphill battle for those still insisting that the acting Rodríguez government is merely conducting a “tactical retreat” without straying from the Bolivarian Revolution’s strategic horizon.

One early line of argument was to invoke historical examples, such as the Brest-Litovsk treaty, to rationalize difficult concessions at gunpoint. However, the analogy grew ever more dubious with the passing months, as the Bolsheviks never renounced their anti-imperialist internationalism nor the nascent socialist state’s sovereignty over the commanding heights of the economy.

The argument that subordinating the economy to US-led capital was akin to China’s post-1978 opening up belies the reality that Venezuela does not even manage its own export revenues and must have its expenses approved by the US State Department, subject to auditing by CIA-linked firms like Deloitte.

Venezuelan government officials and unofficial spokespeople have also abused examples related to Chávez, namely his call for troops to stand down in the failed 1992 insurrection and the fact that he did not martyr himself in the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew his democratically-elected government. However, in both cases, Chávez never surrendered his core principles concerning independence and sovereignty. In 2002, he allowed himself to be taken prisoner by the putschists to avoid a bloodbath, but he did not resign and would not have sat quietly if Venezuela were turned into a US semi-colony overnight. On multiple occasions, Chávez underscored he was prepared to fight and die on the frontlines should Venezuela face an Iraq-style US invasion.

There are other historical analogies that are, unfortunately, more appropriate. Iraq after the US invasion, like Venezuela, to this day does not control its oil revenues, which are deposited in a New York Federal Reserve account. Iraq was until recently under US military occupation, hosting some two dozen bases – a possibility that Trump has recently left open for Venezuela. In past months, the US has carried out extrajudicial executions on Venezuelan soil and deployed military assets in the wake of July’s double earthquake, including temporarily taking over operations at the Simón Bolívar International Airport and La Guaira port.

Egypt under President Anwar Sadat is likewise a very instructive precedent. Sadat never renounced his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser, simply presenting his program as a “correction” of past mistakes. Yet he progressively dismantled the achievements of Nasserism, rolling back land reform and industrialization policies in favor of imperialist capital. Sadat also realigned Egypt from the Soviet Union to the US camp, going on to reestablish ties with Israel and abandon the Palestinian cause.

Vietnam: The forgotten analogy

Lacking justifications for the new alliance with the Trump administration, Venezuelan government officials and influencers have resorted to straw man arguments, claiming that the “international left” wanted the Venezuelan people to immolate themselves by confronting a vastly superior military foe.

The official rhetoric eclipses what was until recently Caracas’ preferred historical analogy: Vietnam. In late 2025, as the US ramped up its military buildup, Venezuelan leaders warned that Trump would face a “second Vietnam” if he dared to attack. There were months of military drills and detailed preparations across the country, consistent with Venezuela’s asymmetric doctrine of “prolonged people’s war”. 

Ultimately it is impossible to know how much resistance Venezuela could have mounted against the US onslaught because the leadership opted not to fight. US air superiority and electronic warfare notwithstanding, Venezuelan defense officials have neglected to explain why only one of Venezuela’s 5,000 Russian-made Igla-S manpads – ideal for taking down low-flying helicopters and combat aircraft – was used. Venezuela’s armed forces offered no organized resistance on that fateful morning, leaving Maduro’s Cuban security detail virtually alone to confront the invader in what reportedly still proved a fiercely heroic firefight that left 32 Cubans dead.

Though Venezuela might have been unable to avoid decapitation of its top leadership – either via capture or assassination – it could have raised the costs for the US empire to a politically unacceptable degree, potentially miring it in the sort of Iraq-style quagmire that the Trump administration most feared. 

Instead, almost overnight, the acting government seamlessly pivoted from vowing to combat imperialism by all means necessary to fawning over Trump and his underlings. Promises that not a “single drop” of Venezuelan oil would be shipped to the US in case of an attack were replaced by risible claims that supplying crude at cost to the Pentagon was Chávez’s plan all along.

Unable to present a convincing case for the domestic and foreign policy U-turns, official and unofficial government spokespeople have also lashed out at criticism from the Latin American left. Most recently, former Colombian President Gustavo Petro slammed the Rodríguez administration for giving away the nation’s oil to Trump. Caracas responded with ad hominem invectives.

At Washington’s behest, Venezuela has also halted all subsidized oil shipments to Cuba, which has added to the island’s gravest energy crisis in its history. Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío recently said that Venezuela remained a “friendly” country, but added that “ally is too strong a word.”

The cost of capitulation 

The human toll of resistance, whether in sanctions-besieged Venezuela or on the battlefields of West Asia, is always immense. However, as national liberation movements have long understood, the price of capitulation is inevitably higher, especially in the medium and long term. Chávez and Maduro clearly grasped this reality, rallying the masses to withstand decades of US hybrid warfare and forging close alliances with anti-imperialist states from Cuba to Iran. 

The cost of submission, meanwhile, is being borne by the Venezuelan laboring classes, from small farmers hard hit by US agricultural dumping to the urban semi-proletariat devastated by spiraling inflation resulting from Washington’s pilfering of the nation’s export earnings. 

For its part, Venezuela’s comprador bourgeoisie, in both its traditional and emergent fractions, stands to reap fabulous rewards from the demolition of the legislative pillars of the Bolivarian Revolution – viz., hydrocarbons, mining, housing and real estate, or forthcoming axing of labor and land laws – reasserting itself as a servile intermediary for US imperialism. 

There is no better example than NABEP owner Alejandro Betancourt, an oil mogul who amassed a fortune from often-unfulfilled state contracts dating back to 2009 and was hand-picked by the Trump administration as a middleman in the 25-year agreement backstopped by the Pentagon. The White House went as far as pressuring domestic and foreign courts to drop money laundering accusations against Betancourt.

Rodríguez and her leadership faction likewise benefit from what analyst William Serafino has called the new regime of “co-government” with the Trump White House, tying their fortunes to the latter to outflank rivals and solidify the strategic alliance with local and imperialist capital. 

The current acting president is one of the architects of the post-2018 neoliberal economic package that was the fulcrum of a new governability pact with the local bourgeoisie, freezing wages and social spending in exchange for social “peace”. Indeed, as then vice president, Rodríguez reportedly brought Betancourt back to Venezuela in 2023, shuttering an investigation into his alleged corruption and key role in financing the self-proclaimed Juan Guaidó “interim presidency” during the first Trump administration. The episode is symptomatic of the Venezuelan government’s Faustian gambit to appease business sectors and maintain a modest economic recovery under crushing sanctions, but at the cost of slowly eroding its popular support base.

The Maduro administration’s concessions hollowed out the Bolivarian Revolution’s sovereign edifice but its institutional foundations remained formally intact alongside the internationalist geopolitical scaffolding binding Venezuela to the broader Axis of Resistance. The post-January 3 semi-colonial offensive has set about demolishing this structure of political-military and economic independence. While the destruction can be repaired through sustained bottom-up mobilization advancing a national popular alternative to capitulation, it will likely be the outcome of a medium- and long-term process. Nevertheless, there are growing signs of revolutionary movements and intellectuals organizing to confront the US empire and its local agents and reconquer sovereignty as the cornerstone of any future socialist construction.

What should be clear without a sliver of a doubt is that the “Rodrigato” – and the lumpen bourgeoisie it represents – has opted to pact with the Trump administration. Any revolutionary strategy to resist re-colonization must begin from concrete analysis of concrete conditions. Ignoring the acting Venezuelan leadership’s discourse and policies, pretending that there is a cunning secret plan being devised or trying to frame everything as a masterful 3D chess move, will ultimately hamper the most important task: fighting US imperialism.

Source: Sovereign Media