Stop the U.S. campaign to overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

Recent weeks have seen a marked U.S. escalation against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and its President, Nicholas Maduro. Donald Trump and his generals have significantly increased U.S. naval activity throughout the Caribbean Sea.

Since 1999, the U.S. military and intelligence community have targeted Venezuela for regime change.

A meeting titled “Stop the U.S. Campaign to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution” was held in Baltimore on Oct. 1, sponsored by the Struggle for Socialism Party and the People’s Power Assembly.

Following is a transcript of the meeting, edited for length and clarity.

Chair:

To begin our event tonight, we honor Assata Shakur. Let us join together with a chant that prefaced every Black Lives Matter demonstration in Baltimore. So, repeat after me. 

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom! It is our duty to win! We must love each other and support each other! We have nothing to lose but our chains!” 

On behalf of the Struggle for Socialism Party and the People’s Power Assembly, I would like to welcome everyone to tonight’s forum and discussion with Leonardo Flores, Venezuelan political analyst, activist, and founding member of the Venezuelan Solidarity Network. 

Tonight, we also turn our attention to the Global Sumud Flotilla, carrying aid to the starving people of Gaza, which is currently under illegal attack by the Israeli occupation forces. Around 500 volunteers from more than 45 countries are part of the 44 vessel fleet, including European Union members of Parliament, Rima Hassan and Emma Fourreau, Nelson Mandela’s grandson [Nkosi Zwellvelle] “Mandla” Mandela, former mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau, and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” star Adéle Haenel, and Greta Thunberg. 

The flotilla is carrying hundreds of tons of aid, including medicine, food, baby formula, diapers, and prosthetic limbs to Gaza, where Israel has continued to occupy and starve 2 million Palestinians. Protests are happening everywhere, including Baltimore, where our members have joined with the Palestinian Youth Movement to demand: Hands off the Flotilla. Internationally, Italy’s largest union has called a general strike on Friday in support of Gaza aid. 

Our discussion is critical. The U.S. Pentagon is poised to go to war with Venezuela, a war that will be disastrous not only to the people of Venezuela but to the youth and workers right here at home. We must stop it. Tonight’s discussion will counter the lies and misinformation spread by the media. 

Before I call on Flores, I would like to call on Carrington from the PPA and Struggle for Socialism Party to announce some important upcoming activities. 

Announcements: 

Good evening everybody, sisters, brothers, and siblings. Here is a quick rundown of what we’re up to. This coming Oct. 14, we will be celebrating George Floyd Day. We know the U.S. government passed a bipartisan piece of legislation to honor the racist Charlie Kirk. So we’re flipping it. We’re making it a people’s holiday, George Floyd Day, because it’s also his birthday. 

We also have a film showing, honoring the African revolutionary Thomas Sankara. We’ll be showing “The Upright Man.” Stay tuned for details on when that will be, along with a field trip to the Harriet Tubman Museum on the Eastern Shore. Stay tuned for that date as well. 

We are also currently fighting a campaign to win a city-owned grocery store to end the food desert, specifically in West Baltimore, the Sandtown, Upton, and Harlem Park area, in honor of Bilal Abdullah, the famous Baltimore arabber who was murdered by BPD in June. 

We are also leading a campaign to rename the Francis Scott Key Bridge to the Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, and also honor the six workers who lost their lives in the collapse. 

All right, without further ado, we will hear a presentation by Leonardo Flores, followed by a discussion. So, Leo, the floor is yours. 

Leonardo Flores:

A massive military buildup at Venezuela’s doorstep

Let me start off with what’s going on. And it’s that the U.S. has deployed a lot of folk, a lot of ships, and even planes to the Caribbean, just off the shores of Venezuela. There are the latest reports that there are roughly 6,500 troops, dozens of warships, and more planes landing every day in Puerto Rico, where they’re conducting exercises for an amphibious invasion. 

It’s a really, really dangerous situation, and it’s a wild escalation of previous U.S. policy towards Venezuela. But it’s something that we’ve been kind of seeing coming over the last two decades, really, because of this attitude of U.S. imperialism that needs to control and dominate not just Venezuela, but everywhere — everywhere from Caracas to Gaza to Baltimore itself, right? It’s something we all live with every day. 

And so far, the U.S. has taken down at least three ships in Venezuelan waters, killing 17 people. I’ll go into that in a little bit. But before I talk about what’s happening and why they’re actually there, let me talk a little bit about the pretext for this apparent invasion, or this deployment, of the military. 

The ‘narco-terrorism’ pretext

It’s actually the biggest deployment in the Caribbean since at least 1989, when they overthrew Noriega in Panama. So it’s a dangerous situation, and they’re all basing it on this wild theory that somehow Venezuela is responsible for quote-unquote “narco-terrorism.” This idea that Venezuela is somehow flooding the streets of the United States with drugs, and not just with drugs, but with immigrants who aren’t really immigrants. They are terrorists in disguise here to cause havoc in our cities. 

But, you know, when you look into it a little bit, Venezuela has never engaged in any sort of terror attack, never been even linked to any sort of terror attack. So, already half of this pretext is all kind of — you can flush it away because it makes no sense, right? This idea that somehow drug dealers are now terrorists. 

The reality of cocaine production and transit

And when we look at the actual statistics, not just from the UN, but from the U.S. DEA itself, we see that not only does Venezuela produce zero coca leaf, which is the base ingredient for cocaine, it produces zero cocaine. It produces no fentanyl, no chemicals that lead to the production of fentanyl. 

And that’s important because Venezuela has never even been linked to fentanyl. But now, because of what we’re seeing in our cities, is addiction to fentanyl and other opioids, and that’s what people really focus on when we talk about drugs lately. 

And now they’re kind of switching the goalpost, saying, “oh no it’s not Venezuela’s cocaine,” quote-unquote, “it’s fentanyl.” But there’s never been any fentanyl coming from Venezuela, so that’s a very naked excuse, right? 

So, back to these DEA and UN figures. According to both of these institutions, about 5%, only 5%, of the global cocaine transits through Venezuela. So, Venezuela is not a producing country, but it is a country that is next to the biggest producers of cocaine in the world, which happen to be Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and, to a certain extent, Ecuador. And 87% of this cocaine that’s produced in all of these Pacific coast countries passes through the Pacific. 

We don’t have a map here, but Venezuela doesn’t have a Pacific coastline. So, the bulk of the cocaine is passing through the Pacific. Actually 70%, and this is according to the Ecuadorian government itself, 70% of all the cocaine goes through Ecuador, which has a right-wing government right now. A president whose family owns a banana corporation where, suspiciously, cocaine is routinely found in some of these shipments. Several tons were found in a shipment to Russia just a couple of weeks ago. This is a company that belongs to the president, the right-wing president, of Ecuador. 

And obviously, the other big player in cocaine, which I briefly mentioned, was Colombia, which is not just a major producer, but also a major transit country as well. And just curiously, we know that the U.S. has seven military bases in Colombia. So if it really is a problem of international drug trafficking was one that could be solved by U.S. militarism, which obviously it isn’t because we’ve had this problem for decades now, and the U.S. has spent billions of billions of dollars not just on Plan Colombia, which was this plan to really hit the cartels in Colombia back in the 1990s-2000s, but also the same thing happened with Mexico. And these plans totally backfired, and cartels are stronger than ever in some of these countries. 

But if you’re really concerned about stopping this trade of cocaine, you wouldn’t focus on Venezuela, where only 5% of cocaine exits through, you’d focus on the Pacific. 

The Tren de Aragua myth

On top of this, you have this rhetoric about the so-called Tren de Aragua, which I’m sure some of you have heard of, and the Cartel de los Soles, and let me talk a little bit about both of those organizations. 

So the Tren de Aragua — Trump talked about it a lot on his campaign trail as a way to denigrate migrants and, really, Latinos in general. And in the case of the Tren de Aragua, TDA for short, it’s not even a cartel, but it is a criminal organization where they do kind of murder for hire, and security for cartels, human trafficking. And the really interesting thing is that it surges roughly between 2015 and 2017, when the U.S. economic war against Venezuela was at its peak. And it surges in part because of the threats faced by Venezuela.

They had to move resources away from fighting cartels and fighting organized crime internally to securing the borders because of this threat of invasion. Not just invasion, but really because of the threat of covert operations and mercenaries sneaking into the country to cause terror attacks. Mercenaries are caught there in Venezuela every year. They catch dozens, and I mean mercenaries, not just from neighboring countries, but from Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the United States; it runs the gamut. 

The thing is, Venezuela basically went to war against Tren de Aragua. They had massive major military operations, and the organization was functionally destroyed in Venezuela in early 2023. Since then, the leaders, some of them escaped, and now it’s barely an organization. But criminals use the name because it has a certain cachet, right? Because even the U.S. government is scared of the threat. So if you’re a criminal and you say you’re Tren de Aragua, that all already immediately makes people pause. And so that’s what we’re seeing now is more and more criminal organizations adopting this name to build on its rep, or to gain from the reputation of a cartel that barely exists. 

On top of this, we had the U.S. government saying repeatedly that there’s this really massive coordination between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government. And yet the U.S. itself doesn’t believe that. 

I’m going to read a quote from a National Intelligence Council memo that was leaked in April. This memo says, and I’m going to read three quotes, the first one is: 

“The Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with Tren de Aragua and is not directing Tren de Aragua movement to and operations in the United States. Venezuelan intelligence, military, and police services view Tren de Aragua as a security threat and operate against it in ways that make it highly unlikely that the two sides will cooperate in a strategic or consistent way. Venezuelan security forces have periodically engaged in armed confrontation with Tren de Aragua.” 

So even the U.S. intelligence services understand that Tren de Aragua is a threat not just to the United States, to some extent, but to Venezuela, and that Venezuela has been dealing with it. 

But then on the other side, you have Marco Rubio and the Cuban right-wing extremists within the U.S. government who are pushing this narrative that there’s somehow a big tie between the Maduro government and the Tren de Aragua. And that’s their pretext for wanting to undertake regime change in Venezuela. And not only that, but of course we’ve seen how Venezuelan migrants and really Latin American migrants in general have been really slandered with these allegations that they’re all criminals, that they’re somehow tied to transnational organizations or the Tren de Aragua. 

And so far, roughly 8,000 people have been deported from the United States to Venezuela over the past year. Only one person was found to have a Tren de Aragua connection, and they were immediately arrested upon arriving in Venezuela. Only 2% of all those 8,000 people, supposedly all criminals that ICE has been going after, only 2% ever had a criminal record in Venezuela. And instead, the United States is not only deporting these people in horrible ways, sending them to Alligator Alcatraz or the torture prison in El Salvador. Thankfully, the Venezuelans are gone from there, but there are still 3,000 to 5,000 people in El Salvador left in this horrible torture prison. 

And you have families being separated, dozens of children, Venezuelan children here in the U.S. in foster care while their parents are back in Venezuela, with no real way to reunite them easily, because there’s no Venezuelan embassy here in the United States anymore. 

Even the DEA and its national drug threat assessment — this is a yearly report that the DEA publishes. This is a quote: “Tren de Aragua conducts small-scale drug trafficking activities.” So they’re pitched by the Trump administration as being this major cartel that’s flooding the streets of the United States with either fentanyl or cocaine. And yet the DEA doesn’t consider them a cartel. And it says that they are small-scale drug traffickers. 

Obviously, this is just pure propaganda that we’re supposed to accept. And we’re not even supposed to check on it, because if you look at the DEA’s own website, it clearly states that they don’t consider them to be a cartel and that their activities are small-scale. 

The fictional “Cartel de los Soles”

When it comes to the Cartel de los Soles, which translates to the “cartel of the suns,” this one’s even more ridiculous because this is a totally fictional cartel. It doesn’t exist at all. 

The first reference that you ever saw to something even close was the so-called Cartel of the Sun. This was actually a CIA operation in 1993. And I recommend that you Google “the CIA’s cocaine.” It’s from 60 Minutes. It’s a segment that they did back in 1993 where they detail how the CIA, with the help of this Venezuelan brigadier general in the National Guard, wanted to so-called infiltrate the Colombian cartels by smuggling cocaine through, from Colombia, through Venezuela, to the United States. Tons and tons of cocaine, generating millions of dollars for the CIA and for this general. It’s called “the CIA’s Cocaine.” 

And so then jump forward 20 years, or in 2005, there’s an article with an anonymous source in the Miami Herald saying, “Oh, the Venezuelan government harbors the Cartel de los Soles.”  Whenever you see some sort of anonymous source in a publication, particularly the Miami Herald, it’s a CIA asset just planting information into this mainstream media. 

And when I say it’s fictional, it’s not just me saying it. If you look at these, I mentioned the National Drug Threat Assessment. It’s a yearly report, right? Put out by the DEA. And I went back to all the ones that they’ve published since 2010. Most of them are available online. A couple of them are not publicly available. Do you know how many times it mentions the Cartel of the Suns? Can anyone guess? Zero. Zero. Zero. 

Every single report of these has sections and sections on the active cartels in the hemisphere. And there’s zero mention ever of the Cartel of the Suns. In fact, in this year’s report, there are 13 pages dedicated to different cartels. The Cartel of the Suns is not mentioned. 

Attacks on boats and the real reasons for deployment

So, why are they actually deploying to Venezuela? Why have they killed fishermen? They’ve killed migrants, and they’ve scared fishermen. And now Trump is bragging about the fact that there are no boats in the Caribbean. And that’s somehow a good thing because fisherpeople can’t make a living anymore thanks to Trump’s threats. 

And not only that, but it’s wild to see the United States bragging about killing innocent people in this way. Generally, if there’s a drug boat, it gets seized, especially if you have dozens of ships in the water. 

It’s curious to me that there’s actually been pushback in Washington on this, and we can talk a bit more about why I think that might be, but let me read this quote from a New York Times article on this first strike of a boat that was supposedly carrying 11 drug traffickers. 

First of all, it’s ridiculous, because if you’re going to traffic drugs, you’re not going to put 11 people on a speedboat. It’s going to be three people and then tons of cocaine, right? You’re not going to move people along with your cocaine. 

This quote from the New York Times: “But officials briefed on the strike said that the video does not tell the entire story.” There was a video showing a boat blowing up, and they captured very different angles of it, then put together a slickly edited video. “The video does not show the boat turning. It was turning around after the people aboard were apparently spooked by an aircraft above them. Nor does it show the military making repeated strikes on the vessel even after disabling it.” 

So, not only were these people turning around, but the U.S. shot at them multiple times. First of all, how many missiles do you need to take down a small speedboat? It doesn’t really paint a good picture in terms of how efficient the U.S. is being here. 

In the second boat, the boat wasn’t even moving. It was just sitting in the water, and then you see this missile hit it and it’s destroyed. So, 17 people are already dead in what is a very clear violation of not only U.S. law, but international law. Due process is supposed to extend not just to citizens or people in the United States, but to actions that the United States undertakes abroad as well. 

But what we’re seeing now is the war on drugs meeting the war on terror. Meaning that the Constitution goes out the window. It doesn’t matter. As long as the president says that this person’s a terrorist, he can therefore legally, this is according to not just Bush, but also Obama, Biden and Trump, he can somehow legally just order their death. 

Psychological warfare and attempts to provoke defection

And so when we look at this kind of deployment, is it enough for an invasion of Venezuela? Absolutely not. You’re not going to invade a country that has 30 million people, a country that is both bigger than Iraq and bigger than Afghanistan, with 6,500 Marines. 

So what it’s there for is really as a mode of psychological warfare. They’re trying to provoke a reaction. And one of the main reactions they’re trying to provoke is that they’re trying to get generals within the Venezuelan military to defect. And we’ve seen this because they’re very open about it on social media. 

There’s this guy named Marshall Billingsley, who was in the Department of the Treasury during the first Trump administration, who then got denied by the Senate to go to the State Department, because he was one of those people who wrote memos saying that it was okay to torture people in Guantanamo, and somehow the Senate blocked his nomination this time around. 

But he’s been posting pictures of random Venezuelan generals, kind of doxing them, really, saying, “This is their information, we’re waiting for you in Miami.” He’s basically encouraging people to defect, and none of it has happened. This massive deployment, aimed solely at breaking the will of the Venezuelan military, has totally failed. 

So on top of that, now that this has failed, now there’s the theory that they’re trying to provoke some sort of accident or false flag event, whereby the Venezuelan military can be blamed if something happens to either a U.S. marine or navy person or a ship. And you know, accidents happen, especially if you have all these massive deployments and you’re conducting all these exercises. 

But what we also know is that it’s really there to provide help for covert actions — the terrorism, sabotage, assassinations. When we look at Venezuela, we’ve seen this sort of thing happen repeatedly over the past 10 years. I don’t know if you all remember, but in Aug. 2018, there was a military parade in downtown Caracas. President Maduro was there with his cabinet, and the military was parading because of a holiday. Suddenly, there was a massive explosion in the air, and it turned out that there were two drones full of C4 that exploded. And they exploded prematurely because Venezuelan intelligence caught them in time. 

But this is kind of almost normal to hear about these sorts of plots that are going on against Venezuela — like mercenaries caught outside of major oil production facilities, and they’re caught with guns and ammunition, and all sorts of GPS equipment and explosives. And this happens several times a year in Venezuela. 

Venezuela’s response: mobilization and readiness

So what has been Venezuela’s response to this deployment and to these threats by the United States? The first response was a massive push to have people enlist in Venezuela’s militias. Venezuela, on top of having the normal armed forces and a reserve, has popular militias where people who really want to defend their country can learn to be part of this militia. 

Right now, between all the armed forces and the reserves and the militias, there are 8 million people in Venezuela who are ready to fight for their country and fight for their land. The troops have been deployed throughout the whole country. There’s this state of readiness for an invasion. It may not come, but what might happen, and what the Trump administration has been threatening for the last month, is strikes within Venezuela. 

So, if the worst-case scenario in the short term that I see is that the Trump administration is going to start bombing and drone striking within Venezuela at any time. That’s certainly a possibility. A lot of people in Washington are specifically saying, “Oh, this is going to lead to a civil war in Venezuela.” It really isn’t. 

And I’m saying it’s not because the time for a civil war in Venezuela would have been six or eight years ago, when the sanctions had totally destroyed the country. The U.S. economic warfare on Venezuela was so bad that the government lost 99% of its revenue. So the revenue GDP went down by almost 99%. And not only that, the country was saved basically from famine through organizing, through grassroots organizing. That’s where food was delivered directly to the people who needed it most. And the interesting thing that’s happening right now is that even people within the Venezuelan opposition are rejecting a U.S. intervention, and it’s really shoring up Maduro’s support. 

So I’m going to read a couple of polls. The first one is from an opposition-linked poll. In Venezuela, everything is very polarized. You have polls linked to the opposition and polls that are somehow linked to the government. So this poll is an opposition-linked poll, and it found that only 3% of Venezuelans would support military action. A different poll found that 93% of Venezuelans reject these U.S. threats. So there’s a consensus within Venezuela, which is not the consensus when you look at, say, Venezuelan Twitter, which is filled with bots and with paid influencers and with these think tanks that are really pushing for war against Venezuela. But the consensus in Venezuela is against war. 

And interestingly, the consensus in the United States seems to be against war, too. We saw this YouGov poll that came out a couple of weeks ago, showing 62% of people in the United States oppose the U.S. invasion. That’s really big, given the massive amounts of propaganda we have been subjected to on Venezuela for the past 25 years. And pretty heartening to see that 62% are against the U.S. invasion.

The geopolitical and economic drivers of regime change

I can talk a little bit about what’s driving this push for regime change. Obviously, there are geopolitical reasons, Venezuela being one of the few socialist nations in Latin America, along with Cuba and Nicaragua. Obviously, Venezuela has the highest reserves of oil in the world. Not just that, but Venezuela has rare earth minerals. It has iron, it has gold. It has water. It has a lot of these resources that the U.S. has been really wanting to control for some time now. 

But there’s an interesting split within the Trump administration, because on the one hand, you have these neocons who really want war, and they’re being led right now by Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State. And we should remember that Rubio, back during the first Trump administration, when he was just a senator, even then, he was totally directing Trump’s Latin America policy. So he was the brains behind the so-called maximum pressure policy that really cracked down on Cuba and Venezuela and Nicaragua’s economies, driving the very migrants here that they’re now forcibly and horribly expelling.

And on the other hand, you have the more MAGA isolationist types led by this guy named Richard Grenell. I don’t want to say anything nice about Grenell. The only thing nice to say about him is that he wants diplomacy with Venezuela, which would be a breath of fresh air. 

Grassroots resistance

Finally, it’s interesting to see that there are actually politicians in Congress here criticizing the Trump administration’s maneuvers and criticizing these attacks, and I don’t know why that is. Because generally, saying anything remotely even positive about Venezuela in Congress is toxic. I personally think it’s because a lot of people in Congress are starting to feel guilty about Gaza, and now they’re looking for a way to atone by stopping this war, instead of stopping the genocide.

But there is a War Powers Resolution that would, in theory, limit Trump’s abilities. But we need not just more of what’s going on in Congress, but more action by groups like People’s Power Assembly and other grassroots folks who are actually doing the work on the ground in terms of political education. That’s why I’m really thrilled to be here today. Not just because you all are comrades and I love fighting with you, especially since everything we went through back in 2019. A lot of craziness, which I’m sure you’ve heard from your comrades. But also because you guys are doing the work, and I really respect that, and I really find you all inspiring. 

So, thanks so much for the invite.