Background Analysis & Current Situation In Venezuela with Vijay Prashad and Carlos Ron
S. E. Anderson
The Caribbean Faces Two Choices: Join the US Attempt to Intimidate Venezuela or Build Its Own Sovereignty
US President donald trump has authorised the USS Gerald R. Ford to enter the Caribbean. It now floats north of Puerto Rico, joining the USS Iwo Jimaand other US navy assets to threaten Venezuela with an attack. Tensions are high in the Caribbean, with various theories floating about regarding the possibility of what seems to be an inevitable assault by the US and regarding the social catastrophe that such an attack will occasion. CARICOM, the regional body of the Caribbean countries, released a statement affirming its view that the region must be a “zone of peace” and that disputes must be resolved peacefully. Ten former heads of government from Caribbean states published a letter demanding that “our region must never become a pawn in the rivalries of others”.
Former Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Stuart Young said on 21 August, “CARICOM and our region is a recognised zone of peace, and it is critical that this be maintained”. Trinidad and Tobago, he said, has “respected and upheld the principles of non-intervention and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and for good reason”. On the surface, it appears as if no one in the Caribbean wants the United States to attack Venezuela.
However, the current Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar (known by her initials as KPB), has openly said that she supports the US actions in the Caribbean. This includes the illegal murder of eighty-three people in twenty-one strikes since 2 September 2025. In fact, when CARICOM released its declaration on the region being a zone of peace, Trinidad and Tobago withdrew from the statement. Why has the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago gone against the entire CARICOM leadership and supported the trump administration’s military adventure in the Caribbean?
Backyard
Since the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the United States has treated all Latin America and the Caribbean as its “backyard”. The United States has intervened in at least thirty of the thirty-three countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (90 percent of the countries, in other words) —from the US attack on Argentina’s Malvinas Islands (1831-32) to the current threats against Venezuela.
The idea of the “zone of peace” emerged in 1971 when the UN General Assembly voted for the Indian Ocean to be a “zone of peace”. In the next two decades, when CARICOM debated this concept for the Caribbean, the United States intervened in, at least, the Dominican Republic (after 1965), Jamaica (1972-1976), Guyana (1974-1976), Barbados (1976-1978), Grenada (1979-1983), Nicaragua (1981-1988), Suriname (1982-1988), and Haiti (1986).
In 1986, at the CARICOM summit in Guyana, the Prime Minister of Barbados, Errol Barrow, said “My position remains clear that the Caribbean must be recognised and respected as a zone of peace… I have said, and I repeat, that while I am prime minister of Barbados, our territory will not be used to intimidate any of our neighbours be that neighbour Cuba or the USA.” Since Barrow made that comment, Caribbean leaders have punctually affirmed, against the United States, that they are nobody’s backyard and that their waters are a zone of peace. In 2014, in Havana, all members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) approved a “zone of peace” proclamation with the aim “of uprooting forever threat or use of force” in the region.
Persad-Bissessar or KPB has rejected this important consensus across political traditions in the Caribbean. Why is this so?
Betrayals
In 1989, trade union leader Basdeo Panday formed the United National Congress (UNC), a centre-left formation (whose former name was the Caucus for Love, Unity, and Brotherhood). KPB joined Panday’s party and has remained in the UNC since then. Throughout her career till recently, KPB stayed at the centre of the UNC, arguing for social democratic and pro-welfare policies whether as opposition leader or in her first term as Prime Minister (2010-2015). But even in her first term, KPB showed that she would not remain within the bounds of the centre-left but would tack Far-Right on one issue: crime.
In 2011, KPB declared a State of Emergency for a “war on crime”. At her home in Phillipine, San Fernando, KPB told the press, “The nation must not be held to ransom by groups of thugs bent on creating havoc in our society”, “We have to take very strong action”, she said, “very decisive action”. The government arrested seven thousand people, most of them released for lack of evidence against them, and the government’s Anti-Gang Law could not be passed: this was a policy that mimicked the anti-poor campaigns in the Global North. Already, in this State of Emergency, KPB betrayed the legacy of the UNC, which she dragged further to the Right.
When KPB returned to power in 2025, she began to mimic trump with “Trinidad and Tobago First” rhetoric and with even harsher language against suspected drug dealers. After the first US strike on a small boat, KPB made a strong statement in support of it: “I have no sympathy for traffickers, the US military should kill them all violently”. Pennelope Beckles, who is the opposition leader in Trinidad and Tobago, said that while her party (the People’s National Movement) supports strong action against drug trafficking, such action must be “lawful” and that KPB’s “reckless statement” must be retracted. Instead, KPB has furthered her support of the US militarisation of the Caribbean.
Problems
Certainly, Trinidad and Tobago faces a tight knot of economic vulnerability (oil and gas dependence, foreign exchange shortages, slow diversification) and social crises (crime, inequality, migration, youth exclusion). All of this is compounded by the weakness of State institutions to help overcome these challenges. The weakness of regionalism further isolates small countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, which are vulnerable to pressure from powerful countries. But KPB is not only acting due to pressure from trump; she has made a political decision to use US force to try and solve her country’s problems.
What could be her strategy? First, get the United States to bomb small boats that are perhaps involved in the centuries-old Caribbean smuggling operations. If the US bombs enough of these little boats, then the small smugglers would rethink their transit of drugs, weapons, and basic consumer commodities. Second, use the goodwill generated with trump to encourage investment into Trinidad and Tobago’s essential but stagnant oil industry. There might be short-term gain for KPB. Trinidad and Tobago requires at least $300 million if not $700 million a year for maintenance and for upgrading its petrochemical and Liquified Natural Gas plants (and then it needs $5 billion for offshore field development and building new infrastructure). ExxonMobil’s massive investment in Guyana (rumoured to be over $10 billion) has attracted attention across the Caribbean, where other countries would like to bring in this kind of money. Would companies such as ExxonMobil invest in Trinidad and Tobago? If trump wanted to reward KPB for her unctuousness, he would tell ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods to expand on the deepwater blocks investment his company has already made in Trinidad and Tobago. Perhaps KPB’s calculation to set aside the zone of peace ideas will get her some more money from the oil giants.
But what does this betrayal break? It certainly disrupts further any attempt to build Caribbean unity, and it isolates Trinidad and Tobago from the broader Caribbean sensibility against the use of the waters for US military confrontations. There are real problems in Trinidad and Tobago: rising gun-related violence, transnational trafficking, and irregular migration across the Gulf of Paria. These problems require real solutions, not the fantasies of US military intervention. US military interventions do not resolve problems, but deepen dependency, escalate tensions, and erode every country’s sovereignty. An attack on Venezuela is not going to solve Trinidad and Tobago’s problems but might indeed amplify them.
The Caribbean has a choice between two futures. One path leads toward deeper militarisation, dependency, and incorporation into the US security apparatus. The other leads toward the revitalisation of regional autonomy, South-South cooperation, and the anti-imperialist traditions that have long sustained the Caribbean’s political imagination.
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The Current Situation in Venezuela: A Government in Charge, a People Resilient
Vijay Prashad + Carlos Ron
On the early morning of January 3, the United States government launched a massive attack on Caracas, Venezuela, and three of the country’s states. Roughly 150 aircraft swarmed the skies, bombing with exceptional ferocity. Amongst these aircraft were EA-18 Growlers equipped with the most advanced electronic warfare systems, such as the Next General Jammers, as well as AH-64 Apache and CH-47 Chinook helicopters. Residents of the city had never experienced such sustained violence: loud explosions, massive plumes of smoke, and aircraft—seemingly unconcerned about counter-attacks —plunged the city into darkness. Later, at a press conference, US President donald trump said, ‘The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have. It was dark and it was deadly’. The United States does not spend more than $1 trillion annually on its military without having built the world’s most lethal arsenal. This was hyper-imperialism in hyper-drive.
Elite Delta Force troops descended from the helicopters to the location where President Nicolás Maduro was spending the night. They faced resistance from soldiers on the ground, but overwhelming firepower from the air killed many Venezuelan and Cuban soldiers (24 Venezuelans, according to the Venezuelan Army, and 32 Cubans, according to Havana). Once ground resistance was neutralised, the Delta Force seized President Maduro and Venezuela National Assembly member, Cilia Flores, Maduro’s wife. They were taken to the USS Iwo Jima and then flown to the United States to stand trial in the Southern District of New York, based on an indictment alleging that they ‘corrupted once-legitimate institutions to import cocaine into the United States’. Six people are accused in the indictment, including Maduro and Flores.
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, Vice President Delcy Rodriquez assumed leadership in Maduro’s absensce. She held a widely publicized meeting with all the main political leaders, including the Minister of Interior Diosdado Cabello who was also named in the indictment. In this initial meeting, Rodriquez called for the release of Maduro and Flores, emphasised that Maduro remains the legitimate president, and confirmed that the government remained intact and at work to assess the situation. Within a day, Rodriquez—now sworn in as acting president in the absence of Maduro –said that she is open to discussion with the United States to prevent another attack, though she continued to insist on the release and return of Maduro and Flores. Certainly, the scale of the attack by the United States made it clear that Venezuela cannot sustain a full barrage from the US over a period, thus, reopening dialogue will be necessary, especially regarding trump’s primary interest: the oil industry. Rodriquez comes from a revolutionary family, her father Jorge Antonio Rodriquez being the founder of the Socialist League, in which Delcy Rodriquez and Maduro once served as cadres. There is no question of any surrender of the Bolivarian process, which is a fundamental political line for Rodriquez and the team that is leading Venezuela’s government.
As dawn broke on 3 January and the stench of bombs lingered in the air, the population was both alarmed and shocked. It is important to emphasise that the 2003 Operation Shock and Awe bombing campaign in Iraq was dwarfed by the bombing of Operation Absolute Resolve (2026) against Venezuela. The bombs were way more powerful, and the weapons systems far more sophisticated and overwhelming. Yet it did not take long for people to take to the streets. A spontaneous open-mic outside the Presidential Palace of Miraflores drew crowds to speak out against the attack on their country. Most speakers spoke passionately with great feeling about the Bolivarian process. They understood that this attack was against their sovereignty, and-–more significantly–-that this was an attack on behalf of the Venezuela’s old oligarchy and US oil conglomerates. Their clarity was striking, yet corporate media ignored this coverage.
The weakness of the new mood in the Global South
A few hours before the attack on Venezuela, President Maduro met with Qiu Xiaoqi, the high envoy of President Xi Jinping. They discussed China’s Third Policy Paper on Latin America (released December 10), in which the Chinese government affirmed, ‘as a developing country and a member of the Global South, China has always stood in solidarity through thick and thin with the Global South, including Latin America and the Caribbean’. They reviewed the 600 projects that are being jointly conducted between China and Venezuela and the $70 billion Chinese investment in Venezuela. Maduro and Qiu chatted, and then they took photographs which were posted widely on social media and shown on Venezuelan television. Qiu then left with the Chinese Ambassador to Venezuela Lan Hu and the directors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Latin America and Caribbean department, Liu Bo and Wang Hao. Within hours, the city was being bombed. That day, the spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said, ‘Such hegemonic acts of the US seriously violate international law and Venezuelan sovereignty, and threaten peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean region. China firmly opposes it’. Beyond that, little could be done. China does not have the capacity to roll back US hyper-imperialism through military force.
Within Latin America, the rising Angry Tide – led by Argentina’s Javier Milei – celebrated the capture of Maduro, while Ecuador’s right-wing President Daniel Noboa made the point not only about Venezuela, but about the need to defeat the Pink Tide that had been inspired by Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarianism: ‘All the criminal narco-Chavistas will have their moment. Their structure will finally collapse across the continent’. Argentina led a group of ten countries to block a condemnation of the US violation of the UN Charter at a meeting of the thirty-three-member Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). These countries were Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago. It is a sign of the Angry Tide’s growing influence that CELAC, once able to stand for sovereignty, is now dragged into support for US adventurism in Latin America and for trump’s orientation toward the revival of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine.
CELAC was established in 2010 from the Rio Group (1986) in 2010 to form a regional body excluding the United States (as the Organisation of American States does), which is why its creation was helped along by the Pink Tide. Its first co-chairs were right-wing Chilean President Sebastián Piñera and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. This kind of unity of the right and left over the idea of sovereignty is now weakened beyond recognition. A failure of CELAC to act has meant that not only its orientation (including the passage of the idea that the Latin America is a Zone of Peace in the 2014 Havana summit) has been dismissed, but so too has the Charter of the Organisation of American States.
trump has openly pledged to revive the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, first articulated by US President James Monroe to combat not only European interference in the Western hemisphere but also the growth of independence led by people such as Simón Bolívar, one of Latin America’s greatest heroes. Bolivarianism was revived by Chávez as one of the core ideological frameworks of the Pink Tide. trump’s open embrace of the Monroe Doctrine and his call for a “trump Corollary” (do what it takes to enforce the Doctrine) signals the US aim to restore old oligarchies across the hemisphere and grant US conglomerates free rein (potentially even reviving the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a trade initiative defeated by Chávez and others in 2005). This is class struggle on a continental level. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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