The Jan. 3 attack on Venezuela has exposed faultlines in the Bolivarian project and possible fractures in the ruling clique of the messianic Bolivarian revolution. The whole affair poses serious challenges to us as internationalists. Which side can we support, if any? 

If we believe in democracy, the people of Venezuela have already answered that question for us. On July 28, 2024 they elected opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia with 66% of the vote.  More than 90,000 people volunteered as poll watchers and millions took to the streets to defend that election. Nicolás Maduro ignored the results of that election with the full cooperation of government institutions. 

Now González and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado are being sidelined by both the Donald Trump and the new Delcy Rodríguez regimes. Although González remains the only legitimate ruler, it appears unlikely, if not impossible, that he will be able to return to Venezuela from exile in Spain. Trump has taken out the dictator and his wife, but has left the dictatorship intact.

“An internal coup facilitated by imperialism”

As I’ve been unable to safely return to Venezuela since 2013, I rely on scholars, analysts and reporters, most of them Venezuelans, who I know I can trust from my years of writing on the subject. To get perspective on the current situation, I first checked in with Rafael Uzcátegui, sociologist, activist and former national coordinator of Venezuela’s oldest and largest human rights organization, PROVEA. Rafael sees the capture of Maduro as an “internal coup” and the events surrounding the military operation that took out the Venezuelan dictator indicate that he may be right. In his piece posted on Facebook from Mexico City where he now lives—in forced exile like roughly one quarter of the Venezuelan population—Rafael warned readers against “becoming the useful fools of the (left-wing) oligarchy.”

While recognizing that the Jan. 3 attack was “worthy of condemnation from many angles,” Uzcátegui notes that current information indicates this was “an internal coup within Chavismo, facilitated by ‘imperialism.’” Now-President Delcy Rodríguez’s actions since the attack give weight to his argument.

Rodriguez, the former vice-president, was in Russia at the time of the attack, even though Venezuelan airspace had been declared a “no fly zone” by the US. She could only have managed to leave the country, then, with the help or assent of the US. According to Anatoly Kurmanaev and others reporting for The New York Times (Kurmanaev is another excellent source on Venezuela), Delcy Rodríguez had been chosen weeks earlier as “an acceptable candidate to replace Mr. Maduro, at least for the time being.” When one asks, “cui bono?” and observes the complicated dance that she did in the aftermath of the attack, her role becomes clearer.

Right after the attacks, the new President of Venezuela condemned the action and engaged in the appropriately anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Bolivarian aristocracy. Rodríguez condemned the attack and declared that “there is only one president in Venezuela and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros.” When Trump threatened her with an even worse fate than Maduro’s, she backed down the following day and offered a conciliatory message that Uzcátegui posted on his page with the words, “draw your own conclusions.” In her message, which also began with a nod to the anti-imperialists, she said “We extend the invitation to the US government to work together on a cooperation agenda aimed at shared development, within the framework of international law and to strengthen lasting community coexistence.” Most telling was the fact that in her message there was no mention of having Nicolás or Cilia returned to the country.

According to the Venezuelan constitution, when a president is removed from power, whether by death, abdication or, in this case, a kidnapping, elections are to be held within 30 days for a new president. The Bolivarian government has long since decided to ignore any inconvenient requirement of its own constitution (initiated by Hugo Chavez in 2000) and Rodríguez no doubt knows that Maria Corina Machado (MCM) would easily beat her in an electoral contest. So there has been no mention of elections, and Trump himself declared that Machado, the Nobel winner who called on him to intervene in the country and has flattered him and promoted his policies incessantly since winning the Prize last year, “has no respect in the country” of Venezuela. 

Prospects for the democratic opposition and social movements

Despite Trump’s ignorant assessment of MCM’s role in Venezuela, she continues to be the most popular leader in the country, but the opposition that supports her has been neutralized. While as much as 85% of Venezuelans consider Maduro to be illegitimate, based on his theft of the July 28, 2024 election, an equivalent number of Venezuelans see Urrutia as the only legitimate ruler. Nevertheless, it’s now clear from the lack of opposition to Maduro’s capture, the conduct of the operation, the way the Bolivarians have regrouped around Rodríguez, and Trump’s own statements, that neither the perpetrators nor co-conspirators in the Jan. 3 attack have any interest in allowing liberal democracy to return to Venezuela. 

Unfortunately, prospects for the opposition to reorganize itself now are fairly bleak. Not only has MCM allied herself with the traitorous Trump, but there is very little left in the country from which to build a democracy after 25 years of Chavista rule. Hugo Chávez began destroying the institutions and rewriting the history of the Venezuelan Democratic Revolution of 1958 from the moment he came to power. No sooner had Chávez been buried in 2013 than the years of battling Madurismo began, first with the student revolt of 2014. Those protests continued, almost daily, for years, followed by massive daily demonstrations against the Maduro dictatorship throughout the spring and summer of 2017. Then came the Juan Guaidó* fiasco of 2019, and the repression in the aftermath of the theft of the 2024 presidential elections. Every attempt to bring about real democracy has been crushed and now most of the leadership of the liberal democratic opposition is either in jail, in exile or in hiding.

There is a growing awareness on the left in the US and other areas where populist fascism is growing that a liberal democratic order is the only environment within which social movements can be organized and competing parties can arise to challenge dictatorial power. Until we experienced the first taste of fascism, many of us had been convinced by Leninist ideas and the rhetoric of authoritarian left regimes, like those of Chávez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.  We never imagined that we in the US would be in the situation of the Venezuelan opposition and social movements. 

Indeed, the coup that captured the Bolivarian leadership completes a strange cycle. Chávez was the harbinger of the wave of populism that has swept the world since 1999, and now at its apparent zenith, that wave completes a circle from left to right with Trump’s attack on Venezuela. Trump has at once brought the Bolivarian Revolution under his control, for the moment, and assumed its mantle. The enantiodromia—the process of things turning into their opposites—from left to right is culminating in this dramatic moment, and it therefore is crucial that we understand the process and rethink everything we once believed we knew.

Solidarity with people, not states

Throughout this first quarter of the 21^st century political activists have continued to judge things by the ideological frame of left and right, an antiquated frame that goes back to the French Revolution. But more and more thoughtful people on the left and the right are recognizing that the actual political poles today are the authoritarian kleptocrats versus the populations they rule. It’s now apparent that authoritarian kleptocrats can be found across the political spectrum, and their rhetoric is merely a matter of culture and style. Here it’s urgent that we follow Uzcátegui’s advice to “Search, contrast, connect the dots, ask yourself questions… And, above all: think for yourself.”

If we step outside of our ideological frame, let go of our ideological loyalties just long enough to consider an objective analysis of our situation and the situation of the people of the world, we might recognize that the only object of our solidarity should be the subjects under the rule of the criminal networks taking over the world. In each instance this international crime syndicate comes to power with its own national character and rhetoric to mesmerize the population. It manifests as here as populist capitalism, in Venezuela as socialism and in Europe as varieties of fascism, but in every case the results are the same: the demise of liberal democracy, rule of law, separation of powers, and the institutionalization of dictatorship, economic decline, rampant corruption, repression and fear.

In the US many of us in the struggle for democracy are recognizing the need to build alliances with the former Republicans, the Never-Trumpers and other elements of the Right to fight the fascist forces of MAGA. We need to take that coalition-building international and acknowledge and support democratic forces around the world, regardless of the political stripe of the states they oppose. Democracy is about the demos, the people, all of us, left and right, of all races, nationalities, tribes and ethnicities. The thousand or so political prisoners of Maduro have now been transferred de facto to Rodríguez, and while they may be construed to be “right wing” prisoners of a “left wing” dictatorship, authentic internationalists need to see them as allies in a common struggle for democracy against the world-wide force of populist fascism.

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The piece is edited by: Marcy Rein

* Juan Guaidó was the opposition President of the National Assembly of Venezuela who was technically made president of the country in a parliamentary maneuver to depose Nicolás Maduro. He led a brief failed insurrection and soon was forced to leave the country. He now lives in exile in the United States.

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