Maduro’s capture and the return of empire: Why Venezuela is not a ‘rescue mission’ but a colonial reprise
January 5, 2026 at 6:04 pm. Middle East Monitor
Captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, arrived at the Wall Street Heliport in Manhattan under heavy escort and were transported to New York City on 5 January 2026. [Stringer – Anadolu Agency]
The US “capture” of Nicolás Maduro is being celebrated in Western capitals as the fall of a tyrant and the restoration of democracy. The language is familiar, almost ritualistic: a strongman removed, a nation “liberated,” history supposedly nudged back onto the right track. Yet this narrative is not merely misleading—it is colonial. It erases centuries of Latin America’s resistance to empire, sanitises racialised class rule, and reduces a deeply political struggle into a morality play written in Washington and applauded in Europe.
To understand Venezuela, one must first discard the fiction that this was ever just about Nicolás Maduro. The Bolivarian Revolution was not a personality cult or a transient regime; it was a historical rupture. It emerged from centuries of oligarchic domination in which a light-skinned elite governed a largely mestizo, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant population through exclusion, repression, and economic dependency. Chávez—and later Maduro—were not aberrations in Venezuelan history; they were its long-delayed reckoning.
Western commentary frames the Bolivarian project as an economic failure caused by authoritarian incompetence. This view conveniently ignores the political economy of sabotage. Venezuela did not collapse in a vacuum. It was subjected to one of the most comprehensive sanctions regimes in modern history—sanctions that targeted oil revenues, financial transactions, imports of medicine, and access to global credit. According to UN rapporteurs, these measures directly worsened malnutrition, health outcomes, and infrastructure breakdowns. Yet when shortages followed, they were blamed on socialism, not siege.
This is not accidental. Imperial power has always relied on producing crises it later claims to resolve. From Guatemala in 1954 to Chile in 1973, from Nicaragua in the 1980s to Iraq after 2003, economic strangulation precedes political intervention. Venezuela is merely the latest chapter in this long tradition of coercive “regime change” disguised as humanitarian concern.
At its core, the Bolivarian Revolution challenged something far more threatening than bad governance: it disrupted class hierarchy and racial order. By redirecting oil wealth toward social programmes, communal councils, literacy campaigns, healthcare missions, and food sovereignty initiatives, the state broke the monopoly of the elite over national resources. For the first time, the poor were not clients of charity but subjects of power. That transformation—messy, incomplete, contradictory—created loyalties that cannot be undone by removing a president.
This is why the fall of Maduro, if it has indeed occurred through external force, will not bring the closure Western strategists expect. You cannot decapacitate a mass political identity. The barrios that defended Chávez during the 2002 coup did not do so because of blind loyalty; they did so because they recognised what was at stake – the return of an elite that had never governed in their interest.
The language of “dictatorship” deployed against Venezuela is equally revealing. Western democracies rarely interrogate their own structures of exclusion, incarceration, racial violence, or corporate capture. Elections are deemed legitimate only when they produce outcomes aligned with imperial interests. When they do not, democracy is retroactively declared invalid. Maduro’s electoral record is scrutinised obsessively, while US allies with far worse human rights records are embraced as pillars of stability.
What is unfolding in Venezuela is not the defence of democracy but the reassertion of empire in an era of declining US hegemony. Control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves—among the largest in the world – has always been the unspoken subtext. The Bolivarian insistence on sovereign control over resources, regional integration outside US dominance, and South-South cooperation represented an intolerable challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy.
“Venezuela and the Return of Colonial Seizure Politics” is a term used primarily by the Venezuelan government and its international allies to describe recent actions by the United States, particularly those involving sanctions, asset seizures, and military pressure. This perspective argues that US actions amount to a modern form of imperialism aimed at seizing the country’s vast oil and mineral wealth and imposing a US-backed government. Venezuelan President repeatedly claimed that US actions, especially statements made by President Trump, reveal a desire to “steal” the country’s oil, land, and minerals. This is framed as a return to 19th century imperialistic behaviour.
Political theory teaches us that empire does not merely extract wealth; it disciplines alternatives. Any project that dares to imagine redistribution, popular power, or post-capitalist futures must be crushed – not because it succeeds perfectly, but because it proves that another order is possible. Venezuela’s greatest crime was not economic mismanagement but ideological defiance.
READ: Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured, flown out of country after ‘large scale’ US strikes
The tragedy of Venezuela is not that it resisted the empire, but that it did so under relentless assault. No revolution unfolds in pristine conditions. The question is not whether the Bolivarian process was flawless – it was not – but whether its fate should be decided by Venezuelans or dictated by a global order that has never forgiven Latin America for refusing to kneel.
The capture of Maduro will be presented as an endpoint. It is not. It is an opening—either for renewed imperial plunder or for a deeper, more grounded popular resistance that understands the stakes with brutal clarity. The memory of social gains, dignity restored, and collective power will not vanish because a leader is removed. History does not work that way.
Latin America has seen this movie before. Each time empire declares victory, it underestimates the persistence of popular struggle. The real battle now is not about Maduro’s fate, but about whether Venezuela’s people will be allowed to defend their revolutionary legacy – or whether the region will once again be reduced to a laboratory for imperial discipline. The arguments draw parallels to historical US interventions in Latin America under the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, which often involved protecting US interests and intervening in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. Venezuela’s history with foreign oil companies, which held significant sway until the industry was nationalized in the 1970s, adds a layer of historical grievance to these claims. Left-wing parties and allies of the Maduro government worldwide have condemned the US actions as “imperialist aggression,” calling for an end to the “war” on Venezuela and the lifting of the blockade. What is at stake is not one country’s government, but the right of the Global South to imagine futures beyond obedience. Empire may capture presidents. It has never been able to capture dignity.
Left-wing parties and allies of the Maduro government worldwide have condemned the US actions as “imperialist aggression,” calling for an end to the “war” on Venezuela and the lifting of the blockade. The debate highlights an ongoing geopolitical power struggle, where the language of “colonial seizure politics” is used by the Venezuelan side to frame US policy as an attempt to re-establish external dominance over the nation’s wealth and political future. The United States is not acting in the name of democracy, legality, or human rights. Those languages are decorative. The actual grammar here is older and cruder: control, extraction, and discipline.
Venezuela was functionally colonised long before bombs fell. Years of sanctions dismantled its economic sovereignty, collapsed state revenue, and made independent governance increasingly impossible. This was not collateral damage. It was the mechanism.
Sanctions hollowed out the Venezuelan state so that intervention could later be presented as “inevitable”. Economic suffocation was followed, predictably, by political delegitimization, then by direct coercion.
The reflexive dismissal of Latin American resistance as “anti-Americanism” misses the point. This is not about sentiment. It is about structure. From Guatemala to Chile, from Panama to Nicaragua, the pattern is uninterrupted: economic pressure → political destabilisation → leadership removal → resource realignment. Venezuela fits precisely into this historical arc. The only difference is the absence of embarrassment. What was once covert is now openly declared. Imperial power no longer feels compelled to deny itself. Trump Is Not the Anomaly – He Is the Instrument
Venezuela’s crime is not authoritarianism or corruption. It is defiance. It is the refusal to accept that its resources are globally negotiable and nationally disposable. This is not a moral story. It is a political one. And it ends, as colonial stories always do, with theft presented as necessity and domination presented as order.
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