DONALD VLADIMIROVICH TRUMP’S “LIMITED MILITARY OPERATION” IN VENEZUELA
You liberate a country to enslave it economically
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While our media are full of details about how the capture of Maduro and his wife was organized, one should focus on how strange this act is: Venezuela is now de facto occupied while the same government as before runs things. Trump said on January 3, 2026, that the US is “going to run” Venezuela indefinitely: “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” and, even more directly, that he considers himself “in charge of Venezuela.”1 No wonder Trump ignores the demands of the pro‑US Venezuelan opposition to play a key role in the new situation – the US wants to “run” the country outside any international legal claim (is it an occupation or…?), and it is deeply significant that it seems to prefer collaborating with Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodriguez (if she will be able to enforce the US demands) rather than with the big figures of the opposition.
Why such strange behavior? The answer is simple: the US doesn’t care about democracy or the interests of the people’s will. Trump talks about indefinitely running the country – which means running it long enough to totally colonize it, controlling and profiting from its natural resources. The US is going to be “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry: “We have the greatest oil companies in the world, the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved in it.” Trump already promises that “we” (the US) will be selling vast quantities of oil cheaply to its allies – in yet another crazy coincidence of opposites, giving power back to the people in Venezuela amounts to a new colonial expropriation of its vast natural resources.
In 1976, the pre‑Chavez government of Venezuela assumed control of the country’s petroleum industry, nationalizing hundreds of private businesses and foreign‑owned assets, including projects operated by the American giant ExxonMobil. In 2007, Hugo Chávez, the founder of Venezuela’s socialist state, assumed control of the last privately run oil operations in the Orinoco Belt, home to the country’s largest oil deposits. The White House said Saturday that the operation to capture Maduro and his wife and fly them out of the country was justified in part by Venezuela having stolen US oil. Trump said the US will indefinitely “run the country” after Maduro’s ouster and seize Venezuela’s massive oil reserves, recruiting American companies to invest billions of dollars in the gutted industry. Trump said US troops will have a presence in Venezuela “as it pertains to oil.” What does this mean? How can a country steal its own oil?
Trump wants Venezuela to return to the US the nationalized property of US oil companies, but Venezuela did the bulk of nationalizations back in 1976, well before the Chavez era, i.e., at a time when it was still considered a “normal” Western democratic country. What Venezuela did was at that time considered part of a process of nations taking over their own natural resources. Trump’s attack is thus directed not just against the “extreme Left” but against a global process of economic decolonization. Furthermore, Trump also treats the oil the US companies were not able to pump as stolen US property – he explicitly talks about seizing “Venezuela’s massive oil reserves.” To imagine a similar obscenity, one has to reach two centuries back, when Haiti achieved independence through a successful slave rebellion – but the price it paid for this was horrible.
