This morning, the third of January, the news arrived not through the slow deliberation of the courts, but through the sharp, sudden fact of American special forces – Nicolás Maduro, a man who had long inhabited the Miraflores Palace as though it were a fortress against time itself, was taken by US forces, on the orders of the Billionaire grifter, Trump. He was flown out, the reports say, into a cold, northern sky, leaving behind a country that has been broken for so long it has forgotten the shape of wholeness.
To look at Venezuela under Maduro was to look at a study in the slow erosion of human dignity. He spoke the language of the people while the people went hungry. It is a particular kind of cruelty to preside over the impoverishment of those who were already poor – to watch as the currency turned to dust in the hands of mothers and as the pharmacies emptied of the very things that keep life from slipping away. This was not merely bad governance; it was a form of abandonment. He held onto power with a grip that was as tight as it was indifferent to the suffering it caused.
There are those, of course, who will see this only through the lens of a tired ‘campism’ – those for whom any enemy of the North is a friend of the revolution. They will mourn the fall of a ‘revolutionary’ while ignoring the 7.8 million who fled his revolution on foot. They will speak of sovereignty as if it were a cloak that could hide the bruises of a population. But to defend Maduro is to defend the right of a man to starve his neighbour in the name of a theory.
Yet, we must also look at the hands that reached across the Caribbean to pluck him from his seat. The United States does not act out of a sudden, shivering empathy for the Venezuelan soul. Its interest is heavier, darker, and more liquid. Beneath the soil of Venezuela lies the oil that the world still craves, and the American gaze has always been fixed on that resource with a hunger that is indistinguishable from its rhetoric of freedom. There is a coldness in this intervention, a sense that the removal of a man is merely the clearing of a path to a well. To believe otherwise is to ignore the long, shadowed history of the North’s movements in this hemisphere.
The Americans speak now of Maduro’s political prisoners – eight hundred, they say, kept in cages for their thoughts. It is a number intended to shock (and does!). And while any prisoner of conscience is an indictment of a regime, the accusation rings hollow when it comes from a nation that has mastered the art of the cage.
Consider the numbers that the Americans do not display on their screens:
In the United States, there are nearly two million people behind bars, a disproportionate number of them Black men, caught in a system that functions more as an industry than an instrument of justice.
There are the thousands held in detention centres at the border – immigrants and those seeking refuge – treated as a tide to be stemmed rather than as humans in transit.
There is the support for regimes outside their own borders where the prisons are just as full of those captured on the streets of the USA by ICE, and thousands of political prisoners and executions happening weekly. And the silence just as heavy, provided the resources flow in the right direction.
To criticise Maduro for his eight hundred prisoners while presiding over a domestic and sponsored archipelago of detention is a feat of moral gymnastics. One can hold two truths at once: that Maduro was a man who failed his people profoundly, and that the force which removed him is one driven by a desire for oil, unburdened by the weight of its own hypocrisies. And with no conscience whatsoever for those impoverished by Maduro (or the 40 million in the USA living in poverty, for that matter.
To look toward the Middle East is to see a landscape where the promise of ‘liberation’ has withered into a permanent sorrow. In Iraq and Libya, the heavy machinery of American intervention did more than just dismantle regimes; it dismantled the very scaffolding of daily life. What was left behind was not the vibrant democracy of the speeches, but a hollowed-out world where the electricity fails and the water is no longer sure. In the wreckage of Baghdad and the shattered ports of Libya, poverty has taken on a new and terrifying permanence – a ‘multidimensional’ misery where millions of families live in the long shadow of conflict, their futures traded for a stability that never arrived. It is a region now defined by the ‘failed state’, where the vacuum of power has been filled by the desperate and the extreme, leaving the ordinary person to navigate a life that is more fragile than it was before the first bombs fell. The North came to bring order, but they left a silence that is loud with the grief of the displaced and the hunger of the abandoned, proving once again that when the great powers depart, they leave the poor to pick through the ruins of a history they did not choose.
One cannot look at the current upheaval in Caracas without seeing the long, flickering shadows of the past. There is a weariness in the way history repeats itself in this part of the world, a sense that the script has been written in a language the people themselves do not speak. We have seen this before, in the high, cold mountains of Chile in 1973, and in the sun-drenched, terrified streets of Guatemala in 1954. Each time, the arrival of the North was heralded as a deliverance, a cleansing of some local rot. But what followed was rarely the promised spring. In Chile, the removal of Allende led not to a flowering of the spirit, but to a long, grey winter of disappearance, fear and murder where the economy was rebuilt on the backs of the silenced. In Guatemala, the toppling of Árbenz left a vacuum that was filled by decades of slaughter, a violence so pervasive it became part of the soil. When the Americans depart, they leave behind institutions that are not strengthened, but hollowed out, their foundations traded for a temporary, brittle stability that serves the ledger but starves the soul. To believe that this time – with the oil of the Orinoco shimmering in the background – the result will be a sudden, lasting prosperity for the poor is to ignore everything the century has taught us about the cost of being ‘saved’ by a force that is looking only for a way to settle its own debts.
In the end, we know that the machinery of intervention is fuelled by a very specific and cold-blooded kind of arithmetic. It is an arithmetic that does not account for the bread on a Venezuelan table or the safety of a child in a barrio, but rather for the balance sheets of a few men whose names are synonymous with vast, untouchable wealth. We are asked to believe that these movements are born of a sudden, moral clarity, yet they align with a suspicious precision to the interests of the billionaire class – the architects of a world where profit is the only sovereign. For them, a country is not a collection of souls or a shared history; it is a portfolio of ‘strategic assets’ and ‘untapped markets’. The removal of a leader like Maduro is, in this light, less an act of liberation and more a hostile takeover, a clearing of the path so that the wealth of a nation can be siphoned into the coffers of those who already have too much. It is the ultimate hypocrisy of the North: to speak of democracy while acting as the enforcement arm of an oligarchy, ensuring that while the people of Venezuela remain in the grip of a new kind of poverty, the bottom lines of the ultra-rich remain, as ever, beautifully and obscenely secure.
The streets of Caracas may be quiet today, but it is the quiet of a house where the doors have been kicked in. The tyrant is gone, but the hunger remains, and the new masters are already looking at the ground, counting the barrels of what lies beneath.
*This article has been spell-checked and some grammar altered by ai. It was written and has been edited by an ungagged human.
