More than seven million people have been forced to leave Venezuela over the past seven years. The Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, reported that “the Venezuelan refugee crisis is one of the largest in modern history.”

Think about it: seven million people, each of them so desperate that they risk everything for a journey that for most will be fraught with danger.

The mass exodus from Venezuela subsided somewhat during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But from November 2021 to the end of August 2022, 753,000 Venezuelans left for another country in South America or the Caribbean. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have tried to get to the U.S., and over 400,000 have emigrated to Spain. The president of the International Rescue Committee told BBC News that “There's no question … that it is a major protracted crisis that is shaking the region [of Latin America].”

Crisis in Venezuela has not been caused by a series of natural disasters. It has been inflicted both by the routine predatory functioning of the capitalist-imperialist system, and by coldblooded decisions made and policies carried out by the rulers of that system, especially by U.S. rulers from Obama to Trump to Biden.

U.S. Instigates Repeated Attempted Coups

For over two decades, the U.S. has initiated and orchestrated measures to undermine and even topple Venezuelan leaders it despises—first Hugo Chavez, and now Nicolás Maduro—and to strangle the Venezuelan economy.

Chavez posed as a socialist and anti-imperialist, and to an extent Maduro has also. Neither of them is, or was, socialist. They tried to maneuver for a “better deal” within the overall imperialist system, including through supporting and forming alliances with similar countries and other imperialist powers, especially Russia.¹

The Chavez and Maduro regimes used some of the wealth from Venezuela’s extensive oil production and exports to fund social welfare programs among the poor.² But the country’s actual relations of subordination to imperialism, and many of the backward social relations within Venezuela, have remained untouched.³ One glaring example: As the crisis in Venezuela deepened, contraceptives became increasingly expensive and difficult for most women to obtain, and abortion is illegal. Millions of Venezuelan women have suffered horribly.

Yet U.S. rulers continue to regard Venezuela as a “thorn in the side” of U.S. imperialism. Not because Venezuela is “repressive”; Venezuela can hardly hold a candle to such U.S. allies as Egypt, to take just one example, where over 50,000 political prisoners are held without bail, some now for nearly 10 years; or Saudi Arabia, a monarchy (!) recently visited by Biden in which political dissidents are imprisoned, whipped, executed and, in the case of U.S. resident and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, tortured and murdered with a bone saw.

Repeated—And Utterly Illegal—U.S. Coup Attempts Against Venezuela

In 2002, when George W. Bush was U.S. president, a failed coup to overthrow the government led by Hugo Chavez “was closely tied to senior officials in the US government … [with] long histories in the ‘dirty wars’ of the 1980s [U.S. funded and directed genocidal wars in Central America].”⁴ In May 2019, as a coup attempt against Maduro was underway, Revolution reported that this was “the third time in four months that these forces [in the Venezuelan military] have tried to launch a coup, with enthusiastic backing from the U.S.” In 2020, another coup attempt—“Operation Gideon”—involved a U.S. mercenary group made up of former Green Berets and Special Forces soldiers called Silvercorp USA, who failed in their effort to oust Maduro.

Sanctions—Economic War Crimes Against the People of Venezuela

For over 15 years, the U.S. has imposed a series of punishing sanctions on the Venezuelan government and some individuals in Venezuela. In 2015, then-president Obama issued an executive order declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” Obama and then Trump issued an escalating series of sanctions against Venezuela over the next seven years. The purpose of these sanctions—ousting Maduro from his elected position as president of Venezuela—was made clear in a document released this year by the Congressional Research Service, complaining that “Despite U.S. and international sanctions, Maduro consolidated power.”

These sanctions have devastated the Venezuelan people. The online journal World Politics Review reported that people in Venezuela are “…living in the most dire conditions outside of a warzone in recent memory.” Disastrous economic conditions in Venezuela mean that millions of people are unable to meet life’s most basic needs like water, food, fuel, and shelter. The country’s health system has collapsed. In 2019, 14 percent of all children under five suffered from acute malnutrition, and 57 percent of pregnant women were malnourished. These figures have almost certainly risen since.

Again, take 10 seconds to think about the human beings described in those last two figures. This is the doing of the USA.

Here’s the story of one man out of the 7 million refugees. A construction worker, he used his family’s life savings of $450 to buy essentials for a journey of almost 4,000 miles to Chile, with his wife and two children. They made most of the trip on foot, through five national borders, sleeping on the streets or in the woods at night, over mountains, and across the 13,000-foot-high Atacama Desert, the highest and driest plateau in the world, in freezing temperatures. Almost half a million people, including entire families with infants and children, have made the perilous journey from Venezuela to Chile in recent years.

Collective Punishment Against the People of Venezuela

A 2019 report by Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research concluded, “[T]he sanctions have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018; and that these sanctions would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population ….”

This intensified suffering, death, and dislocation is the result of conscious decisions made by the monsters who rule the U.S. system of capitalism-imperialism, fully aware of the pain they perpetrate. In 2018, William Brownfield, former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, said of the punishment imposed by U.S. sanctions, “…what the debate now is, and this is a legitimate debate, is the impact on the people of Venezuela. In other words, how hard do we want—the international community writ large—do we want to sanction Venezuela, how much increase to malnutrition, lack of medicine, impact on the public health system, how much impact is that going to have. Now, that is a valid argument to have. That's a legitimate issue, and no one in this room can't tell me that you don't have friends or in some cases family in Venezuela that actually has to have some impact as you decide how hard do we want to apply the screws to Venezuela in terms of the impact it is going to have on the people of Venezuela. My own view, thank you for asking, is we should treat this as a bit of agony, a tragedy that's gonna go on until it's finally brought to an end. And if we can do something that will bring that end quicker, we probably should do it. But we should do it understanding that it's gonna have an impact on millions and millions of people who are already having great difficulty finding enough to eat, getting themselves cured when they get sick, or finding clothes to put on their children before they go off to school. We don't get to do this and pretend as though it has no impact there. We have to make the hard decision. The desired outcome justifies this fairly severe punishment." In 2019, after the Trump/Pence regime tightened the screws on Venezuela with a new set of sanctions, Republi-fascist senator Marco Rubio swaggered, “Over the next few weeks, Venezuela is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted in modern history.”

Biden Lifts (a) Sanction

In November, the Biden administration lifted a sanction against Venezuela. Many others remain. Biden granted the Chevron Corporation—one of the world’s largest oil corporations—a license to resume oil drilling and production of petroleum products in Venezuela. The license is only for six months, and sanctions can be re-imposed if the U.S. determines Maduro is not acting “in good faith.”

The U.S. removing one sanction on Chevron is like a big-time gangster who burns down the home of a smaller rival, destroys his businesses, kills off much of his family, beats him to the point of death, then grabs the throat of his bloody and battered foe and snarls, “OK, you ready to talk now?”

The U.S. is lifting the Chevron sanction as its geostrategic conflict with rival imperialists—especially Russia and China—intensifies. Venezuela had been an ally of Russia for years. But shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration sent a high level delegation to Venezuela to begin talks between the two governments, following two decades of overt hostility. The Washington Post reported in May 2022 that this opening marked “a notable shift in US policy toward the authoritarian Maduro as the [U.S.] administration tries to drive a wedge between Venezuela and its close ally Russia, while also addressing soaring gas prices sent higher this year by the war in Ukraine.”

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Earlier this year, Raymond Lotta examined how oil and other fossil fuels are “foundational to the profitable functioning of capitalism-imperialism, as it has developed. Oil is a strategic-military necessity, and an instrument of imperialist competition, rivalry, and domination.” Even though some experts say Venezuela’s oil production facilities have been so wrecked by the U.S. sanctions that it would take billions of dollars and seven to eight years to get the country’s oil production back to 1998 levels, maintaining control over that oil is a vital strategic interest of the rulers of U.S. imperialism, especially in a time of great and growing confrontation with its imperialist opponents.

In other words, Biden is aiming to both weaken Russia’s alliances in Latin America and to gain access to potential oil. But Biden’s opening to Venezuela has drawn howls of protest from some Republi-fascists, like Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who claims that Biden is weakening the U.S. Cotton tweeted, “Banning drilling, emptying the strategic reserve, begging the Venezuelan dictator to produce more oil—these policies aren’t an accident. It’s decline by design."

This clash between Biden and the Republicans is a fight between rival gangsters over how best to advance their larger interests.

Their Interests, and Our Interests

One certainty—neither Biden and the Democrats, nor the Republi-fascists—are doing any of this out of any sense of compassion, or humanity, or a desire to relieve the enormous anguish they and the system they represent have imposed on Venezuela. They both are working to advance the blood-soaked interests of U.S. imperialism.

And the interest of the people—in Venezuela, in the U.S., and all over the world—is to overthrow this system at the earliest possible time, and build a world worth living in for all humanity.

The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.
—Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:3