Category Archives: Venezuela

The struggle over the new world (dis)order

by Jim Hodgson

The first hours of the annual parade of world leaders at the UN General Assembly Sept. 22 showed again the sharp disagreement between the leader of the United States and many other leaders over multilateral cooperation and unilateral abuse of power.

In his speech, Donald Trump threatened to “annihilate” Iran, proclaimed his nation’s supremacy, and declared that “to the victor go the spoils.” He also called Cuba “a failed state,” though any “failure” is due to his country’s decades of interference, embargo and sanctions.

Trump’s speech followed those of UN Secretary General António Guterres (left) and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva (centre), who both emphasized the need for multilateral cooperation in the face of the ecological, political and humanitarian crises that confront humanity. Guterres also called for debt relief that is timely and effective.

“In the face of a global catastrophe more than 80 years ago,” Guterres said, “the United Nations was created as an act of defiance. The defiance of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear. The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right. The defiance of countries that know our futures are bound together. The defiance of hope.”

Lula, who seeks re-election in October, warned that countries should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. In the current campaign, Trump has openly backed Flávio Bolsonaro, son of a disgraced former president. Trump previously interfered in elections in Honduras, Argentina and Colombia.

Lula urged world leaders to take stronger action in response to intensifying global conflicts and called on the UN to recover its capacity for dialogue and mediation. He added that it is time to choose between multilateralism or global fragmentation.

“Concessions to the law of the stronger have surpassed all limits. This is not idealism, but pure realism,” he said. “War is not the continuation of politics by other means; it’s the complete breakdown of politics.”

In his speech, Trump said Mexico was the “epicentre” of drug-trafficking in Latin America and that it had ceded some of its territory to the cartels. 

A day later, President Claudia Sheinbaum responded with irony: 

“I could say that it is very difficult to live next to a country with such a high level of consumption of illegal drugs. Or I could say that it is very difficult to live next to a country that produces so many weapons. But I won’t say that because we have a good relationship.”

(Sheinbaum did not attend the General Assembly; Mexico’s remarks were delivered Friday by Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco, who emphasized collaboration with other countries and reform of UN structures.) 

Trump gathers his “Shield of the Americas”

Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the United States has tried to dominate its neighbours in the Western Hemisphere. The early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine (now dubbed “Donroe”) is revived to limit perceived threats in the region.

Over the past 13 months, the U.S. military has killed at least 230 people in about 70 air strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean. In January, U.S. forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his spouse Cilia Flores, and now holds them in a prison in Brooklyn across the East River from the United Nations building.

In April, U.S. and Ecuadoran soldiers launched an effort to dismantle a drug-trafficking group. On Sept. 24, U.S. troops and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration assisted Ecuadoran authorities in arresting more than 30 people with alleged ties to Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

During the high-level General Assembly session, Trump gathered leaders of the 14 countries allied with him in his so-called “Shield of the Americas.” 

They pledged coordinated action against 24 organizations designated as “narco-terrorist.” The declaration calls for sanctions, intelligence sharing, security cooperation and a commitment to invoke the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, or Rio Treaty, to consider collective military action against the groups.

New Canadian aid to Palestine and Haiti (but not Cuba)

Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand, also emphasized multilateral collaboration in her speech. Canada’s foreign policy, she said, is guided by establishing autonomy in strategic fields to limit superpower coercion, along with aspirations to lead middle powers.

“Great powers are walking away from global economic co-operation, dismantling economic integration,” Anand said. State sovereignty “has been treated with disdain.”

“We are facing serious challenges in the global order,” Anand said.

“We will lead other middle powers to act collectively and decisively, because middle powers are playing a key role in building the framework for the new international order — which is being established as we speak.”

Earlier in the week, Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged $100 million in aid for Palestine in an effort to preserve “the possibility of a two-state solution.”

The funding includes $80 million in humanitarian aid, while the rest is development funding for security initiatives, including top-up funds for a multi-year project to train police in the West Bank. 

Anand announced $25.4 million in new Canadian funding for Haiti to support security, governance and community resilience in Haiti. But there have been no new funding announcements for Cuba since commitments earlier this year of $13.5 million to the Pan-American Health Organization, the World Food Program and UNICEF for programs in Cuba.

(Images: http://www.lajornada.com.mx)

Colombia’s Gustavo Petro seeks to contain the growth of “hyper-fascism” in Latin America

by Jim Hodgson

During a visit last week to Mexico City, Colombia’s former president Gustavo Petro declared he would work with others to prevent “hyper-fascism” and “techno-fascism” from taking control of all Latin America.

He met with President Claudia Sheinbaum in the National Palace (above); spoke with students at Mexico’s National Autonomous University on economic policy in the climate crisis; met with Colombians living in Mexico; and sat down for an interview with Miguel Ángel Velázquez of La Jornada daily newspaper.

In that interview, Petro spoke of his complicated relationship with the administration of Donald Trump. The two have differed sharply over Israel’s treatment of Palestine, climate justice, relations with Venezuela and Cuba, and the U.S. “war” on drugs.

Petro’s four-year presidential term ended on Aug. 7 when his hard-right successor, Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in. Petro had been Colombia’s first president from a party of the left. He had tried (unsuccessfully) to bring about “total peace” in a country torn for decades by civil war and violence tied to drug-trafficking. It was Jan. 3, when the United States kidnapped Petro’s Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro, that fear set in.

“After the crucial day, when they bombed Caracas, Trump said: ‘Watch your back, because now I’m coming for Petro.’ That day I thought: ‘A missile is coming for me.’”

After talks among diplomats and with Republicans in the U.S. congress, Petro and Trump met in the White House on Feb. 3. Trump called the conversation “terrific.” Petro said it was “constructive.” (In the La Jornada interview, Petro added that others behind Trump “worse than him” are driving the key decisions.)

Their rapprochement did not last. In Colombia’s presidential election, Trump and his officials backed de la Espriella, calling the other candidate, human rights defender Iván Cepeda, a “radical left Marxist.” This was one more instance of U.S. interference in Latin American elections (after a presidential vote in Honduras and mid-term contests in Argentina). 

Now, countries from Argentina and Chile to El Salvador and Trinidad and Tobago have governments of the hard-right that are solidly attached to Trump’s agenda. The next election to watch is in Brazil next month, where progressive President Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva faces Flávio Bolsonaro, son of disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Across the region, right-wing parties are backed by a large-scale disinformation network, La Derecha Diario (“The Right Wing Daily”). A failed murder-for-hire plot in Bolivia has drawn wider attention to the network’s activities. 

In his interview with La Jornada, Petro spoke of his vision of the political moment: 

“We live in a planetary shell; it’s the matrix of lies. We act like in The Matrix, like in the movie. Suddenly you find a bot farm. It’s not made up of human beings, but rather profiles that automatically react to any Latin American leader because they want to degrade political discourse and reduce it to insults. That’s why I call it the matrix of lies. In this shell of falsehood, some parts escape because they are strong, like states, but the intention of this matrix is ​​to enslave human beings, and it’s not just a physical chain, but a mental one, to enslave human beings to allow the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources, for example.”

Petro explained the counterattack: “Mathematics is required, because it’s a mathematical, algorithmic attack, both in the bots used to manipulate human beings and in the elections themselves and their final results.”

In a subsequent editorial, La Jornada wrote:

“Petro’s contribution to the political debate serves as a wake-up call to increase vigilance regarding foreign agents who exploit communication tools such as social media to promote neo-fascist rhetoric, spread misinformation, incite hatred, and manipulate electorates to benefit their external and internal sponsors – namely, the White House and a sector of big business resistant to democracy. 

“Alongside the bleak picture he paints, there is a message of hope. In his country in 2022, the people elected the first progressive government in history, and this experience cannot be seen as a failure. Societies are not defenseless against technofascism, he says, because they can protect themselves with strong minds and with the same resources used by oppressors: mathematics. Education is fundamental to the resistance that he joins and invites others to join.”

Yes. And, to me, hope is in revival of the networks of social movements that gave rise to the “pink wave” of progressive governments a quarter-century ago.

A postscript: In a Labour Day essay, Canadian politician and activist Charlie Angus offered a similarly sharp warning about the power of the big-tech corporations in the Trump White House. He recalled that in his farewell address, Joe Biden warned that the Silicon Valley elite were capable of destroying democracy and damaging the future.

On the use and misuse of sanctions in a time of empire

by Jim Hodgson

Venezuela’s catastrophic double-tap earthquake on June 24 raises yet again the issues that surround use of sanctions and their humanitarian consequences.

Forgive me for repeating myself, but most sanctions – “unilateral coercive measures” – are almost exclusively applied by rich northern countries against less-wealthy southern countries.

See Common Dreams, July 7, 2026

Venezuela’s drama plays out in the context of historic U.S. refusal to accept the development in this hemisphere of a political and economic model other than the capitalist one. At the end of 1998, Venezuelans chose Hugo Chávez to be their president because he represented a shift away from an oligarchy that used the country’s oil wealth for its own benefit and some allies in an aspiring middle class. In 2004, the United States backed a coup attempt against Chávez: it failed.

Since 2005, U.S. administrations have made annual determination that Venezuela has “failed demonstrably to adhere to its obligations under international narcotics agreements.” The United States began applying sanctions in 2006, saying that Venezuela was not cooperating fully with anti-terrorism efforts, and prohibited all U.S. commercial arms sales and retransfers to Venezuela.

Persistent U.S. action against Venezuela began after the death of Chávez in 2013. His successor, Nicolás Maduro, was perceived as less charismatic (and in the U.S. view, therefore less popular) than Chávez. Oil prices, moreover, had collapsed in 2009, rose again between 2012 and 2014, and collapsed again in 2015. Maduro seemed more vulnerable to external pressure.

Days before Christmas in December 2014, the U.S. Congress voted to give the United States the right to intervene in Venezuela “in defense of democracy and civil society.” Members of congress justified themselves by citing the need to defend “peaceful Venezuelan protesters,” alluding to protests that left 43 people dead. That “defense of civil society” law established the legal framework and paved the way for future sanctions against Venezuela.

These and other measures have been strengthened since 2015. They include a prohibition on use of currencies issued by the Venezuelan government, seizures of accounts and material goods owned by the Venezuelan state and the state-owned oil company and its subsidiaries, and measures against “third parties,” targeting companies that provide services to the Venezuelan state (including transportation of oil). 

Three months later, President Barack Obama cited that law as he issued a presidential decree declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” and launching what would become a program of more than 1,000 unilateral coercive measures: sanctions.

Assets of Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA, including its U.S. subsidiary, CITGO, were eventually blocked or seized, preventing the companies from renegotiating international commitments or attracting new investment. Venezuela went from receiving $39 billion in foreign earnings in 2014 to receiving $743 million in 2020. Measures taken during the first Trump administration led to Venezuela’s effective exclusion from international banking (including SWIFT).

Assets held abroad were confiscated by the United States and handed over to a fake government led by an opposition politician, Juan Guaidó, for whom nobody had voted and yet was backed by Canada and a handful of Latin American countries called the Lima Group.

A variety of situations show limits and possibilities of sanctions. Their use is said to be a “stick in the diplomatic toolkit,”[1] alongside others like dialogue, human rights protection, democracy promotion, mediation, or election observation. For decades after World War II, sanctions were applied by international organizations like the United Nations or the African Union against a member.

After the end of the Cold War in 1991, the UN Security Council used sanctions with mixed success in Yugoslavia and Africa—and also to tragic effect against Iraq in the 1990s. More recently, unilateral sanctions applied by individual states or groups of states against non-members have become more common—and denunciations of their illegality have become louder.

Critics see sanctions as a neocolonial tool available only to powerful states, and one that should be removed from the kit permanently. Indeed, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are a combination of historic colonial powers and contemporary super-powers that are repeatedly accused of threatening or interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. Moreover, sharp differences among the permanent five have made it more difficult both to impose new multilateral sanctions and to ease existing ones.

Currently, the Venezuelan Anti-Blockade Observatory has documented approximately 930 active sanctions against hundreds of individuals, companies, aircraft, and vessels. A recent article in TeleSUR documents the impact of the sanctions on earthquake recovery efforts.

In a July 7 piece for Just Security, a pair of experts—George Lopez, professor emeritus of peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, and Venezuelan economist and Francisco Rodríguez of the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR)—noted that post-earthquakes, “the United States pledged $300 million to relief agencies, mobilized civilian and military teams to Venezuela that are trained on disaster relief, and issued a limited sanctions waiver for earthquake relief activities.

“But these measures are far from enough,” they stressed, explaining that “the United Nations estimates the losses from the quakes stand at $37 billion,” or 32 per cent of Venezuela’s gross domestic product.

Even The New York Times can see the enormous gap between the U.S. relief offer and the billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets it controls.

Calls to end the sanctions on Venezuela are not new: the damage has been felt for more than a decade. In 2020, more than 40 churches and ecumenical organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean signed a letter calling for an end to U.S. sanctions. “These strategies will not serve any purpose other than to harm those who are already suffering, and who are the most vulnerable to COVID-19. The economic sanctions will also negatively affect the political and social environments needed for a peaceful solution to the crisis in Venezuela.”

That letter followed a statement the previous month from the U.S. National Council of Churches that condemned any possible military intervention in Venezuela and urged elimination of all economic sanctions. It also called on the global ecumenical movement to oppose intervention and sanctions, and to affirm Venezuela’s right to self-determination and sovereignty.

These issues were taken up again by the World Council of Churches and its Commission on International Affairs in a July 16 webinar.

“From the standpoint of international law, interventions such as those perpetrated by the Russian federation in Ukraine and by the U.S. in Venezuela raise serious concerns,” said Peter Prove, director of the commission. “For the WCC, such illegal violations are also theological and ethical violations.” The webinar can be viewed here.

[1] Michael Nesbitt, “Canada’s ‘Unilateral’ Sanctions Regime Under Review: Extraterritoriality, Human Rights, Due Process, and Enforcement in Canada’s Special Economic Measures Act,” (2017), 48-2 Ottawa Law Review 509, CanLIIDocs 119: https://canlii.ca/t/71w.