By Cira Pascual Marquina
October 31, 2025

Given the threat of imminent U.S. military attack on Venezuela, Colombia and other sovereign countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, The International Action Center is increasing its coverage from that region. The following article is from venezuelanalisis.com, Oct. 24.

In recent months, Washington has stepped up its military presence in the Caribbean, sending warships, aircraft, and even a nuclear submarine to waters near Venezuela amid extrajudicial attacks on fishing vessels. For many, this new phase of aggression is all too familiar — part of a decades-long campaign of hybrid warfare designed to undermine Venezuela’s sovereignty.

In this context, Cira Pascual Marquina spoke with Ana Maldonado, a sociologist, international relations coordinator for the Francisco de Miranda Front — a national Chavista movement — and member of the Venezuelan chapter of ALBA Movements. In this interview, Maldonado offers her perspective on how Venezuelans are experiencing the latest imperialist escalation, reflects on the country’s long resistance to hybrid war and situates the current threat within the broader struggle for sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean.

How are the Venezuelan people experiencing this new imperialist escalation?

President Nicolás Maduro has said that in this scenario of maximum pressure, our response must be maximum preparation. At the same time, he has called on us to combine vigilance with calm, to continue our daily lives and to defend the peace with social justice that has cost us so much to build and preserve.

You can see this clearly in the fact that, even amid the current military escalation, the new school year began normally across the country. More than 20,000 educational institutions opened their doors without disruption, and over 6 million children and youth returned to class, as they do every year around this time.

While we are indeed facing a serious threat of war, people are also carrying on with their everyday lives and that, in itself, is a victory, since the enemy seeks precisely to disrupt our lives.

People abroad are often surprised to learn that daily routines here continue undisturbed and that Venezuelans are not living in a state of panic. How do you explain this?

This is far from our first encounter with imperialist aggression. The tactics may shift, but the strategy remains unchanged: hybrid warfare. For years, U.S. imperialism and its allies have waged a relentless campaign against Venezuela, beginning in earnest in April 2002 with the coup d’état and the people’s heroic counteroffensive that restored democracy. That was followed by the oil sabotage, mercenary incursions and global media campaigns against our democracy.

After Comandante Chávez passed in 2013, a new and sustained period of aggression began. Initially, they bet that we would fail to hold peaceful elections or that President Maduro would never be elected. The dominant narrative was “Maduro is not Chávez.” With that simplistic argument, they sought to demoralize the Chavista social base, implying that the Bolivarian project would not withstand the loss of the Comandante. Yet we won the elections and, even as we mourned Chávez, the project continued.

But the U.S. and their local agents were determined not to let us go on with our revolution. In 2014, the opposition launched a violent campaign called “La Salida” [The Exit], led by Voluntad Popular and María Corina Machado, the same factions now openly calling for foreign intervention. The following year, the United States took another war-like step: Obama’s 2015 executive order declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”

That decree was followed by the 2016 economic strangulation, marked by deliberate shortages aimed at making everyday life unbearable. Ten years later, we remain under a blockade that has killed tens of thousands of people..

In 2017, the most extreme factions of the opposition returned to the streets with fascist violence, committing atrocities such as the burning alive of a young Black man, Orlando Figuera, targeted simply for looking like a Chavista. More than 100 people were killed during this period of intensified fascist terror.

President Maduro responded by calling for a National Constituent Assembly, once again raising the banner of peace and democracy in the face of fascist violence. People from all sectors, including residents of middle-class neighborhoods whose polling centers had been attacked, were able to vote in peace at the Poliedro de Caracas.

Since then, we’ve lived through multiple phases of hybrid war: Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation as “interim president” in 2019 and the “Battle of the Bridges,” when the opposition attempted to stage a false-flag operation on the Colombian border under the guise of a humanitarian aid effort. That was followed by massive blackouts that left the country in darkness for days and the 2020 Operation Gideon, recently further exposed in a Max Blumenthal interview with its U.S. organizer, Jordan Goudreau, a former Green Beret.

None of these were isolated incidents: They are coordinated fronts in a sustained hybrid war combining political, psychological, economic and military aggression.

Yet, in each of these moments, the government and the organized pueblo [people] have responded effectively. During the 2019 electrical sabotage, for example, communities mobilized to ensure access to water and basic needs, while Operation Gideon was defeated by the same fisherfolk who are now being attacked in the Southern Caribbean.

So, to return to your original question: Yes, people are alert, because the threat is real, but we are also seasoned and organized. We know we are capable of defending the Revolution with unity and discipline. We are in a phase of maximum preparation, with millions voluntarily enrolling in the militia and preparing for the defense of the Patria [homeland].

Indeed, people are not only enlisting in the Bolivarian Militia but also preparing collectively. You’ve given us a historical account of the attacks faced by the Bolivarian Revolution over the past 25 years. But as we know, the current military buildup in the Caribbean is not only against Venezuela: It is an attack on the continent. How do you understand its broader implications?

The imperialist onslaught on the Caribbean is nothing new. Haiti, still punished today for its revolution more than two centuries ago, remains under siege. Now, armed gangs tied to the Dominican Republic are also involved. Puerto Rico continues to endure capitalist dispossession, with 5 million Puerto Ricans now living in the U.S. while barely 3 million remain on the island. All the while, revolutionary Cuba has faced a brutal blockade for many decades.

However, the recent imperialist military buildup should deeply concern the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, since it signals a shift in Washington’s military policy. Around 10,000 U.S. troops are currently stationed in the Caribbean, mainly in Puerto Rico, to say nothing of the destroyers, nuclear submarine and air force deployments.

They are not there only to threaten Venezuela; this is the revival of the Monroe Doctrine. As Trump once said, “Why pay for Venezuelan oil, if we can just take it?” That’s how they think about the resources of the continent.

When it comes to Venezuela, beyond seizing our resources, the U.S. also aims to strip away our sovereignty and destroy the example that we represent. If our project succeeds, it will inspire the entire continent. From Canada to Patagonia, people are struggling for liberation, and the Bolivarian Revolution represents a living example of how that can be done.

Attacking Venezuela serves two purposes: to loot our resources and to extinguish the example of participatory democracy. Since 2021, Venezuela has experienced renewed economic growth and the strengthening of its communes and popular power.

That is precisely what Washington wants to halt: They fear that the peoples of Latin America, and even within the United States, will draw inspiration from our experience.

Why the military escalation at this particular moment?

Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is itself an admission of decline. The U.S. is no longer what it once was, and its elites are desperate to recover lost ground. Yet even within those elites, fractures abound between the neoconservatives, the Zionist zealots and the MAGA bloc. Their internal contradictions often produce erratic foreign policy decisions.

However, on one point they all agree: War is profitable. The military-industrial complex remains central to sustaining the U.S. economy. So even amid domestic tensions, there is a bipartisan consensus around war as business.

Before the recent attacks on Venezuelan vessels, President Maduro warned that they might attempt to recreate a Gulf of Tonkin incident, because their hunger for war is insatiable. He was right: This aggression is ultimately driven by the economic imperative of feeding the war machine. In a post-Cold War world, it survives through perpetual “hot wars” — and what better front than Venezuela, which is rich in resources and defiant of imperial domination?

Let’s close with Chávez. He declared the Bolivarian Revolution anti-imperialist in 2004, but in truth, it always had a sovereign and anti-imperialist character. Could you reflect on Chávez’s anti-imperialism?

Indeed. The formal declaration came during a historic rally at the Botanical Garden in 2004, but the Revolution was Bolivarian from the start, and Bolívar himself was profoundly anti-imperialist. He warned that the United States seemed “destined by Providence to plague the Americas with misery in the name of liberty.” That same spirit lives in our revolution since day one.

Chávez revived Bolívar’s anti-imperialist legacy as early as 1977, when he created the People’s Army for the Liberation of Venezuela, whose founding document enshrined Bolivarianism and anti-imperialism as guiding principles. Later, in “The Blue Book” [1991], he outlined the vision of sovereignty and dignity that still guides us. President Maduro calls that text a “historical compass” pointing us steadfastly, no matter how much we have to maneuver, toward our strategic goal: the defense of sovereignty and the rejection of imperial domination.

For us, being anti-imperialist means not only refusing to surrender our resources, but also defending our identity, our dignity and our very being. The empire’s elites belong nowhere; they want the world to belong to them. We, by contrast, define ourselves by belonging to a land, to a pueblo and to a history.

That is why even symbolic aggressions, such as the attempt to erase “Bolivarian” from the Republic’s name during the 2002 coup, or mocking us as “venecos” in an attempt to erase our identity, are part of the war.

Bolivarianism and anti-imperialism are also deeply rooted in your organization, the Frente Francisco de Miranda. Can you tell us about it? 

Indeed. In 2003, Fidel and Chávez founded the Frente Francisco de Miranda as a movement of Bolivarian, anti-imperialist social workers. However, anti-imperialism isn’t limited to my organization; it’s in the bloodstream of millions of Venezuelans who have resisted International Monetary Fund impositions since 1989 and continue defending the Bolivarian project today.

To be Chavista is to be anti-imperialist. Chávez was the first South American president to recognize Palestine, to support the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and to speak of our historical debt to Haiti. His backing of these and other liberation struggles was not just a matter of words, but also about material support. He also linked the defense of Haiti to a history that, for him, didn’t begin with Pétion and Dessalines, but with Hatuey, the first known hero of an anti-colonial Caribbean rebellion.

That is our Chávez — the anti-imperialist Chávez — whose legacy continues to guide us!