Venezuela: “For Now”

Nobody here gives up.

– Hugo Chávez

Venezuela defeated the Spanish Empire in the Americas. That is an essential part of its national identity. History is not a series of dates in this country but serves as an ideal and a consolation for present dangers.

On April 2, 1819, on the plains of Venezuela, 1,500 fully equipped and fed Imperial Spanish soldiers, led by notable generals, faced a patriotic “rag-tag” army of 153 Venezuelan llaneros led by General José Antonio Páez. Venezuela’s independence was on the line. When the llaneros saw they were outnumbered, they turned in hasty retreat. Páez raced to face his troops and ordered (with a few impolite words included) “About Face!” They turned, the Spaniards panicked and the Venezuelan forces won the battle spectacularly. They lost only 2 men, but the enemy lost 400. And the Independence of Venezuela was further advanced.

Venezuelans have had to relive this scenario again in recent years many times against another vile empire.

On Feb. 4, 1992, Lieutenant Hugo Chávez led a rebellion against the thoroughly corrupt and violent presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez. The rebellion failed and when Chávez surrendered before the TV cameras, he lamented that they had not achieved their objectives -“for now.” These now famous words catapulted Chávez into Venezuelan political history. He was jailed, but all was not lost. After two years in prison, he went on to win the presidential election of December 1999 by a landslide, obliterating the ruling parties.

In 2002, the USA led, financed, and sheltered, Venezuela’s anti-democratic, fascist opposition which toppled and kidnapped President Hugo Chávez. As he and his ministers were surrounded in the Presidential Palace being threatened by bombs, Chávez managed to speak directly to Fidel to whom he said they were ready to die. But Fidel urged quite forcefully: “Chávez, do not martyr yourselves! Do not die! To retreat is no shame. Live, live to fight another day!” Chávez then surrendered to avoid the bombing. All was not lost, however: in two days, the people and army rescued him just before he was to be executed, in a never-before spectacular popular reversal of a coup d’etat and the Bolivarian forces strengthened and thrived. (See: The Revolution Will Not be Televised, on YouTube)

In 2013, when President Hugo Chávez died of a strange cancer, the USA and its lackeys thought that would be the end of Chavismo. By law, elections had to be called within 30 days. The nation became flooded with US money and political lackeys steering the opposition’s campaign and voter intimidation. They thought the fall of the governing party was imminent without its leader. They were wrong. The Bolivarian Revolution did not depend on one man, not even its charismatic leader. Nicolás Maduro went on to win despite never having run a presidential campaign. Misjudged and underestimated he went on to consolidate the governing party, the communal councils and communes, the grassroots and workers organizations.

Since 2014, the USA launched the fiercest attack any nation the Hemisphere has known. It imposed 1020 illegal economic sanctions, launched mercenary raids, cyber-attacks, sabotage, used criminal gangs and all sorts of blackmail and corruption to try to weaken and topple President Maduro. Oil production and sales were impeded. To no avail. Bolivarianism became stronger with every attempt to weaken it. President Maduro was recognized by his people as their defender against the foreign enemies and traitors who were the ones causing such terrible economic and political woes. The economy suffered, people’s daily lives were severely affected, some 100,000 citizens died because of the illegal sanctions that prevented access to food or medicines.

The West demonized President Maduro and his government and warned of Venezuela’s “imminent collapse”. But again, it did not happen because the Bolivarian Revolution meant that the people were ORGANIZED. They were not a mass of lone individuals. There were regular food package distributions, rural communes produced so much food that importing it was not necessary; it was communes, government and army working together helping people. The economy was diversified and produced for the domestic market. The housing program amazingly built 5 million houses; schools and universities continued, public health services never closed. Venezuela’s diplomacy reached out to the world outside the USA and its lackeys and there found genuine international solidarity and new markets. Venezuelans, despite the odds and the attacks, lived to fight another day and its economy – even though heavily sanctioned – attained the highest GDP growth in the region (7.7% in 2025).

January 3, 2026, is “a day that will live in infamy” like the attack on Pearl Harbour, except that it is the USA that has perpetrated such barbarity: a most vicious attack on Venezuela, without a cause, without a declaration of war, without any justification legal or otherwise. A powerful army with nuclear capacity, with the most technologically advanced weapons in the world, bombed a nation at peace, that had never gone to war, that did not have even a tenth of its military capacity. US forces massacred the presidential guard with unknown cyber weaponry, and in total killed 120 people. And violating all international laws and protocols, they kidnapped the head of state, the legitimate, elected president of Venezuela and his wife, President Nicolás Maduro and Congresswoman Cilia Flores. (https://orinocotribune.com/president-nicolas-maduro-is-not-a-dictator/)

This unprecedented, unwarranted violation of the sovereignty of a democratic country, of the human rights and political immunity of a head of state, the bombing of innocent people, is a heinous act, worthy only of the most criminally led governments. The US navy can add piracy to the list of crimes, as its enormous and numerous war ships prior to the bombing, assassinated 142 innocent people in small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific without arrests, charges, evidence or trial.

The USA will be held accountable of these war crimes, if not by law, certainly by History and in the collective memory of the region. There is no reason, no cause, no justification in any law that allows a foreign power to attack another sovereign country and remove its legitimate president – whether they liked or agreed with said president or not. In other words, the USA is an outlaw nation, a nation that exercises its military power through piracy, bombing, massacring, and trashing the sovereignty of a peaceful nation that poses absolutely no threat whatsoever to its security, so that it can steal its resources.

This is the political situation, which Trump and his factotum Marco Rubio, have enshrined in the most imperialistic, colonialist, dictatorial document in modern political history, comparable to Mein Kampf: an extended Monroe Doctrine. It asserts, gangster-like, that the USA actually owns the Western Hemisphere and all its resources and its nations have to obey the wishes and interests of the USA – or else.

President Maduro showed his mettle when brought before a court in New York and asked to identify himself. He calmly and clearly stated his name and that he was the president of Venezuela and was a prisoner of war, kidnapped from his home by the US military. That court has no authority whatsoever to judge a prisoner of war, let alone a legitimate head of state of a foreign country. The initial charges had to be withdrawn as the Department of Justice had to admit finally that the drug cartel that President Maduro was supposed to be the leader of, in fact, has never existed. The trial has been postponed while the prosecutors scramble to invent other false accusations to make against him.

However, the bombing and kidnapping in the end, failed to achieve its main goal: to topple the Bolivarian government. Again, the USA thought that if the leader is eliminated the Bolivarian government would collapse. It did not. There was no “regime change”. The Constitution was complied with in detail: Vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, was immediately sworn in as interim president by both the National Assembly and the Supreme Court. The entire government cadre stayed in place. The Bolivarian Revolution proved it was not a façade but is deeply imbedded in Venezuelan political life and culture.

Granted, Venezuelans have had to negotiate with a gun pointed at their heads and at the heads of their president and first lady. Moments after the president was kidnapped, the executive Vice-president Delcy Rodríguez, Jorge Rodríguez head of the Natonal Assembly and her brother, and Diosdado Cabello, top director of the ruling party PSUV, were given 15 minutes to decide whether to cooperate or be killed and the country further bombed. They decided to live to fight another day.

To add insult to injury, Rubio boasted that he was a Catholic and in a speech in Munich on February 13, 2026 he had the audacity to preach that the USA is a champion of the values of Christianity. Rubio was the architect of the bombing of the overwhelmingly Christian country that is Venezuela. This is truly tempting God.

Is the USA a pillar of Christian values as Rubio states? It has been at war 232 out of 250 years since its beginning. In this century alone it has invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Siria, Yemen, and continues to support the devastation of Gaza. It is estimated that 20 million people have lost their lives in US led wars post-WWII. It has invaded and/or overthrown Latin American nations and their governments at least 90 times, has blockaded Cuba for more than 60 years, and without casus belli bombed Caracas without provocation, a capital city in our region with which it was not formally at war.

As to its own people, the USA has the highest prison population in the world, the highest inequality of all G7 nations by race, age and class, 47.9 million people have no food security, there were 425 mass shooting last year alone, and during the Covid-19 pandemic 1.2 million died – by far the highest of any country in the world. According to the New York Times, a third of the workforce earns less than $12 an hour and each night 200,000 sleep on the streets. 4 million are evicted from the homes each year. Black and Latino families fare the worst of these dystopian social statistics. And Trump’s immigration goons, ICE, has recently forcefully detained up to 70,000 immigrants, 73% of whom have no criminal record. This is Rubio and Trump’s “diabolical theology”. If they were truly Christian, they would know that Jesus said clearly that we will be judged by how we treat “the least of these” the poor, hungry, sick and marginalized.

Government of the USA: read the sign on the wall: you will be found wanting.

“During the hardest hours of dawn on January 3rd, the first thing that I said as Executive Vice-President was that I was not going to betray President Nicolás Maduro, and secondly, I said that I will not betray the people of Venezuela. “ (Delcy Rodríguez, 24 Feb. 2026)

For now, and for as long as necessary, Venezuela will live to fight another day.

The post Venezuela: “For Now” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.