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source: Resist US led War Movement 

Resist US-Led War condemns the hybrid-war against Venezuela and new "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine. US hands off Venezuela! US Out of Latin America!

The US has been at war with Venezuela for decades
The US has pursued a systematic and decades long war against the Venezuelan people and the Bolivarian Revolution, a campaign waged through many different forms of aggression. While initial strategies relied heavily on economic warfare and covert subversion, the current escalation has brought the threat of direct military intervention and invasion as a possibility at any moment. The ultimate aim of this imperialist offensive remains the overthrow of the legitimately elected representatives of the Bolivarian republic, first President Hugo Chávez and now President Nicolás Maduro, to be replaced by a client regime wholly subservient to the US geopolitical and economic interests. This aggression against Venezuela is a critical component of a broader US strategy to reassert uncontested dominance over Latin America and the Caribbean, as the US desperately attempts to cling to its dominance in the region as it competes with strategic competitors, namely China.

This hegemonic design is grounded in the framework of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. The particular referencing of the Monroe Doctrine, the declaration by US President Monroe in 1823 declaring that the rising imperialist US was the only state with the right to shape the future of all other countries in the Western Hemisphere, is exemplary of the desire to carve out a particular sphere of influence for the United States. This doctrine has been historically enforced through military invasions such as the Spanish American War when the US took colonial control of Cuba and Puerto Rico. The 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, which self-proclaimed the US in the role of an international police power, formalized a lasting pattern of overt and covert intervention in US foreign policy. That tradition has been explicitly revived in the 2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS) released in November, which states “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”

This “Trump Corollary” as mentioned in the NSS, signals a formal return to even more aggressive hemispheric domination attempts through overt means rather than mostly covert and economic warfare. This is a direct response to US imperialism's crisis and China's rise as the main economic and military challenge to the US. China's economic presence in Venezuela, particularly in the oil sector, has injected a new geopolitical urgency into US efforts to orchestrate a coup, aiming to both seize strategic resources and contain its main global economic rival.

This statement aims to expose the different forms of warfare the US has employed on Venezuela and the resistance of both the Bolivarian Republic and the Venezuelan people in their fight against US intervention as they defend and struggle for their independence and a just and lasting peace in the Americas.

On the Political and Diplomatic front
From the first days of the current Trump regime, executive orders laid the groundwork for militarized responses, including measures to designate Venezuelan gangs as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. This manufactured legal pretext was followed by overt military actions, such as naval deployments and lethal airstrikes on Venezuelan territory, falsely packaged as counter narcotics operations. These acts represent a mix of the War on Terror doctrine that justified the killing of millions in West Asia with the War on Drugs doctrine, utilizing drone warfare to carry out extrajudicial killings absent any due process or transparent evidence.

This long-running imperialist propaganda campaign to falsely paint the Venezuelan government as a "narco-state" is a lie propagated by US officials and the US media to justify its military actions against Venezuela. This slander created by the US dates back to the times of President Hugo Chávez and has been aggressively intensified against President Maduro. There exists no credible evidence of cocaine production or processing on Venezuelan soil for well over a decade. Venezuela's geographic position, like that of many nations in the region, may make it a transit route for the flow of narcotics, but the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) itself reports that a mere 5% of drugs produced in Latin America transit through Venezuela, debunking the central US allegation.

If the goal were genuinely to combat major drug trafficking routes, focus would logically fall on other nations with far more severe and documented roles in production and transit. However, the political calculus of US imperialism overrules facts. It targets Venezuela not for narcotics, but for its sovereignty and refusal to follow US dictates. On the other hand the US "excuses" allied regimes with documented trafficking challenges, if those regimes submit to US geopolitical interests.

This political warfare is complemented by the promotion of figures like María Corina Machado, a key architect of the violent 2014 guarimba protests, (guarimba is a form of street protest marked by the blocking of public roads and avenues using improvised barricades) funded and supported by the US, aimed at paralyzing the government of Venezuela. Her Western-backed endorsement and awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025 exemplify how the US manipulates international institutions to lend a false sense of legitimacy to its regime change operations, following a discredited tradition that includes honoring war criminals such as Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.

These diplomatic maneuvers follow a long standing US pattern of intervention in West Asia and North Africa. During the "Arab Spring" the US funded opposition groups and nongovernmental organizations to foment unrest, arming them to create a proxy ground force, and finally exploiting the resulting chaos as a pretext for direct or NATO-led invasion. This model was deployed in Libya and Syria. However, the Venezuelan people, armed with the political consciousness forged by the Bolivarian Revolution and a historical memory of imperialist intervention, have proven resilient in identifying and countering these very tactics.

On the Economic Front
The US wages war not only with drones and bombers but also through economic sanctions. Marketed under the deceptive banner of a "targeted" or "humane" policy, sanctions are in reality a form of collective punishment and economic warfare designed to cripple sovereign nations that refuse to bend to US economic and political will. Their primary victims are never the political leaders they claim to target, but the civilian population, most brutally the working class and the poor. By systematically blocking a nation's access to the global financial system and trade, sanctions create artificial shortages of life’s essentials: food, medicine, vaccines, and the resources required for clean water and functioning healthcare.

The result is social unrest and humanitarian crisis where people suffer and even die from preventable disease, starvation, and deprivation. By fomenting economic desperation, imperialism creates the very instability it then uses to demonize the targeted government. This chaos created by the imperialists provides the pretext for further intervention, whether through support for violent opposition groups or direct military action, under the false pretext of "restoring order" or "protecting human rights."

In the case of Venezuela, the current siege by the US began with the so-called Venezuela Human Rights Defense Act and the 2015 executive order that falsely declared the Bolivarian Republic an "extraordinary threat." It was escalated dramatically by Trump’s Executive Order 13808 in 2017, which launched a financial blockade designed to asphyxiate the Venezuelan economy. This order weaponized the global dollar system, prohibiting transactions with Venezuela using the US dollar and severing Venezuela’s access to international credit and markets, with the explicit goal of crippling its main source of income, oil exports.

By outlawing the use of the US dollar to be used with Venezuela, it has forced the nation to incur over $20 billion dollars in extortionate exchange costs. It has transformed international commerce into a logistical nightmare, stretching payment processing from 48 hours to up to 20 days. Furthermore, through the threat of secondary sanctions, it holds a gun to the head of any third country or entity that dares to trade with Venezuela, attempting to enforce a total global isolation of the sovereign state.

This economic warfare explicitly barred transactions on Venezuelan foreign debt, blocking all avenues for refinancing and economic relief. In a blatant act of international piracy, control of the US-based subsidiary Citgo was seized in January 2019 and handed to the US-appointed puppet, Juan Guaidó. This theft directly prevented the state oil company PDVSA from obtaining letters of credit for shipments, securing tanker insurance, maintaining infrastructure, and conducting transactions with any party fearing Washington's retribution.

The human cost of this imperialist economic terror is genocidal in scale and intent. Venezuela has suffered a near-total collapse in foreign currency earnings, plummeting from approximately $56 billion to roughly $1.7 billion annually within the sanctions' first five years, a catastrophic loss of over 95%. In an economy where imported goods were essential for basic consumption the sanctions target every facet of Venezuelans' lives, destroying the country's purchasing power for basic goods. Imports from Europe dropped by 65% between 2015 and 2019, while delivery times for vital goods increased by 33%. The total direct financial damage inflicted is estimated at a staggering $37 billion.

The US sanctions have caused one of the most severe peacetime economic contractions in modern history, contributing directly to a public health crisis. This economic warfare is a primary driver of the displacement of more than 7 million Venezuelans, creating the Western hemisphere's largest migration crisis. Based on a number of different studies the report by The Washington DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) estimates that sanctions were responsible for 40,000 deaths just between 2017-2018, while over 300,000 people were at immediate risk due to denied access to treatment of preventable or treatable diseases. This includes approximately 80,000 people with HIV denied antiretroviral drugs, 16,000 needing dialysis, 16,000 with cancer, and 4 million with diabetes and hypertension who cannot reliably obtain life-saving medicine.

On the Military Front
Extrajudicial violence marks the current escalation against Venezuela. The Trump administration ordered unilateral military strikes against private vessels near the Venezuelan coast, allegedly to prevent drug trafficking. To carry out these attacks, the US Armed Forces deployed a massive naval force comprising warships, drones, and special operations units.

Since these attacks started, the US has conducted the summary execution of at least 107 people, at the moment this article is being released. The Trump regime has characterized the victims, without reliable evidence, as drug traffickers and "terrorists," an allegation that, even if true, does not grant the US president the legal authority to execute whomever he decides. The vast majority of those killed in this way were fisherfolk simply trying to fish in sovereign Venezuelan waters.

This campaign of terror is accompanied by a massive and provocative deployment of US military equipment and around 15.000 troops in the Caribbean. This includes the USS Gerald R. Ford, the US Navy's newest and most destructive aircraft carrier. Its capability to unleash its wing of approximately seventy-five advanced warplanes positions it as a primary platform for inflicting devastating aerial bombardments against the Venezuelan people. This carrier operates in coordination with an Iwo Jima-class Amphibious Ready Group, a flotilla designed for invasion, containing vessels capable of landing 2,200 marines along with their tanks and artillery in Venezuelan land.

The naval siege is further reinforced by six destroyers and two cruisers, armed with hundreds of missiles for offensive bombardment and "defensive" cover. The region is also poised by the presence of an AC-130 "Spooky" gunship, an aircraft designed for concentrated fire against populated areas. The special operations vessel Ocean Trader supports covert interventions, while the threat of at least one attack submarine equipped with nuclear power capacity lurks in the Caribbean sea.

Furthermore, the US has reactivated the Roosevelt Roads Naval Base in occupied Puerto Rico, transforming it into a fortified launching pad for aggression. Satellite imagery exposes the staging of deadly weaponry at this base, including F-35 jets, helicopters, and the AC-130 gunship, solidifying it as the tip of the spear for the ongoing military siege against a sovereign nation. This concentration of US military assets in the region represents the largest such deployment since the 1994 intervention in Haiti, known as "Operation Uphold Democracy."

The impact and stage setting for this war reveals the continental control aims of US imperialism. On December 15th Trinidad and Tobago's government announced it would allow the US military to use its airports, with equipment described as combat-ready and "far beyond anti-smuggling", putting yet another country in the cross hairs of a US made war and using a puppet government to attack Venezuela.  Furthermore, Trump ‘decertified’ Colombia in its ‘war on drugs,’ falsely claiming it had failed its commitments, with Trump publicly accusing President Gustavo Petro of being a drugs leader" while conducting strikes that resulted in extrajudicial killings off of the pacific coast of Colombia. In the Dominican Republic US aircraft and personnel will be “temporarily deployed” to the country for refueling and moving equipment. The War on Drugs allows the ultimate financial beneficiaries of the drugs trade to continue their business in the US and elsewhere, while the poorest peasant farmers, fisherfolk, workers and the environment pay the highest price.

The Venezuelan people and the Bolivarian Republic stand strong and continue to fight for a just and lasting peace
These imperialist attacks aim to roll back the historic achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution. Under President Chávez, Venezuela eradicated illiteracy, constructed a massive public healthcare system with Cuban solidarity, and built millions of homes for the poor. The process deepened democracy through popular power, fostering over one thousand self-governing communes and thirty thousand Local Supply and Production Committees to ensure mass political participation and food sovereignty.

Despite the immense hardships induced by the economic war and hybrid attacks of the US, the Venezuelan people and their institutions continue to resist and adapt. Today Venezuela is able to produce 97% of the food it consumes, while domestic medicine manufacturing has reached 80%, despite the sanctions.

In response to escalating military threats, the Venezuelan government has convened an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. This diplomatic move follows a strong international condemnation of recent US attacks. Domestically, the focus has shifted to a massive, organized mobilization for national defense. A clear signal of popular resistance and support for the Bolivarian revolution, government reports indicate that 8.2 million citizens participated in the initial two-day readiness exercises of the Bolivarian Militia.

In Puerto Rico, an anti-bases protest movement is growing in response to US use of its land as the outpost to wage invasion on Venezuela. The protests draw strength from the historic anti-militarism resistance that expelled the US Navy from Vieques in 2003.

Such as the people in the Venezuela, the people of the world see through US imperialist lies and reject this war for resources and strategic domination, even in the belly of the beast where 60% of the people oppose US war on Bolivarian republic. In December representatives from at least 14 countries, attended the People’s Assembly for peace and sovereignty to reaffirm the global commitment to a fair peace that respects the peoples’ sovereignty. Mobilizations have taken place in hundreds of cities across south, central and North America and in all regions of the world where people reaffirmed their stance against the US-led imperialist offensive in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It is the duty of all peace loving people to stand in solidarity with Venezuela and defend the achievements its people have achieved despite deadly sanctions imposed by the US. Venezuela stands as a beacon of hope to all of Latin America and the Caribbean as an example of defense of the right to self determination against imperialist domination, a pre-requisite to a just and lasting peace.