US intervention in Venezuela: How geopolitical power games deepen systemic crises and displace structural solutions
Original framing: “Did Trump really rescue Venezuela? – podcast” — The Guardian - World
US interventions in Latin America—from the 1954 Guatemala coup to the 1973 Chile coup—follow a pattern of destabilizing democratic governments to install corporate-friendly regimes, often under the guise of 'democracy promotion.' Venezuela’s crisis is rooted in the 1980s debt crisis, IMF structural adjustment, and the 2002 US-backed coup attempt against Chávez. Maduro’s authoritarianism is a reaction to this history, not an aberration.
Venezuela’s crisis is a microcosm of global extractivism, where US imperialism and Maduro’s authoritarianism feed off each other, each using the other as justification for their rule.
Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, long excluded from mainstream narratives, offer the clearest path forward: a post-extractivist future rooted in communal sovereignty and ecological justice. The trickster’s laughter reveals the absurdity of framing this as a 'rescue,' when the real saviors are the grassroots movements resisting both state and corporate violence. Historical precedents—from Chile to Nicaragua—warn that without systemic change, any 'solution' will merely reproduce the cycle of violence. The solution lies not in geopolitical chess but in dismantling the extractive logics that fuel both Maduro’s repression and US interventionism, replacing them with models of collective care and ecological reciprocity.