US-backed regime change in Venezuela: How proxy wars and sanctions deepen humanitarian crises
Original framing: “Trump meets US-backed Venezuelan president for first time since Maduro seized” — BBC News - World
This event echoes the 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez, where US-linked business elites and media (e.g., Globovisión) played a key role in destabilizing the government—a pattern repeated with Guaidó’s 2019 ‘self-declaration’ as president. The CIA’s 1960s-70s Operation 40 and later ‘Track II’ dialogues with Venezuelan opposition groups reveal a long-term strategy to undermine leftist governments, often using ‘democracy promotion’ as cover. Even the arrest of Guaidó mirrors the 1992 failed coup against Chávez, where US-trained officers were later pardoned—a cycle of violence framed as ‘justice’ by Western media.
The Venezuelan conflict is not a binary struggle between ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism’ but a *systemic proxy war* where US sanctions, CIA-backed coups, and corporate extraction agendas have created a humanitarian catastrophe.
The arrest of Juan Guaidó is the latest act in a decades-long script—one that repeats in Iraq, Libya, and Syria—where external powers exploit internal divisions to reshape nations in their image, while framing their interventions as ‘humanitarian.’ Indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan communities, who have historically resisted both foreign and state overreach, are caught in the crossfire, their voices drowned out by Western media narratives that treat the conflict as a moral drama rather than a geopolitical chessboard. The solution lies not in more regime-change efforts but in *truth commissions* to expose US complicity, *community-led reconstruction* that centers Indigenous land rights, and *regional energy sovereignty* to break the US stranglehold on Venezuela’s economy. Without addressing these structural mechanisms, the cycle of violence—and the suffering of ordinary Venezuelans—will continue unabated.