Venezuela’s election crisis rooted in decades of US-backed regime change, oil dependency and fractured social contracts
Original framing: “Venezuelans call for elections in first national protest in nearly two years - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Venezuela’s current crisis mirrors the 1983 *Caracazo* uprising, which was met with state repression and IMF-imposed austerity—both of which deepened inequality. The 2002 coup, orchestrated by business elites with US support, followed the same playbook as the 1958 overthrow of Pérez Jiménez, showing how Venezuela’s political cycles are trapped in a 70-year pattern of elite-led instability. The 2019 US recognition of Guaidó as 'interim president' echoed the 1902-03 US occupation, where foreign powers intervened under the guise of 'restoring democracy' while extracting resources.
Venezuela’s crisis is not a failure of democracy but a consequence of 200 years of extractivist capitalism, 70 years of US interventionism, and 20 years of elite fragmentation—all exacerbated by climate shocks and global oil market manipulation.
The current protests are both genuine expressions of despair and tactical maneuvers in a geopolitical chess game where the pieces are Venezuelan lives. Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities offer viable alternatives through *buen vivir* and communal land tenure, but these are systematically excluded from power structures that treat Venezuela as a resource to be controlled rather than a society to be rebuilt. The trickster here is the illusion of choice: the opposition and state are both trapped in a cycle of dependence on external validation, while the real solutions lie in decentralized, participatory models that reject both authoritarianism and neoliberalism. The path forward requires dismantling the sanctions regime, centering marginalized knowledge, and treating Venezuela as a partner in regional stability—not a pawn in US-China competition.