Trumpian Colonialism Is Not Freedom |
On January 3, the US launched an illegal attack in Venezuela that resulted in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Attorney General Pamela Bondi wrote via Twitter-X that the couple has been indicted and will “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”
For Vice President JD Vance, because “Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism,” these military strikes were legal. This, despite the fact that these strikes were conducted without congressional approval in a clear violation of the Constitution and the separation of powers.
With Maduro out of power, President Donald Trump announced that, “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” The crucial detail that Trump leaves out here is that what constitutes “such time” is left entirely up to his administration.
Let us be very clear here: Venezuela was not liberated. Overnight, it became a US-occupied colony whose lands and resources will be stolen and exploited; whose people will be subjugated to a hostile foreign power; and whose future will remain uncertain.
The threat to American sovereignty is Trump himself.
Whether Maduro was a dictator is irrelevant to this equation. Even leaving aside the fraught history of US regime change in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, the US is not the world’s judge, jury and executioner. The US does not get to invade other nations simply because it decides they are not “good neighbors.”
Latin America is not “our backyard.” This language is inherently colonialist. It symbolically reduces a region of the world that contains over 30 nations into America’s property. With this metaphor, the US gives itself the license to do as it pleases: It may trim the weeds (eliminate anti-American leaders), plant a garden (install a puppet government), and harvest what it grows (plunder their resources). The weight of this metaphor is visible when Trump causally refers to Venezuela’s natural oil reserves as “our oil.” In his mind, he is not seizing foreign resources, but rather reclaiming what Venezuela unjustly took away. After all, a backyard has no right to deny its owner access.
What Venezuela needed was a people’s revolution. The removal of Maduro and the destiny of Venezuela should have been left to the Venezuelan people to decide.
The fundamental error with the belief that invading a country will somehow "bring" freedom to it is that "freedom" is not an object that can be given. This is not to say that material conditions cannot limit the scope of one’s opportunities and freedoms—they most certainly can. But, at its core, freedom is an act of the will, not property to be transferred. The US cannot make Venezuela free. Only Venezuelans can.
Instead of freedom, Venezuela has been forcibly taken by a country that couldn’t care less about its people. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent the bulk of 2025 arbitrarily designating Venezuelans as members of Tren de Aragua and then deporting them to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador—a literal “torture-enslavement detention center.”
For Trump, Venezuela—like any other colonized territory—is simply a resource to be exploited. Trump doesn’t even hide this. He has already announced that “we’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure.” Venezuela is an investment for Trump. He and his ultra-wealthy donors will strip Venezuela of its wealth and then leave what’s........