Image by Planet Volumes.

On the morning of January 3, U.S. forces, with 150 jets, armed helicopters, and state-of-the-art drones, launched an attack on Venezuela. Strikes hit Venezuela’s largest military complex in Caracas along with targets in La Guaira, Miranda, and Aragua. Less than 90 minutes later, Maduro was kidnapped and flown out of the country.

In a subsequent press conference, Trump announced that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela until a “safe transition will take place,” meaning a neocolonial transition. In the same press conference, Marco Rubio made it clear that this was to set a precedent for all of Latin America when he said, “If I lived in Havana and were part of the government, I would be worried.”

With this act of naked imperial aggression, the Trump administration has entered a new phase of imperial assertion, one defined by open seizure of territory, resources, and political authority. The so-called rules-based order has been exposed as a hollow fiction. No longer even evoked, it has given way to the raw exercise of force justified on the pretext of narcotrafficking.

For Latin America, this is not just merely an episode of aggression but also a profound wound to regional dignity and self-determination, one whose consequences will reverberate far beyond Venezuela. The acting president, former Maduro vice president Delcy Rodriguez, has spoken of “collaboration and dialogue” with Trump and the United States, which is to be understood in terms of tutelage and cooperation with full access to oil. This so far has been endorsed by the entire executive branch, the military leadership, and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). It remains to be seen whether fractures will emerge.

It is important that Trump is going for this “transition” rather than turning to Venezuelan opposition leaders Edmundo Gonzalez and Maria Corina Machado because he believes it can guarantee him greater control and stabilization for his plans of colonial or semi-colonial domination.

Since returning to office, Donald Trump has dramatically escalated U.S. pressure on Venezuela. What began as sanctions and rhetorical threats has increasingly taken the form of military intimidation, maritime attacks, oil seizures, and covert dealmaking—often justified under the language of “counter-narcotics” or “national security.” At the time of this interview (before the January 3 attack and abduction), the U.S. had carried out over 30 attacks on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 107 people.

At the same time, Trump has quietly extended Chevron’s access to Venezuelan oil under opaque and constitutionally dubious arrangements, even as his administration labels Venezuela a “terrorist state” and doubled the bounty on Nicolás Maduro’s arrest.

These developments raise urgent questions: Why is the U.S. escalating now? What explains the contradictions between sanctions, military aggression, and continued oil exploitation? How do internal divisions within Trump’s camp—between hardline regime-change advocates and energy-sector pragmatists—shape U.S. policy? And how has Maduro used U.S. threats to justify intensified repression at home, particularly against workers, left critics, and popular organizations?

To help unpack the meaning and consequences of Trump’s latest moves—and to clarify what an independent, anti-imperialist left position should be—Tempest’s Anderson Bean interviews Venezuelan socialist Gonzalo Gómez from Marea Socialista on Venezuelan politics and U.S.–Latin America relations.

Note: This interview took place before the events of January 3.

Anderson Bean:Trump has intensified sanctions, deployed a massive military presence in the Caribbean, authorized lethal attacks against boats, and seized Venezuelan oil. And yet, at the same time, he has extended Chevron’s license to operate under opaque and secretive terms. How should we understand this combination of escalation and accommodation? What is genuinely new here, and what represents an acceleration of existing U.S. policy?

Gonzalo Gómez:I think there is a double game being played by both sides. Trump plays carrot and stick: They are contradictory elements and, at the same time, they combine dialectically in the service of his goals and interests.

This situation also seemed functional to the survival of Nicolás Maduro’s government under the conditions Venezuela is currently experiencing. What is new, one could say, is the intensification of military-type actions: the air-naval encirclement, the attacks on boats of alleged drug traffickers (I’ll make an observation about this later), and the restrictions on air traffic and on the movement of vessels carrying Venezuelan oil products—not Chevron’s. Now they also say they attacked a supposed drug production center on land, which is also unclear.

That represents an increase in pressure on Venezuela and on the government of Nicolás Maduro, fundamentally on military terrain. But these are still fairly limited actions, and they seem more directed at generating scenarios that force negotiations with the government, or that allow the United States—Trump—to obtain some concession from Nicolás Maduro’s government.

They are not yet decisive actions, beyond the fact that they signify an intervention or could be a prelude to something more serious........

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