The US “capture” of Nicolás Maduro is being celebrated in Western capitals as the fall of a tyrant and the restoration of democracy. The language is familiar, almost ritualistic: a strongman removed, a nation “liberated,” history supposedly nudged back onto the right track. Yet this narrative is not merely misleading—it is colonial. It erases centuries of Latin America’s resistance to empire, sanitises racialised class rule, and reduces a deeply political struggle into a morality play written in Washington and applauded in Europe.

To understand Venezuela, one must first discard the fiction that this was ever just about Nicolás Maduro. The Bolivarian Revolution was not a personality cult or a transient regime; it was a historical rupture. It emerged from centuries of oligarchic domination in which a light-skinned elite governed a largely mestizo, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant population through exclusion, repression, and economic dependency. Chávez—and later Maduro—were not aberrations in Venezuelan history; they were its long-delayed reckoning.

Western commentary frames the Bolivarian project as an economic failure caused by authoritarian incompetence. This view conveniently ignores the political economy of sabotage. Venezuela did not collapse in a vacuum. It was subjected to one of the most comprehensive sanctions regimes in modern history—sanctions that targeted oil revenues, financial transactions, imports of medicine, and access to global credit. According to UN rapporteurs, these measures directly worsened malnutrition, health outcomes, and infrastructure breakdowns. Yet when shortages followed, they were blamed on socialism, not siege.

This is not accidental. Imperial power has always relied on producing crises it later claims to resolve. From Guatemala in 1954 to Chile in 1973, from Nicaragua in the 1980s to Iraq after 2003, economic strangulation precedes political intervention. Venezuela is merely the latest chapter in this long tradition of coercive “regime change” disguised as humanitarian concern.

READ: Large part of Maduro’s security team was killed in US military operation, says Venezuela’s defence chief

At its core, the Bolivarian Revolution challenged something far more threatening than bad governance: it disrupted class hierarchy and racial order. By........

© Middle East Monitor