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Most people in the United States encounter Venezuela not as a country with a history, but as a set of talking points. Those talking points — about mass migration, economic collapse, sanctions, authoritarianism — circulate without much attention to how they were produced, what they leave out, or whose interests they serve. That lack of grounding has mattered in recent weeks. When news broke that the United States had kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, many people were caught between competing narratives: reports of celebration among some Venezuelans, warnings about fascist imperial expansion, and reminders of the U.S.’s long, costly record of failed regime-change efforts. That collision of narratives made clear how little shared context exists for interpreting what the U.S. was doing — and to what end.

Geo Maher is a political theorist and longtime scholar of Venezuelan politics whose work examines popular power, the Bolivarian Revolution, and the role of U.S. intervention in shaping Venezuela’s crisis. He is the author of several books on these themes, including We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (a bottom-up account of Venezuelan social movements and the Bolivarian process) and Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, which explores the participatory politics of Venezuelan communal institutions. Geo also recently hosted an informal, ask-me-anything–style conversation on Facebook that stood out for its clarity and careful attention to context — qualities often missing from mainstream coverage.

I wanted to build on that conversation by asking Geo questions aimed at orientation rather than reaction. In this interview, Geo offers some historical and political context that makes current events legible, and may help readers think critically about what comes next.

Many readers have heard the phrase “the Bolivarian Revolution” but don’t actually know what it refers to. What was the Bolivarian project, and what was it trying to change in Venezuela?

As the name suggests, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela finds its roots long before Hugo Chávez himself took up the name as a mantle. In recent Venezuelan history, it has come to name a struggle against imperialism and global capitalism and for the construction of a revolutionary alternative to export-oriented development grounded in Venezuelan reality and based on directly democratic socialist principles. As I have long emphasized, this was never the work of a single man, but of thousands of grassroots organizers, community activists, and militants, and in that sense, the question is less what was the Bolivarian project and more what is that project today and what will it be moving forward.

You’ve emphasized that the Bolivarian Revolution dramatically improved the lives of millions before the country entered a profound crisis. What did those improvements look like in everyday terms — housing, healthcare, education, political participation?

We can understand the process in roughly three stages. The first phase, from around 1999-2005, was characterized by laying a new democratic foundation and reclaiming natural resources to be dedicated to social welfare programs that dramatically reduced poverty, provided universal access to healthcare and education, and built millions of housing units. The second phase, from around 2006 to........

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