By Carlos Fazio on January 4, 2026
graphic: Adam Iglesias Toledo
In another illegal and flagrant act of his imperial presidency, after four months of deploying a powerful war machine in the Caribbean Sea to carry out a regime change operation in Venezuela and seize its geostrategic resources (particularly oil), by ordering the bombing of the South American country and the kidnapping of the constitutional and legitimate president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, Donald Trump swept away the remaining vestiges of international law and the moribund United Nations system half-buried in occupied Palestine. As Jeffrey Sachs pointed out in an interview with Glenn Diesen, he is the head of a military state that does not obey the Constitution and where everything is decided by executive decree, Trump is carrying out the total dismantling of the international institutions created after World War II. Which makes the world extraordinarily chaotic and dangerous today. What’s next? Greenland and the Panama Canal? Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil?
Although the deep state directs its steps and prepares its narrative, yesterday, during his press conference at the White House, when he made it known about Operation Absolute Determination, Trump, without support, exhibited his evil narcissism that erects him as a war criminal lagging behind several of his predecessors in the Oval Office; He will remain forever in the annals of infamy and cynicism. Along with the genocide in Gaza, the aggression against Venezuela catapults him into the gallery of the great scoundrels of the history of Our America.
We don’t know what will follow now, but historically U.S. interventions are marked by destruction, violence, terror and barbarism. Although everything can change in the short term, Washington does not yet have political, military or territorial control of Venezuela. As of this writing, the military assets deployed in the Caribbean were not enough for a ground invasion, but they did enable the possibility of an operation of the special forces and their SEAL commands (land, sea and air) in collaboration with the native assets of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) inside Venezuela.
The coordinated attack against several strategic objectives, civil and military, such as the fort Tiuna, heart of the military power and the air base of La Carlota, in the center-east of Caracas; the area of the Miraflores Palace; the communications infrastructure in the area of El Volcán, where there are repeating antennas vital for telecommunications, and some targets in the vicinity of the Maiquetía International Airport, in the state of La Guaira. In turn, the fallacious narrative of “narco-terrorism” will serve as a pseudo-legal alibi to try to cover up the aggression at the international level, already supported by several vassal presidents of Europe and Latin America and the hegemonic press.
Since Commander Hugo Chavez acceded to the government by electoral route in 1999, Venezuela has been the laboratory for the various forms of asymmetric hybrid warfare executed by the Pentagon and the CIA worldwide. In this quarter of a century, a central objective of Washington has been to de-step the political-military leadership of the Chavista revolutionary process, and to induce, according to the regime change manuals, a fracture within the Bolivarian National Armed Forces. But so far the US has not found a Pinochet or a Zelensky. He even turned down Maria Corina Machado to head a puppet government and claimed that the U.S. will “rule” Venezuela with “the people who are right behind me” (the head of the armed forces, General Dan Caine, and the Secretaries of State and Defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth) until I can carry out a “safe transition.”
For now, the US does not have an endogenous force with firepower and mass capacity, which can proclaim a parallel government in some “liberated” beachhead. The Venezuelan territorial military political unit is for now solid. That’s why Trump threatened another round of attacks to force the unconditional surrender of emerging constitutional authorities.
It is possible that as it did before in other theaters of operations (Iraq, Libya), the US tries to take control of wells and oil infrastructure, and initiate a strategy of territorial balkanization of Venezuela. The U.S. National Security Strategy 2025 defines that, in its dispute with China, a “hostile” enemy in the American subcontinent, the area’s geostrategic resources belong to it, and it was reflected in the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
Carlos Fazio is a Uruguayan writer, journalist and academic resident in Mexico. He is the author of various books and publications and a member of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (Mexico Chapter)
Adam Iglesias Toledo is an editor and well known Cuban graphic cartoonist.Cuban.
Source: Mate Amargo, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English