By Cira Pascual Marquina on January 18, 2026 from Caracas
There are moments when geopolitics stops being an abstraction and becomes something you feel in your body. In Caracas, January 3 was one of those moments. The low, grinding sound of warplanes overhead, the shockwaves from explosions rippling through apartment blocks, the brief, suspended silence that follows—it all collapses the distance between imperialist violence and everyday life.
It is easy, from afar, to talk about sanctions and military operations. It is different to watch your windows rattle and your neighbors step out into the street in fear that another strike may be coming. And it is different still to wake up the following days and find those same streets filled with marches, flags, anger, and a stubborn, collective sense of dignity.
This piece is written from inside that contradiction: between imperialist violence and popular resolve, between propaganda and lived reality. It is an attempt to make sense of what it means to live through an imperialist attack in a country that refuses to see itself as disposable. It is also an argument: what is unfolding in Venezuela is not an anomaly, but part of a global moment in which US imperialism, as it loses ground, increasingly relies on direct, brute force, and in which peoples, from Gaza to Caracas, are refusing to disappear quietly.
Imperialism in crisis: coercion as strategy
Coercion becomes pedagogical when hegemony collapses: it is meant to teach a lesson not only to the target but to everyone watching. The US message on January 3 was clear. A country that insists on controlling its resources, its institutions, and its political destiny will be disciplined. Sovereignty, in the eyes of imperialism, is an unforgivable sin.
Here in Caracas, that lesson arrived not as an abstraction but as a physical experience. Warplanes and helicopters hung in the sky for more than an hour. Explosions rattled windows. Walls vibrated. And yet the following days the same streets were filled not with panic, but with marches in support of the government, bigger and more boisterous every day.
Recolonization is not a relic of the past. Venezuela’s refusal to submit—to hand over its oil, dismantle its institutions, and abandon its socialist horizon—makes it intolerable to an imperialism that can only accept obedience. The violence of the attack was not a sign of Venezuelan weakness but of imperialist frustration at a country that has proven stubbornly resilient.
Coercion, however, is a crude instrument that tends to backfire. It can destroy buildings and infrastructure. It can kill and kidnap. It can bomb dialysis centers and civilian homes. But it cannot generate legitimacy. It cannot organize a society. And it cannot break a people who recognize their government as their own and their political project as collective. The wager in Washington was that shock would fracture the revolutionary bloc, that fear would dissolve political confidence. Instead, the opposite happened.
What has emerged since January 3 is not chaos but cohesion. Daily life continues—shops open, fuel flowing at pumps, people going to work—while hundreds of thousands fill the avenues of Caracas and cities across the country. There is anger, of course, and grief, and a shared sense of danger. But there is also high morale, discipline, and a striking clarity about what is being defended.
The unity between the Bolivarian government, the armed forces, and the people has not been imposed from above. It has been produced in a dialectical relationship between the people and their revolutionary leadership. This is what hegemony looks like in practice: neither coercion nor passive consent, but the active identification of a society with a political project it recognizes as its own.
Imperialism increasingly relies on force because it can no longer lead by persuasion. The Bolivarian Revolution, even under attack, continues to generate legitimacy through participation, organization, and collective purpose.
Many lies and one truth
Every imperialist assault is delivered on two fronts. One is material—bombs, kidnappings, destruction. The other is symbolic: a war over meaning. Since January 3, Washington and its media system have released a torrent of claims—that there was treason, that the government is divided, that the operation met no resistance, that Trump now “runs” Venezuela, that the streets are ruled by armed gangs. These are not descriptions of reality. They are attempts to replace it.
When imperialism can no longer persuade, it tries to impose a narrative that overwhelms truth with lies. But in Venezuela, those lies have collided with something more stubborn: a politically organized society whose sense of truth is rooted in collective struggle.
The story being told abroad is one of collapse. The reality here is different. People go to work and to school, and communes continue to organize while some hold masses for the dozens of martyrs who died defending the president. We are told the government is fractured and isolated, yet Acting President Delcy Rodríguez appears alongside the civilian and military leadership of the revolution as hundreds of thousands march with political clarity, demanding the return of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores and affirming support for the government.
We are told to be afraid—that violence rules the city through “colectivos.” But walking through Caracas, you feel something else: alertness, yes, after the visible brutality of imperialism, but also a deep sense of camaraderie. People look out for one another, and their determination to defend what is collectively theirs is unmistakable.
The sum of these basic truths here is not a slogan or any combination thereof. It is something lived. It is produced in assemblies, in marches, in the civic-military union, in the everyday functioning of a society that refuses to dissolve. That is why mobilizations matter: they make visible a reality that the enemy’s propaganda is trying to erase.
There has been a flurry of lies in these days. But there is one truthful account, written every day in the collective action of the Venezuelan people.
We are nobody’s colony!
In Venezuela, sovereignty is a principle rooted in centuries of struggle and in the collective determination of a people to decide their own fate. Here, that principle draws from a long history of anti‑colonial resistance that began when the first Spanish colonialists arrived. The struggle that would become Bolivarianism (named after Simón Bolívar, Venezuela’s independence leader) was never only about formal independence; it carried a social emancipatory horizon, inspired by the Haitian Revolution and by maroon rebellions throughout Venezuela. Today, that legacy lives on in the Bolivarian Revolution, with its insistence on self‑determination against imperialist domination and collective emancipation via the commune.
On January 3, the United States attempted to reduce Venezuela to a colonial condition once again—through bombs, kidnapping, and a narrative full of lies. They sought to turn the country’s oil, institutions, and people into objects they could control. But the people and their government responded with the clarity of those who know what they are defending. As Acting President Delcy Rodríguez declared and is now scrawled in freehand graffiti across the streets of Caracas: ¡No somos colonia de nadie! (“We are nobody’s colony!”).
This is not rhetoric. It reflects two and a half decades of resistance to coups, mercenary incursions, sanctions, and blockades. It means that Venezuela’s destiny belongs to its people, not to Washington. You see it in practice in the communes, in the civic-military union, in the daily marches. Sovereignty here is not granted or merely declared; it is enacted. This country is not ruled by bombs and kidnappings, but by collective will. The attack was meant to fracture that will. Instead, it revealed its depth.
What comes next
Negotiations are coming. Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, like Comandante Chávez and President Maduro before her, has expressed willingness to keep channels of communication open with the United States. Some on the left already claim this proves capitulation. History suggests otherwise.
Lenin’s remarks during the Brest-Litovsk negotiations are relevant today. When faced with the prospect of continuing a war Russia could no longer wage, Lenin argued that tactical concessions under duress did not equal surrender. In his debate with critics over signing the peace treaty, he drew an analogy to giving up money or possessions to armed robbers to save one’s life: the act itself does not mean abandoning one’s principles or broader aims, but it does allow one to survive and continue the struggle.
In the same spirit today, Venezuela may be compelled to make temporary concessions—whether diplomatic or economic—to sideline war and create conditions for the return of President Nicolás Maduro and National Assembly deputy Cilia Flores. Those tactical moves do not determine the revolution’s strategic horizon or dilute its fundamental goals.
go to hell you yanqui hacks
What matters is that the government in Caracas is the one chosen by its people—a Chavista, revolutionary government with real roots in popular organization. The proof is in the streets. You do not get hundreds of thousands marching right after a bombardment for a government that lacks legitimacy.
Still, these negotiations will be attacked, especially by Eurocentric voices on the left that underestimate the intelligence, experience, and agency of the Bolivarian government. Tactical retreat is not strategic betrayal. Concessions are not capitulation.
This moment is part of a wider landscape. Gaza has exposed the colonial logic of imperialist violence to millions around the world. Venezuela extends that lesson. And inside the United States itself, repression increasingly mirrors what was once reserved for the Global South. The same logic is at work.
Defending Venezuela today is not only about one country. It is about resisting a decaying world system in which sovereignty is punished, and submission is demanded. The task is to organize, to tell the truth, and to stand with the people who are, right now, defending that truth in the streets of Caracas.
We struggle together
This is where the Venezuelan moment intersects with a broader, worldwide anti‑imperialist struggle. The attack on Venezuela did not occur in isolation; it unfolded in a world increasingly aware of the violence imperialism unleashes when sovereignty refuses to bend. Just as the genocide in Gaza awakened millions in the Global North to the brutal logic of colonial violence, the attack on Venezuela can extend that consciousness, showing how imperialism responds to any assertion of autonomy with brute force and in absolute disregard of international law.
At the same time, the consequences of these methods are coming home to roost. In the United States, ICE—today’s Gestapo—reveals how the tactics once exported to the global South are being repurposed domestically. Repression and systemic violence, long tools of imperialist control in the periphery, are increasingly applied to people in the United States, taking on the form and content of fascism. These dynamics are prompting a growing recognition by many that defending sovereignty abroad is inseparable from fighting fascism at home.
Venezuela today offers a lesson not only to its future generations, but to movements across the world. The task ahead is to educate and organize against the common enemy. It is to stand with Venezuela’s own leadership and people, as the people of the world stand with the people of Palestine and their leadership. And it is to recognize that defending Venezuela’s sovereignty at this moment is part of a larger international struggle against the violence of imperialism and its fascist twin.
A few days after the bombs, Caracas is still loud—but now it is loud with chants, drums, and traffic. There is concern, of course, but determination overshadows it. You feel it in the marches, in the way strangers talk to each other, in the graffiti on newsstands and walls that read “¡No somos colonia de nadie!”
Cira Pascual Marquina is a popular educator at the Pluriversidad Patria Grande, the educational initiative of El Panal Commune. She is also a member of the International Communal Democracy Network.
Source: Monthly Review