By Roger D. Harris on October 7, 2026
foto: Bill Hackwell
A reactionary wave is sweeping Latin America. Since the elections of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in July 2024 and Uruguay’s Yamandú Orsi in November 2024, all seven of the subsequent direct presidential contests have gone to the right.
The Maduro election is widely assumed by the US-aligned corporate press to have been stolen, although a recently declassified CIA report found no election manipulation. More relevant has been Washington’s role in tipping elections to the right in Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Costa Rica. Most blatant was the Honduran contest in which Trump pardoned convicted narco-trafficker and former president Juan Orlando Hernández immediately before the election and threatened to cut aid if his candidate lost.
“The Latin American electoral left has reached its limits,” the Peoples Dispatch concludes. If Brazil’s Lula da Silva loses the presidential runoff, an orange wave will have inundated the Pink Tide for some time to come.
The new right
A US-backed reactionary wave of the 1960s-1980s brought the rule of the generals. The current one might be called the reign of the clowns: Colombia’s De la Espriella joked about burning cats, Argentina’s Milei communicated with his deceased dog, and El Salvador’s Bukele proclaimed himself the “world’s coolest dictator.”
While the reactionaries of the past posed as nationalists, today’s neo-fascists flaunt their subservience to the White House in what Foreign Policy calls “caudillo courtship.” “Patriotism,” according to Vijay Prashad, “is cast aside for absolute loyalty to Washington and its corporations.”
Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez helped initiate regional alliances for Latin American integration and autonomy that deliberately excluded the US and Canada. ALBA and CELAC have survived, though much reduced; UNASUR and Petrocaribe have largely withered. Capitalizing on their decline, Washington has constructed the Shield of the Americas, a hemispheric bloc designed to reintegrate the region into a US-centered political and security architecture.
The US military build-up in the Caribbean surrounding Venezuela has been accompanied by an aggressive penetration into the entire region. The Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere is integrating military capabilities of 17 partner nations with those of the US in the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition.
Decapitation strike
For a quarter century, the US tried to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution. The campaign further escalated with the imposition of an oil blockade last December. And still the Venezuelans resisted. Then on January 3, Washington kidnapped Venezuela’s President Maduro and his wife, National Assembly delegate Cilia Flores, leaving over 100 dead. The attack demonstrated, especially to Venezuelans, that Washington could act with impunity.
With a war on Iran looming, the US needed to reassure international oil markets to keep prices down at the gas pump. Maduro had repeatedly offered to negotiate with Washington and even update the hydrocarbon law. The US had demonized Maduro as a narco-terrorist, providing a pretext for abducting the lawful president while leaving intact much of the Chavista system that emerged from the Bolivarian Revolution led by Hugo Chávez.
Washington possibly reasoned that removing Maduro while compelling the existing state to accommodate intervention was more workable than destroying Chavismo and attempting regime change from scratch.
Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president. The Chavista party, legislature, judiciary, military, and grassroots organizations united behind her and continue to do so. Venezuela’s access to oil markets and thus its hope for economic recovery and national development was restored, but at a terrific price.
In the face of overwhelming force, Venezuela has been forced into an unprecedented negotiated sovereignty. Washington determines the boundaries within which Venezuela can bargain, although Caracas retains some agency within those boundaries.
Sentiment on the street
Venezuelans feel alone, a sentiment communicated to me in a February visit and subsequent correspondence. Even some critical voices recognize “the continuing capacity of US imperialism to impose its will when no countervailing power exists, and without new political breakthroughs internationally to come to Venezuela’s aid.”
Venezuelans, regardless of political affiliation in a highly polarized country, feel under attack. They believe, with good reason, that the US could come back at any time with ever more devastating force. The metaphor of a “gun to the head” is a lived reality. Every week or so, a small boat is capriciously incinerated in the eastern Pacific or the Caribbean.
Some online leftists living in the imperial core call Rodríguez “cowardly” – substituting moralism for political analysis. But the “gun” was pointed not just at the leadership but at the whole country: the threat of an asphyxiating blockade, a large-scale invasion, a far-right government, and a bloodbath for Chavistas.
Venezuelans also want peace. While militant currents exist, particularly in some of the more successful communes, there is no appetite for confrontation with the hegemon. The consensus after 26 years of US siege and 11 years of suffocating sanctions is a desire for reconciliation and economic recovery.
The Caracas Chronicles describes the current fatigue in Venezuela: “The timeline for economic relief is slipping away, while the timeline for public demand is accelerating,” resulting in “an exhausted society that has watched both the revolutionary narrative and promises of a swift transition collapse.”
The oil deal
The so-called oil deal became a lightning rod for mounting discontent, all the more so because neither Venezuela nor the US released the details; anyone could read anything into it. The long-hostile international corporate press took false umbrage that the Chavistas weren’t Chavista enough.
Everyone found fault, but practically no one discussed what Venezuela’s development path should be. It is easier to criticize the Chavista leadership than to consider a possible economic solution. Nor were comparisons made to other regional oil development agreements.
Venezuela does not have the capacity or investment to undertake major oil projects by itself.
Closer investigation would have shown that the Rodríguez government required negotiations, resisted company demands, and imposed fiscal and operational conditions. In fact, US oil companies complained that the conditions they were getting in Venezuela were too onerous.
But Venezuela did not negotiate from anything approaching equality with a hegemon that controlled sanctions licenses and much of the oil-sales revenue flow. Yet asymmetric bargaining is still bargaining. To think otherwise is to deny agency to the Venezuelans.
“Venezuelan Exceptionalism”
Most left-leaning folks see through American Exceptionalism. Yet a reverse corollary has lately been circulating: that among Latin American states there is something singularly wrong in Venezuela. The danger of “Venezuelan Exceptionalism” is that it downplays a united struggle against US imperialism and undermines building a common defense.
Some online leftists counterpose Cuba’s heroic resistance to Venezuela’s supposedly shameful capitulation. Whatever truth there may be in such a characterization, it obscures important realities. Washington never offered socialist Cuba – whose former ruling and propertied classes had largely left – the option of a negotiated soft landing. Further, holding Cuba’s resistance up against Venezuela is just half of the equation. The other half is the dire condition of the Cuban people under US blockade. Who wishes that on Venezuela?
Cuba and Venezuela are particularly intense expressions of a regional struggle for sovereignty in a hemisphere where the US remains the predominant power. The central regional divide is not between governments that make compromises and those that do not. Virtually every Latin American government makes accommodations to international capital.
The key is understanding the problem as regional and the solution as uniting against the same enemy. The common denominator is the enormous leverage exercised by US imperial power.
Has the Bolivarian Revolution retreated or been betrayed?
The Party for Socialism and Liberation, among others, concludes that the Chavista leadership has gone from tactical retreat to strategic realignment. PSL points to troubling developments such as the deportation of Alex Saab and the opening of consular relations with Israel.
Whether the retreat over the last 10 months has gone so far that it no longer allows for a reversal remains unresolved. Given incomplete knowledge, however, the greater danger is reaching a premature conclusion rather than erring on the side of Rodríguez’s counsel for “prudence and strategic patience.”
We should not compare the Venezuelan present to a socialist ideal, but to the alternatives actually available under the present balance of forces – including the possibility of a fascist future.
Whether the current forced retreat ultimately proves tactical or strategic remains an important question for Venezuelans and their revolution. But for internationalists, that uncertainty does not change the immediate tasks.
The tasks remain the same
Agreement on the character of the Rodríguez government is not a prerequisite for common action against US imperialism. Debate entails disagreements, sometimes sharp ones. But declaring others outside the movement because they differ over how to assess developments in Venezuela weakens the shared counter-hegemonic struggle.
For internationalists, the focus, as always, is on our own imperialists. Concretely, that means freeing Maduro and Flores, ending sanctions and the military threat, and returning stolen assets. In addition, whatever the future course of the Chavista government, solidarity with the communes and other social advances of the Bolivarian Revolution is still essential.
The situation in Venezuela highlights what the Venezuelans have been telling us in the imperial core: their predicament is a result of our failure to curb our own imperialists. The periphery will not free the core.
Whatever concessions have been forced upon Venezuela, so long as Venezuelans continue to resist, their struggle calls for international solidarity.
Roger D. Harris is active with the Task Force on the Americas and the Venezuela Solidarity Network.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English