Venezuela: The Shadow of Trump and USAID Money

By Geraldina Colotti on February 26, 2025.

At the UN Human Rights Council, Foreign Minister Yvan Gil has denounced the instrumentalization of the issue of human rights as a weapon to reverse the progress of revolutionary democracy. And he recalled that, at the time of the Caracazo, when the human rights of the people protesting against the neoliberal package imposed on the government by the International Monetary Fund were clearly violated, no protest was raised at the headquarters of international organizations.

Today, however, the socialist government is under attack for defending the rights of the people and the popular mandate.

Also on February 27, Venezuela pays tribute with marches and debates to the victims of the Caracazo of 1989, when the impoverished masses rebelled against the neoliberal austerity measures of the government in office in the Fourth Republic and were harshly repressed. And, meanwhile, the country is preparing for another election year: in peace, but in far from calm waters, both domestically and internationally.

Initially, the National Electoral Council (CNE) had decided to open the ballot boxes on a single date, April 27, to merge the parliamentary and regional elections. But on February 19, the president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso, announced that that date will be occupied by the second stage in which community projects that will be implemented as a priority with state funding will be voted on.

Voting for the composition of the Parliament (the National Assembly, a single chamber), the Legislative Council and the 24 governors plus the governor of Guyana Esequiba will take place on May 25.

This news is shaking up the political landscape, both inside and outside the country, and is causing cracks to appear within the more radical opposition, led by María Corina Machado, and its main candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, with the former having been disqualified for 15 years for repeated acts of destabilization against the institutions.

Within the opposition coalition, the United Democratic Platform (PUD), several parties are divided over Machado’s order to make any electoral participation conditional on the “recognition of the results of July 28”. Parties such as Un Nuevo Tiempo and Movimiento Por Venezuela, as well as the twice defeated presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, and others, have instead called for a vote on May 25.

Even the more moderate members of the right, members of parliament, are choosing their own candidates and campaign slogans. It would be enough to publish the list of groups and parties opposed to the Bolivarian government and acting calmly in the political arena to refute the international propaganda that defines Venezuela as “a dictatorship”.

From Spain, where he moved after the post-election violence of July 28, 2024 caused by his “little commanders,” González Urrutia has stated instead that he will not participate in what he considers “fake elections.” Meanwhile, he is engaged in frenetic “diplomatic” activity, considering himself not the second winner as established by the CNE, but the true victor, and therefore the “legitimate” president. Both he and Machado collect awards from European countries as “defenders of human rights” persecuted by a totalitarian and “illegitimate” government.

Neither the accusations made against Urrutia, coming from the Salvadoran base church, according to which he was complicit in the persecution and deaths of exponents of liberation theology when he was a diplomat in El Salvador, nor Machado’s political positions seem to disturb the European “democracies”. Machado, one of the signatories of the Madrid Charter that launched the fascist international under the aegis of Steve Bannon, in 2020, inaugurated the third congress of the far-right alliance, organized by the Spanish party Vox in Paris.

For the stateless woman, only the Patriots group represents “true freedom” and only these fascist and Nazi parties are the true allies of the Venezuelan far right against the “dictator” Maduro. A short-circuit that, however, does not seem to disturb the sleep of the Italian and European political forces, which support her with bipartisan emphasis.

This time at the Convention of Patriots there was no Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, another signatory of the Madrid Charter, but instead Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, in good company with all the subversion of the ruling classes after Trump, whose campaign slogan – MAGA, Make America Great Again, re-adapted as MEGA, Make Europe Great Again – was displayed at the Convention of Patriots.

The Venezuelan elections, as well as those throughout Latin America (starting with the second round in Ecuador in April), are also taking shape under the shadow of Trump and the techno-feudalism promoted by Elon Musk, who supports him. The persecution of Cuban doctors has already resumed. But meanwhile, although Trump’s policies are guided by figures such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who have made the fight against Cuba, Venezuela and all experiences reminiscent of socialism in Latin America a real obsession, it will be difficult for Machado and her associates to emerge unscathed after the scandal that erupted over the funding of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), of which there is no trace.

The US government agency, created in 1961 to counter the influence of the Soviet Union in the world, and now archived by Trump, has disbursed a substantial sum to achieve the desired “regime change” in Venezuela.

Between 2014 and 2024, it has increased its funding for “humanitarian aid and democracy promotion” 26-fold, from an initial $8 million to $211 million last year. Funds confiscated by the extremist opposition and embezzled for their own benefit, as has been regularly denounced by some internal sectors dissatisfied with the division. Proof of this is the properties that these figures hold in European countries.

Now, the different components of the PUD are targeting Juan Guaidó, the former self-proclaimed “interim president” of Venezuela, who has taken refuge in Miami, where he could end up under investigation for embezzlement. His businesses in Madrid are in the firing line. Another thorn in the side of Machado and her associates, who are calling for greater “sanctions” against their country, is the meeting between a spokesman for the Trump administration and the Maduro government.

As a result, Chevron’s license to operate in Venezuela was renewed for another six months, despite the “sanctions”. However, Trump has recently reconsidered the decision, dusting off the tones used at the end of his first term, when he considered Biden’s decision to “relax” some sanctions in order to grant the license to Chevron to be useless: “It seems useless to me,” he said, “to spend money to buy oil that is a stone’s throw away, and that I would have gone to get by force.”

For her part, Machado claims to maintain “fluid communication” with the administration of the US president, who has a “clear” vision of the actions that must be taken to move towards a “democratic transition”.

Meanwhile, the Bolivarian government receives and settles the hundreds of migrants with  open arms, deported by Trump, after having gone to recover a group detained in Guantánamo. In “democratic” Europe, migrants are deported and detained. On the contrary, when observing the affection with which repatriated migrants are received in Venezuela, one understands the huge distance between two different models of society: the capitalist, ferocious and exclusive, and the socialist, which places respect for human beings and social justice at the center.

But, in the meantime, far-right lobbies are putting pressure on international organizations: from the International Criminal Court, where they are trying to get Maduro convicted, to the United Nations Human Rights Council, where they want to extend the mandate of an “independent” verification commission appointed by the defunct Lima Group during the Guaidó era.

During that period, the siege and suffocation of Venezuela reached its peak, with the powerful support of the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, now at the end of his term. It remains to be seen what happens at the OAS Extraordinary General Assembly, to be held in Washington on March 10 to elect Almagro’s successor.

The decision will be made between the candidacy of Rubén Darío Ramírez Lezcano, from Paraguay, positioned on the right, and that of Albert Ramchand Ramdin, from Suriname, a member country of Caricom, whose government in recent years did not support resolutions against Maduro. The winner must obtain at least 18 votes from the 34 member countries of the OAS, from which Venezuela has withdrawn, as Cuba has already done.

But another source of tension is spreading from the disputed area between Venezuela and Guyana, the Essequibo, which is very rich in oil and precious minerals. The Guyanese government has allowed exploitation – illegal according to the Geneva Accords, which Venezuela is resorting to – by US multinationals, and has also authorized the entry of the US Southern Command.

Meanwhile, Venezuela is taking advantage of its economic growth – the highest in the region, according to all international indicators – to expand social programs aimed at the working classes, renew some collective agreements with workers and increase the “social wage”, including goods and services and not just money, to prevent increases from being pulverized by “induced inflation”.

And while the terms of the planned constitutional reform are being discussed, which should increase “popular power” even more, four special commissions have been appointed. For the opposition media, this is a new turn towards the “Cuban model”, which takes up the constitutional reform project narrowly rejected with Chávez as president in 2007. For the Maduro government, this is another step towards the weakening of the “old bourgeois state” and the expansion of direct democracy.

A path marked by votes on projects chosen by the communities. A vote that anticipates the meaning and scope of the communal state project that Bolivarian socialism has been working on for years: at least since October 20, 2012. During the last Council of Ministers attended by Hugo Chávez, who had been re-elected for a third term as president of the country on October 7th, he laid down the guidelines for the self-government of the organized communities.

A speech that went down in history as the “Golpe de Timón” (the “Rudder Change”), the change of course necessary to straighten the march towards the horizon of a, “humanist” socialism guided by popular power.

“Commune or nothing,” the president emphatically concluded to indicate what the course of ‘21st century socialism’ in Venezuela should be. And, shortly before dying of cancer (most probably induced) on March 5, 2013, addressing the man he would appoint as the person to vote for to succeed him as president – Nicolás Maduro – he said: “Nicolás, I recommend the Commune to you as I would recommend my own life to you.” And Nicolás is keeping his word.

Source: Resumen Latino Americano – Argentina